22nd Sunday after Pentecost (A) – Amos 5:18-24
Well, God, normally I take my sermon time to talk to the people gathered here. But I think today instead I need to talk to you. Especially after reading today’s scripture passages. Saint Theresa of Avila once said that if this is the way you treat your friends, God, it’s no wonder you have so few of them. And to be honest, I feel like I understand pretty well what she is saying.
I mean, here we are, your community gathered here on a Sunday morning. Do you know how busy we all are? Our lives are full of things—many things—opportunities that you’ve put in our paths. It’s hard sometimes to take time out for Sunday morning worship, to gather everyone together in one place so that together we can celebrate our faith. But somehow we manage to do it. Here we are, against all odds.
And then you have the nerve to give us the words of the prophet Amos today. “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.” Placed in the mouth of an ancient prophet, the word you have for us today is that you somehow, you only know why, do not accept our worship. The choir rehearses, the ushers “ush,” people run around to make sure everything is ready, the pastor has his sermon prepared, we do all this work for what? So you can hate, despise our assembly? What exactly do you mean?
Perhaps you want something else from us. Amos seems to say as much at the end of today’s reading. “Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” It sounds to me, God, like you want us to reach out to our neighbors, to bring justice and charity to the world around us.
And so it’s still hard words to hear. Don’t we already do that? Isn’t the Church one of the most successful social agencies in the world? And our own congregation. We just went to Dismas house last week; John Street soup kitchen is coming up at the end of the month. And don’t tell us about justice on the same week that it’s our turn at Interfaith Hospitality Network—the sign up sheet in the lobby is half full already. We do let justice roll down like waters. Don’t we do enough?
Maybe it’s because the problem is so big. I know, God, I know the statistics. 1.2 billion people on our planet live on less then a quarter a day. Someone dies from hunger of all things every 3.6 seconds. Ten million children die of preventable diseases every year. For all our advances, more slaves exist today than ever before in human history. A hundred million people on the planet are homeless, and ten times that many people have inadequate homes. 780 million people lack clean water. America spends more money on trash bags than half the world spends on everything. The statistics go on and on.
So maybe you’re thinking that instead of letting justice roll down like waters, we’re just letting it trickle like a drainpipe. But frankly, God, you can quote all the statistics at me you want. I don’t know how we could do more, not really. We are doing our part. The problem is too big for us to fix by ourselves. I don’t know what more you want from us.
Of course, it’s not like your words to Amos were heard very well in their own time, either. Ha-ha, you’re talking to someone who studied Amos very carefully in his time, God. I remember those words of doom he spoke to the people of Israel. “Go worship at Bethel and sin! Go down to Gilgal and sin more!” You called your people out for making places like Bethel and Gilgal sites of worship, instead of Jerusalem.
And why shouldn’t they have? Bethel was a place where Abraham himself set up an altar and worshiped you. Jacob saw his vision of a stairway there, and Deborah sat there as a judge. Samuel prophesied at both Bethel and Gilgal. The latter was the place where Joshua parted the waters of the river Jordan, just like Moses did at the Red Sea. These are places that your people sanctified over the centuries—that you made holy by your saving work toward your people. Why shouldn’t they have worshipped there?
Unless, of course, the problem wasn’t with the place. It was with the way they did worship. Which puts me in mind at first of the debate about contemporary and traditional worship. Oh, Lord, let’s not go down that path today. We work hard enough to make things the way that they are. [I: We just had our organ repaired!] But that’s not what you’re talking about, is it?
After all, we work at making this worship happen for our own benefit, don’t we? As much as we’d like to say that it’s all for you—you are the object of our worship, of course—the reality is that the subject of our worship is us. We do worship the way we like, when it suits us, to make us feel good. We’re not happy unless we have some nugget of faith to take home with us. We talk about worship as “recharging our batteries” for the rest of the week. We worship you, but we’re the ones that get the most out of it.
It’s like the beginning of today’s reading. The people are waiting, expecting, hoping for “the Day of the Lord” to come. They think that your coming is going to be a good thing, but you say that it’s not going to turn out so well. They think you’re going to come and fix everything, but you describe it as a day of terror, like someone who runs away from a lion and runs into a bear instead. (And let me just tell you, God, that the day I find a bear on my lawn at the house in West Boylston is the day I’m move to Florida. So keep that in mind.)
This time of year, we spend a lot of time reading Bible texts about waiting for your coming, God. Like the bridesmaids and their lamps in today’s Gospel reading. And I for one like it. I have that same prayer often as those ancient Israelites to whom Amos was speaking. I look at this messed up world, and sometimes I look at my own messed up life, and all I want is for you to come and fix it all.
But I guess, if I’m honest, I know better than that. I don’t need Amos to tell me that your coming is bad news, God. I heard about it from the first time you came. We like to think of a gentle Jesus but that’s not what he was at all. He taught a way of life that was totally different from what people back then lived. In fact, it’s totally different from what we live now, if we’re honest. We try to live according to your will, but we often fail. We certainly aren’t like Jesus. And when he did live according to your will, we found it so discomfiting that we put him to death. Yes, when you came to us in the flesh, when The Day of the Lord was upon us the first time, we were so troubled by it that we killed you.
And we still didn’t get our way. Because you came back to life.
It seems to be how you work with everything, God. Subverting our will, our wishes, our desires. We choose injustice, and you break bonds. We choose to hurt, and you heal us. We choose death, and you give us life. You come into our lives and destroy the parts of us we love most—lying bare the beautiful, beloved creation that hides inside.
When you call us to works of justice and righteousness, I suppose we respond with our hands and feet. We do our part to make the world better. But perhaps we don’t respond with our whole hearts. We do the work and then return to our regularly scheduled lives, with little more thought for those who are poor and hungry and desperate. Our lives as a whole don’t change. We don’t live differently because of your call to us. And you want us to.
When we go to worship, we pray and sing and gather around your word and sacrament. We play our role here. But perhaps we don’t notice how that bread and wine that we share here have transformative power. We ignore the ways that it affects our whole hearts. We go back to our lives and worry about money and work and all the business of daily life, when our hearts are busy crying out for us to worship you without ceasing, every moment of every day. We don’t live differently because of our relationship with you. And you want us to.
I think, God, you yearn for us to discover that our lives are enriched constantly by your presence in them. To have lives that are different because we worship and work for you. That is why you hate and despise our celebration here. Because you love us, and you want so much better for us. You want our singing and our celebration in worship to captivate our whole being, to transform our hearts and send us out to transform our world.
It amazes me, God, that even your angry words in scripture are still a love letter to your people.
I learned from a professor in seminary that prayer is dangerous. That we need to be careful of what we pray for, because it’s likely to happen. So I suppose that makes this a dangerous prayer, God. But I pray it anyway, because it’s what we need. Fill us with your love, God. Change our hearts so that we live entirely for you. May our worship help us to fall more in love with you, and may it fill our every moment. May our work change the world for the better, and may we learn to put our whole selves into it.
Amos begged that justice would roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Well, God, I beg you to let justice and righteousness pour fourth like a deluge. Let it wash over us, so that we may be submerged in it. Let us know you, and let us drown in your love. Amen.