Part of that vision. July 21, 2019 The Rev. David M. Stoddart

Amos 8:1-12

Phillips Brooks is now remembered primarily as the author of “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” but he was an Episcopal priest, and in his lifetime (he died in 1893) he was renowned as a great preacher. And he famously said that “preaching is truth delivered through personality.” That’s a very incarnational statement, acknowledging that God must of necessity speak through the beauties and limitations of human personality. And if that’s true in preaching, it is also true in prophecy. God reveals Godself through the personalities of particular prophets. And those personalities vary quite a bit: Ezekiel was a mystical visionary;  Second Isaiah was a hopeful and embracing person; Hosea’s writing shows a warm and compassionate nature. But then there’s Amos. He was not a warm, fuzzy guy. His was a fierce and angry personality. which can make hearing his words difficult: I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth on all loins, and baldness on every head — you know it’s bad when a prophet starts talking about people going bald!

Perhaps God needed an angry prophet at that moment: Amos wrote in the 8th century B.C.E., at a time when Israel was fat and happy: it was militarily secure and its economy was booming. It may have taken someone like Amos to get people’s attention. But while God spoke through Amos’ angry personality, we need to make sure we don’t make the basic mistake of assuming that God has the same personality. God may speak through an angry person, but that doesn’t mean that God herself is angry: God is not like us that way. And, perhaps more importantly, we should not ignore the message because we don’t like the messenger. What we need to do is to hear the truth being expressed through that personality. Amos may have preached it with ferocity, but what is the truth he is conveying? What is God actually saying through this man?

Well, God is speaking to the people of Israel and saying, “You people act religious. You worship on the sabbath day and offer all the right sacrifices at all the right times — and then you immediately go back to taking advantage of the poor. You’ve rigged a system where the rich get richer and the poor get cheated: you trample on the needy,  and bring to ruin the poor of the land . . . buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals.  And you think that God doesn’t see and doesn’t care. But God does see and God does care.”

That’s not an easy message to hear, in part because it is a social message. In some ways, it’s easier to hear about personal sins because I have more control over them, there are ways I can repent and change my behavior. But when God addresses the sins of our society, it can feel overwhelming. There is just so much. Poverty is a crushing reality in our country: around 40 million people live in poverty. You can work 60 hours a week at minimum wage and still not make enough to feed a family, pay rent, and buy health insurance. Racism is real, and it’s not just limited to a few bad apples: it’s systemic, ingrained into our culture. Sexual discrimination, homophobia, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism are unfortunately alive and well. According to the FBI, hate crimes are not only on the rise, but they remain under reported — the problem is worse than we think. In the face of such news, we might be tempted to block it all out — except that God won’t let us block it all out.

And as hard as hearing God address these issues may be, it would be far worse not to hear God at all. And that is the ultimate problem that Amos raises. If the people will not listen, then the worst thing that can happen to them is not fire and brimstone, not lamentation and baldness: the worst thing that can happen is famine — not a famine of food, but a famine of hearing the word of the Lord. If we don’t listen, Amos says, eventually there will be nothing to listen to.

This is the problem in the Gospel today. Every time this passage comes up, I have a dozen people say to me at the door that Martha gets a bum rap, and that they’re on her side: she’s doing all the work and Mary’s just being lazy. Apparently, many people feel this way. You may have heard of Lenten Madness, the church’s version of the NCAA basketball tournament, with 64 saints in brackets vying to win the Golden Halo. Do you know who won this year? Martha! And, hey, Martha’s great in many ways, but good people, in this story, the bottom line is that Martha is not listening! And no amount of busyness makes up for that. All of our actions must ultimately be grounded on hearing the word of God spoken to us. Otherwise, we are just spinning our wheels.

The Church is primarily a listening community. Week by week, we come together to hear the story, to listen as God speaks to us through Scripture, sermons, liturgy, hymns, prayers, and each other. We just spent a week of Summer Celebration, using music, crafts, drama, dancing, and everything at our disposal to help children hear that God is good. And if we are at all faithful, if we are at all attentive, we will hear that God cares about the poor, the powerless, the marginalized, and the needy. And we will hear that God has a dream and a vision of a world where love and justice prevail for all people — and we are all part of that dream, part of that vision. How that will impact us, individually and corporately, is unpredictable. It may lead us to volunteer in the Food Pantry, or get involved in advocacy work for the disadvantaged, or devote more time and energy to racial reconciliation. What we hear on Sundays may influence the way we spend money and the way we vote. And how it changes me may be different than how it changes you. The one thing that is true for all of us is that we are called to listen. The only reason we read from the Bible, the only reason we conclude each reading by saying, “The Word of the Lord,” is that we believe and trust that God wants to speak to God’s people, that God will speak to anyone and to everyone who has ears to hear. May we be among those people who hear.

So be it. Amen.