For Silver and Sandals

July 21, 2013

Amos 8:1-12

¹This is what the Lord GOD showed me-a basket of summer fruit. ²He said, "Amos, what do you see?" And I said, "A basket of summer fruit." Then the LORD said to me, The end has come upon my people Israel; I will never again pass them by. ³The songs of the temple shall become wailings in that day," says the Lord GOD; "the dead bodies shall be many, cast out in every place. Be silent!" ⁴Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land, ⁵saying, "When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, ⁶buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat."

⁷The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds. ⁸Shall not the land tremble on this account, and everyone mourn who lives in it, and all of it rise like the Nile, and be tossed about and sink again, like the Nile of Egypt?

⁹On that day, says the Lord GOD, I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth in broad daylight. ¹⁰I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth on all loins, and baldness on every head; I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and the end of it like a bitter day.

¹¹The time is surely coming, says the Lord GOD, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD. ¹²They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the LORD, but they shall not find it.

Sermon: “For Silver and Sandals”

We live in a small town, so y’all will probably hear about it.  I might as well tell you myself.  There is a certain activity that several local Presbyterian pastors and I enjoy, one that requires a covert rendezvous in the parking lot of a McDonald’s in Sanford and then piling into an old van to head to Durham.  You should be worried.

Every few weeks throughout the Spring and Summer, we go see the Durham Bulls play.  While baseball is my favorite sport to watch, there’s a lot I don’t know about it.  But thankfully, my pastor friends have evangelized me in the ways of this great American pastime.  Take, for example, pitching.   I’ve learned that a fast pitch can top 95 miles per hour (at least for a Triple-A team), and that a curve ball looks surprisingly slow and easy to hit (coming it at a mere 72 miles per hour or so), until it slyly veers at the very last moment.  So the difficulty in a curve ball seems to how it sneaks up on a batter, feigning being ordinary, slow even.

Now, maybe I’ve been watching too many Bulls games, but when reading this Amos text, I couldn’t help but feel like the lectionary threw us a curve ball.  And, while I don’t believe baseball was invented in the time of the prophet Amos, he clearly knew how to throw a curve ball. 

Here goes the pitch:

“See this lovely basket of sun-ripened, summer blueberries?  Can’t you just taste their sweetness, and imagine them celebrated in cobblers, pancakes and jams?”

And here comes the curve:

“The end has come.  God is fed up with you people.  Death follows your way of greedy living.  Listen up!  You trample the needy to get to the top.  You can’t wait for worship to be over so you can go back to making money.  You intentionally cheat the poor with false balances, placing silver and sandals at a greater value than another human being, or God.  No longer can this continue!”

And the people of Israel (and us) are left frozen with a useless bat in our hands, wondering what just happened.  But he doesn’t stop there…

“You’ve forgotten me, says the Lord.  But guess what?  I won’t forget you.  I won’t forget all of the prideful things you have done.  You’ve made the world revolve around you, so I’m going to show you that it does not.  The sun will go down at noon, and at day break I’ll make the earth as dark as midnight.  I’ll take your gluttonous feasts and turn them to ashes in your mouth.  All you’ve known is pleasure, at the expense of the poor.  Now, all you will know will be bitterness.”

Amos gives one final warning in this curve ball:

“The time is coming when you will experience a famine like you’ve never known.  Not a famine for food, or water, but of hearing the words of the Lord.  You will wander from sea to sea, the whole world over, in search of me, but you will not find me.”

The people of Israel and us are left thinking, “Can’t we just go back to talking about blueberries?  That was so much more pleasant.”

We Presbyterians like to dwell on the pleasantries of faith, don’t we?

I think this is why, when having a discussion with a Baptist camp counselor this week at Camp Monroe, she asked me what Presbyterians believe, specifically posing “Do you believe in sin?”  I’ve heard some of you from time to time comment that, growing up, every Sunday the sermon was about sin, and now it seems like church is always about making people feel good.  This is in some ways true.  Sin is not a topic we enjoy discussing: give us grace and redemption over hellfire and damnation any day.  To go back to our earlier metaphor, give us a nice predictable ordinary pitch over a curveball. 

I did, though, tell that counselor, that yes, we believe in sin, but not just one sort, several kinds.  I explained that I didn’t mean there were varying degrees of sin (some being greater than others), but that Presbyterians see sin in different ways, such as the sin of an individual willfully harming another person just as much as the sin of an economic system willfully harming those on the margins. 

Now, I wish this wasn’t the case.  I wish I could just believe that sin meant me having my own little angel on one shoulder and devil on the other, and me just listening to the wrong voice.  If sin was only personal, it would be so much easier to manage, and to point fingers at others and not ourselves.

But Amos, that sly pitcher-prophet, reminds us that sin is not just personal.  In fact, the whole of scripture, especially the words of Jesus, spends a much greater time speaking about sins that are corporate: sinful cities, sinful households, sinful kingdoms, sinful religious communities, sinful economic structures.

Like the people of Israel longing for a fresh helping of blueberries instead of the inevitable devastating effects of their sin, we would like to just skip this lectionary week.  To swing, miss, and let it go by.  Because that curve ball hits just a little bit too close to home.

Whatever our political beliefs, it cannot be denied that the rich are getting richer, and the poor getting poorer.  The demand on our government aid for the poor grows as rapidly as the call for massive cuts in funding for education.  Technology is creating astounding opportunities for medical and career advancement…but only for those who can afford it.  For those who can’t, the gap between have’s and have-not’s, between rich and poor, widens.

And this preacher has an ipad whose parts are linked to harsh labor factories in China, and a smart phone containing a metal that is mined in the Congo, the profits of which continue to support violence there.  That is only one small example of corporate sin, the ways that sin has a massive impact when baptized as “good” or “profitable” or “trendy” by those with power.  There are countless other examples.

I may not buy the poor for silver and the needy for sandals, but I do buy the poor for a smartphone and the needy for my own amusement.   If I’m honest (which I try to be), I would love for sin to be individual -- to be blissfully ignorant of my lifestyle’s impact on the rest of the world.  This yearning for ignorance is why guys like Amos don’t get invited to worship on Sundays very often.  He’s too political, too uncomfortable, too demanding.  We don’t like his God very much.

Will Willimon says it well, “One way you can tell the difference between a true and living God and a dead and fake god is that a false god will never tell you anything that will make you angry and uncomfortable!”

If we worship the god of self-gratification at the expense of the poor in our own backyard and in the rest of the world, we’ll find that, like Amos warned, we have silenced God.  Allowing God to only speak in the realm of certain sins or pre-approved comfortable categories, we will find that God has nothing new to say to us.  We will wander from this spiritual practice to that self-help movement, and God will be far from us, among the poor we have tried so hard to forget.

There is a time to speak of sin.  And Amos tells us that, when economic growth that only benefits the wealthy and comfortable becomes normative, when the poor are a number while the privileged have names and votes, when church is only as important as the money it makes, it is time.  It makes me uncomfortable, and I’m sure it does for y’all, too.  But maybe in naming the ways we have sinned as a people, and as a nation, we can begin to hear the voice of God once more over all of the other gods of greed and comfort we have worshipped. 

Perhaps in that discomfort is our salvation.  For in that place of admitting we have not lived as we should, we find something beautiful.  We find that it is not all up to us.  That we are not nearly as important or independent as we thought we were, but that we can do important things for others.  We find that there is a Savior who not only takes our individual and corporate sin upon himself, but who shows us that another way is possible. 

As individuals, we are capable of inflicting great harm on one another. As a group, we are capable of inflicting even greater harm.  But the reverse is also true!  By the grace of God, we as individuals can practice faithfulness to God through faithfulness to those on the margins. 

And as a community, we can proclaim that in our awareness of our impact on this world, in our advocacy for those who are silenced, in our ache to be reformed and always reforming by God’s Spirit, God is still speaking.  And while God clearly speaks of sin, helping us hear that word no matter uncomfortable it makes us, we are promised that, in Christ, grace will always have the final word.

Thanks be to the God who has greater standards for us than we have for ourselves, to the Savior who shows that redemption has no limits, and to the Spirit who inspires new life in even the most broken of people and systems.  Amen.