Hosea 1:1-11

1The word of the Lord that came to Hosea son of Beeri, in the days of Kings Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah of Judah, and in the days of King Jeroboam son of Joash of Israel.  2When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, “Go, take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.” ³So he went and took Gomer daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son. ⁴And the Lord said to him, “Name him Jezreel; for in a little while I will punish the house of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel, and I will put an end to the kingdom of the house of Israel. ⁵On that day I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel.” ⁶She conceived again and bore a daughter. Then the Lord said to him, “Name her Lo-ruhamah, for I will no longer have pity on the house of Israel or forgive them. ⁷But I will have pity on the house of Judah, and I will save them by the Lord their God; I will not save them by bow, or by sword, or by war, or by horses, or by horsemen.”

⁸When she had weaned Lo-ruhamah, she conceived and bore a son. ⁹Then the Lord said, “Name him Lo-ammi, for you are not my people and I am not your God.” ¹⁰Yet the number of the people of Israel shall be like the sand of the sea, which can be neither measured nor numbered; and in the place where it was said to them, “You are not my people,” it shall be said to them, “Children of the living God.”

Sermon:  And yet… When the Divine interacts with humanity, it often does so in stories and symbols.  Think about the burning bush, Ezekiel’s wheel, the forbidden fruit, the tree of temptation and the tree of life, the stake that when gazed upon, healed; the cross, where humanity and divinity intersect.  I could go on for a long time, and I’m sure you could think of profound symbols of great meaning from our Bibles alone, not to mention symbols from other religious traditions, recording other people’s perceptions of interactions with that which is Mystery and Other.  God communicates deep truths to us out of images and events that beg to be interpreted and decodified.  Interpretation, you see, requires our engagement.  God goes to great lengths to engage us in a kind of theater, mesmerizing us with story, stories we tell and reenact again and again, Sunday after Sunday ever since Pentecost—remembering, until the narratives and the images become real to us and shape our thought, lives, and communities.  We are meant to be entranced, hypnotized and psychically shaped by the power of the stories we read in our Bible.  Jesus knew this; that is why he often communicated deep truths through telling his parables.  Now these were offensive stories to some, especially the Pharisees and rulers, because they disrupted the natural course of the human mind with an unexpected twist—a twist that pointed to God’s favor of the poor, the ordinary worker, the migrant, the refugee, the mixed-blood Samaritan, and the sinner.  So, know it is not unusual for God to ask prophets to do something, even as strange as marrying a prostitute, to produce an image, a visual lesson.  This is how the Divine communicates with us. And so, with that background, we will now approach today’s passage about the prophet Hosea.  The story of Hosea is an offensive, shocking story, at least to our modern ears.  Sometimes women in particular have a tough time with this story, as the bad person here is the prostitute wife.  It’s not a good tale for a feminist—and if you read it in full, you might see why.  But I would say, stick with the story, because allegorically, it has a lot to reveal about God’s nature.  Remember that there are many virtuous tales of women in the Bible as well, and men are often bad guys in the Bible too.  I’m glad we have no children here today, because Hosea is about a prostitute—but there’s the thing, we can all be like the  prostitute Gomer, men and women alike.  Now with all of that said, I should tell you that some modern-day theologians even go as far as to say that this is the second greatest story in the Bible—next to the Jesus story of course, because if we stick with Hosea’s story,  you will see that God is communicating something profound to us through it: God does not leave us even when we leave God—that is your take-home message in a nutshell.  God is always actively at work, going to great lengths, and we find this good news simmering just below the surface in the story.  Hosea communicates to us God’s very nature, a nature always working for our redemption and restoration.  God is the ever-pursuer, even when Israel breaks its covenant, again and again.  And it is our calling as Christians to always imitate God in life—not the prostitute Gomer.  We too must be the ever-pursuers when it comes to loving and matters of justice.  Now, the covenant God made with Abraham was conditional in that God would guide and protect Israel if Israel would obey God.  That little word “if” is a clue that it was a conditional covenant.  Even though Israel did not uphold its side of the covenant, and the covenant was broken again and again, God’s love was never, ever conditional.  It was steadfast, even when the people committed, as the Book of Hosea roughly calls it, “great whoredom.”

So, let’s dive into the first chapter of Hosea with a little historical background: Hosea, who prophesied for at least 38 years, lived during a time when Israel was suffering from a war with Assyria and in virtual anarchy.  Four Israelite kings had been assassinated within fourteen years after the death of Jeroboam II.  Remember him?  He was king when Amos was prophesying—Jeroboam the Second’s reign was marked by peace and prosperity (at least for the elite).  And by the way, Amos and Hosea were roughly contemporaries—Hosea prophesying just after Amos.  Hosea’s time was in the middle of the eighth century BC.  Both Amos and Hosea were calling out Israel for its offenses against God—oppressing the poor and worshipping other gods for material gain.  During this historical period, God commanded Hosea, a native to his own people, to take a wife of whoredom; in other words, God tells this prophet to marry a prostitute and have her children, which Hosea does, expediently and obediently; Hosea marries the local prostitute Gomer.  Now I’m not sure this was pronounced “Gomer” (as in Gober Pile) or “Go’mer,” pronounced with more of a French accent!  No doubt this great drama, this theater is to exemplify in a symbolic way that Israel has committed great whoredom by forsaking God—because Israel was worshipping other gods, Baal in particular.  They were worshipping for water and bread, wool and flax, grain and wine, all those material things.  The Northern Kingdom of Israel, you see, had delved into pagan practices, believing that there was favor and reward to be gained.  The whole Hosea drama is an analogy; Hosea (who symbolizes God), will deal with Gomer.  Gomer is a symbol for Israel, or by extension, even us.  As the book of Hosea unfolds, the prophet’s personal life becomes an embodiment of God’s redeeming love and amazing grace.  You will also see the Christ motif.

Now the symbolism I was talking about earlier runs deep.  Hosea’s Hebrew name means “salvation” or “deliverance.”  Imagine that!  Not surprising if Hosea represents God in this story; Hosea, in fact, is an early Christ figure.  Now, Gomer’s name means “completion,” in the sense that she was the complete measure of idolatry, or ripeness of consummate wickedness. Her name symbolized the complete adultery and idolatry of the very kingdom she represented. “As ‘a wife of whoredoms,’ this woman of the Northern Kingdom, regarded as an idolatress, became a symbol of her people” (All the Women of the Bible, Zondervan, 1988, https://www.biblegateway.com/resources/all-women-bible/Gomer).  In fact, Gomer likely was one of the Temple prostitutes, hanging out near the front door of the temple.  Ironic and kind of funny, since Hosea, as a prophet, had probably been condemning such prostitutes all of his life—and then God commands him to marry a prostitute! 

Soon after they were married, Gomer begins to bear children, whose names also have prophetically symbolic meanings.  And I should tell you that the children were not Hosea’s; these children were born out of Gomer’s continuing unfaithfulness—we learn this if we keep reading through chapter 2.  Even during marriage, Gomer continued prostituting herself.  She bears three children.  The first is a boy, Jezreel, which means “God Scatters.”  The second is a girl, Lo-Ruhamah, which means “not pittied.”  And the third, another boy was named Lo-Ammi, which means “not my people.”  Our passage today tells us that Gomer was the daughter of Diblaim, whose name is also interesting.  Diblaim means “double layers of grape cake,” double layers of cake being something sensual and indulgent.  The prostitute, symbolically at least, came from a father, whose name represented sensuality and indulgence, which were prime temptations for Israel.  But as you will recall from last week, God’s wrath often ends up being something like karma—cause and effect from the lack of right living—from lack of caring for the poor and from worshipping other Gods, which in this day and age may look like worshipping the God of money at the expense of the poor or the earth—when the legacy of such will be revisited upon us with long-reaching social ills or environmental calamities.

We see God’s utter exasperation with Israel in Chapter 1.  God says things like “I will no longer have pity on the house of Israel.  You are not my people and I am not your God.  And yet…juxtaposed with that exasperation, God goes to say, “Yet the number of the people of Israel shall be like the sand of the sea, which can be neither measured nor numbered, and in the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ it shall be said to them, ‘Children of the living God.’  The people of Judah and the people of Israel shall be gathered together, and they shall appoint for themselves one head; and they shall take possession of the land, for great shall be the day of Jezreel’.’”  So, you see, Israel’s punishment it not final; there is hope for the future—a hope that Christians see actualized in the coming of Jesus.  Something else is coming—a new and final covenant.  There is another place in the Old Testament that is absolutely pivotal regarding salvation history, and that’s Jeremiah 31:31-34, which reads, “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.  It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband,’ says the Lord.  ‘But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days,’ says the Lord: ‘I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.  No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,’ says the Lord; ‘for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.’”    These verses, like the Book of Hosea point forward to the coming of Jesus, the embodiment of God with us, God joined like a husband to the church, the bride of Christ.  Hosea tells us that God will be steadfast even with a sinful humanity, even when his wife, Israel and us by extension, have courted other lovers.

I want to provide a little sermon illustration that sums up the point of Hosea’s unconventional marriage with a prostitute.  “A couple married for 15 years began having more than usual disagreements.  They wanted to make their marriage work and agreed on an idea the wife had.  For one month they planned to drop a slip in a “fault” box.  The boxes would provide a place to let the other know about daily irritations.  The wife was diligent in her efforts and approach: ‘leaving the jelly top off the jar,’ ‘wet towels on the shower floor,’ ‘dirty socks not in hamper,’ on and on until the end of the month.  After dinner, at the end of the month, they exchanged boxes.  The husband reflected on what he had done wrong.  Then the wife opened her box and began reading, They were all the same, the message on each slip was, ‘I love you’” (www.sermonillustrations.com/a-z/marriage.html. The husband here is so much like God, who rather than harping on his wife’s faults, just wants to love her into reconciliation.  And so, how can the first chapter of Hosea be good news for us?  How is your relationship with God?  Do you see God as one continually wielding a big stick, out to get you?  Or do you see God as the ever-pursuer, even when we fall away.  

I was kind of brought up to see God wielding a big stick, someone always out to get you.  I remember an awful episode from my childhood right after my father died, when I was 12.  We had a big estate to keep up—four acres of lawn to mow.  My younger brother was out on the riding mower and my little sister had jumped onto the hitch in back of the mover and held on to my brother, bumping along for a joyride.  My mother caught a glimpse of this out the window and went into a bit of a frenzy as she ran out the door to intervene, bawling at me: “The dear Lord is going to take her next because of the way you mistreat her!” Fortunately, I was in confirmation class at the time, and our good UCC pastor was able to disabuse me of any notion of God exacting any kind of retribution for sibling rivalry and meanness by having my sister get run over by a lawnmower.   

Do you see God as the one who writes the message, over and over again on the pages of your Bible, “I love you?”  Fierce judgments are proclaimed on the pages of the prophets, to be sure, but we need to stay close to the text and keep reading.  Fierce judgments, that play out something like karma, and yet…Something else is coming:  Hope, steadfastness, demonstrations of sacrificial love…A love that woos us, calling us to respond, actively at work to buy us back.  A love calling us all the while to forsake the Baal’s of this life, to forsake all that is cheap and all the easy money at the expense of the poor and the earth and our relationships.  Because we are wedded to the Divine and often forget this—but deep signs abound everywhere, reminding us that we are joined to God.  That is what going to church and taking communion are all about—a weekly reminder that there is so much more than this material universe and all of its distractions.  This is why we are surrounded by symbols and drama and entrancing stories.  We need to be entranced and called back—regularly.  Jesus said to the church at Ephesus through John in Rev. 2:4, “You have forsaken your first love.”  What are the Baal’s in our lives?  What makes us spiritual adulterers who forsake our first love?  For some, addictions.  For some, neglecting our relationship with God and others.  Only you know what stands between you and God, you and your spouse, you and your family, you and your co-workers, you and your friends.  Know this, there is cause and effect; judgments do come when we forsake God and God’s ways…And yet, the best news is that God is always at work in all of our lives, supplying power, working for our redemption, wooing us back.  We do not have to be Gomer; God has shown us a better way.  Let us live into the image of God, revealed best in the person of Jesus, and shown also to us today in the Old Testament exemplar Hosea.  May it be so, Amen.    

Amos 8:1-12

8This is what the Lord God showed me—a basket of summer fruit. ²He said, “Amos, what do you see?” And I said, “A basket of summer fruit.” Then the Lord said to me, The end has come upon my people Israel; I will never again pass them by. ³The songs of the temple shall become wailings in that day,” says the Lord God; “the dead bodies shall be many, cast out in every place. Be silent!”

⁴Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land, ⁵saying, “When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, ⁶buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat.” ⁷The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds. ⁸Shall not the land tremble on this account, and everyone mourn who lives in it, and all of it rise like the Nile, and be tossed about and sink again, like the Nile of Egypt? ⁹On that day, says the Lord God, I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth in broad daylight. ¹⁰I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth on all loins, and baldness on every head; I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and the end of it like a bitter day.

¹¹The time is surely coming, says the Lord God, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. ¹²They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.

Sermon: Something like Karma

“In an op-ed piece in the November 30, 2012 issue of The New York Times, entitled ‘The Monster of Monticello,’ Paul Finkelman writes about Thomas Jefferson’s hypocrisy on race. When he wrote the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson affirmed the ‘self-evident truth’ that all men are ‘created equal.’

Yet even as he wrote that, he owned 175 slaves. On top of that, while many of Jefferson’s contemporaries, including George Washington, freed their slaves during and after the Revolutionary War, Jefferson did not. He remained what Finkelman calls ‘the master of Monticello, and a buyer and seller of human beings.’

1820’s heated arguments over slavery during the debate over the Missouri Compromise shocked Jefferson. He believed that by opposing the spread of slavery in the West, the children of the revolution were about to ‘perpetrate’ an ‘act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against the hopes of the world.’

Yet Finkelman concludes, ‘If there was ‘treason against the hopes of the world,’ it was perpetrated by the founding generation, which failed to place the nation on the road to liberty for all” (Doug Bratt, Old Testament Lectionary, Center for Excellence in Preaching, www.calvinseminary.edu).

I am often amazed at how we, as human beings, are able to compartmentalize so well.  Many of us proclaim words that look attractive, but deep down, we often lack real integration of word and practice or integration of symbol of substance.  Curiously, while Jefferson wrote the declaration of independence and proclaimed that all men are created equal, he continued to own slaves—and the African American people, and other previous-enslaved ethnic groups, continue to suffer from the awful legacy of slavery; the legacy lasts for generations and spawns costly social ills lasting long into the future in slavery’s aftermath.

This opening sermon illustration about Thomas Jefferson gets to the heart of Amos’ message in Chapter 8.  Chapter 8 records Amos’ fourth of five prophetic visions.  In this vision, Amos indicts Israel even as the nation’s outside, its surface looks as good as a ripe bowl of summer fruit.  Amos indicts Israel, namely for its fraudulent business practices highlighted in chapter 8, which hurt the poor and reap long-term implications for all of the society.  Amos proclaims God’s judgement upon Israel—judgements which are actually the fleshing out of those implications.  But today, we are going to look very closely at what God’s judgement means in our lives, because it may not be what you think it is.  In fact, I posit that God’s judgement during our earthly lives ends up looking something like karma, which is a concept found in eastern religions. 

You all know what karma is?  Probably so: What goes around comes around.  I’ve heard it argued that karma is not a Christian concept because for the Christian, karma is superseded by grace, and ultimately, eternally that is true.  But as we live our lives, the universal principal of cause and long-lasting effect is taught throughout our Judeo-Christian scriptures.  In life, we reap what we sow in our daily lives, and sin’s legacy can stretch far into the future.

Let’s look at what was going on in Amos’ time, specifically in chapter 8.  Amos’ fourth vision begins with what seems like a lovely basket of ripe fruit.  Now the symbolism of this fruit runs deep.  In the original Hebrew language, there is a pun.  The term for “summer fruit” is qayits, while the term for “end” is qets.  In the Norther Kingdom’s dialect, the two words would have sounded quite similar; hence the pun, they play on words.  Amos is juxtaposing a pleasant image of fruit with and ending of unspeakable disaster.  A fruit basket is an attractive image; no wonder bowls of fruit are frequently the subject of still-life paintings.  But the meaning of this image is superficial only.  While the current milieu in the North Kingdom looks good on the outside, the heart of the matter is anything but: Amos warns of upcoming disaster.  Now why did things look good on Israel’s outside?

Modern-day archaeology confirms that Jeroboam II’s reign was the most prosperous that Israel had ever known.  “By the late 8^th century BC, the territory of Israel was the most densely settled in the entire Levant, with a population of about 350,000.  This prosperity was built on trade in olive oil, wine, and possibly horses, with Egypt and especially Assyria providing the markets.  According to Amos, the triumphs of the king had engendered a haughty spirit of boastful overconfidence at home.  Oppression and exploitation of the poor by the mighty, luxury in palaces of unheard-of-splendor, and a craving for amusement were some of the internal fruits of these external triumphs” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeroboam_II).  Amos rails against the materialism and selfishness of the Israelite elite of the day and says, “Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land…”  And then he proclaims upcoming disaster.      We learned last week that Israel was worshipping God alright.  They were attending temple, giving their offerings, making their sacrifices on the Sabbath.  They were wholeheartedly singing the songs at temple like we sing them at church.  Yet something was rotten like a past-ripe banana.  Outward looks, you know, can be deceiving.  While they looked like they were worshipping at the temple, they were thinking about how to make money.  (Oh, yes, how our minds often wander in church!  What are we thinking about right now?  I remember times in my teens when my body was raging with hormones—shameful thoughts during church!)  And Amos says that the worshippers were saying, “When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain?  And when will the sabbath be over so that we may offer wheat for sale?”  See, the merchants were impatient for the holy days to pass so they could resume their fraudulent business and make themselves richer.  And how did they make themselves richer?  On the backs of the poor.  Amos writes, they “practice deceit with false balances buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and sell the sweepings of the wheat,” which were empty hulls.  It’s like in my twenties when I used to go shopping at the Italian Market in Philly.  There were beautiful grapes there displayed, and I would ask for a pound.  The merchant would fill a paper bag in the back with un-displayed grapes, but all were rotten except one bunch on the top.  Empty hulls!  I had been swindled!  I wondered if the merchant was a church-going man, shiny as a ripe apple one the outside but rotten to the core even as he went through all the religious motions.  The biblical canon condemns such hypocrisy.   

Amos proclaims a time of what seems like God’s retribution when the people did not measure up to God’s plumb line, that measure of morality we talked about last week.  Amos warns, “The dead bodies shall be many, cast out in every place…Shall not the land tremble on this account and everyone mourn who lives in it, and all of it rise like the Nile, and be tossed about and sink again, like the Nile of Egypt…”  And God says, “On that day, I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth in broad daylight.  I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation…I will send a famine on the land…”

I hope you can connect this ancient text to the issues of today.  Huge profits continue to be made through “economic and environmental exploitation. Corporate fraud, exploitation of the poor, and ecological disruption are all consequences of the drive to maximize profit at any cost.  [And what is worst of all is that p]eople who live on the margins often suffer disproportionately from environmental abuse” (Blake Couey, Commentary on Amos 8:1-12, www.workingpreacher.org).  And all we have to do is think of the Flint, Michigan water crisis and the elevated levels of lead in that water.  Families there, families that are minorities, are suffering medical ailments all because it was cheaper to pump in water from the polluted Flint River rather than Lake Huron.  I wonder how adequately insured these families are, and if they are being treated.  Ultimately the costs of treatment and reparation come back to society anyway, and the cost—both monetary and to human life and health—becomes greater later than doing the right thing in the first place, even if the right thing costs more initially.  We all pay for our abuses in some way; there is cause and effect, and that’s something like karma.

We reap, what to Amos looked like God’s judgement, when we make a quick buck off mother earth.  Consider these current issues:  The EPA has recently rolled back Obama-era coal plant regulations which by some estimations (including the EPA’s own) will result in the deaths of an extra 300-1500 people each year by 2030, because of the increase in air pollution.  Not only that, but pollution in the environment causes mercury accumulation in the food chain—not just lung ailments.  Sure, the rollbacks improve the short-term economy for some, but look at the long-term effects.  Mercury in high concentrations is a powerful neurotoxin that can lead to lower IQ and impaired motor skills in children.  Why is our current government not consistently encouraging investment in clean technologies like wind?  If fossil-fuel burning continues as it does not, CO2 levels will rise to a level that could not return to pre-industrial levels even tens of thousands of years into the future.  There have never been CO2 levels this high in our atmosphere since measurements began.    Wildfires rage in Alaska, where it has hit 90 degrees for the first time. There indeed are devastating, karmic consequences for systemic sin, and the prophets warn us about this. One thing I want to underscore before I finish today is that as you read Amos and other passages in the Bible, you may come away with the notion that God is punitive and that God’s justice is retributive.  I would remind you that human beings wrote the Bible—human beings with dualistic minds, and who only know justice as retributive, punitive, or getting even.  Instead, know that there is a trajectory in the Bible.  In many OT passages, God indeed looks punitive and retributive, because we often see in God what we see in ourselves, but the in the big picture, if you stay within the biblical cannon through the Gospels and through Paul, you will come to understand that God’s justice is more about restoration—about setting people back on the course God had intended for them from the beginning.  God’s primary interest is getting all of us back to the unspoiled Garden of Eden.  That’s what the Jesus story is all about—restoration.  Richard Rohr says that we “gradually let God ‘grow up.’  God does not change as much as human knowledge of God evolves” (Richard Rohr’s Meditations, Justice in the Scriptures, Sunday, July 7, 2019).  Yes, the prophets tell us that bad things happen—that Israel will experience God’s devastating judgements—when people don’t address the root of the problem—greed and oppression of the ones in the margins.  Slavery, we find, has long-lasting social implications; making a quick buck with cheap energy will poison us in the long run; disrespecting the planet will make us sick and die, and the first to suffer will be the poor, the ones on the margins, the ones God cares preferentially for, the ones who can’t afford a home in a cooler place with better drinking water.  Sometimes things look good as a bowl of ripe summer fruit on the surface, but rottenness festers just below, and that rottenness spreads and ultimately becomes costly for all of society.  It’s something like karma.

I want to end today by telling you a story of St. Roseline, whose picture in on the front of today’s bulletin.  I took this picture of her statue when we were in Gassin’s little church.  Gassin is a little beautiful village in the mountains above San Tropez, France.  Our guide told us Roseline was born in 1263 and is the special saint of that region.  A local winery that produces the area’s iconic Rose wine even bears her name.  According to local legend, Roseline would take food from her family’s larder and hide it in her basket, and then distribute it to the village’s peasants, who were poor and hungry during a time of famine.  She was caught by her father, a Marquis, the Lord of Les Arcs, who sternly disapproved of her doing that.  One day, he demanded to know what she had in her basket.  She dutifully and no doubt nervously opened her basket for him to see, and it was full of roses—not food.  Legend says that angels transformed the food into flowers to protect her from her father’s anger.  Now to become a Catholic saint, an individual must not only be full of good works but also to have miracles associated with his or her life.  This was not the only good work and miracle with which she was associated—she was known for her piety, charitable works, and other miracles, including casting out demons.  She became a nun and went on to become prioress of her abbey.  And what this legend tells me is that God is so very concerned with the poor that God will underscore this at critical junctures oppressed and cheated at the hands of the elite.  God so desperately wants all of humanity restored to the people God created us to be.  God wants hearts in us like the heart that was in St. Roseline.  God wants right living and for us to make good choices.  The future is malleable—it is not set, prophecies don’t all come true because we can make godly choices to live in love, and to treat the poor with justice—both in our individual lives and in our shaping of larger systems.  And that love and justice will return to in time, and work miracles to protect the ones caring for them.  No wonder so much of our Old Testament is written by prophets like Amos who shake up the status quo and warn what will happen if the poor are us; the generations will bear this out; and that is something like karma.  Amen.

by Rev. Sandi Anthony, preached Sunday, July 14, 2019

Amos 7:7-17

⁷This is what he showed me: the Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand. ⁸And the Lord said to me, “Amos, what do you see?” And I said, “A plumb line.” Then the Lord said, “See, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass them by; ⁹the high places of Isaac shall be made desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste, and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword.”

¹⁰Then Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, sent to King Jeroboam of Israel, saying, “Amos has conspired against you in the very center of the house of Israel; the land is not able to bear all his words. ¹¹For thus Amos has said, ‘Jeroboam shall die by the sword, and Israel must go into exile away from his land.’” ¹²And Amaziah said to Amos, “O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, earn your bread there, and prophesy there; ¹³but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom.” ¹⁴Then Amos answered Amaziah, “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees, ¹⁵and the Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’ ¹⁶“Now therefore hear the word of the Lord. You say, ‘Do not prophesy against Israel, and do not preach against the house of Isaac.” ¹⁷Therefore thus says the Lord: ‘Your wife shall become a prostitute in the city, and your sons and your daughters shall fall by the sword, and your land shall be parceled out by line; you yourself shall die in an unclean land, and Israel shall surely go into exile away from its land.’”

Sermon: The Priest and the Prophet

“Moishe, a medieval Jewish astrologer, prophesied that the king’s favorite horse would soon die.  Sure enough, the horse died a short time later.  The king was outraged at the astrologer, certain that his prophecy had brought about the horse’s death.  He summoned Moishe and commanded him, ‘Prophet, tell me when you will die!’  Moishe realized that the king was planning to kill him immediately, no matter what answer he gave, so he had to answer carefully.  “I do not know when I will die,’ he answered finally.  ‘I only know that whenever I die, the king will die three days later’” (www.aish.com/j/j307287641.html?)

Today we are going to talk about the differences often found between priests and prophets, and how the tension between the Old Testament prophet Amos and Amaziah, the priest of Bethel plays out—and what we can learn about that.  And you will see how there is nothing new under the sun, especially today, when we see priests (effectively “pastors of the court”) cozying up to kings or political leaders.  Prophets have the difficult job of calling out the priests who give license to political leaders to enact policies of oppression.  Prophets also call out the political leaders directly.  A good priest or pastor is supposed to be many things, including God’s prophet.  Amaziah was not this.  Let me first clear up a misconception about what prophecy actually is, especially in the biblical canon.  Prophecy is not so much “foretelling” as it is “forth-telling.”  The clever Moishe was more of a foreteller, and biblical foretelling really takes back seat to the difficult art of forthtelling.  So today, we will define prophets as forth-tellers, one who are critical of their own religions, especially when they see that religion becoming co-opted by the state and hurting the poor.

Let’s first look at what was going on in Amos’ day.  I want to provide some background for understanding:  Amos, of course, is the prophet most famous for the words, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”  He was one of God’s first and finest social justice prophets who announced that Israel’s punishment would be inevitable for its mistreatment of the poor.  Amos prophesied during the time of the Divided Kingdom, when King Uzziah ruled the Southern Kingdom, which we call Judah, and when King Jeroboam II ruled the Northern Kingdom, which we call Israel.  The time frame was between 786-746 BC.  Amos’ primary concern was Israel, the Northern Kingdom.  In the kingdom at that time, the society was sharply stratified.  The gap between the rich and poor was stark, and the poor were oppressed by the wealthy, as they have often been throughout the ages, including today.  The prophet Amos railed against those who abused basic human rights.  He also criticized Israelite worship, saying that the people were more concerned with adhering to proper ritual than they were with the plight of the poor—and this made God angry.

So, in our particular passage today, Amos has a vision; in fact, it is his third of five visions Amos has of God in this Old Testament book.  In Amos’ third vision, God is standing next to a wall built with a plumb line.  Now I know nothing about construction, so I had to look up plumb line.  I learned that a “plumb line is a weight suspended from a string used as a vertical reference line to ensure a structure is centered. As they always find the vertical axis pointing to the center of gravity, they ensure everything is right, justified and centered” (https://www.latimes.com/socal/daily-pilot/opinion/tn-dpt-me-0724-commentary2-20160718-story.html).  So, the plumb line is actually a metaphor for justice in society—our plumb line in Christian practice is that which ensures care of the poor, immigrant, marginalized and widow—which are always God’s primary and preferential concerns.  So, the take-home message is that we need to be aware of how our votes, our political support, our personal giving, and our mission as a denomination and congregation measure up to God’s plumb line, where everything is right, justified and centered in God’s eyes.  In other words, we need to ask ourselves continually if our participation in society is morally straight when measured by God’s plumb line.

So next, Amos engages with Amaziah, the local priest who is fairly cozy with King Jeroboam II, the political power of the time.  Amaziah sends word to the king that Amos was conspiring against him.  Amaziah tells Amos to flee to Judah and to prophesy there, because no one wants to hear this uncomfortable message in Israel, including the priest.  Amaziah calls Amos on the carpet for prophesying in the “king’s sanctuary” and essentially messing with the status quo that the upper strata of society was enjoying.  One can almost hear the privilege this priest enjoys in this liaison Amaziah has with the king; Amaziah does not want his cushy world rocked.

Now Amos humbly defends himself saying that he is “no prophet, nor a prophet’s son.”  He says he is a “herdsman, a dresser of sycamore trees,” which may imply that he is both a keeper of animals and a migrant laborer.  This would make him a social outsider as most prophets are—but Amos still knows the system.  We can think of him in the same way that we think of Martin Luther King Jr, Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela—outsiders to be sure, but ones who knew the system.  Now remember how shepherds in the ancient world were considered by society to be unclean because of their proximity to animals?  They were part of society yet on its outskirts, as Amos was.  Nevertheless, Amos maintains that God took him from the flock and gave him a message: “Go, prophesy to my people Israel.”  And Amos is faithful in bearing the voice of God, who cares deeply for all human beings.   But keep in mind that a prophet’s job is very difficult, because it rocks the status quo.  People want to banish the discomforting voice and the inconvenient truths; as Amaziah says, “The land is not able to bear all [Amos’] words.”  The Apostle Paul, in fact, lists prophecy as the second most important spiritual gift.  But those who stand up to power can get crucified, as we well know.  Remember how the gospels tell us that it was “the priests, the elders, and the teachers of the law” who condemned Jesus, who was another advocate for the poor.  Jesus unfailingly embraced the prophetic office.

Now I want to give you a contemporary example of how the tension between the prophet Amos and the priest Amaziah still plays out today.  We need to be aware of the human tendency to marginalize and look critically at the voices of Celebrity pastors in particular, whose voices dominate the airwaves.  Many of them have cozied up to the present administration in a similar attempt to defend the “king’s sanctuary” to retain their places of privilege and power.  I want to share with you a recent quote from James Dobson, whose organization you may have heard of, Focus on the Family, which he led 15 years ago.  Sojourners Magazine is a prophetic Christian voice and calls out, very much in the style of the prophet Amos, problems and abuses within contemporary Christian attitude and practice.  Sojourner’s writer, Brandon Massey reports on Dobson’s July 2019 newsletter describing Dobson’s visit to McAllen, Texas, at the invitation of the White House, to share what he had seen “up close and personal.”  It is troubling the way Dobson characterizes the men, women, and children in the border camps.  He describes them as carriers of “lice, scabies, and other diseases;” they sit silently with “plaintive eyes;” they are from the “lowest rung of many societies.”  The most alarming of Dobson’s rhetoric, according to Massey, occurs in Dobson’s closing paragraph, which reads:

“What I’ve told you is only a glimpse of what is occurring on the nation’s border.  I don’t know what it will take to change the circumstances.  I can only report that without an overhaul of the law and the allocation of resources, millions of illegal immigrants will continue flooding to this great land from around the world.  Many of them have no marketable skills.  They are illiterate and unhealthy.  Some are violent criminals.  Their numbers will soon overwhelm the culture as we have known it, and it could bankrupt the nation.  America has been a wonderfully generous and caring country since its founding.  That is our Christian nature.  But in this instance, we have met a worldwide wave of poverty that will take us down if we don’t deal with it.  And it won’t take long for the inevitable consequences to happen.”  

Massey goes on to point out that Dobson’s fear-filled rhetoric is alarmingly similar to that of German pastors and theologians in the Third Reich, the ones that were cozy with the state who did not use the prophetic voice to call out the atrocities of the holocaust.  Massey gives this historical example and writes, “The closing paragraph of Dobson’s newsletter reminds me of a 1933 book by the German theologian Gerhard Kittel.  The problem of the Jews living in Germany was, according to Kittel, based on the fact that they are a people perpetually in a foreign land and thus, as foreigners, they have brought decadence to Germany

[hear the echo of Dobson’s words, “illiterate,” “unhealthy,” “criminal,”
“overwhelming numbers,” “bankrupt,” “lice,” “scabies,” “disease,” and “lowest
rung of many societies.”]

  But back to Kittel.  “In an effort to solve this ‘problem’ from a Christian theological perspective, Kittel offers four possible solutions: 1) Extermination (which he rejects on practical, rather than moral grounds); 2) Deportation (which he also considers impractical on political grounds); 3.) Assimilation (an idea abhorrent to Kittel); or 4) Separation (the only possible solution)” (“James Dobson’s Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric is Dangerous,” Brandon Massey, Sojourners, July 3, 2019).  And I should mention that the German theologian Kittel wasn’t alone in his support of the Nazi’s.  Other court pastors and German theologians supported the Nazis as well, and it is common knowledge that many of Germany’s churches remained complicit in their silence.

Voices like Kittel’s and Dobson’s hearken back to Amaziah’s, but right now the world desperately needs Amos’ voice and prophetic voices like the ones featured in Sojourners.  See, these celebrity pastors whose messages dominate our airwaves, folks including Jerry Falwell Jr., Pat Robertson, and Jack Graham, and others are court pastors, court priests, not prophets in the style of Amos.  Like Amaziah, these guys are not measuring with God’s plumb line in the current immigration crisis—even though their assorted contributions through the years might not have been all bad.  Kittel, Dobson, and Amaziah were much more interested in protecting the king’s sanctuary and a privileged way of life, where resources are not shared with the very ones God is most concerned with.  Court pastor rhetoric has been dehumanizing and perpetuates the inhumanity of the border situation; it makes the refugees look like contagion, less than us, even as they are children of God just as we are.  Rather than speak creatively and prophetically, these court pastors and court priests communicate a fear-filled theology of limited resources rather than God’s abundance.  They effectively stifle the creative visions that challenges like the border crisis inspire.  Instead of inspiring ways to bring God’s kingdom to the least of these, they revert to protecting the status quo, retrenching rather than progressing toward a future that looks more and more like God’s kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. 

Richard Rohr, another contemporary prophetic voice says this: “The United States and many other nations need courageous prophets as today’s world leaders show little or no ability to criticize their own duplicitous power games. I suspect that we get the leaders who mirror what we have become as nations” (Meditations, Prophets: Part One, Struggling with Shadow, Tuesday, July 2, 2019).  So, the priestly voice may not always be the prophetic voice, and we ought to be very careful when we listen to faith leaders, especially the celebrity ones whose voices dominate our airwaves.  We need to measure their messages with God’s plumb line by asking “Is their primary focus safeguarding the poor, the immigrant, the widow and the marginalized, or are they trying to protect the king’s sanctuary and keep all the resources for ones who look like them?”  We see this same tension playing out in our scripture today between Amos and Amaziah.  Priests (called pastors in our circles), you see, are called to be Amos-style prophets as well.

Years ago, we had a dynamic pastor at Prescott United Methodist Church.  I remember the words of his last sermon that he preached the Sunday before the bishop moved him on to bigger things.  In his sermon, he recounted his assessment of his own perceived accomplishments and failures of his seven-year tenure there.  I thought he was remarkably honest and brave.  He felt good about the pastoral care he delivered.  He felt reasonably good about his preaching and leadership in church growth and the new building program.  But he said, “What I could have done better to have been your prophet.  Every day we had people coming in off the streets in hopeless situations.  I should have inspired you, the congregation, to develop more ministries for them.  I should have challenged you more—even to the point of risking relationship with some of you who disagreed with me and wanted this to be a homogenized church that first and foremost looked after our own.”  He really impressed me in his honesty while assessing his own perception of his prophetic voice.

I’ll end with this.  The UCC theologian Walter Brueggemann says this about the role of the prophet in his book The Prophetic Imagination: “The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.”  Friends, our dominant culture says, “Let’s safeguard what we have because there’s not enough to go around.  Let’s spend our money to build a high wall and more gated communities rather than address the root of the problem.  There is simply not enough for the other.”  The prophets, like Amos, interrupt our self-focus, put forth a new vision, inspire imagination, and call us back to God, whose plumb line is the truest measure of morality, justice and righteousness.  Amen.