En el nombre de Dios, creador, redentor, y santificador. Amen.
I love the prophets in our Scripture! To me they are like artists, painting doorways to the truth. As with other forms of art, it often takes some education to fully appreciate their work.
Amos is known as the prophet of social justice. He was a herdsman and farmer who lived when Israel was divided into two kingdoms: the southern kingdom of Judah and the northern kingdom of Israel. Amos lived in Judah and God sent him Israel, where Jeroboam was king, to prophesy.
The northern kingdom of Israel then was kind of like Galilee was in our Gospel reading. Today, we might see Hollywood or Washington D.C. similarly. These are places of earthly excesses, even decadence, populated by circles of rich, materialistic cosmopolitans, who believe they earned their own fortunes and, therefore, deserve the enjoyment their fortunes afford them. They show little to no mercy for those in need among them. In fact, they hardly notice them.
It was to people like these that Amos prophesied in Chapter 6: “Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory, and lounge on their couches, and eat lambs from the flock, and calves from the stall; who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp, …who drink wine from bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph!” (v 4-6)
Amaziah, the priest of the temple, begged Amos to leave Israel and prophesy somewhere else. Stop saying bad things about us, Amaziah said. This is the king’s territory, and we are beloved, favored, and blessed by God. That’s why we have it so good.
Amos responded, yes, you are beloved of God, which is why you, of all people, should know how you are to live in relationship to God and one another. You have gotten lost in the satisfaction that comes from earthly wealth, power, and privilege. You believe that you deserve the blessings you have and that you can kick back and enjoy them. But your power and privilege are an illusion. And when the illusion fails, you’ll realize that you have nothing because you chose to live in the absence of God, which leads only to nothingness.
Amos uses prophetic language to describe this nothingness saying, your wife will be sold into indignity, your kids will have no life in them, you will lose all you hold dear – including your land (which, for the people of Israel, meant their identity). You will even lose the dignity of your life and your death.
In other words, by the mercy of God, all that the people cling to, all that seems desirable to them but leads to their destruction will be removed. All may seem lost because those things – the luxuries, the power and wealth, the success, and the esteem of others– had seemed so important.
But God, who loves us with steadfast love, knows that these things are to us humans like pills are to an addict. They trick us into believing that we are satisfied and happy even as they are destroying us.
We become so focused on ourselves that we lose sight of those suffering around us – the hungry, unhoused, infirm, and alone. Since we also convince ourselves that we are the source of our success, we conclude that they should earn their own and we don’t need to share with them any part of ours. We even tell ourselves that it’s for their own good that we don’t share – they should learn to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps – presuming, of course, that they even have boots.
They don’t because they’re so preoccupied trying to amass or keep their own power and the luxurious lives they’ve become accustomed to, that they don’t care about the horror being played out right in front of them. Speaking truth here isn’t worth the risk of losing what they’ve worked to gain for themselves.
Sound familiar? That’s because people are people - in every era of human history.
We, who are followers of Jesus Christ, must go a different way. We are called to walk the way of love, as Presiding Bishop Michael Curry often says, the way of kindness, graciousness, and community.
But detaching from our hubris and self-sufficiency is a lot like detoxing from an addiction – it’s painful at first. The body and mind fight against it. We cling to the false reality we’ve created for ourselves because it is preferable to the truth that is coming into view – the truth that all of those things we thought mattered, the luxuries, power, wealth, and esteem of others, lead us to nothing… leave us as nothing.
It feels like desolation, and, in fact, it is desolation, blessed desolation, the total destruction of a false reality we had made for ourselves. From that place of desolation, we call out to God who is already there waiting to hear and respond to us in mercy and love and to show us what we ought to do, as our Collect says.
We believe that our salvation is in Jesus Christ, the second person in the Trinity of God, who came to live and minister among us, and gave his life for our salvation. Jesus did it and it has been done – once, for all. There is nothing we can or need to do to save ourselves. No amount of obedience or good works can save us. Indeed, they are the fruits of our salvation, not the means to it.
We need to remember that when we do anything good it’s because the grace of God has been lavished upon us, compelling us to do our part in Christ’s continuing work of the redemption of the world. When we do anything good, it’s because the Spirit of God, the viriditas of God, lives in us and touches the world through our grateful hearts and willing hands. When we do anything good, it’s because we have “heard the word of truth,” which is another way to say Jesus. We have believed in him and surrendered ourselves and our lives to him.
It is through Jesus that we have wisdom to understand what we ought to do and it is by his grace that we can do it. The rules that guide us have to be reinterpreted in each age to make room for a compassionate response to the changes in the world. Jesus did so much of that during his ministry: healing on the Sabbath, touching a bleeding woman to heal her, calming and restoring a demoniac. Jesus showed us how the law is meant to serve humans, not the reverse, through the grace and mercy of God.
Right now, we are witnessing an increase in the passage of laws that criminalize being unhoused and other laws that forbid people from feeding them; laws that forbid giving water to asylum seekers; laws that forbid doctors from providing life-saving surgeries for pregnant women and best practice medical care for trans children.
And no matter how many Herods of today manipulate their way around what’s right - or even lawful- destroying lives they neither notice nor care about; we won’t stop calling it out as wrong. As Ida B. Wells once said, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”
We have the light of truth in us. It is the very Spirit of Jesus given to us so that we can continue his reconciling work in the world. So, no matter how impossible or desolate the path to peace and love seems to our earthly minds, we’ll continue to pray for and gratefully receive the grace and power to do what God would have us do. Amen.
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