C Proper 11 16 Ord Paul 2025Amos 8:1-12July 20, 2025
This
past week I had lunch with a young college student I’ve come to love and
respect who shared with me her mission trip to Cambodia. In sharing some of the stories of that work,
she also shared how liberating it has been to attend a United Church of Christ
church. I grew in respect and admiration
for her as she said what she found most meaningful in her Cambodian work was
not so much the original reason she has been sent in mission but the
relationships she developed during her time there. And to illustrate the point, she showed me a
photo of her steering what would like the handles of a cross between a scooter
and a motorcycle, with about five smiling Cambodian children on the seat
directly behind her. I imagined how she
had changed the life of those children and how they had radically changed her
life.
She grew up in a very
strict wing of the Seventh Day Adventist Church which had her forever worried
about her personal behavior—how she dressed, how she spoke, how God might be
watching every detail of her personal life.
What she had found in United Church of Christ churches like ours was
And what she was
continuing to hear in United Church of Christ churches like ours is that God is
largely unconcerned about these personal sins, these details about appearance
and personal preference, daily mistakes she might make in performance and
work. I would like to think that is a
universal reflection of our denomination, the United Church of Christ,
right? That we teach and preach a God
who is not checking in on our daily lives to see if we are more fit for heaven
and hell? That God begins primarily with
a liberating love?
The flip side is what
many of our churches get right about a God who leads with liberating love, they
often then struggle to articulate and lead out their communities for where
God’s attention is found. I think that
is the case because it is part of the human condition to be conflict
avoidant. We would rather that God asks
nothing of us, to never walk into deep waters, to never call out evil and the
suffering of others.
Jewish writer Marge
Piercy penned one of my wife, Tracy’s favorite definitions of love. “Attention is love,” Piercy wrote, “what we
must give children, mothers, fathers, pets, our friends, the news, the woes of
others. What we want to change we curse
and then pick up a tool. Bless whatever
you can with eyes and hands and tongue.
If you can’t bless it, get ready to make it new.”
What we want to
change we curse and then pick up a tool.
If you can’t bless
it, get ready to make it new.
I think those two
wonderful sentences define how the Jewish prophets understood themselves, how
the Jewish prophet Amos, a shepherd and sycamore fig farmer, understood
himself.
In our passage from
Hebrew Scripture today, God comes to the Amos and asks him, “What do you
see?” God or a messenger of God asks
this question seven times in the Bible, always seeking the answer from a
prophet, a truth-teller.[1] What do you see is a way of saying, “Read the
times, what is the reality laid out before you?” And what Amos saw, before the nation of
Israel went into Exile into Assyria and long before both the nations of Israel
and Judah went into Exile in Babylonia, was an end to the covenant God had made
with Israel. The whole Israelite
infrastructure was so dirtied, so poisoned, so contrary to God’s hopes and
dreams for them, that none of it was salvageable.
That must have been
an unpopular truth, a hard truth for Amos to tell. Again, prophets were not so
much the fortune-tellers as the truth-tellers, the people who spoke truth with
a strong voice to power. From Samuel to
Christ, Biblical prophets believed that if people did not act in right
relationship with one another, abide by the covenant established with Moses,
the world as God had made it, would unravel.
The prophet Jeremiah believed that the creation story would come
undone—and all those limits and boundaries God had put in place to keep wind,
water, and fire at bay would now be unleashed in chaos.
So too then the
Exile, the Biblical prophets of the time believed, was an indictment against
the ruling and religious elite who lived in luxury and practiced their
religious ritual while the most vulnerable in their communities suffered.
The prophet Amos
signals the break with the original covenant with Moses by referencing the Nile
River in Egypt and how that river would rise beyond its borders and limits to
create chaotic destruction.[2] In invoking the Nile, Amos is not only
invoking the creation story as Jeremiah did but is a reminder of God’s judgment
against Pharaoh and the Egyptian empire who could not abide by God’s liberating
love.
As with Egypt, the
cries of creation and the plight of the poor are symptoms of the deep
destruction that is coming to Israel.
People are treated like commodities, turned back into a debt slavery
that the Mosaic covenant expressly forbid.
Amos sees that the poor are exchanged for silver and the needy for a
measly pair of sandals.[3]
Gleaning, a sabbath
practice instituted in the Mosaic covenant to support the economically poor and
provide for their starvation and hunger, are not permitted in Israel’s economic
system.[4] Amos sees that what was left over and
intended for the poor, the sweepings, are even sold.[5] Many of the Ten Commandments use the language
“thou shall not covet or seize” as a way of forbidding the powerful from taking
advantage of those who might need their mercy and kindness.[6]
In the marketplace,
the commercial enterprise, Amos sees people taking advantage of false
measurements and balances to advance their greed and profit. Mosaic Law forbid work on the Sabbath so that
rest would be valued, even for beasts of burden and the immigrant or resident
alien.[7] Amos sees traders seeking to short the
Sabbath or religious holidays so there would be no rest. Those in the know would buy and sell every
single hour, every single minute, every single second.[8] And the world, as the Living God has
constructed and measured it, provided limits and boundaries for it, begins to
unravel in Amos’s eyes.
“What do you see,
Amos?” God asks. And Amos feels,
strikingly, the absence of God, in a time of profound grief and mourning. The people go from the river to the sea
looking for a word from the Living God.
And God is silent. A word from
God cannot be found.[9]
We, in the United
Church of Christ, are fond of saying, “God is still speaking.” And what the prophet Amos sees and hears is
that God is no longer speaking. Amos
rails against the royalty who demand that the poor peasants grow grapes for
wine for the wealthy in the royal courtyard rather than the wheat which might
allow the poor to glean from their fields and feed their children.[10]
Leftover wheat can be
made into bread. Grapes rot out the
teeth of their children.
In the climax of the
book of Amos, those grapes are grapes of wrath Julia Ward Howe used to write
the hymn, “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory.”
God is trampling through those grapes to say that God does now want your
religious ritual if your public values are screwed up, if you can’t get the
economics right. The Living God says, “I
hate your religious celebrations!”[11] The Holy One declares in Amos, “I will not
accept your offerings!” that try to get yourself right with me when you should
get right with your neighbor.[12] And, finally, the God of the Mosaic Covenant
shouts, “Take away from me your hymns!”[13] Don’t pretend your worship and prayer exclude
you from your attention to public values.
Instead, the God of
the Exodus prays to the people, “But let justice roll down like waters, and
righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”[14] Give me economic justice, the Living God
prays and begs of the people. Let it
course through your infrastructure and institutions. Let it be about what you do daily with your
wallet and pocketbook, defining your priorities. Let it relate your relationship with the most
suffering and vulnerable in your communities and nation. God prays.
God begs. God seeks their
attention.
As your pastor, I
read the Scriptures and feel almost heavy-handed in then asking you to turn,
every so slightly, to our present day and ask what you see. For I see us sucking on the tailpipe of a
system that is not sustainable and becoming even more so. I wonder if this system itself is sick and
crumbling, readily destroying family, community, and national life for profit
and wealth accumulation. Creation is
becoming undone. The threads which hold
us together are becoming frayed.
Amos saw those same
things happening among the families, communities, and the nations of
Israel. The very piecing together, the
Mosaic coveant, had been ignored by political and religious elite who made
greed, profit, and luxurying their values.
Amos mentions ivory beds[15],
summer and winter homes[16],
and eating and drinking sumptuous fare[17],
as signposts of their public sin. This
is what Amos sees. And as long as those
were the values, Amos prophesied from his farm, all of society would unravel
and the world, as presently constituted, would be destroyed. For the pillars of creation, its stitching,
is economic justice. Hope could not be
found sucking on the tailpipe of the present system and status quo. Something new would have to be done by
appealing to the public values of ancient covenant.
In appealing to the
public values of ancient covenant, Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan
believes that Amos most closely resembles Jesus. What do you see, Jesus? Jesus, like the prophet Amos, called people
to right relationship as he saw rural Galilean villages disintegrating around
him. In response to that
disintegration, Jesus called people within those villages to see how basic
needs might be met around hunger and health care and urged the people of his
time to practices, to turn away from a system which encouraged their climbing
the ladder to become the exception, to not pretend they would be the exception
by believing they could eek out something which valued greed, profit, and
luxury to the very few.
Jesus appealed back
to that Mosaic covenant in four major ways, ways of economic justice, to keep
communities where he taught and ministered from unwinding and unraveling. Much of what he taught was based in the cooperation
and collaboration found in the 10 Commandments.
First, Jesus taught
around issues of food cooperation and collaboration. Shared bread, fish, and meals were
fundamental to his ministry. It is why
we practice communion as a sacrament.
Communion is a reminder of our shared endeavor to meet hunger and
need—physically and spiritually.
Forgiveness of debt, an important part of the Lord’s prayer we will pray
later in worship, was about allowing people to stay on their farms, keep their
nets and boats, and cooperate and collaborate around local food producers. By supporting food cooperation,
collaboration, and the support of local food systems, Jesus sought to sustain
local villages and communities.[18]
What do I see? I see so many UCC churches in southwest
Michigan who have huge swaths of land which could plan and plant perennial food
systems to feed their communities. As
food systems based on fossil fuels shipping from California begins to crumble,
how powerful it would be to have churches who bring attention to their own
local communities so that they piece together investment in local economies?
Supporting local food
systems leads to the second emphasis in Jesus’s teaching and ministry. When villages and communities have such dire
poverty, disparity, or a lack of healthy food systems, health care becomes a major
issue. Think of the number of healings and exorcisms recorded within the
gospels that related deformity, leprosy, or maybe even alluded to mental
illness. Even doubly so as we have depended on fossil fuel systems, the
microplastics found in our water and the poisons used to produce our food leave
the whole system compromised. Tending to
the ill in each community was an important part of the work Jesus and his
disciples did.
As I will continue to
remind this blessed church, our tradition began with German immigrants in St.
Louis who created what has become one of the largest non-profit health systems
in the United States. They were small. They had little economic resource. Still, they came together to care for the
health care needs of their communities.
Third, Jesus reminded
people who they were as the Children of God, and that God created Sabbath out
of love for humankind. The Sabbath
reminds us that we do not have to do it all, that we should have rhythms and
practices to shut it down, that physically, emotionally, mentally, we were not
meant to be “on” 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That 24-hour-a-day business cycle makes us
all into commodities to be bought and sold.
We are not slaves, consumers or dependent on any economic system. Rather, we were meant to live and intentionally
practice rhythms of rest, play, celebration, fun, and healing. As a church, how shall we live into that
calendar and encourage it for everyone?
Finally, with family
as the central building block for village and community life, Jesus enlarged
the meaning of family. He called those
who sought to collaborate and cooperate to piece together an alternative economic
system “brothers” and “sisters” and “mother.”
The luxury many of us have had of single-family households may not be a
reality in the near future. We may have
to have multiple families living in one home, become better neighbors, and
think how we extend our homes, extended care facilities, and even hospitals to
meet the growing needs as savings and retirement disappear. As a church, how might we help expand the
definition of family so that people in our communities experience grace,
healing, and do not become even more vulnerable.
This is what I
see. I see systems and structures that
were based on greed, profit, and luxury coming to an end as we find them
unsustainable. I think it is my job, as
your pastor, to encourage you to start dreaming and imagining a world God is
still seeking to create and re-create, to encourage all of us to stop sucking
on a tailpipe that will lead to further unraveling and destruction of
community.
Rather, I want to
call you to ancient and Biblical practices that sustained communities and
helped people live the lives God intended for them and now for us—lives full of
cooperation, collaboration, and rest, fun, play, and joy. The good news is that God is already creating
something new—new systems, new structures, new ways of being. And like Amos and Jesus, we are being invited
to see in our mind’s eye a new earth.
“Attention is love,
what we must give children, mothers, father,s pets, our friends, the news, the
woes of others. What we want to change
we curse and then pick up a tool. Bless
whatever you can with eyes and hands and tongue. If you can’t bless it, get ready to make it
new.”
We are St. Paul
United Church of Christ, a blessed and historic church of 175 years, part of
the liberating love of the United Church of Christ. Let’s get ready to make the world new. As the church in the orchard, may our summer
fruit feed our community. What do you
see? Amen.
[1]
Jer 1:11, 13, 24:3; Amos 7:8; 8:2; Zech 4:2, 5:2.
[2]
Amos 8:8
[3]
Amos 8:6.
[4]
Leviticus 19:9,10; 23:22; Deuteronomy 24:19,20.
See also the book of Ruth for how gleaning was used to protect the poor
and the powerless (widows and women without resource).
[5]
Amos 8:6.
[6]
Exodus 20:17; Deut. 5:21; Richard A. Horsley, Covenant Economics: A Blblical Vision of Justice for All (Louisville,
KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009),
p. 25.
[7]
Exodus 20:10; Deut. 5:14; Richard H. Lowery, Sabbath and Jubilee (St.
Louis: Chalice Press, 2000), p. 107.
[8]
Amos 8:5.
[9]
Amos 8:11-14
[10]
Amos 2:8; 5:10-11; 6:6
[11]
Amos 5:21.
[12]
Amos 5:22.
[13]
Amos 5:23.
[14]
Amos 5:24.
[15]
Amos 6:4
[16]
Amos 3:15
[17]
Amos 6:5-6
[18]
The feeding of the 5,000 found in all four gospels and used, as liturgy, during
our communion services is an example. In
John, the story begins with a boy who has five loaves and two fish who is
willing to share. The baskets return to
overflowing, recognizing that all have shared.
Jesus shared meals so many times he was referred to as a glutton and
drunkard.
No comments:
Post a Comment