Rot
Amos 8:1-12
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I had to throw out some raspberries this week. They were completely covered with fuzzy mold, so they went into the compost. I always feel like a failure when I do that. What looked so good that you had to buy them in the store didn’t get eaten for whatever reason, and just like that they turn bad and the window has passed. But, of course, it isn’t just fruit that’s prone to spoilage.
God shows the prophet Amos a basket of summer fruit and asks him what he sees.
Is this a test, God? Amos sees exactly what is there, a basket of summer fruit. God had been showing Amos lots of things. God had shown him a swarm of locusts devouring the land, but Amos protested and God relented. So God showed him a shower of fire with the same result, the land destroyed. But Amos protested and God relented. Then God showed Amos a plumb line, the method for making sure that what’s getting built is straight and true. The implication is that the people of Israel aren’t living upright lives, and that God is going to do something about it.
Amos shares this word from God, this criticism of the nation and how they are conducting themselves. Amos shared this word from God and it gets picked up and passed around until it makes its way to the high priest who shares it with the king. “Amos is out to get you,” the priest tells the king, “the nation cannot bear it.” And do you know what the priest tells Amos? This is from Eugene Peterson’s translation of Amos, chapter 7, verse 12 that comes just before our reading this morning: Then Amaziah confronted Amos: “Seer, be on your way! Get out of here and go back to Judah where you came from.” As the writer of Ecclesiastes puts it, “there is nothing new under the sun.”
From time immemorial those who hold power have been less than receptive to the voices of outsiders who would call out or call into question their leadership. But for equally as long, God has sent prophets to do just that. As such, prophets aren’t terribly popular. That’s because prophets tell the truth.
The great southern novelist Flannery O’Connor said, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.” Jesus said it would make you free. Mostly though, it just seems to make people mad, or uncomfortable. We don’t like being confronted with the truth about how we are failing to live up to our own values. We don’t like having to confront something so big and scary that it feels unmanageable. And if we cannot manage it, if doing something about it threatens to upend the way things have always been, or what we have grown used to, then we’d just rather leave well enough alone.
The mother of a friend of mine had Alzheimer’s disease. When it was still undiagnosed, he started noticing the occasional memory lapse. It wasn’t terribly obvious; she was pretty good at covering. But eventually things became more pronounced. Still, nobody said anything. Finally, he was sitting next to his sister at a softball game for one of her kids. “Have you noticed that mom seems to be having trouble remembering things,” he asked. “Uh, oh,” she thought, “now we have to talk about it.” You see she had noticed the same thing that he had, that the whole family had. But no one wanted to say anything. No one wanted to say anything because we think that if we don’t talk about it we can keep on pretending that it doesn’t exist.
And that is why God sends us prophets, because it’s the prophet’s job to talk about it, to say the thing that everybody may be thinking, or feeling but is afraid to speak aloud for fear of making it so. The only problem with that strategy is that it is already so, whether we talk about it or not. Not talking about it, not saying the thing that needs to be said gets us into far more trouble than speaking up.
But the prophet’s call isn’t simply to say the unpopular thing, the controversial thing. Fr. Richard Rohr suggests that the prophet’s vocation, their call, is to keep alive the ministry of imagination. And as Margaret Gillikin has observed, our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. It isn’t just the hard thing, the thing we may not want to hear that the prophet says. It is the thing that we have trouble imagining to be true, and the thing so immense we cannot imagine making it right. Both the way in which the path we are on has us headed for destruction, and the means by which we may be saved from such a path and restored to God’s good intention of us and our world.
God shows Amos a basket of summer fruit; so beautiful to behold, the fruit of a successful harvest, a sign of both blessing and abundance. But do we imagine that such a basket of fruit will stay good forever? Do we imagine that such blessing and abundance is a gift of our own making? What we can’t see with our translation is that this basket of fruit is a pun. In the Hebrew, the word for fruit shares the same root as the word for the end of something. God is announcing to Amos that this is the end for Israel.
When I was a kid, I remember watching the re-runs of the original TV show Star Trek. By then the first Star Trek movie had come out. So, I remember sitting in our family room, glued to some suspenseful episode or another where one of the characters was in serious peril, and realizing that whatever doom seemed certain would not come to pass if that character was in the movie that got made some 15 years after the episode first aired. The threat of certain destruction was tempered by the promise that there was more to the story than the moment suggested.
The same holds true for these prophetic words. Nevertheless, the end that God announces, the doom of these verses about God never forgetting, about the land trembling and everyone mourning, the sun going down at noon plunging the earth into darkness, turning feasts into mourning and every song into the blues; it’s all very intense. And it’s the kind of thing that people refer to when they say they don’t care for the Hebrew scriptures. They prefer the God of love that they encounter in Jesus to the God of wrath depicted here.
While all of that is understandable- who wouldn’t prefer affirmation to judgement- it is only half the equation. Sometimes, sometimes judgement is warranted. Sometimes judgement is the only thing that will save us. If we never talk about mom’s memory loss. If we never say anything about a friend’s secretive drinking. If we never tell the truth about the thing that happened in the dark, or the destruction of our environment taking place in broad daylight. If we never name what is wrong, the thing that may in fact be killing us, then we will never be able to imagine setting it right.
So Amos’ words are strong stuff. There is no weak sauce here. It is full strength and even a little caustic. But the words Amos uses are the words needed to get through to God’s people about the seriousness of their situation. They are words equal to the injustice that will bring about the end God has announced; words that need to be heard. Which is why we are ordered first to be silent. Because we cannot hear what we need to hear, we cannot know what God would have us know if we never stop talking, if we insist that things are fine and never stop making excuses for the very things that we need to stop doing.
We may not think so upon first hearing them, but these words are actually good news. They are good news because they speak to the need for limits in this world. The people of Israel have allowed their greed and the enchantment of the marketplace outstrip the second great commandment. Instead of loving their neighbor as themselves, they have turned to cheating their neighbor to enrich themselves. To make the ephah small and the shekel great is about gaming the system; selling 12 oz. of flour as a pound, putting a thumb on the scale. In violating the commandment to love their neighbor, they’ve also given short shrift to the first commandment, to love God with all they’ve got. Instead of attending to the rhythm of sabbath rest, they’ve got an eye toward doing business 24/7, ignoring God’s role in the work they do.
Maybe it sounds like bad news to say that you cannot keep that up without serious negative consequence. But it is good news to the family that’s waiting for someone to come home from work. It’s good news to the workers who are subject to an unsustainable work ethic. And it is good news that there is a limit to it all that will not allow such injustice to persist.
It is good news because God loves us enough to say, “enough!” Be silent. You’re done. No more of this. As one commentator noted of this passage, “Whenever humanity seeks to dominate, destroy, or reduce God's creation [and their own neighbors] to a commodity, God stops our plans.”
God puts an end to all our spoiled rotten instincts, so that, like so much compost, we can be turned and used to nurture the new life that God is bringing forth even now.