B Proper 10 15 Ord
BFC 2018
Amos 7:7-15
July 15, 2018
The
last week of June, Rep. Maxine Waters, legislator from California, actively
called for the peaceful, inhospitable confrontation of Trump Administration
officials, to push back. She was
greeted with push back of her own referencing her call for incivility as
dangerous and a bad precedent, Waters receiving numerous death threats.
The
week before, Stephanie Wilkerson, owner of the Red Hen farm-to-table restaurant
in Lexington, Virginia, had been called by the chef to tell her that President
Trump’s Press Secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, had arrived with a group of
people at the restaurant. The staff was
concerned. What should he do? She hopped in her car and headed down to the
restaurant. It was true. Sanders, party of eight, had taken their
seats and were eating from the cheese boards.
She knew what the Trump Administration had meant to many of her
employees, several of them identifying as members of the LGBTQ community. Wilkerson quickly huddled with her staff and
asked them what they would have her do.
The staff wanted to ask Sanders and her party to leave. Wilkinson asked Sanders to step outside with
her and said, “I explained that the restaurant has certain standards that I
feel it has to uphold, such as honesty, and compassion, and cooperation. I said, ‘I’d like to ask you to leave.’” Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her party left,
with Sanders then tweeting out her displeasure.
It was the week of July the 4th, the day
when we celebrate the values of our country, a remembrance, sometimes, of where
we have grossly failed, a grand experiment in democracy we may never get fully
right, and the peculiar idea of the United States as a country where e pluribus unum—“out of many, one.” The common idea of a monolithic state where
the one dictates to the many has been tried and tried and been found morally
wanting. “One person, one vote” is that
sense that we are all participants in this grand experiment, our voice and our
basic life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness matters, such that when others
try to usurp, fabricate, or manipulate away from not only our equal protection
but also the common good, something is amiss and we must engage and confront.
So it was that on July 2nd, middle-school
teacher Kristin Mink was out for lunch with her two year-old son when she
noticed the then Environmental Protection Agency Administrator, Scott Pruitt,
out for lunch as well. She loaded her
son on her hip, an important part of shaping her values, and headed over to
Pruitt’s table. She began
Hi. I just wanted to
urge you to resign for what you are doing to the environment in our
country. This is my son. He loves
animals. He loves clean air. He loves clean water. Meanwhile, you’re slashing
strong fuel standards for cars and trucks for the benefit of big corporations.
You’ve been paying about 50 bucks a night to stay in a D.C. condo that’s
connected to an energy lobbying firm, while approving their dirty sands
pipeline. We deserve to have somebody at the EPA who
actually does protect our environment, somebody who believes in climate change
and takes it seriously for the benefit of all of us, including our children.
So, I would urge you to resign before your scandals push you out.[1]
When she was finished, Scott Pruitt thanked her.[2] Three days later, Pruitt did resign, most
assuredly not from the singular confrontation of Kristin Mink, as Mink herself
knew of the number of people who have called him out, but any embarrassment or
shame or dishonor Pruitt experienced on that day came from a person who spoke
and carried her values plainly, truthfully, forthrightly, in a confrontational,
non-violent manner. Just the week
before, Kristin Mink had been arrested at the Hart Senate Office Building for
protesting the separation of children from their parents at our country’s
border with Mexico.[3]
Whether it is Karen Mink with her two year-old son
or Stephanie Wilkerson with her Red Hen staff, love shows a willingness to
align ourselves with others and not let go, not turn away, to show up and stand
up. Justice is love with legs on, what
love looks like in public.[4]
We need to get back to basics—to tunnel down to who
we are in relationship to Creator, to the good earth Creator is continuing to
shape and form, to each other as blessed partners in mutual care and public
love for one another. We do that, I
believe, by beginning to affirm that we know what God intends for us—life, rest,
love, play, and joy. Some of us can feel
that in our bones. Others need to engage
practices to get that into our bloodstream:
practices like counting our blessings, regular movements in prayer,
gratitude, meditation, and the stretch and pull of our bodies sunward. Still others have been so beaten down, hear
another message so much in our lives, that we have to fake it till we make
it: teach and preach it so much that it
gets into us, ask good friends and colleagues to hem us in with their love,
wisdom, and warning, use our imagination, science fiction, to see the world not
how it us but how God wills it, desires it, with us in it—living surrounded and
embraced in love, rest, play, and joy.
That is
one of the basics. One of the other
basics is the birth story of the Jewish people, the exodus. The Children of Israel were victims of abuse
and exploitation, enslaved in bondage by the most powerful nation of the age,
Egypt. It is the mark of compassion that
God identifies with them, promises to release them from bondage, and delivers
them. God would not let go, did not turn
away, showed up and stood up. In the
same way, the Jewish people were held captive in exile. The most powerful nation of the age, Babylon,
razed the Jewish Temple, salted the promised land, and carted off the best and
brightest to sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land. In that foreign land, God identifies with the
Jewish people in compassion, promises to return them from exile, and delivers
them. God would not let go, did not turn
away, showed up and stood up. The action
of God in Israel's past history is to ground and shape Israel's own continuing
action on behalf of those comparably abused and marginalized.”[5]
The
prophets were those reluctant leaders who held onto the plight of the people in
one hand, asked for God’s mercy, and held the hand of God in the other,
unwilling to let go of a character that demanded compassion for people in their
own nation who might identify as Hebrew slaves in Egypt or Jewish exiles in
Babylon in another age.[6] Earlier in chapter 7, the prophet Amos pleads
for the people, begs as an intermediary for God’s mercy. But now a plumb line has been established, a
way to say that God’s compassionate character for the economically poor and the
socially outcast cannot abide by systemic evil found in Israel. The way must be made straight. In an ode to the Exodus story, God can no
longer “pass over” this violence, injustice, and evil. God must pass through--wreaking desolation
and waste on the halls of the political power and the signs and symbols of
spiritual collaboration and corruption.[7]
Indeed. Amos is regularly preaching at Beth-el,
literally meaning, “the house of God”, that place where Jacob encountered the
Divine. The ruling priest at Bethel,
Amaziah, shows just how coopted he is by the political establishment. Rather than assert the freedom intended to
provide necessary critique to the political establishment as a spiritual leader,
Amaziah wants Amos to stop preaching at Bethel. In verse 13, Amaziah sends out
an edict, “Don't
prophesy anymore at Bethel, because this is the king's sanctuary
and the temple of the kingdom.”
“With those words the religious justification of political
empire is complete, and faith is reduced to patriotic cheer-leading.”[8]
Hebrew
Scripture scholar, Terence Fretheim, penned an article way back in 2008,
titled, “The Prophets and Social Justice:
A Conservative Agenda.”
Fretheim’s point was that social justice was not a new morality or a novel
analysis. He writes, “In promoting
social justice, the prophets were religious conservatives. They built on the
ancient traditions of Israel and the central promises of God to call Israel to
attend to issues of justice on behalf of the oppressed.”[9] What the prophets did do differently and
creatively and new in each age, Fretheim observed, was to figure out how to “get in the face”
and “under the skin” of the rulers, public officials, and religious elite,
often at great sacrifice.
Those signs of God’s creative love are
breaking out everywhere and we best pay attention to recognize that the Divine is
seeking ways to make love public. It
might be a Parkland, Florida, student, with stubborn, opportunistic discipline,
in love for their classmates, asking an elected official to not take one more
dime from the NRA as a way to move through thoughts and prayers to real action
to curb gun violence. Or it might be an
organization of kayakers, in love of the earth, who will not allow an
oil-drilling rig moored in Seattle to leave port to make its way up to Alaska. It could be Native people who hold up camp in
North Dakota in prayer and wisdom, for the love of water, to stop the
advancement of a pipeline that turned out to be everything they said it would
be. Or it could be children and youth
who, in love of their future, bring a law suit against the federal government
to end the despoiling and ravaging of the earth.
Do you feel it? It is the love of God, bubbling up among
those who know those communal values, who know words like “community” and
“citizen” and “family” are defined far more widely broadly than what the
domination system tells us. We define
those words in a way that is far more long-standing, in a way that is new or
novel but in a way that is Biblical and ancient and religiously conservative to
attend to issues of justice on behalf of the oppressed. Amos defines God as a lioness, on the hunt,
on the prowl, her feet padding out of the den to say, “Enough! No more!
It is time to restore the ancient values on which the good earth was
created.” She roars and she is ready.
I think, somewhere along the line, we were
told that religion makes us into nice, civil people. We are supposed to be nice. I just don’t see it. Not with these cantankerous
prophets—tambourine players, shepherds, stutterers, and carpenters. Not with this wild God who seems much happier
in a tent than in a palace, is found changing the world more out in the desert
and wilderness than in the halls of Congress, and on this day is coursing in
you to bring about the transformation of this community and this country.
Pshaw, you say. Not happening you say. In every time, there will be religious
leaders like Amaziah who try to shut you up and tell you not to preach. We are part of a long-standing tradition, a
conservative tradition, a Biblical tradition, that will not shut up. In the time of Christ, the religious elite
tried to quiet the crowds, and Jesus knew.
He knew that God would have the very stones sing out if the crowds were
quieted.
Why are we losing hope? God’s movement is breaking out all across our
country. All it requires is for us to
enter the struggle in love. As
Christians, we are called to do this confrontation non-violently, with a
discipline and wisdom that represents our freedom apart from any political
party. We seek transformative justice. We do
not confront, or get under the skin, or get in the face to do what I call “garbage
can protests”—where we feel content hearing our own voices or seeing our own
signs from two blocks away. We find
creative ways, opportunistic ways to confront with deeply held, Fretheim’s
basic, conservative values seeking transformation. And we also do this confrontation with an
idea of what we will do next. Then we
keep practicing and practicing and practicing until what was once on the skin,
gets under the skin, what was under the skin gets into the bloodstream, what
was in the bloodstream gets typed on every, last red blood cell found in the
body politic. Amos defined it as letting
justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing
stream. It just keeps rolling and
flowing. All we have to do is rock and
roll, get in the flow.
Basic,
conservative faith tradition. In
shimmying up the flag pole to remove the Confederate flag from the South
Carolina State house, after the shooting at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston,
South Carolina, Bree Newsome, quoted Psalm 27, “The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I
fear?” Indeed. Nothing new. Nothing novel. You are loved. Do not fear. In love, God seeks the transformation of
oppression, abuse, exploitation, and domination. In the public square. With legs on. God is on the move. We best walk together. Amen.
[1] Kristin Mink, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXLIsLLlLIA.
Kristin Mink, “Meet the Mother Who
Confronted Scott Pruitt & Urged Him to Resign—Three Days Later, He Did,” Democracy Now!, July 6, 2018, https://www.democracynow.org/2018/7/6/meet_the_mother_who_confronted_scott.
[2]
Bonnie Fuller, “Kristin Mink: 5 Things
to Know About Teacher Who Told Scott Pruitt to Resign in a Restaurant,” Hollywood Life, July 3, 2018, https://hollywoodlife.com/2018/07/03/who-is-kristin-mink-confronted-scott-pruitt-restaurant/.
[3]
Ibid.
[4]Dr.
Cornel West, of course.
[5]
Terence E. Fretheim, “The Prophets and Social Justice: A Conservative Agenda, Word and World, Vol. 28, No. 2, Spring 2008, p. 164
[7] John Holbert,
“Preaching from Amos? Reflections on
Amos 7:7-17,” Patheos, July 7, 2013, http://www.patheos.com/progressive-christian/preaching-amos-john-holbert-07-08-2013.html
[8] Daniel P.
Clendenin, “Remembering
Romero: Amos
the Prophet vs. Amaziah the Priest,” Journey
with Jesus, 2010, https://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20100705JJ.shtml.
[9]
Fretheim, “The Prophets,” p. 159
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