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Amos
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2:Good morning. Good morning. Welcome to Commons. Super impressed with this crowd getting through the snow. We are so extremely glad that you are here, that you left your homes today to be with us.
Speaker 2:My name is Bobby. If we have not met, I'm one of the pastors on the team here. And I thought I'd take a moment while you're settling in to clear something up. Ready for it? Here it is.
Speaker 2:Some of you have been asking, Bobby, where is this husband of yours? And are you even married? I really do have a husband. I really do. This is Jonathan and I.
Speaker 2:Well, a snap of us anyway. And he's actually the reason that I did something I never thought I'd do. I moved to Alberta a couple years ago where I got to experience snowpocalypse twenty eighteen. Well, Jonathan, my husband, is a little more low profile around here at Commons, but he is around. But spotting him is kind of like spotting the ghost cat in Walter Mitty, like, could that be him?
Speaker 2:Maybe. Is that him? Any secret Life of Walter Mitty fans in the room? Oh, yeah. Yes.
Speaker 2:Right? It's so good. Speaking of Walter Mitty, there's this line in the film that I've been thinking about all week. It connects to this last message in our Truth to Power series. And the line is not a high point in the movie or maybe even that memorable, but right at the beginning of the film, Walter, played by Ben Stiller, rushes into his office building and his sister runs up to him to deliver a birthday cake like you do.
Speaker 2:And a family related exposition transpires. And Walter's sister is rushing to a Greece audition, and she's hoping for the role of Rizzo. And Walter doesn't know who Rizzo is, and his sister explains the part like this. Rizzo, you know, she's she does a smoking gesture. She's tough and tender.
Speaker 2:Well, we are making our way through some of the last tough parts of the prophet Amos, and we're moving towards the more tender parts. We even see this tough to tender transition with God. It is beautiful. But first, let's take a look at what we've covered so far. When we opened Amos, we took a look at this notion of speaking truth to power, particularly when it comes to social justice.
Speaker 2:Amos is this sheep herder turned prophet from the Southern Kingdom Of Judah, and Amos is called by God to take a message of judgment and doom to the Northern Kingdom Of Israel when times were actually pretty cushy and comfortable. A lot of people then had a lot of wealth. They had a lot of stuff. However, Israel had neglected their identity to be blessing bringers. And now God was coming at them like a roaring lion because they had abused the most vulnerable in their midst.
Speaker 2:It's like the first words out of this lion's mouth are, you should be ashamed of yourselves, but, you know, more roar and a little less finger wagging. Well, last week, Scott helped us to understand the particular work of Yahweh's prophets. Amos set himself apart from the other prophets of his day or we could call them fake prophets by delivering a message that made his hearers deeply uncomfortable. The number one rule in the prophet handbook is this adage, comfort the disturbed, but disturb the comfortable. And against the backdrop of Israel's success in his day, Amos is there to say, yo, you are not gonna stay comfortable forever.
Speaker 2:There is a dust storm of demise on the horizon, and it's coming right for you. Amos is a heavy message because it's truthful. And from where we sit, Scott helped us to see in Amos, in his judgments, an invitation to live connected to God's generous gushing stream of justice and righteousness in the world. So yes, Amos' message is mostly pretty heavy, but it does get light. I promise you, it does get lighter.
Speaker 2:Following the prophetic themes of justice and generosity in this truth to power series, today, we are going to look at anger, the kind that gets to work at bettering the world. So let's pray together and then jump into the last few chapters of Amos. Generous god, in this moment, we quiet ourselves a little bit to take a look inside. There are circumstances in our lives that make us angry. There are tragedies in our world that make us angry.
Speaker 2:There are shadows in our own hearts that make us so angry. And we confess our need to hear the truth that you will speak, truth through the scriptures, truth through your holy spirit, truth through one another. So loving God, will you empower us to live as Jesus did with truthfulness and humility and healing for all right in the wake of anger. May we be aware of your nearness today in surprising places, we pray. Amen.
Speaker 2:So Amos chapter seven begins with a string of visions. There are locusts and a judgment fire and a plumb line to measure how crooked Israel had become. And I wanna move down to verse 10 where this priest, Amaziah, has an exchange with first king Jeroboam and then later with Amos. And the thing about Amaziah is that he's in bed with power. The crown had made him a priest, not the traditional Levite lineage.
Speaker 2:So he can't really see that clearly, he can't see this truth. It's like he's that emoji with dollar signs in his eyes. Go ahead, you can look for it, it's there. The text reads, then Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, sent a message to Jeroboam, king of Israel. Amos is raising a conspiracy against you in the very heart of Israel.
Speaker 2:The land cannot bear all his words for this is what Amos is saying. Jeroboam will die by the sword and Israel will surely go into exile away from their native land. See, you may or may not have kinda caught what Amaziah is doing there. He misrepresented Amos, claiming that Amos' message only originated from Amos and not from the divine. Hashtag ancient world fake news.
Speaker 2:And Amaziah, he skipped all the parts where Amos called Israel out because they truly deserved to be called out. Amos basically says, you have brought this upon yourselves. You have ignored the poor and abused the weak among you. And the abused was not just concerned with walking by those with in need. Israel was kind of actively walking on them.
Speaker 2:They had sold their own as slaves. They had sexually abused women they were meant to protect, and they had perpetrated all kinds of shady deals against the poor. And Amos was there to hold up a mirror as any good prophet and to say, look, look in this mirror. You are the farthest thing from who you're meant to be. You have got to know that life is going to get very uncomfortable, very hard for you because you can't live apart from your behavior.
Speaker 2:And Amaziah, this priest, responds, get out. Get out, you seer. Go back to the land of Judah. And in our vernacular, a summary of Amaziah's posture towards Amos might look like this. La la la la la la la.
Speaker 2:And not only from Amaziah, but also from all of Israel. While Amos was there speaking truth to the power and greed, they just ignored him. Israel's corporate posture towards Amos was also la la la la la. We don't wanna hear it. It would be a while before Israel would search for Amos' words to help them make sense of their suffering.
Speaker 2:And while we don't know how long Amos stuck around, he lived and worked during Jeroboam the second's reign in Israel, and here are some dates for any of you history buffs, from about July to July. But Israel, of course, they didn't pay attention to Amos' message until after the Assyrian exile raked them off their land and took them elsewhere, which was in July. And Jonathan, my alive and very real husband, he said it like this. So books like Chronicles and Kings explain what happened, and the prophets answer the question, what happened? He's so smart, that guy.
Speaker 2:So real. But back to this inclination to shut down and to shove away hard truth in our lives when we need it the most. What do you do when you're faced with hard truth, both listening to hard truth and speaking hard truth. Maybe confrontation about your behavior or your motives or your decisions. Does hard truth motivate you?
Speaker 2:Does it change you? Or does it cause you to just shut right down? Maybe you're like Amaziah. I mean, it's not that hard to imagine. We have this gut response to turn away from hard truths, don't we?
Speaker 2:And more, when confronting being confronted by what makes us uncomfortable, what makes us defensive and reactive, what makes us angry, we can so quickly just lash out and plug our ears and say, nope, no way I'm not listening to you. Shut it. I am fine just the way that I am. And just so we're clear, I am not talking about that part of yourself that turns away from what you know is not true. I am all for that.
Speaker 2:You need to trust that sacred sense of yes and no inside of yourself. We need more of that. But I'm talking about just common human defensiveness. We've all done it. Maybe you're even doing it right now.
Speaker 2:But maybe you're like Amos, and that's not that hard to imagine either. Maybe you've confronted a person or a system or a way of thinking, and you've been met with anger and defensiveness and distance, a shutting down, a rejection, a pushing away. And maybe that frightened you. Or maybe it actually made you more clear, more certain, more fired up about the right way forward. Resistance can clarify.
Speaker 2:It can sharpen. It can hone you. And that's what it did for Amos. At the end of the exchange with Amaziah, Amos delivers a very sick burn on Amaziah's family and all of Israel. And Amos says the crooked priest's family will be disgraced and destroyed, and Israel Israel will surely go into exile.
Speaker 2:And then Amos' message for Israel, it just kinda gets louder and sharper, and I'm sorry to say, even more dismal. Chapter eight and the beginning of chapter nine spell out disaster and ruin. It's curtains. And it goes like this. This is what the sovereign Lord showed me, a basket of ripe fruit.
Speaker 2:What do you see, Amos? He asked. A basket of ripe fruit, I answered. Then the Lord said to me, the time is ripe for my people Israel. I will spare them no longer.
Speaker 2:In that day, declares the sovereign Lord, the songs in the temple will turn to wailing. Many, many bodies flung everywhere. Silence. Now I could just leave you to sit alone with that vision, you know, in the dark, just rocking back and forth, because it is so haunting. But I'm gonna tell you about this little Hebrew wordplay here.
Speaker 2:The Hebrew word for the fruit in this verse is the word qayetz, and the Hebrew word for end is ketz. It's a pun, all you CBC As It Happens fans. There's probably like three of you in the room. It means that the time is indeed ripe for Israel's end, and this end is gonna smell like rot and death. It's really horrible.
Speaker 2:So even these tiny little words are getting this really strong message across. It's like God just piles on with these visions. Chapter nine holds the final vision in the book. After the sovereign Lord turns the lights out on their festivals and leaves them to mourn in their shame, There is this final leveling. Though they dig down to the depths below, from there my hand will take them.
Speaker 2:Though they climb up to the heavens above, from there I will bring them down. For ancient Israelites, the place of the dead is not some spiritual afterlife. It's gloomy and dusty. Many believed that Sheol, the netherworld, was stretched so far to the ends of the cosmos that not even Yahweh could reach the place of the dead. But here, Amos says that there is no escape, no place where God won't go, Not even death or the distance of the dark cosmos will keep them hidden from God.
Speaker 2:And you know why? Because God says, will keep my eye on them for harm and not for good. It's so heavy. It's so brutal and so tough, isn't it? According to Amos, God is mad, so angry, so fed up and finished with their story.
Speaker 2:But we have to ask, really? Is God? Is God finished? Is this really their end? Like, lights out, end scene, finito.
Speaker 2:Or could it be a radical new beginning? Well, we're going get back to that in a moment. But first, let's take a look at our own anger. Like, really? Let's look at it.
Speaker 2:When was a time you were horrifically angry? When I think of this question, I think of two stories. The first was when I was in college and in the thick of some conflict in my life. I was telling a mentor about it, and he pointed out this simple observation. Look at your hands, Bobby.
Speaker 2:Look how mad you are. I was sitting there with my hands clenched so tightly that I didn't notice the crescent moon indentations on my palms from my own fingernails. And I confess that the anger I felt in this story, it did not move through me for years. I held it, and I nursed it, and I exaggerated it in a way that prevented me from moving forwards in parts of my life. It's not like I shouldn't have been mad.
Speaker 2:I had every right to be mad. It's what I chose to do with that anger that really affected me. Then there's this one. Last week, after the 7PM service, I went over to the pub to catch the last few commoners who were still up for hanging out despite a, the weather and b, Super Bowl. They were real pub champs.
Speaker 2:And when I got there, I plopped down beside Mark, who had been one of the worship leaders that Sunday. And I told Mark the story about how earlier in the evening, was driving in the snow, really grateful for my snow tires. But as I drove slowly up a slippery hill in my little car, a big SUV came up behind me and flashed his headlights. Not once, you guys, but three times. I was so mad that four hours later, I found myself saying to Mark, sometimes in those situations, I want to get out of my car and just knock on the other driver's window and say, you and me, let's talk about this behavior right now.
Speaker 2:And Mark, he tipped his head and he said, Bobby, that's road rage. I'm not the only one who's been caught off guard by their own anger, am I? Whether or not road rage is your thing, and I honestly never thought it was mine, we all know about the kind of anger that bubbles under the surface for hours and weeks and months and maybe years and wants to bring harm on those we're mad at. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum, she talks about this kind of anger in her book Anger and Forgiveness. And I'm gonna read you a quote, and it's probably the only sports quote I'll ever read for all eternity.
Speaker 2:Here it is. Many cultures, past and present, think this way all the time. In most major sports, we find an emphasis on retaliation for injury, and players are thought wimpy and unmanly to the extent that they do not strike back so far as the rules permit, and a little beyond that. Even though it is obvious that injuring one player does not take away the injury to another, a retaliatory strike back is thought symbolically to restore the balance of status, manliness, or whatever. And I gotta love an academic quote that ends with whatever.
Speaker 2:Nussbaum argues that retaliation does not restore the balances. If I hurt the person who hurt me, it does not take my hurt away. The epistle of James says it like this, human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires. So what if that is not what anger was meant to do? What if there is another side of anger that is a valuable part of moral life and even human flourishing?
Speaker 2:What if that's what we see when we stick with Amos right to the end? After verses that describe Israel as people shaken like grain through a sieve, meaning that God had come looking for the good in them, but not a speck was found. Amos does this thing where he just spins the camera around, and now we're appearing at the brilliance of God's power and involvement in creation. The Lord, the Lord Almighty, he touches the earth and it melts, and all who live in it mourn. The whole land rises like the Nile, then sinks like the river of Egypt.
Speaker 2:He builds his lofty palace in the heavens and sets its foundation on the earth. He calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out over the face of the land. The Lord is his name. Now a lot of scholars think that this fragment and the one that closes Amos in verses 11 to 15 are late additions to the text added after the exile. Israel would be taken into exile by Assyria after Amos prophesied their destruction, and it's true that a hundred and fifty years later, Judah would be conquered and Jerusalem destroyed by the Babylonians, and after that, ancient Israel would always be an occupied people.
Speaker 2:Even though this is their story, the prophets weren't spelling out literal history. The words of the prophets were meant to captivate and make meaning, not file a report of the facts. And I can just imagine a small group of exiled Israelites sitting around a campfire in their enemies' land. Their clothing is threadbare. Their sandals are tattered.
Speaker 2:Their faces are creased with trauma and fatigue, and they're just trying to figure out how they got so far from home. When out of the night's quiet, one of them speaks. He says, hey, you guys. Remember that mad prophet? The one from Judah.
Speaker 2:What was his name? Was it, like, Abednego? Amelie? Amos. Didn't Amos warn us?
Speaker 2:And didn't we, like, totally ignore him? Maybe it's time we think about what he had to say. So they'd track down the scroll, and they'd pour over it. And then, eventually, someone would uncover that though God had been angry and terrible things had happened, God had so much more to say on the matter. So the people in exile made sure that the book ended in hope.
Speaker 2:Whether it was Amos himself or the community together that decided how to end this prophetic message, the wisdom that prevailed was that God's anger is always meant for good, like large scale good, like good for all good. The epilogue of Amos is known as Israel's restoration. Reading it, we can imagine exile saying, yeah, okay, it feels like God is absent. But remember that the world is the Lord's and everything in it. So as long as we walk this earth, even so far from home, God is not so far from us.
Speaker 2:So let's take a look at this final vision, a message that has more tenderness than you'd likely imagine for the exiles now. I'm calling it the other side of anger. We pick up in verse 15. The days are coming, declares the Lord, when the reaper will be overtaken by the ploughman and the planter by the one treading grapes. Now, we're a little distant from this language, but the Hebrew scholar Ehud Benzvi explains it like this, saying, the produce will be so abundant that the harvesting will continue through the time of planting new seeds.
Speaker 2:It's a picture of perpetual abundance. Carrying on. New wine will drip from the mountains and flow from the hills, and I will bring my people Israel back from exile. This is a covenant God, a promise keeping God who makes and keeps these promises with the land that God loves, the people that God loves, and all creation that God loves. They will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them.
Speaker 2:They will plant vineyards and drink their wine. They will make gardens and eat their fruit. This is not Israel as before either, as in, remember how we used to be so awesome? Can't we just be awesome again? It's not that.
Speaker 2:It is a new Israel, a people transformed, people who, though they had been under occupation, wouldn't enact occupation on others. I will plant Israel in their own land, never again to be uprooted from the land I have given them, says the Lord your God. This is what's on the other side of God's anger? Restoration, abundance, boundless human flourishing, gardens and vineyards and safe cities? Oh, my.
Speaker 2:What if the fact that we can see and feel the force of God's anger in Amos means that our anger can be transformative and hopeful too? Some mystics and peace activists, they say that we should invite our anger forward, that we should picture it like a howling baby, and instead of running from it, we should embrace our anger, and the power of that embrace is strong enough, like a mother's love, to transform fear and hurt into love and trust. Yes, you can get mad, but then put that energy into doing good. After all, there's plenty to be mad at in the world. You don't like the issue of food scarcity?
Speaker 2:Learn how to support local farmers. Poverty and global inequality make you mad, bro? Get into microloans. Support organizations you admire. You're furious about the wrong someone did to you?
Speaker 2:Find a good listener or a skilled therapist and work through every speck of your anger. Because if you don't, the one who will get hurt by your fear and your rage is you. Okay. So what does this kind of anger that works for good in the world actually look like? For me, this question gets answered in the details of the world I actually live in.
Speaker 2:I found this to be the case when reading through a recent edition of Time Magazine called The Optimist, and it was edited by Bill Gates. And the premise of The Optimist issue is explained by Bill Gates in his letter from the editor called, cleverly, The Good News, and he writes these words. Reading the news today does not exactly leave you feeling optimistic. Hurricanes in The Americas, horrific mass shootings, global tensions over nuclear arms, crisis in Myanmar, bloody civil wars in Syria and Yemen, your heart breaks for every person who is touched by these tragedies, even for those of us lucky enough not to be directly affected. It may feel like the world is falling apart, But these events, as awful as they are, have happened in the context of a bigger positive trend.
Speaker 2:On the whole, the world is getting better. And Bill Gates goes on to cite all kinds of interesting data to support this claim. I encourage you to check it out. But what struck me in light of Amos is that the people featured in the issue of Time magazine, they got mad about something, and then they got moving. Trevor Noah was angry about apartheid and segregation, and then took action by advocating for better information and social change.
Speaker 2:Malala Yousafzai was angry about a lack of education for girls worldwide. Malala, who was shot and nearly killed because of her refusal to stop learning, took action through the Malala Fund to invest in educators in developing countries. John Lewis, the great civil rights leader, got mad at Jim Crow, marched from Selma with Doctor King, and dedicated his life to nonviolence and change in America. And Lewis, he ends his article in time with these words, You have to be hopeful. You have to be optimistic.
Speaker 2:If not, you will get lost in despair. When I travel around the country, I say, don't get down, you cannot get down. I'm not down, he wrote. I got arrested, beaten, left bloody and unconscious, but I haven't given up, and you cannot give up. All of this, every speck of these articles and these voices has the divine all over it in a kaleidoscope of ways.
Speaker 2:These are the people speaking truth to power in our world. This is Amos. And you know what? It probably cost everyone in that magazine a great deal. We're talking about stopping the trajectories of wealth and greed to give more money away.
Speaker 2:We're talking about putting our neck on the line to do what we know is the right thing to do. We're talking about saying in the face of violence and threat, no. No way. You may try to hurt me and jail me and even shoot me or crucify me, but I stand for love. This week, we begin the Lenten journey towards Resurrection Sunday.
Speaker 2:The church has traditionally used this time of year to focus in on praying and fasting and giving. And these practices, they actually map out really beautifully on the themes in our Truth to Power series. Justice, generosity, and anger that goes somewhere. Let me encourage you to practice Lent this year with these three spiritual practices. To combat injustice, see what you can give up this Lent.
Speaker 2:Fasting and abstaining have a way of correcting the influence of our culture's pressure to be just consumers. To expand your generosity, use this time of year to consider your charitable giving. What makes you mad, and what can your money do about it? And to make sure that your anger doesn't get stuck inside of you and become your enemy, pick up a new prayer practice. Get contemplative.
Speaker 2:Look inside your own heart. Face your fears and sense that God is near. Finally, and a little plug here, check out our commons events calendar at commons.life to take advantage of spaces that we are carving out for you this Lent season. We kick it all off this Wednesday at our Ash Wednesday service at 7PM here in this room, and there's a lent worship night the following Tuesday. There's a contemplative prayer event on March 4 and stations of the cross during holy week.
Speaker 2:So I really encourage you to participate in some of those things. It's Lent, almost. Let's get into it, and let's pray. God, you are the source of all truth and all power, and we confess that we can get a bit turned around about both of these things. This season, as we trudge through Lent towards the spring of Christ's resurrection, will you speak your truth to us?
Speaker 2:Will you show us the tenderness of your care? Will you make us strong enough and reflective enough to do good work in the world? It's our calling, our delight, and our glory to be shaped by you. As individuals and a community, God, will you make us prophets of your love, your justice, and your beauty. Amen.