“Reality Check”

( Amos 7:7-17)

This is what he showed me: the Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line in his hand.  The Lord said to me, “Amos, what do you see?”  And I said, “A plumb line.”  Then the Lord said,

“See, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will spare them no longer; the high places of Isaac shall be made desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste, and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword.”

Then Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, sent to King Jeroboam of Israel, saying, “Amos has conspired against you in the very center of the house of Israel; the land is not able to bear all his words.  For thus Amos has said,

‘Jeroboam shall die by the sword, and Israel must go into exile away from his land.’”

And Amaziah said to Amos, “O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, earn your bread there, and prophesy there, but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom.”

Then Amos answered Amaziah, “I am no prophet nor a prophet’s son, but I am a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees, and the Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’

Now therefore hear the word of the Lord.  You say, ‘Do not prophesy against Israel, and do not preach against the house of Isaac.’  Therefore thus says the Lord; Your wife shall become a prostitute in the city, and your sons and your daughters shall fall by the sword, and your land shall be parceled out by line; you yourself shall die in an unclean land, and Israel shall surely go into exile away from its land.”

Interestingly, Amos seems to be the earliest of the prophetic books in the Bible.  Now, of course there were prophets before him like Elijah and Elisha, but we’re talking about the named prophetic books here, and his came first.  So, Amos may have been a turning point in Israel’s faith history.  His was a voice for the oppressed and a demand for justice.   The book of Amos is powerful, but his words are sometimes hard to hear… and to preach.

            What I’ve noticed as I’ve been preparing for this morning is that Amos tells us about our human condition.  He reminds us, sometimes in an aggressive, abrasive manner, that humans, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, will insist that they are right.  And, in doing so, they resist the change that is being called for, that is so necessary for the transformation that God needs to happen, not only to Israel, but to every generation of humans right up to our time.

            Further, Amos talks a lot about the way that the Israel of his time, that is, the 8^th century BCE, will die due to its bad choices and behavior.  This was the first part of the story of redemption that the prophets began to tell, the way that God had to bring to an end the bad things that the people were up to.  The later prophets could see the bad stuff too, but they began to imagine how God could actually raise Israel up from those ashes. 

So those later prophets could speak about both death and resurrection.  Amos was putting language to the dying part, calling the people to accountability, scaring the bejeebers out of them while giving little or no hope for transformation.  What we Christians know, because of Jesus, is that we must die to our old selves so that we can live to the new selves that God envisions for us.

            And so, we come to today’s text.  It is unusual in this book because it gives us just a snippet of information about Amos the person.  We have a scene enacted between Amos and the priest of Bethel, Amaziah.  We hear that Amaziah had sent a message to the King of Israel, Jeroboam, telling him that Amos was conspiring against him.  Amos had brought an in-your-face oracle from God to the people.  Amos didn’t worry about saying things in a certain way so that nobody’s feelings were hurt.  He just told it like he had heard it from God.  He said, “King Jeroboam shall die by the sword, and Israel must go into exile away from this land.” 

            Amaziah did NOT want Jeroboam OR the people hearing this.  Amaziah, being a card-carrying leader in the organized religion of the time, told Amos he needed to return to the place he came from. 

Now understand that the land, Israel and Judah, that we’re talking about was united in King David’s day.  But in Amos’ time, it was divided into 2 areas.  The northern kingdom was Israel and the southern kingdom was Judah.  Amos came from Tekoa which was actually in the southern kingdom, in Judah. 

So Amaziah said, “Amos, go back to Judah, earn your bread there and prophesy there.  But never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom.”

            Amos replied that God had told him to work right there in Israel.  And then he really let loose on Amaziah, telling him all the horrible things that were going to happen, and, finally, that Israel would eventually end up going into exile far away from its home.

             Amos was constantly in conflict with the establishment, troubling those who lived by the status quo.  He must have had thick skin and great courage to be saying the things he said, to be challenging the powerful ones who were comfortable in their practices and their self-centered ways of living life.  Clearly, God, speaking through Amos, was declaring that God was going to work outside the system, outside the establishment, outside the way everyone was expecting God to work.

            Amos was speaking God’s truth into the situation, and it was a turn-the –world-upside-down kind of talking.  Now, I want to take just a little side trip here.  Those of us who tend toward the cynical, toward being rebels, love identifying with Amos.  Some of us who were children of the ‘60’s like to think of ourselves as standing against the status quo, as those who stand in opposition to all things that we look down upon. 

We need to be carefully reminded that simply being in opposition is no proof that one has spoken the truth.  Having a chip on one’s shoulder does not always constitute having God’s word.  People like Amos, like some of the folks at Kent State on May 4, 1970, like Dr. Martin Luther King, were putting their lives on the line for what they believed to be right.  There can be a difference between being a rebel and doing what’s right.

            …Back to Amos and us.  Delivering a message such as Amos’ was not easy nor was it pretty nor was there any delight in it.  His life must have been constantly in danger, so he had to have been completely focused on the importance of what he was saying.  As I mentioned, the mission of Dr. Martin Luther King put him daily in danger and ultimately claimed his life.   Jesus put his life in danger.  Amos, by saying what God had directed, was risking his life. 

              Now, you must know that there are still plenty of opportunities to stand for the truth today in Amos-style.  There are still matters of life and death.  There are still situations in which people are so oppressed that good folk must stand up and be counted.  There are still injustices that are being committed that require our voices to be raised in the truth.  There are still things going on that simply break God’s heart.  …Like right now in America.

            We live in a nation in which we ought to be able to speak out without fear for our lives.  Not true for everyone these days.  But there is much to speak about, friends.  We stand for peace with justice, not peace just for the sake of no conflict. 

The truth is: our nation is in a mess.  We’re divided in a way that we have not seen in my lifetime.  We don’t trust each other.  We don’t trust our leaders.  We certainly do not trust what our government is doing right now.  We need to be searching for a peaceful solution—NOW—to the way we are treating immigrants, to the fear that is growing each day in our minority neighborhoods, to the hopelessness that is being sown among people who are poor, people who are disabled, families with children who depend on help from the government, people who are terrified that they will lose their health care.

It is time for the nation that prides itself on being humane and concerned with human rights to stand up and search for another way to bring peace.  If you believe that God’s truth is different than the path we are on, will you please use your voices?

            The truth is that people use scripture to rationalize a lot of untruths.  We take passages like, “There will always be the poor among us” to get us off the hook for sharing our resources and working to feed the hungry and care for the children.

            Amos didn’t let worry about afflicting the comfortable get in the way of his truth-telling.  Neither should we.  Now I’m not saying I have the truth about everything, but I don’t want to look back on this time or any time and think that I was a coward for not speaking what I understand to be God’s truth. 

             …for here is the truth:  I know that we all resist hearing anything that is going to require us to change our minds or behavior when we are set in our sense of rightness or comfort.  It may be self-serving like this:  I’m so upset about this supposed “Big Beautiful Budget.”  Oh, but it looks like I may get a tax break.  Woohoo!  I will just close my eyes to how millions of Americans, especially children, will be hurt because of it.

            …That is an example of our resistance that comes when we are caught up in a certain ideology to which we are quite loyal.  It can make us blind to God’s truth, to doing the right thing.  And I know very well that any of us can be affected by this blindness at any place along the political and theological spectrum.  We get stuck, resisting the change that God may be calling us to, while insisting that we are so righteous.

            Here’s the thing that Amos didn’t have all figured out.  He was predicting the death that must come, but God had not clued him in on the resurrection that would follow.  For us followers of Christ, in order to experience the rising, we first need to die to our old selves, the ones who are driven by our own greed, self-involved-ness, our own egos that make us think that we have all this figured out. 

The hope is in the transformation that God can bring forth from the con-sequences that happen because they are the natural, logical results of our self-centeredness.  The hope is in the marvelous lives that God creates for us once we know that Jesus has given us a new model, one that celebrates our being transformed into the New Being that God has imagined we could be.  The Israelites who were sent to exile eventually began to know where to seek hope.  We know, too, that our hope is in the Lord who made heaven and earth, not in ourselves.  Listen to these words from Lamentations 3:22-24:

Hope returns when I remember this one thing;  

God’s unfailing love and mercy still continue,

Fresh as the morning, as sure as the sunrise.

God is all I have, and so, therein I shall put my hope.

So Folks, be brave like Amos, speak the truth like our prophet, let nothing get in the way of what you know to be right and pray for God’s hope in Christ, that somehow in these times of chaos, the truth may set us all free from this insanity.