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Sermon - April 26th, 2009
Amos the Prophet
Rev. Gwen Drake
Scripture:Amos
Amos is one of those minor prophets in the Old Testament, which does not mean he was not important. It means that he was a condenser instead of an expander. After all, he was a shepherd. He was a rancher-farmer from Tekoa, called by God to speak. And all the rancher-farmers I grew up with, well, they said a lot in a few words as opposed to saying a little with a lot of words.
The book of Amos is untidy according to modern literary tastes. The text is rough, intense, and very raw. Amos was not a refined, educated city boy. He told it like it was without mincing words. Scholars have struggled with this little book’s inconsistencies, varieties of styles and literary forms, and the difficulty of relating one part of the book to another. The scholars have blamed the editors and the scribes who have copied the book over and over again. Of course, these issues with Amos can be studied and discussed and debated, but none can be resolved. So, the unity of the book is not found in its uniformity. The unity and integrity of the book is found in the words, the life, the ministry of Amos himself. He was a country boy, a shepherd, a farmer. He was a pincher of sycamore fruit, fruit that was used by the poor. Amos pinched the fruit so it would ripen.
Now Amos spoke his words in a time of great prosperity. All was well with the nation of Judah and Israel, the divided Kingdom. It was a time of great optimism and confidence. Now when times are good, bad news is not welcome. Amos was the bearer of bad news, as most prophets are. The voice of Amos came from the rural area of Tekoa, from the fringes of the Judean wilderness. Amos gives us another picture of Israel’s prosperity around the time of the year 750 BCE. He speaks from ground level. He doesn’t use elaborate symbols or metaphorical visions. He describes the lion roaring over its prey, a plague of locusts eating the pasture, the stars in the night sky.
The shepherd prophet had a lot to say to the prosperous city people. He said they bathed in luxury, they were overfed and lived in luxurious homes and thought constantly of ways they could amuse themselves. This was true, he said, while the peasant was burdened with debts and sold into slavery for the price of a pair of shoes. Amos didn’t have anything good to say about religion either. He had seen the places of worship filled with people confident and thankful for their good fortune. He had seen priests and prophets sitting silent in the face of dishonesty, immorality, and injustice. The urban and elite of the Hebrew people were blind and deaf to the reality that Amos pointed to. Amos spoke with no credentials, no formal religious training. Yet he spoke the word of the Lord with a simple and poetic truth.
A priest named Amaziah was disturbed by Amos. He told King Jeroboam that Amos was part of a conspiracy against the King. He said, “The land is not able to bear all his words!” Amaziah told Amos to get out of Israel and go to the land of Judah. “Eat bread there, prosphecy there; but never again prophesy at Bethel in Israel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is the temple of the kingdom.”
Amos responded, “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son, I am a herdsman, a dresser of sycamore trees, and the Lord took me from following the flock and said, ‘Go, prophecy to my people Israel.’”
He was a farmer/rancher/shepherd whom God called out of his comfort zone, to disturb a contented and comfortable people. He was called to bear bad news to a people who believe everything was fine when it wasn’t. He was speaking about defeat to a nation with a strong military. He was speaking to the ruling elite who believed God had blessed them and was on their side because of their success and wealth. He said the success of the wealthy was built on a foundation of injustice. They maintained their luxurious lifestyle on the backs of the peasant majority. Profits were maximized. Rent, taxes, tribute, interest, fines, and slavery were on the rise.
Amos said to the ruling class, God will answer your war against the peasants with war against you. God will turn your festivals into lamentation. Israel will go into exile.
The words of Amos were words of doom, visions of gloom and words of woe. “I despise your feasts! I take no delight in your solemn assemblies! Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings, I will not accept them, and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; the melody of your harps. I will not listen. But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream!”
He was a simple rancher-farm boy turned prophet by God. He was a nobody, and nobody paid attention to him. He spoke clearly and directly about the consequences of greed. They did not listen. When times are good, bad news is ignored. We know that. Israel learned that. Soon after the time of Amos, in the year 722 BCE, Israel, the northern kingdom was conquered by Assyria and ceased to exist for many, many generations.
What does the word of God according to Amos mean for us today? We live in a world that is bombarded by words. Many of us have become hard of hearing. We have learned to filter out words that are not necessary for our lives. We learn to sleep through noise. We stop listening to the preacher, or our spouse, or our children. There is so much bad news in the world, we protect ourselves by not listening. Studies have showed that most people only recall about 25% of what they have heard in the past few days. Gosh, what 25% of this sermon are you going to recall, or the announcements! We do not listen well. We listen faster than most people talk and we use the lag time to compose our own response, which means we listen even less.
Let’s add in another challenge. We have become a nation of interruptors. Have you ever observed a conversation of interruptions? Conversation becomes more like a competitive sport! I think that is why the internet and text messaging on the phone, and now twittering is such a rage these days. You can get your thoughts out without an interruption! You can log on and off whenever you want.
What has happened to the once noble role of the word? What words do we trust? How can we listen when we seem to have calluses on our ears? I know that we are hungry for a Word from God. We are starving for fresh words from the mouth of God. Amos knew this too. He said, “The time is surely coming, says the Lord, 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. They 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.”
We live in a land of plenty, yet there is a famine. A famine for truth, for answers, for justice, for wisdom, for God. In this land of plenty, we hunger for the Word of God. The words that rise up around us on every side of us, they do not nourish us. So what do we do, we pile on more words, and more, thousands of words coming at us every moment. Words that distract us from the terrible silence within.
In a world of too many words, silence affects us because we are no longer affected by sound. We have built up our defenses against sound. We have no defense against silence. Many of us flee from silence because silence can mean anything. Silence could mean we do not know anything. Or it could mean we know something all too well.
Silence is nondenominational. Silence is inclusive. Silence is ecumenical. It is before religious dogma. It is incapable of crusades, of war. In silence, people who do not speak the same language can act together, creating something that speaks louder than words.
Perhaps it can be said that silence is God’s final defense against our idolatry. We rule the earth and the land as if we are little gods. We justify our actions by saying that God is on our side. We project our image onto God over and over again. Meanwhile, the world is full of violence, the earth is being polluted and its resources sucked dry. Bad news comes at us from all sides—and God is silent. God is silent knowing that nothing gets to us like the failure of our speech. God is silent, knowing that we won’t listen to anything, like we listen to silence. God is silent, because maybe when we run out of words, then and perhaps only then can God be God. When we have eaten our own words until we are sick of them, when nothing we can tell ourselves makes a dent in our hunger, when we are prepared to surrender the very Word that brought us into being in hopes of hearing it spoken again—then, at last, when we have no words, when we are silent, we are ready to worship God, then, at last, we find God in the silence. We find God in the silence, surrendering our illusions of safety and comfort and superiority. We surrender to a silent God who calls us to leave our sanctuaries, wherever they are, and seek God in the streets, in the fields, in the migrant camps, trying to figure out together how to untie the fancy knots of injustice and how to take the yokes of oppression apart. We surrender work together to give bread to the hungry, homes to the homeless, and to do nothing less than transform the world and build the restoration, as the shepherd prophet Amos said over 2700 years ago,
Indeed the time is at hand,
Says the Lord your God,
When the one who plows shall overtake the one who reaps, and the treader of grapes the one who sows the seed;
the mountains will drip with sweet wine, and all the hills will flow with it.
Then I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel; they shall rebuild the ruined cities, and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards, and drink their wine; they shall cultivate gardens, and eat their fruit. I will plant them upon their land, and they shall never be rooted out of the land that I have given them—the Lord your God has spoken.
Amen.