Sermon 07152012 Amos 7 - Clover Sites



Sermon 07152012 Amos 7

“We’re on a mission from God.” Those memorable words come from the mouth of Elwood Blues, the fictional musician played by Dan Akryod in the 1980 film, The Blues Brothers, based on a series of Saturday Night Live sketches. In the film, the Blues Brothers scramble to outrun police, Nazis, and country music fans in an attempt to get their band back together and raise enough money to save the Catholic orphanage where the grew up. The hard-living blues musicians, perhaps the last people alive who look like they would be on a mission from God, fight the powers that be through two hours of antics and car chases until they finally prevail. Incidentally, in 2010 the Catholic church actually blessed the movie and declared it a Catholic classic, alongside films like The 10 Commandments and The Passion of the Christ. Huh. Maybe they really were on a mission from God.

Missions from God can be surprising like that. Take Amos, for example. Amos lived about eight hundred or so years before Christ, and he was a herdsman – not so much like a shepherd. More like a cowboy – somebody who sells and manages herds of larger animals like cattle. Amos’s story goes something like this:

Amos, this merchant-cowboy, is with his flocks one day down in Judah, the Southern Kingdom. This was a time when the Holy Land was split into two nations, Israel in the north and Judah in the south. So Amos is in Judah, a town called Tekoa about 20 miles south of Jerusalem, and one day he receives the word of the Lord. But the word from God today isn’t about Judah – it’s about Israel, Amos’s neighbors to the north. In a rare move, God sends Amos up to the capital of Israel, Bethel, to give this message to the rulers – the king, the nobility, the wealthy and powerful.

Chapters 1-6 of Amos are basically a series of judgments. There is absolutely no information given about Amos except what I just told you – the time period, his job and his hometown. At the very beginning of the book, in chapter one, verse 2, Amos starts proclaiming – “The Lord roars from Zion, and the voice of God is uttered in Jerusalem-“ and he just goes. Amos proclaims a message of judgment against every enemy that Israel and Judah have – Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Ammonites, Moabites, on and on. Almost everybody that has ever hurt Israel and Judah is pronounced guilty, that God’s wrath burns against them. He uses a very specific formula – “For three transgressions of Damascus, and for four, I will not hold back.”

Amos’s audience, by the way, would have been loving this. Eating it up. His audience is the elite of Israel. The high and mighty of the Northern Kingdom – its politicians and its rich and powerful people. And this is at a time whether country is at its peak of wealth. Never in Israel’s history was the country so prosperous as this time. More territory, more money, more comfort and luxury. You hear lots of talk about couches in this time period – not because they’re new or exciting or rare or anything, but all of these wealthy Israelites have the time to just lie around on couches. For the first time, like, ever. There is such an abundance in Israel, they just feel so blessed. And they’re pious folk – they don’t go to the Temple, because it’s in Jerusalem, in the Southern Kingdom, but they have their own sanctuaries and high holy places in Israel. They pray, and hold sacrifices, and keep the feast days. They did not fail to assemble themselves in the House of the Lord, as the saying goes. So they believe, honestly believe, that their abundance of great stuff and comfort is a direct result of their goodness, their piety and righteousness as a people. After all, if you read the Torah, the promises given to the patriarchs, that’s sort of what it says – keep these laws, and you will be blessed with abundance. You sometimes hear this kind of talk today in our culture – preachers and other public voices reminding the rich and powerful that they have it so good because they’re just that awesome. This is what the Israelites believed. It’s what their professional prophets were telling them, the people whose job it was to bring spiritual guidance to the nation.

And for the first, oh five speeches of Amos? He was falling right in line. He proclaimed God’s judgment on the enemies of the Hebrews, and you can just imagine the cheers and the jeers, all the conviction and vindication in the royal court when they hear his words. God has blessed us with abundance, and God is judging our enemies. All is right with the world.

But then Amos gets to his sixth speech, and it catches their ears. But in chapter 2, verse 4, you can just imagine some of the cheering of the royal court faltering, as Amos says: “For three transgressions of Judah, and for four, I will not hold back, because they have rejected the Law of the Lord.” This would have taken them off guard. Judah was technically sort of an enemy at this point, but they were still relatives. They spoke the same language, had the same history, worshiped the same God, kept the same law – the Israelites might not have gotten along with the Judahites at this point, but hearing their judgment by God would have still been a little striking.

And then, Amos really hits them: “For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not hold back.” And, we can imagine, the royal court gets very, very quiet. You see, one of the basic ideas of Hebrew theology at that time in history is that for them, God does hold back. For them, punishment is never what it deserves to be, that God’s compassion for them always tempers God’s anger. So while God “doesn’t hold back” for the other nations, they expect God to hold back for them, the Chosen people. And when Amos tells them otherwise… they’re not very pleased.

The first chapter or so of Amos is judgment against the nations. From chapter 2, verse 4, until the end of the book in chapter 9 is judgment against Israel. The text that we read today comes towards the end, in chapter 7. First Amos reports a series of visions from God – maybe the ones that prompted him to come to Israel in the first place – and then there is a conversation with Amaziah, the royal priest of the north. It’s the first time in the whole book that there’s a break in Amos’s speeches of judgment.

At the beginning of chapter 7, Amos sees two visions of destruction – a swarm of locusts that would eat the spring plantings, the nation’s food for most of the year, and a shower of fire that would consume the whole land. Each time, Amos begs God to stop, to forgive. He says, “How can Jacob stand” – Jacob, that is Israel, - “How can Jacob stand? He is so small!” God, compared to your power, Israel cannot stand – compared to you, it is so tiny!

Both time, God relents. Both times, God hears Amos’s plea to stop, and says, “This shall not be.” Then God shows Amos a third vision – now, the original text either says that God showed Amos a plumb line, a rope with a rock on the end that hangs from a building to show whether or not it was built straight, OR the original Hebrew says that God was holding and standing on a bunch of tin – the stuff that the big and scary Assyrian Empire used to make their bronze weapons. Although our Bibles here say “plumb line”, most Bible scholars are pretty sure that it’s actually the tin, that God is saying, “I am placing the weapons of the Assyrians in he midst of Israel, and I’m not going to stick around to protect them anymore.”

Regardless of which reading we believe, the impact is the same: Amos doesn’t protest this time. Maybe God convinces him that the punishment is deserved. Maybe God is giving the Israelites a punishment that they can try to defend themselves against – you can protect yourself from an invading army a lot better than you can a firestorm from heaven. Either way, God says, “I am doing this, and I will no longer be there to protect them. Their holy places will be laid to waste, and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam, the ruling family, with the sword.”

When the royal priest of Israel hears this, he tells the king that this prophet is conspiring, threatening the royal house, threatening Israel. The priest tells Amos to go prophesy in Judah, because he’s not wanted in the King’s sanctuary.

And this time, it’s Amos who is angry. Amos says, “I’m not a prophet, nor a prophet’s son. I’m not joining the prophets’ guild, I’m not getting a prophet job anywhere. I’m just a herdsman, a guy who tends the cattle and the sycamore trees. I’m nota prophet, I’m just some guy, but God took me out of the pasture and brought me here to tell you this. So now that you’re trying to shut me up, hear what God says to you:

“Your wife will become a prostitute, your kids will be killed by the sword. Your land will be given away bit by bit, and you will die in a foreign land, and Israel will go away into exile.”

These are harsh words. The lectionary usually leaves this verse out, because it sounds so offensive to us, but he’s using extreme language to get his point across – He’s saying to the King, to the priest, to the rulers of Israel: “God has judged you, and because you tried to shut me up when I told you about it, everything that you think is yours will be taken away from you.” Remember, to the ancients, wives and children were property just like land was property, so that’s what Amos is really trying to tell them: “Everything that you have and believe to be yours, from your family to your land to your lives, will be taken from you.

[PAUSE]

Usually in the words of the prophets, most of the bad things that they predict don’t end up happening. They’re in very certain terms, but they’re really warnings – so in the midst of all these proclamations of doom, you’ll find encouragement and a plea to repent. The prophets are usually sent to say, “This is what’s going to happen if you don’t change something. Please, please change something.” In this instance, what Amos was describing… sort of happened. The King survived to die at an old age in his bed, and the nation remained untouched and prosperous… for another thirty years or so, until the Assyrians came. The northern Kingdom of Israel was sacked, its people were sent into exile and scattered, and those tribes of Hebrews were lost to history.

Still, there’s something in that idea, in that prophetic voice. “Listen to me, or else. God has told me that if you don’t stop what you’re doing, if you don’t change something, then you won’t get a pass anymore. All the bad stuff that happens to other people will happen to you, maybe even more, since you had a warning and ignored it.”

We hear it from preachers. We hear it from shouting voices on the television and the radio. We hear something very much like it from politicians. “If you don’t do XYZ, then the worst thing that you can thing of will happen.”

We hear these words. We know these stories. We know the stories of the thinkers and the speakers who stood up and proclaimed judgment, who were on a mission very probably from God, who stood and did what was true and right in the face of danger. The prophets of Scripture. The saints. Civil rights leaders. Martin Luther King. Gandhi. They faced disagreement and anger and violence from all sides. But then again, so do fanatics, and bigots – so how do you know the difference? How do you tell if somebody’s message is a righteous warning or if it’s a product of hatred?

Well, if we look at the words and actions of the holy people, the people who were definitely on missions from God, in Scripture and history, from Abraham to Amos to the Blues Brothers… the one consistent theme that we find throughout is this: Wherever some lounge in wealth while others starve and freeze, there is injustice. Wherever the people who claim God’s favor ignore and oppress the weak, God’s favor is not truly there. Wherever righteous people tread on the backs of strangers, and they silence and attack those who tell them to stop, there is judgment. If we are to call ourselves the people of God, then let us be a people called by the prophets, a people who take their words in and make them our own, a people who take in their anger at the injustices of this world and make it our own. Let us be a people called by Christ, a people who take in his love for all and spread it with our words and our deeds, with our shouting and our praying, with our hands and with out hearts. Amen.

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