Summer Fruit / A Sermon

Summer Fruit
Amos 8: 1-12/ Colossians1: 15-28/ Luke 10: 38-42
8th Sunday of Pentecost/ Year C/ July 18, 2010

We have just celebrated Independence Day. July 4th is the day when we celebrate the gift of our country’s freedom, our national independence. Every year the celebration becomes grander and more elaborate, as we attempt to show the world we are the greatest nation on earth. And don’t get me wrong, we are a great nation, greatly blessed with land, resources, and a multitude of cultural and ethnic heritages that enrich our democracy and enhance our feelings of security and greatness. And it strikes a discordant note when we come to the texts for today, particularly the Old Testament text from Amos.
Amos has a different word to the nation of Israel, and through them to us today. It is not a word of independence, but a word of dependence on the words and judgments of a righteous God. When we celebrate our nation, we tend toward self-congratulation, patting ourselves on the back saying look at us, we are great, we have it all, and we can do as we please. We think of ourselves as good, free and righteous, but when we come up against Amos’ words of judgment we find ourselves smack in the middle of trouble with a Capital “T.” According to Amos, to be a person of faith is to be dependent upon and tethered to the righteousness of God. Our judgment of ourselves is quite different from God’s judgment. A truly good person recognizes God as the creator and giver of life, and is willing to give body, soul, strength and mind over to God, and to love the neighbor as the self.
Part of Israel’s greatness was that the people saw themselves a relationship with God, fully accountable to something higher, more substantive that their own opinions. Does that sound familiar to you? No for we have lost that sense of account ability to a power greater than ourselves. We as a people and a nation see ourselves accountable to no one. We have come to believe that we are free to do as we please, even if it means oppression and death to someone else.
In today’s text from Amos, we come up against some threatening and troublesome words for Israel and through Israel to us. The Lord has set a plumb line in the midst of the people and the nation has been found to be deeply wanting in their attitudes and behavior.
Almost every day we hear people lament “the moral decay of America.” Usually the lament concerns a perceived decline in personal relationships, sexual behavior, family values. But Amos is not so much concerned with these as he is with the economic behavior of the people of Israel. He seems to understand that a happy and righteous people, are a people who concerned with the treatment of the poor and the outcast, those who fall below the radar of society. He voice concern for a particular class of people. Amos singles out the merchants, the business people who cannot wait for the religious holidays to end so they can go back to fleecing the poor with their high prices for grain and goods.
God, through Amos, threatens fierce, dire consequences against and economically unrighteous society promising dark days ahead. Amos does not take injustice against the poor lightly. He tells his greatly contented society, made up of people who think they are secure in their prosperity and wealth- that they will disintegrate into dark, disruptive chaos. He proclaims in no uncertain terms that God is not happy with those who glibly transgress the righteous law of God.
We here in 21st century America have enjoyed a couple of decades of prosperity, but is not a prosperity that has been enjoyed by all. “An unfair tax code has literally enabled the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer. It has been a couple of tough decades not only for the poor, but also those of us who live in what was once known as the middle class. We have seen our gains in salary and benefits fall away as many of us slipped below the income level that made us middle class. While the corporate giants of Banking and industry have made millions off the backs of hard working middle class families and in the process have desecrated and destroyed the good earth that God has given to us to care for.
We have spent billions in the most expensive war in history in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have borrowed money from those programs that were designed to help those who have retired, and those programs that were designed to help our children and our grandchildren to continue the American legacy of prosperity to pay for this war. The infrastructures that helped to build the strength of this nation, have been neglected to the point that now they are failing when natural disaster strikes and the elements play havoc with our roads and highways. We have politicians who are unwilling to raise taxes on the rich, because they are afraid of their economic clout when election time comes around. And so they borrow money to fund this unwanted and unnecessary war creating massive debt for those who will come after us. We have become like the business men that Amos spoke, who seek to work seven days a week, stealing money from the poor and the middle class, to make sure they live in luxury; unwilling to stop and listen for the word of God that brings life.
As in Amos’ time, the poor and the middle class are overtaxed, economically burdened with high interest rates, and we have no real advocates who are willing to tackle the problems we face. Our elected officials, tasked with leading, find themselves in a gridlock of competing groups and when creative and new ideas are spoken they are immediately silenced by the rich and the powerful. It has to stop.
Amos calls the people of God to account for their behavior, setting before them the judgment of God against those who thwart the will of God. Amos is the voice that calls humankind to judgment. He sets before us the call of God for human kind; “to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God.” If we do not the consequences are dire and formidable; the total loss of the presence of God.
Amos sets before us the truth of our existence in this world; that in life and death we belong to God and that God calls us to live lives of justice, right relationships with our neighbors as well as the stranger. Yes, we are to continue to worship God, but not to make a show of it. We are to worship God in everything that we do, whether it is on Sunday morning at 10:30 or on Monday at the office, or Tuesday at the Bridge club, or Wednesday at The Seniors Group, or Friday at the Ball game. God want not just our hearts or our soul. God wants all of us.
WE have been called as God’s people. We have been given a way of life that demands justice and righteousness that is rooted in love for the neighbor and the stranger as well as the self. Amos is a prophet not only of Israel, but of our world as well. He names our wrong doing and calls us to account. He calls us to be a people who are willing to call our world, our nation, our community and our church to account so that we can see the consequences of our actions, the destruction and collapse of the world that we live in. God had spoken. It is time for us to act.