2 Kings 4:42-44; Ephesians 3:14-21; John 6:1-21
What did you expect when you came today? I’m guessing that you expected the usual. Three hymns, some musical responses, some sort of special music, offering and prayers, fantastic organ music, and another stellar sermon. Right? I hope the sermon is stellar. We’ll know in 18 minutes.
Did you expect to be spiritually fed? Did you expect to be blessed by what transpires here? Did you pray last night or this morning that God might use the words spoken, the songs sung, the prayers offered, the people present to do something blessed for someone in these seats or outside of these walls? Did you expect the Spirit to be present powerfully?
I’m sure each of us expected something. Did we expect enough? The account in John’s gospel about the feeding of the 5,000 and the brief account in 2 Kings both deal with low expectations. Neither the disciples with their five loaves and two fish nor Elisha’s servant with the donated 20 barley loaves expect enough.
Why is it that we think God is stingy? Our God is not a parsimonious God. We are the children of a generous God. God fed the Israelites in the wilderness with manna for 40 years. No one had too little and no one had too much. Elisha’s mentor, Elijah, stayed with a non-Israelite woman in Zarephath. She had enough flour and oil to make one dinner’s worth of bread. Neither the flour nor the oil ran out and the widow, her son, and Elijah ate for many days (1 Kings 17:8-16). God delivers what is necessary when it is needed.
I think that we are afraid of plenty. That is, afraid of the plenty that God wants to give us. The plenty that God wants to hand us isn’t a free handout. It’s a burden. That’s how we feel. The love, the mercy, the grace, the redemption that God wants to give us is a burden because we have to act responsibly with it. We have to receive it. We have to respond to it. All that God lavishes on us can’t be stored up, set aside for a rainy day.
We say the words quickly and absent-mindedly, but every time we say the Lord’s Prayer we are hit square in the gut with one aspect of the burden of God’s generosity: “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” This responsibility gets to us in other ways. Be merciful as you have received mercy. Do to others as you would have them do to you. You have received without having to pay, therefore, give without demanding payment.
Our three verses about Elisha and bread don’t deny the presence of suffering. God does not ignore suffering. God may not always address it in the ways we humans being think that it needs to be addressed. Suffering does exist. And it is not just attacks in movie theaters or car bombings or Christian pastors accused of sedition by the non-Christian majority elite. Suffering isn’t only 20 hours a week at $7.35 an hour or having to buy school uniforms or choosing between food and medication.
Suffering is acute loneliness. Suffering is the inability to find a way to fit in with others. Suffering is ethnic or racial or gender discrimination. Suffering is fear of one’s own shadow. Suffering is having to hide one’s opinions, ideas, identity. Suffering is feeling so burdened by guilt and remorse that there is no hope. Suffering is not knowing that there is a God, and that God is truly gracious, desiring to give salvation to all who are moved by the Spirit to recognize and accept God’s redeeming work in Christ.
There is no scarcity of suffering. There is also no scarcity in God’s blessings.
People felt pretty low in the time that Elisha lived in Gilgal. The land was beset by a series of wars between Israel and Syria, and a famine as well. Suffering reigned. But the divine message is clear. It is signed in the name of the prophet: Elisha, which means, “God has granted salvation.”
Scarcity was the only game in town. The man from Baal-shalishah was tremendously generous. Elisha chooses not to receive the gift for himself but to offer it to God’s people in need. Elisha’s servant sees the 20 loaves as an impossibly small amount to meet the needs of a hundred people, the “sons of the prophets.” Elisha tells him to do it anyway. The people will eat and there will be leftovers. And it was so.
The disciples acted the same way with their trove of five loaves and two fish. The crowd was 5,000, as if everyone in Waverly had gathered at the high school football stadium.
We don’t know if Elisha’s servant was convicted by the prophet’s invocation of God’s word or if he simply acquiesced to the prophet’s command. The same wondering could be made about Jesus’ disciples. Did they believe or did they pout?
In both cases the word of the Lord is true. To try and figure out the mechanics of the miracles is to miss the whole point of either event. What is clear is that in the midst of human need an individual is generous in offering the best that is available and the gift is given to God’s people. The result is beyond human expectation. That is the point. God always works beyond our expectations.
So why don’t we raise our expectations? Who do we doubt? Why do we short-change God’s intent and ability to be generous, merciful, and gracious to us? In the words of British theologian N. T. Wright, “We have seen the future in the resurrection of Jesus and it is real.”
We are very good at budgeting our resources and our time with a careful eye to the limitations that we perceive. There are only so many hours in a day. There are only so many pennies in a dollar. There are only so many people. There is only so much energy and physical capacity. We go overboard counting the cost of doing anything and so we budget shortfall, and believing shortfall we lower our vision and reduce our passion.
We need to be honest about our needs – as individuals, as God’s people in this place. But we also need to break out of our self-imposed prison of poverty (in heart, soul, mind, and strength) and trust the unlimited God we serve.
God has called us to holy work of proclaiming the gospel for the salvation of humankind; sheltering, nurturing, and fostering the fellowship of the children of God; maintaining divine worship; preserving the truth; promoting social righteousness; and exhibiting the Kingdom of Heaven to the world. Yet we are afraid to ask God for the basic necessities that God provides.
When we are totting up our resources for any activity, we fail to include God’s contribution. How many times have we been contacted by a college, a charity, even a political party with the message that our gift will be matched two for one or three for one? God is the original match giver. Only we don’t know the ratio. We don’t know the threshold at which the match kicks in. We only know that we don’t have enough by ourselves. And we forget that God wants to use what we have and make it go farther than we can imagine.
You probably think that I mean money. Money is only one resource. God wants us to offer the best of everything we are as well as what we have. God wants our best faith. It is not too small that God can’t use it if we give it over to God. God wants our best praying, however humble and tongue-tied it might be. God wants our best attempt to grapple with the words we call the Bible and believe that the Spirit will take our scripture wrestling and use them to open our hearts and minds to new vistas of God’s activity in the world. God wants our best attentiveness to God so that God can make visible in small ways through us the grand and glorious love that God lavishes all around.
Elisha and Jesus may seem to be cavalier with the way they nonchalantly tell the folks around them to distribute the goods. The truth of the matter is that they are being very prudent. Elisha and Jesus are able to recognize the presence and will of God. Elisha and Jesus challenge us to put on prophetic eyes to see beyond worldly estimations of resources to God’s abundant blessings at work in the world. We can raise our expectations as well as discover how we can participate with God in holy work.
Who knows what will happen? And that’s all right when God is in charge. Let it be so! Amen.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Monday, July 27, 2015
Sunday, July 19, 2015
Where Cross the Crowded Ways of Life
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56; Jeremiah 23:1-6; Ephesians 2:11-22
No matter where Jesus and his disciples went, they could not escape the multitudes who ran after them. That only gave Jesus more opportunities to teach the people and be compassionate toward those in need. The compassion of Jesus stands out as the most remarkable feature in these two brief summaries of the Galilean ministry.
The second part of the reading is the conclusion to the first major section of Mark’s gospel. The emphasis has been on the declaration that Mark made near the gospel’s beginning, as Jesus came up out of the baptizing waters of Jordan: the Spirit was on him (Mark 1:10). And that’s the same message which Peter gave Cornelius the centurion following Peter’s revelation that the good news embodied in Christ was for Gentiles as well as Jews: “Jesus of Nazareth, whom God anointed with the Holy Spirit and endowed with power,...traveled around doing good and healing everyone oppressed by the devil because God was with him” (Acts 10:38).
In the first part of the gospel reading, Jesus has compassion on the twelve whom he had sent out, his apostles as he calls them. He called them away for a debriefing, but they were soon recognized and the respite was over. In the second part of the reading it is the crowd which received Jesus’ compassion. The verses skipped between the two readings recount the feeding of the five thousand, so we know that Jesus wasn’t just found by a few nosy people. He was sought out by many through word of mouth. As he and the twelve tried to escape once more the sharp-eyed folks in the crowd noticed that he must have slipped away by boat. The word spread once more and the crowds were waiting for him when he was ready to put aground further along the lake shore.
Wherever Jesus went, people had needs. At times it seemed that their needs outdistanced his capacity to meet them. Yet Jesus always embraced the people and their needs. He dealt with pressing crowds, with random hands reaching out to touch his garments, with people who didn’t even feel good enough or connected enough to ask for his help.
You and I are a pretty self-sufficient lot. We don’t fend completely for ourselves like our ancestors did several generations ago. As the character in the decades old commercial said, “Mother, please, I can do it myself.”
The reality is that there are a lot of things we can’t do for ourselves. And a deeper reality is that there are a lot of people who can’t do as much as we can. I don’t mean physical things. I’m talking about mental, psychological, and spiritual things. Every newscast, every front page, every Internet news feed is filled with the reality of deeply seated pain, anger, anguish, fear, guilt, uncertainty, helplessness. It’s not only in the victims, but also in those who do unbelievable things like shooting up an armed forces recruiting station or a movie theater. It is also in the arrogance of demagogic politicians speaking without thinking through their thoughts as well as the knee-jerk acceptance of such political pablum without parsing it for truth and falsehood.
Human pain is as omnipresent as human beings. And most of it can’t be touched by acetaminophen or ibuprofen or stronger drugs. That’s because a lot of human pain is societal, institutional, systemic. It is because we human beings build walls. It goes back nearly as far back as people go. Abel was a shepherd. Cain was farmer. Rodgers and Hammerstein alluded to that in a song from the musical, Oklahoma, “The farmer and the cowman should be friends.” We divide. Me versus the world. Us and them. Democrats and republicans, owners and employees, government and people, slaves and free people, gay and straight, immigrants and native-born citizens, Protestants and Catholics, Israelis and Palestinians, creationists and evolutionists, Sunnis and Shiites, whites and blacks, jingoists and pacifists.
Walls divide, and that’s what Paul was trying to tell the Ephesians. Robert Frost’s great poem says, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” For Paul that something was Jesus and his gospel. Jesus does away with the us-them understanding of the world. There will be no walls when Jesus gets through with us. That’s our pain because it is hard to live without walls dividing us from other people. We want to be set apart, special, secure, pain-free. The trouble is that we can’t live in isolation, no matter how much we want to.
I love to drive down roads when there is little or no traffic. But that rarely happens. I dislike having to stop at intersections. It’s slow, it’s cumbersome. As the number of vehicles increases, engineers have developed new ways to keep traffic flowing smoothly. The criss-crossing levels of ramps ease the flow of traffic. Rotary intersections may slow traffic but by taking turns and cooperating, drivers don’t have to wait for light changes.
Paul strove in his Ephesian letter to create a sense of unity among the several classes of converts in the early church, particularly Gentiles and Jews, who had very significant differences. The crucial element is their common faith in what Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross did in giving everyone access to God. The Jews needed to get beyond the issue of “circumcision,” the symbol of belonging to Israel’s sacred covenant. Because of that exclusiveness, they were “without Christ.”
In a similar manner, many Gentiles excluded from God’s favor people of other religious traditions because they did not believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ, Son of the living God. The church has clung to that exclusiveness and still wrestles with what Peter wrestled with about letting in outsiders who are different.
The gift of God’s Spirit to create a new humanity through faith was universal. That is plain in the events of Pentecost. You and I have to keep thinking about the walls we keep trying to repair as fast as Christ is trying to remove them. This letter proclaims this message while at the same time making it abundantly clear that such unity can only be through faith in Jesus Christ, a faith that we keep trying to wall off to protect God while the world on the other side of our walls cries out in pain for justice, integrity, righteousness, humility.
There can be no closed doors in the fellowship of faith. The letter writer reiterates that while the doors of faith are wide open to everyone, the building to which we are moving in faith from many directions has Jesus Christ as its cornerstone. As so often in depicting theological concepts, the metaphor creates the situation of truth being found not in a conflicting state of either/or but of both/and.
Christ did not live an either/or gospel. He did not separate himself from the world. He stepped into the midst of it, whether it was a crowd on a hillside that needed fed with both teaching and with bread, a throng following him seeking healing, a crowd hugging the lanes of Jerusalem, or even hanging from a cross with arms spread wide saying, “Father, forgive.”
A number of years ago there were a growing number of homeless people in Evanston, Illinois. A Baptist church in that wealthy Chicago suburb decided to open its doors as a shelter and other Evanston church leaders were considering doing the same. When the Evanston city council heard about this, it attempted to pass a new zoning ordinance to wall the city off from homeless people by forbidding the use of churches as shelters for the homeless. The organizer of one shelter project had no complaint. Rather than opening up a shelter for the homeless, they hosted an all-night prayer vigil to which all were welcomed with pillows and blankets besides bulletins and hymnals. Christ tears down the walls we keep trying to put up.
Both parts of the gospel reading and the Ephesian passage challenge the church to live in the world, a world which is suffering and in need of healing reconciliation. To withhold the wholeness that Christ gives is to practice the religious malpractice that Jeremiah decried in his writing read earlier.
Let us begin by recognizing for ourselves that Jesus is the healer and reconciler that each of us needs. When we are healed and reconciled ourselves, Christ then can be a healer and reconciler through our activity in our community. The ways of life are crowded. And they cross every which way in an unorderly fashion. That did not stop Jesus. It should not stop us, either.
Amen.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
No matter where Jesus and his disciples went, they could not escape the multitudes who ran after them. That only gave Jesus more opportunities to teach the people and be compassionate toward those in need. The compassion of Jesus stands out as the most remarkable feature in these two brief summaries of the Galilean ministry.
The second part of the reading is the conclusion to the first major section of Mark’s gospel. The emphasis has been on the declaration that Mark made near the gospel’s beginning, as Jesus came up out of the baptizing waters of Jordan: the Spirit was on him (Mark 1:10). And that’s the same message which Peter gave Cornelius the centurion following Peter’s revelation that the good news embodied in Christ was for Gentiles as well as Jews: “Jesus of Nazareth, whom God anointed with the Holy Spirit and endowed with power,...traveled around doing good and healing everyone oppressed by the devil because God was with him” (Acts 10:38).
In the first part of the gospel reading, Jesus has compassion on the twelve whom he had sent out, his apostles as he calls them. He called them away for a debriefing, but they were soon recognized and the respite was over. In the second part of the reading it is the crowd which received Jesus’ compassion. The verses skipped between the two readings recount the feeding of the five thousand, so we know that Jesus wasn’t just found by a few nosy people. He was sought out by many through word of mouth. As he and the twelve tried to escape once more the sharp-eyed folks in the crowd noticed that he must have slipped away by boat. The word spread once more and the crowds were waiting for him when he was ready to put aground further along the lake shore.
Wherever Jesus went, people had needs. At times it seemed that their needs outdistanced his capacity to meet them. Yet Jesus always embraced the people and their needs. He dealt with pressing crowds, with random hands reaching out to touch his garments, with people who didn’t even feel good enough or connected enough to ask for his help.
You and I are a pretty self-sufficient lot. We don’t fend completely for ourselves like our ancestors did several generations ago. As the character in the decades old commercial said, “Mother, please, I can do it myself.”
The reality is that there are a lot of things we can’t do for ourselves. And a deeper reality is that there are a lot of people who can’t do as much as we can. I don’t mean physical things. I’m talking about mental, psychological, and spiritual things. Every newscast, every front page, every Internet news feed is filled with the reality of deeply seated pain, anger, anguish, fear, guilt, uncertainty, helplessness. It’s not only in the victims, but also in those who do unbelievable things like shooting up an armed forces recruiting station or a movie theater. It is also in the arrogance of demagogic politicians speaking without thinking through their thoughts as well as the knee-jerk acceptance of such political pablum without parsing it for truth and falsehood.
Human pain is as omnipresent as human beings. And most of it can’t be touched by acetaminophen or ibuprofen or stronger drugs. That’s because a lot of human pain is societal, institutional, systemic. It is because we human beings build walls. It goes back nearly as far back as people go. Abel was a shepherd. Cain was farmer. Rodgers and Hammerstein alluded to that in a song from the musical, Oklahoma, “The farmer and the cowman should be friends.” We divide. Me versus the world. Us and them. Democrats and republicans, owners and employees, government and people, slaves and free people, gay and straight, immigrants and native-born citizens, Protestants and Catholics, Israelis and Palestinians, creationists and evolutionists, Sunnis and Shiites, whites and blacks, jingoists and pacifists.
Walls divide, and that’s what Paul was trying to tell the Ephesians. Robert Frost’s great poem says, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” For Paul that something was Jesus and his gospel. Jesus does away with the us-them understanding of the world. There will be no walls when Jesus gets through with us. That’s our pain because it is hard to live without walls dividing us from other people. We want to be set apart, special, secure, pain-free. The trouble is that we can’t live in isolation, no matter how much we want to.
I love to drive down roads when there is little or no traffic. But that rarely happens. I dislike having to stop at intersections. It’s slow, it’s cumbersome. As the number of vehicles increases, engineers have developed new ways to keep traffic flowing smoothly. The criss-crossing levels of ramps ease the flow of traffic. Rotary intersections may slow traffic but by taking turns and cooperating, drivers don’t have to wait for light changes.
Paul strove in his Ephesian letter to create a sense of unity among the several classes of converts in the early church, particularly Gentiles and Jews, who had very significant differences. The crucial element is their common faith in what Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross did in giving everyone access to God. The Jews needed to get beyond the issue of “circumcision,” the symbol of belonging to Israel’s sacred covenant. Because of that exclusiveness, they were “without Christ.”
In a similar manner, many Gentiles excluded from God’s favor people of other religious traditions because they did not believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ, Son of the living God. The church has clung to that exclusiveness and still wrestles with what Peter wrestled with about letting in outsiders who are different.
The gift of God’s Spirit to create a new humanity through faith was universal. That is plain in the events of Pentecost. You and I have to keep thinking about the walls we keep trying to repair as fast as Christ is trying to remove them. This letter proclaims this message while at the same time making it abundantly clear that such unity can only be through faith in Jesus Christ, a faith that we keep trying to wall off to protect God while the world on the other side of our walls cries out in pain for justice, integrity, righteousness, humility.
There can be no closed doors in the fellowship of faith. The letter writer reiterates that while the doors of faith are wide open to everyone, the building to which we are moving in faith from many directions has Jesus Christ as its cornerstone. As so often in depicting theological concepts, the metaphor creates the situation of truth being found not in a conflicting state of either/or but of both/and.
Christ did not live an either/or gospel. He did not separate himself from the world. He stepped into the midst of it, whether it was a crowd on a hillside that needed fed with both teaching and with bread, a throng following him seeking healing, a crowd hugging the lanes of Jerusalem, or even hanging from a cross with arms spread wide saying, “Father, forgive.”
A number of years ago there were a growing number of homeless people in Evanston, Illinois. A Baptist church in that wealthy Chicago suburb decided to open its doors as a shelter and other Evanston church leaders were considering doing the same. When the Evanston city council heard about this, it attempted to pass a new zoning ordinance to wall the city off from homeless people by forbidding the use of churches as shelters for the homeless. The organizer of one shelter project had no complaint. Rather than opening up a shelter for the homeless, they hosted an all-night prayer vigil to which all were welcomed with pillows and blankets besides bulletins and hymnals. Christ tears down the walls we keep trying to put up.
Both parts of the gospel reading and the Ephesian passage challenge the church to live in the world, a world which is suffering and in need of healing reconciliation. To withhold the wholeness that Christ gives is to practice the religious malpractice that Jeremiah decried in his writing read earlier.
Let us begin by recognizing for ourselves that Jesus is the healer and reconciler that each of us needs. When we are healed and reconciled ourselves, Christ then can be a healer and reconciler through our activity in our community. The ways of life are crowded. And they cross every which way in an unorderly fashion. That did not stop Jesus. It should not stop us, either.
Amen.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Sunday, July 12, 2015
The Idolatry of Human Power
Amos 7:1-17; Ephesians 1:3-14
Human beings idolize power. We look up to people in high elected office. We envy bank presidents. We admire university chancellors. We hang on the words of great orators. We celebrate the accomplishments of surgeons and architects. We are awestruck by the creativity of artists, musicians and writers. We cheer great athletes.
For all our love of power – intellectual, physical, creative, inspirational – we hate power. We think that many politicians are more interested in themselves than in the country. We see bank presidents greedily perpetuating unjust economic mechanisms that feather the nests of the 1% to the detriment everyone else. University officials appear to be more interested in rankings and endowments than in individual students. Oratory is too often empty. Doctors and engineers are unapproachable. Much of creativity is beyond our understanding. Athletes too often are overpaid, immature brats.
These love and hates are generalizations over-limned for emphasis. Yet the kernel of truth underneath the extremes is that power is the object of both love and hate. Anyone wielding power may have very necessary skills, including vision, wisdom, and charisma, nevertheless they become lightning rods for all our dissatisfaction, anger, gullibility, frustration, and disillusionment.
Yet for all that we idolize human power.
The prophetic work of Amos takes place during the time following the dissolution of Israel following the end of the reign of Solomon, David’s son. The charismatic bonds of the house of David no longer held and the twelve tribes, experiencing uneven leadership, broke apart. While Judah was a viable nation, the remaining tribes loosely formed the Northern Kingdom, commonly called Israel. Both nations drifted from the spiritual roots of the Exodus, the nation building wilderness sojourn, and the kingdom building under Saul, David, and Solomon. In fact, the moral level of the people, following the example of most of the kings, reached the level of everyone doing what was right in their own thinking.
In the reading from the prophet Amos, we have three visions and two meetings. The visions from God which Amos saw were visions of judgment. Following the first two visions, the locusts and the fire, the prophet pleaded for Israel, asking, “How can Jacob survive” He is so small?” The Lord God relented.
Then comes the vision of the plumb line. While the judging of the previous visions have been general and unquantified, the plumb line of the vision shows how off the mark the nation has gone. King Jereboam and the people have deviated too far. His kingship will be annulled and his royal line destroyed.
The plumb line is a very accessible image showing that the people are not measuring up to God’s expectations. So God’s judgment will be brought down upon the proudest accomplishments of the kingdom. “The shrines of Isaac will be made desolate and the holy places of Israel will be laid waste.”
The word of the Lord which Amos delivers is that all our greatest achievements, all the things that we hold up as our crowning human glory, the things that we puff ourselves up about, the signs and symbols of how great we are in our own eyes – all these things are temporary. If God were to choose to do so, they all could be swept away in the blink of an eye. To use an image that Jesus used, they are grass that blooms at dawn and withers at dusk.
Amaziah, the head priest, heard about the words that Amos was speaking. He reported to King Jereboam that Amos was plotting against the king, that the king will die by the sword, and that Israel will be forced out of its land.
We can understand where Amaziah was coming from. He and the king were the two most powerful people in the nation. The priest’s response is both personal and public. Imagine how each of us might respond if someone came to Waverly declaring that God was going to tear down this church, the museum, the municipal building, the court house, and the country building, and then would go on to kill the mayor, the village council, the county commissioners, and other office holders. We would respond as Amaziah did.
Amaziah works from his power base. He immediately tells the king, and then, whether on orders of the king, or on his own authority, he confronts Amos. After all, he didn’t get to be the head priest by being a wallflower. He knows how to use his position. Coming on with full bravado, he shows just how big he is. He tries to banish Amos by sending him packing back across the border with Judah to speak his treasonous words there.
Were you paying close attention to Amaziah’s two conversations? Never once does he mention God. When threatened by Amos’ words he runs not to the sanctuary to pray but to the king to tattle. When he talks about the sanctuary at Bethel he calls it the king’s holy place.
Do you remember how Bethel got it’s name? Way back in Genesis, Jacob named the place where he slept and dreamed of God’s messengers ascending and descending a raised staircase. Then he saw the Lord standing on it promising to give the land on which Jacob was lying to his descendants who will be come as innumerable as the dust of the earth. Jacob awoke and knew that the place here he lay was an awesome, sacred place. “It’s none other than God’s house and the entrance to heaven” (Genesis 28:17), which is what the name “Bethel” means.
The descendants of Jacob were indeed living on the land that Jacob was promised, a land flowing with milk and honey as Moses had been promised. All that abundance had led God’s people to the point that they failed to recognize the presence of God. God’s house had become the king’s house, a human being’s house. The abundance of blessings had distracted the people from the God who provided them.
Amos refuses to be labeled as a professional prophet. He is a shepherd and a trimmer of sycamore trees. Amaziah’s order for him to leave Bethel is countermanded by God’s order to Amos to go to Bethel. As Amos stands before Amaziah and all his supposed power and might, Amos may well be realizing just how small the priest really is in the eyes of God.
We are small. We huff and puff, we billow our egos, but we are small. We allow the perceptions of our power and privilege to cripple our relationship with God. We look at what we have earned and bought and built and we fairly break our arms patting ourselves on our backs. We believe that it all belongs to us. We forget that the blessings that we have are “according to [God’s] goodwill and plan and to honor his glorious grace that he has given to us freely through the Son whom he loves” (Ephesians 1:7-8).
When we deny our smallness, we make ourselves into our own creator. When we take on that role, we cannot hear God’s word of judgment, repentance, and forgiveness for our lives. We cannot hear the words of Jesus, just as the Pharisees, Sadducees, teachers of the law and elders could not see God’s grace in the actions of Jesus or hear God’s words of grace in Jesus’ words.
When we carelessly or intentionally accord ultimate authority and power to human institutions we have broken relationship with God and have entered into idolatry. We live a falsehood. When we believe that we can control the activity of God, indeed God’s very will, through the institution of the church or through the auspices of positions within the church set aside for particular ministries and service, we deny the abundance of God’s grace and mercy lavished so greatly in Christ. God will do what God wills to do, through us or in spite of us.
We cannot save ourselves. That is why we again and again come to this table which is hosted by Christ, the Lord, the giver of mercy, who though he was rich, though he was the Son of the Father, gave up all that in order to become powerless and small that we might receive the greatness, the power, and the glory of God’s love in our lives. This table reminds us that God will be active in ways that do not match human ways. God’s power and glory are nothing like the power and glory we human beings we conceive. And for that we may be eternally grateful.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
General Resource: Douglas T. King, “Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), Year B, vol. 3, pp. 219-223.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Human beings idolize power. We look up to people in high elected office. We envy bank presidents. We admire university chancellors. We hang on the words of great orators. We celebrate the accomplishments of surgeons and architects. We are awestruck by the creativity of artists, musicians and writers. We cheer great athletes.
For all our love of power – intellectual, physical, creative, inspirational – we hate power. We think that many politicians are more interested in themselves than in the country. We see bank presidents greedily perpetuating unjust economic mechanisms that feather the nests of the 1% to the detriment everyone else. University officials appear to be more interested in rankings and endowments than in individual students. Oratory is too often empty. Doctors and engineers are unapproachable. Much of creativity is beyond our understanding. Athletes too often are overpaid, immature brats.
These love and hates are generalizations over-limned for emphasis. Yet the kernel of truth underneath the extremes is that power is the object of both love and hate. Anyone wielding power may have very necessary skills, including vision, wisdom, and charisma, nevertheless they become lightning rods for all our dissatisfaction, anger, gullibility, frustration, and disillusionment.
Yet for all that we idolize human power.
The prophetic work of Amos takes place during the time following the dissolution of Israel following the end of the reign of Solomon, David’s son. The charismatic bonds of the house of David no longer held and the twelve tribes, experiencing uneven leadership, broke apart. While Judah was a viable nation, the remaining tribes loosely formed the Northern Kingdom, commonly called Israel. Both nations drifted from the spiritual roots of the Exodus, the nation building wilderness sojourn, and the kingdom building under Saul, David, and Solomon. In fact, the moral level of the people, following the example of most of the kings, reached the level of everyone doing what was right in their own thinking.
In the reading from the prophet Amos, we have three visions and two meetings. The visions from God which Amos saw were visions of judgment. Following the first two visions, the locusts and the fire, the prophet pleaded for Israel, asking, “How can Jacob survive” He is so small?” The Lord God relented.
Then comes the vision of the plumb line. While the judging of the previous visions have been general and unquantified, the plumb line of the vision shows how off the mark the nation has gone. King Jereboam and the people have deviated too far. His kingship will be annulled and his royal line destroyed.
The plumb line is a very accessible image showing that the people are not measuring up to God’s expectations. So God’s judgment will be brought down upon the proudest accomplishments of the kingdom. “The shrines of Isaac will be made desolate and the holy places of Israel will be laid waste.”
The word of the Lord which Amos delivers is that all our greatest achievements, all the things that we hold up as our crowning human glory, the things that we puff ourselves up about, the signs and symbols of how great we are in our own eyes – all these things are temporary. If God were to choose to do so, they all could be swept away in the blink of an eye. To use an image that Jesus used, they are grass that blooms at dawn and withers at dusk.
Amaziah, the head priest, heard about the words that Amos was speaking. He reported to King Jereboam that Amos was plotting against the king, that the king will die by the sword, and that Israel will be forced out of its land.
We can understand where Amaziah was coming from. He and the king were the two most powerful people in the nation. The priest’s response is both personal and public. Imagine how each of us might respond if someone came to Waverly declaring that God was going to tear down this church, the museum, the municipal building, the court house, and the country building, and then would go on to kill the mayor, the village council, the county commissioners, and other office holders. We would respond as Amaziah did.
Amaziah works from his power base. He immediately tells the king, and then, whether on orders of the king, or on his own authority, he confronts Amos. After all, he didn’t get to be the head priest by being a wallflower. He knows how to use his position. Coming on with full bravado, he shows just how big he is. He tries to banish Amos by sending him packing back across the border with Judah to speak his treasonous words there.
Were you paying close attention to Amaziah’s two conversations? Never once does he mention God. When threatened by Amos’ words he runs not to the sanctuary to pray but to the king to tattle. When he talks about the sanctuary at Bethel he calls it the king’s holy place.
Do you remember how Bethel got it’s name? Way back in Genesis, Jacob named the place where he slept and dreamed of God’s messengers ascending and descending a raised staircase. Then he saw the Lord standing on it promising to give the land on which Jacob was lying to his descendants who will be come as innumerable as the dust of the earth. Jacob awoke and knew that the place here he lay was an awesome, sacred place. “It’s none other than God’s house and the entrance to heaven” (Genesis 28:17), which is what the name “Bethel” means.
The descendants of Jacob were indeed living on the land that Jacob was promised, a land flowing with milk and honey as Moses had been promised. All that abundance had led God’s people to the point that they failed to recognize the presence of God. God’s house had become the king’s house, a human being’s house. The abundance of blessings had distracted the people from the God who provided them.
Amos refuses to be labeled as a professional prophet. He is a shepherd and a trimmer of sycamore trees. Amaziah’s order for him to leave Bethel is countermanded by God’s order to Amos to go to Bethel. As Amos stands before Amaziah and all his supposed power and might, Amos may well be realizing just how small the priest really is in the eyes of God.
We are small. We huff and puff, we billow our egos, but we are small. We allow the perceptions of our power and privilege to cripple our relationship with God. We look at what we have earned and bought and built and we fairly break our arms patting ourselves on our backs. We believe that it all belongs to us. We forget that the blessings that we have are “according to [God’s] goodwill and plan and to honor his glorious grace that he has given to us freely through the Son whom he loves” (Ephesians 1:7-8).
When we deny our smallness, we make ourselves into our own creator. When we take on that role, we cannot hear God’s word of judgment, repentance, and forgiveness for our lives. We cannot hear the words of Jesus, just as the Pharisees, Sadducees, teachers of the law and elders could not see God’s grace in the actions of Jesus or hear God’s words of grace in Jesus’ words.
When we carelessly or intentionally accord ultimate authority and power to human institutions we have broken relationship with God and have entered into idolatry. We live a falsehood. When we believe that we can control the activity of God, indeed God’s very will, through the institution of the church or through the auspices of positions within the church set aside for particular ministries and service, we deny the abundance of God’s grace and mercy lavished so greatly in Christ. God will do what God wills to do, through us or in spite of us.
We cannot save ourselves. That is why we again and again come to this table which is hosted by Christ, the Lord, the giver of mercy, who though he was rich, though he was the Son of the Father, gave up all that in order to become powerless and small that we might receive the greatness, the power, and the glory of God’s love in our lives. This table reminds us that God will be active in ways that do not match human ways. God’s power and glory are nothing like the power and glory we human beings we conceive. And for that we may be eternally grateful.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
General Resource: Douglas T. King, “Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), Year B, vol. 3, pp. 219-223.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
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