Sermon July 18, 2010

The passage from Amos begins with the image of a Basket of Summer Fruit. A timely image for us in the Yakima Valley. Cherries, peaches, apricots, plums, grapes, melons. A vision of the abundance of God’s creation.

It could have been a vision of all sharing in the blessing of creation, enjoying together its abundance, and the abundant grace of God, but no instead –

The passage quickly turns to condemnation “The end has come!” Literally a pun in the original Hebrew: “the time is ripe.” What looked like a sign of harvest festival, ripened fruit, is really a portent of doom to come. What unfolds is a grizzly vision of a future without God, a time of mourning and death when songs of the temple become wailing, dead bodies pile up and are cast out everywhere. The whole land trembles and rises and sink again, darkness covers the land. There will be famine, but not a famine of bread, but of hearing the word of God. A time when the people will be utterly cut off from God, left to wander aimlessly without this relationship to the ground of their being that roots them and gives their life meaning and purpose.

Why is God so angry?

“You trample on the needy, bring ruin to the poor of the land.” You are impatient with holy days, anxious to can get back to business and cheat the poor with false balances, and poor quality product, selling the sweepings of the wheat. It is this injustice, this corruption that is the reason for God’s anger and the reason for the dire prophecy of what is to come.

Sometimes we live in denial, we say, boy things were really bad in Amos’ day, and we thank God that we live in a time and place where people are more free and equal, in a society more just. Or we compare our life here in our own country with places around the world and we thank God that we are not like those other people. Or we blame some evil individuals or whole classes of people rather than seeing the systemic injustice that runs through and through the way things are set up. We live in denial, just like the people of Israel did in Amos’ day.

Amos plays a rhetorical trick on the people he is prophesying against. He begins in Chapter one by condemning everyone else; all of Israel’s neighboring nations. He condemns Damascus, and Gaza, Tyre and Edom, Ammon, Moab. And he sets the people up, works them up into a fervor of self-righteousness against the rest of the world around them. I can imagine his listeners thinking, he must be about to speak of how great Israel is compared to all the rest of those nations. But instead he condemns Judah as well. Ok, that was close. This is at the time of the divided Kingdom, Judah to the south, Israel to the north, and he is prophesying in Israel not in Judah. So, ok, yes we can condemn them as well! But we are still going to come out ok! Compared to all these others we are the chosen people, the city on the hill, the hope of world. Then Amos goes in for the kill.

This is what the LORD says:
"For three sins of Israel,
even for four, I will not turn back.
They sell the righteous for silver,
and the needy for a pair of sandals.

They trample on the heads of the poor
as upon the dust of the ground
and deny justice to the oppressed.

Then he launches into a relentless critique of the injustice, corruption and depravity of Israel and pronounces judgment from God that ends finally in the destruction of Israel. The last 5 verses of the book of Amos, as if an afterthought and in a completely different tone and style, speak of the restoration of Israel. Some scholars think that these five verses were added on later by another editor who just could let it end that way, could not leave the book where Amos left it in such utter hopelessness, unrelenting condemnation, the finality of judgment.

This sort of editing happens again and again in the bible and sets up a dialogue and debate in the bible itself about the ultimate fate of Israel. How shall we deal with this angry God? Will God completely forsake Israel? Will he listen to their repentance and turn to them once again? Is God’s promise to them unshakeable finally? Will he save all the people or just a remnant?

This is the same debate we have about humanity in general. Is there universal salvation? Will God finally turn his back completely on his creation? Will he only save a remnant, some chosen few, only the good people, or just the poor, while the rich go to hell, or is it true that not one of his sheep will be lost? Even in the face of the kind of anger at injustice that God exhibits in Amos, are we still finally, loved by God, saved by grace which is a gift for all of humanity? What is God’s ultimate intention for us? All of us need some sign that God still loves us.

I must say that I am one that would have edited Amos as well. I don’t like homogenizing scripture. We sometimes attempt to tame it by playing down some of its more dangerous, ugly and uncomfortable passages. But what I have come to understand is that the Bible is a dialogue. To faithfully read scripture you have to become a part of the conversation yourself.

For my part I want to add to the conversation the dialogue that occurs in the Color Purple. It’s a story of the journey of an oppressed people and the liberation of abused women. Two characters, Shug and Celie, have this wonderful conversation walking through a field of flowers, talking about God. Shug comes to a new sense of God in her journey of liberation. God just wants to love and be loved, she says, and the whole world is set up as this love relationship. All of us, people, flowers and trees just want to be loved, to be noticed, Shug says. It’s all about getting noticed, admired, recognized for who we are as beloved children of God. God wants to “share a good thing,” always giving back and loving us by creating more and more beauty.

Shug says, “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple

in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” Celie asks, “What does God do when it pissed?” and Shug replies, “It just make something else!”

This is the image of the Creator God of Love who constantly holds in its hands the least of these, the most insignificant and simply notices and admires and loves, and cherishes every living thing. When we don’t, in return, notice and care for and cherish others and ourselves the way God does, God just makes more stuff and puts more beautiful people and things in our way for us to encounter until we do begin to notice and cherish and love all of God’s people and all of God’s creation, until we love ourselves and until we love God who is in all things.

With this vision of creation we are back to the vision in the beginning of the Amos passage of the Basket of Summer Fruit. No longer is it a vision of doom, but once again a vision of the hope to which we are called. Remember the prophecy in Amos is not a famine of bread or thirst for water, but of hearing the word of God. There is still all around us the continual image of the blessing of God, of the abundance of creation, the bounty of the harvest, a vision in which all can share in the blessing of creation. God’s creation is a constant reminder of abundance, grace and blessing. The reality is that there is enough for everyone if we only discover how to share in love with all - If we could only listen to God calling us into this way of being in the world.

One of my favorite passages from Annie Dillard, a naturalist writer, is her description of an ant hill. God does not just create one ant or a few hundred or even a few thousand. They just keep pouring out of the ant hill, in this incredible fecundity of creation. Fecundity is about fruitfulness, fertility, reproduction, the capacity for abundant production. This is the earth that God has given us.

And yet we often do not live out of this vision of abundance. We often live instead in a mentality of scarcity.

I attended a retreat once called the Ministry of Money a program of the Church of the Savior in Washington DC. It was a program that primarily took incredibly wealthy people on reverse pilgrimages to places like Calcutta with the intention of liberating them from their wealth. What I discovered first hand spending a week in retreat with a few very wealthy folks and listening to their confessions was how trapped they felt in their wealth, how fearful they were that they did not have enough, how concerned they were for their own security and safety.

On the other hand, I met a woman recently whose non-profit had just been awarded $20 million over the next 10 years from the California Foundation to design and implement a comprehensive poverty reduction plan. They have gathered together stakeholders from across her county, they are discovering the diversity of assets already in their community, how they can more effectively work together and they are beginning to address a broad range of issues across all sectors of the community. It is amazing what we can do when we stop fighting with each other, being afraid of one another, exploiting one another and begin to work together for the common good.

But it does not begin with doing. Rather it begins with listening.

Paul says, I became a servant of God to make the word of God fully known. There is a mystery that has been hidden through the ages but now it has been revealed to you. As the Colossians passage today reminds us Jesus Christ is the image of God, the first born of all creation. He is before all things and all things hold together in him. Christ is a universal vision of all the incredible diversity of creation united as one in God. This universal vision is embodied in the church. We are the body of Christ. Our role is to be a living sign of this universal vision of all things reconciled to God. We are a sign of all things reconciled in the abundant grace of God.

Jesus Christ is the image of the Basket of Summer Fruit, an image of abundance in which all can share in the blessing of God’s creation. There is enough for everyone. Everyone, rich and poor, young and old, people of all colors and backgrounds, the whole wide world can have a place at this table.

Listen. Hear yourselves become a part of the dialogue around the dinner table. Listen to Martha and Mary talking to Jesus and what Jesus says, “Mary has chosen the better part.” Martha, Martha, you are distracted by many things: not enough time, not enough help, not enough of whatever you think you need to get the job done. You are distracted, just like the Israelites in Amos’ prophecy who where in a famine of hearing the words of the Lord. They wondered from sea to sea, north to south, they ran to and fro seeking but never finding. They were completely lost in aimless activity without the word of God to guide them.

It is not until you sit down at the feast that has been prepared for you and encounter the one who is both the meal and the host that you will know yourselves once again to be beloved children of God, and find yourself once again among family. Only when you sit at the feet of the one who reconciles all things to himself, and allow his words and his abundant life to transform you, wash over you – only then will know. You will never be able to think of anyone as a stranger or an enemy again. You will never again be able to let the least of your brothers and sisters go unnoticed. You will never again be able to tolerate abuse or injustice in any form, to anyone, and you will seek always and everywhere to include everyone at the table of blessing. You will do this because this is who you are, because you listened to, you fed on, you have been filled with, the Word of God.