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Amos
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Maybe today, you need a whole list of and statements to remind you that no matter how much you've missed the mark, God's got you. Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad you're here, and we hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Hit the commons.church for more information. Well, Sundays are a feast of a different kind around here.
Speaker 1:In our teaching at Commons, we look to connect to the world that we live in and the lives that we live. So last week, we finished a series called lonely. And if you missed any of it, you'll wanna check it out on our YouTube channel or our podcast feed. And my favorite part of the series was this back and forth between knowing how to be alone and what to do with our loneliness. And Jeremy drew from the master of shame and vulnerability research through the series, the inspiring Brene Brown.
Speaker 1:In her work, it helps us to understand the connection between loneliness and vulnerability. And when we process our isolation well, when we don't look away but we look straight at the things that make it hard for us to be alone, well, then our human vulnerability can be the birthplace of love and longing and joy and courage and creativity and empathy. And that list is from Brene Brown's book Daring Greatly, which now graces our lending library shelf, and you can find that at the top of the South staircase by the Kensington Road entrance because books are good, people. Books are good. So that's Brene Brown.
Speaker 1:But speaking of cool women with lots of b's in their name, I'm Bobby. I'm one of the pastors on the team, and I have the great honor of opening our new series, Truth to Power. And speaking truth to power is everywhere right now. You are likely familiar with the phrase on account of Oprah. You get truth to power.
Speaker 1:You get truth to power. You get truth to power. But really, a couple of weeks ago, she received the Cecil B DeMille award at the Golden Globes, and it was an award show that really rode the important cultural wave of the Me Too and the Time's Up movements. The greatest thing we can do said Oprah is to speak our truth to power. She went on to highlight the role of the press so that we can uncover the truth that keeps us from turning a blind eye to corruption and to injustice.
Speaker 1:Now, there's enough in those words from Oprah's speech to get us started with Amos. He's not the press, but a Hebrew prophet that leads us through our truth to power series. And Oprah took a page out of Amos when she let a much bigger story speak through her own particular story. And amazingly, while Oprah was inspiring her nation, she was also confronting it. There's both invitation and critique in her words.
Speaker 1:And the pages we turn to today, they are ancient, but the truth there is still precious and timely and true. Amos has a whack load of criticism for the world that he lives in, nations around him, and the nation that he stands in to speak this truth. He might even have a bit for us. What Amos shows us is that maybe the voices we need to listen to, they kinda come out of nowhere. And maybe the truth that we need to hear is brutal before it is beautiful.
Speaker 1:And maybe speaking up and listening are two sides of a very important coin called prophetic justice. So let's pray together and then carry on. God, our maker and sustainer, you have a way of equipping people to get our attention, to remind us of how uncontainable you are and how connected we are? Will you wake us up to your passion and your grace for all? Will you show us the nature of the power we live with, the power we need to resist, and the power of generosity that leads to life everlasting.
Speaker 1:Holy Spirit, you are here, and we give you thanks for how you teach us. Amen. So there are a lot of layers to this story of Amos. Amos is a character. He's a real character.
Speaker 1:A prophet from the Southern Kingdom Of Judah in the eighth century BCE, and god called him to take a message to the people in the Northern Kingdom Of Israel. So the dude's in the South, and god calls him to the North. And it turns out that over the centuries, after God's people were delivered out of a brutal regime, they became people who made brutal regimes for others. And after living among nations with bloodthirsty ways and idolatrous worship, The Israelites became, well, the worst version of themselves, and I kinda get that. I've moved around a bit in my adult life.
Speaker 1:I've been a Californian, a Vancouverite, a Calgarian, and hopefully, I've become some of the best parts of those places. But we all know that's not always the case. Right? We've lived in cities that give preferential treatment to the wealthy over the poor, and before we know it, it's all too easy to walk past the pain of another person. And we've worked in places that have been toxic, and that negativity of the workplace that infects us.
Speaker 1:And now we're kind of this version of a person that we don't like. And we've participated in some family or friend dynamic that really brought out the worst in us. And sometimes before we know it, when surrounded by forces that challenge the best parts of who we are, we become the thing that we despise. And then we need someone from the outside to tell us what we've become. And that's what these first two chapters of Amos are about.
Speaker 1:How the toxic parts of nations and empires around Judah and Israel infected the best parts of God's people, and they let it happen. So let's begin with Amos chapter one verse one. The words of Amos, one of the shepherds of Tekoa, the vision he saw concerning Israel two years before the earthquake when Uzziah was king of Judah and Jeroboam son of Jehoash was king of Israel. So Amos is yanked out of his day to day life as a sheep breeder and an owner of orchards. And Amos is called by Yahweh to step into the role of a seer, s e e r.
Speaker 1:He is tasked with this message of God for the people of God. But it's not like this game of telephone like, hey, heaven calling. Can you just pass this message on to those dopes over there? No. The message from God passed through Amos' own life.
Speaker 1:In these critiques, they picked up some of the qualities of his own story, and they were put before the people of God like these words that are just waving to get their attention. So Amos was not a poor shepherd but he was connected to the land. He understood organic rhythms like seasons and soil and birth and death and planting and pruning. And Amos was called from the field to take God's message to the places of power. He's an outsider speaking against the abuses of the insiders.
Speaker 1:And what's more, Amos was delivering messages when kings had a lot of power and people were really comfortable and there was so much peace in the land, but it was peace that came at a cost to the vulnerable in their midst. And as a man of the land, he gets what's going on on the ground. And speaking of the ground, there's this mention of an earthquake. This earthquake that captivated and informed the people much disasters like hurricane Katrina and the Fort McMurray fires. There are all kinds of before and after moments that define us, aren't there?
Speaker 1:Life before the fire, Life after I got dumped. It's happened. Life before she got sick. Life after I took a job that sucked the life out of me. This is the language of confrontation.
Speaker 1:Being confronted in life by a disaster that wakes us up to what's important. Being confronted by relationships that shift and sometimes shatter. Being confronted by actual voices that call out to say, dude, you're going the wrong way. That way leads to death. And maybe it's literal death, but it's likely spiritual and emotional, relational.
Speaker 1:And Amos is saying that these events of earthquakes and empires have the power to tear through our lives and to force us to rebuild and rework and regrow. The ground would shake for the tribes of Judah and Israel. It would literally shake. But Amos was about to tell them that the ground was shaking for a different reason now. It was shaking with the roar of God who comes at them like a lion.
Speaker 1:That's right. A lion. Verse two, he said, the Lord roars from Zion and thunders from Jerusalem. The pastures of the shepherds dry up and the top of Carmel withers. Amos had this divine encounter that was a lot less Simba, cute little Simba, and a lot more, I'm gonna rip you to shreds.
Speaker 1:In fact, a prophet had been killed by a lion on the same road that Amos traveled on to get to Israel. This is a lion that can take life away. A lion that roars and thunders to rock the holy places of Zion and Carmel draining the vitality of all who hear it. So what are we supposed to do with this image of a god who is roaring, who's a furious lion? It's easy to think, oh, no hoo hoo.
Speaker 1:I prefer my deity to be all love, no lion. A good friend of mine reminded me last week that intimacy means that we see all parts of a person, that lovers can't fake it with each other because if they do, they build anything but love. If you can't get mad or ask for more or scream and cry with those you love because you need them to see you, you need them to meet you, you need them to be their better selves with you, then what's any of it for? If you've built walls around you to keep the people you love out or even just a neighbor in need, then maybe an earthquake isn't such a bad thing. Love and marriage and friendship are not meant to be places where we pretend.
Speaker 1:Yes, they comfort us but they're also meant to confront. Abraham Heschel says that God's angry roar is meant to reveal God's pathos. Heschel says that God's justice, God's mishpat in Hebrew is motivated by divine sympathy for the victims of human cruelty. And I'm gonna say that part again. God's justice is motivated by divine sympathy for victims of human cruelty.
Speaker 1:And Heschel writes, God's anger is not a fundamental attribute but a transient and reactive condition. In other words, this anger we read here is not God's general disposition, but it's a piece of the rising action that moves humans toward the climax of God's sweet compassion. God's chesed. God's loving kindness for all. And the surprise of it is that God's passionate roar is actually good news.
Speaker 1:It signals that God can be God's whole self with us. Now that's divine intimacy, isn't it? I mean, what good is a God who isn't at least a million times more mad about the abuse of vulnerable people than I am? And what good is a God who isn't absolutely moved by the worst thing that's ever happened to you? The point is that this outrage, this fire, this roar is not the end.
Speaker 1:This disappointment is not even the climax. We pass through this divine disappointment to get to the climax of God's compassion. God can be angry but God is love. So let's take a look at how bad some of this criticism sounded. Amos launched into a litany of oracles that followed a pattern.
Speaker 1:They began, this is what the lord says, for three sins, even four, I will not relent. And these numbers, they're not literal. They're meant to suggest that basically god has had it up to here. And after this refrain, there's a list of criticism followed by coming judgment. Spoiler alert, everything they've built to divide them is gonna burn.
Speaker 1:So let's walk through this first one. This is what the Lord says. For three sins of Damascus, and Damascus was a neighbor of Israel. Even for four, I will not relent because she threshed Gilead, their neighbor to the north with sledges having iron teeth. It's an image of a rake, but not like your friendly garden rake.
Speaker 1:It's a brutal rake, pulling up the excesses of war and making sure that the battlefield held no survivors. It's a very violent image. Verse four, I will send fire on the house of Hazael that will consume the fortresses of Ben Hadad. These are dynasties. I will break down the gate of Damascus.
Speaker 1:See the imagery of human division. I will destroy the king who is in the Valley Of Avan, the valley of wickedness, and the one who holds a scepter in Beth Eden, the house of pleasure. The people of Aram will go into exile to Kir, says the Lord. And this is a big deal because they had come from Kir and now they were being thrown back. It's a cycle of man made boundaries and violence.
Speaker 1:And Amos, he just keeps going. He's pointing at the seven nations around Israel crying, they're guilty of extreme cruelty crushing people like grain. And they've been involved in heartless large scale deportation. And they've violated international treaties, and they've been grossly cruel to people who were supposed to be like brothers to them. And they've brutalized women and children, and they have no regard for human life.
Speaker 1:They even abused the bodies of the dead. And Judah, Amos says, well Judah should have known better. They have the Lord's law that leads to compassion. But as important as it is to name the wrongdoing around him, Amos isn't there to just point out the offenses of others. He's there to shock and awaken God's own people to their abusive ways.
Speaker 1:And you can imagine Amos actually there in his overalls, maybe like a piece of straw from his mouth. I don't know. Actually yelling these judgments in all directions, but on the page, the judgments are are constructed literarily. The number seven symbolizes completion, and eight means there's a surprise, but they don't know it yet. Recently, I was listening to this conversation on the radio.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The radio. And, Anna Maria Tremonti and the scholar and writer Chris Katarna were having a chat. And by the way, my favorite part of Chris Katarna's bio on Google says he resides in Oxford, Beijing, and Regina. Hi.
Speaker 1:High five Regina. Anyway, the conversation was actually about social media, but that's not what stuck out to me. What stuck out to me was the part of the conversation when Chris talked about how the US president has a stranglehold on our attention. And Chris asserted that we live in a world where he who says a thing and how big an audience he has is going to determine what is true. And then he made this challenge.
Speaker 1:He said, we need to recover our capacity to ask. Who do I want to listen to? Who do I want to ignore? He said, we need to exercise our judgment and ignore what doesn't bring value to our life and inclusion to our society. Maybe that's a little bit easier said than done.
Speaker 1:Like the people of Amos' day, we soak in the values of a culture by just being a part of it. And some of those values are pretty toxic, values about status and wealth and power. And we forget who we actually need to listen to. People like this guy. This is Francis of Assisi.
Speaker 1:And even after eight hundred years, his life still speaks. Now, I'm not going to tell you his whole story. It's wild. You can Google it. But Francis was known for renouncing his wealth, and he had some.
Speaker 1:Marrying lady poverty and founding the Franciscan order. Are there any Richard Rohr fans here? Yeah. I see some. Dorothy Soleil wrote about Saint Francis in her book, The Silent Cry, and she says that despising money and possessions is the key to Francis's life and legacy.
Speaker 1:And she writes, freedom from possessions, freedom from the possibility of exploiting others and economic justice. These alone can be the foundation of a non imperialistic peace as the bible envisioned it in its insistence on justice as the cornerstone. Justice is the cornerstone. If we had possessions, Francis would say, we would also need weapons. He held on to the inescapable link of poverty and peace.
Speaker 1:Francis lived these convictions to the end. When he died, he was undressed and laid bare naked on the ground. In eight hundred years later, we can hear God's lion voice through Francis's life. Prophets have this way of unsettling us. They always always get to the heart of the matter.
Speaker 1:And the thing about listening to their stories and their speeches is that they disturb us because deep down, I think we know they're right. Amos begins his message with these major disses against the world bordering Israel. And listening to each one would have had his hearers feel more sort of justified and more and more self righteous like, oh, yeah. Those guys are terrible. At least we're not like them.
Speaker 1:And that's what's so surprising, so lambasting about this eighth oracle. The entire time Israel would be pointing the guilty finger at everyone around them when really the truth was that they were the ones God was roaring at all along. So let's be careful when we approach the eighth Oracle of Amos, the longest and the most detailed by far because I'm not so sure that we're given any free passes here. There's plenty of injustice in the world that might have our fingerprints on it too. So Amos two verse six.
Speaker 1:This is what the lord says for three sins of Israel. And can you just hear the people gasp? Wait. I thought it was done. Did he say Israel?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Even for four, I will not relent. They sell the innocent for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, meaning their courts are corrupt. They use the innocent to pay off their own debts. In total, Amos outlined seven offenses just for Israel.
Speaker 1:And compared to the seven offenses of other nations, these crimes were about how they treated each other. The commentator James Lindbergh describes their conduct like this. In the saying against Israel, we hear that this same God is also concerned when legal aid is denied the poor, when a young woman is sexually abused, or when the machinery designed to protect the dignity of the powerless in a society is quietly disregarded. God is concerned with the political, and God is concerned with the interpersonal. All of these human interactions are deeply personal to God.
Speaker 1:But to really get into the spirit of this section in chapter two, it's helpful to turn to the Hebrew because our English translations take out some of the repetitive Hebrew conjunctions. This single letter vav attached to all kinds of words and translated with a simple conjunction and. Well, I'm gonna relax the language a bit. Verses six to eight list the offenses of Israel like this. And they trample on the heads of the poor and they deny justice to the oppressed and they profane my name when they abuse woman they have power over and creditors have abused debtors.
Speaker 1:It's meant to sound breathless. But that's not all that's breathless. Yes, their sins have piled up, but so too does the favor of God. There's another string of Hebrew vavs in verses nine to 11 which sound like this. And I destroyed what was against you, and I brought you out of Egypt, and I led you from a wild place, and I raised up prophets to speak truth to you.
Speaker 1:Even in such a sorry state, As Abraham Heschel says, mercy is a perpetual possibility. How many times do we list off criticisms of ourselves and miss out on the bounty of God's favor? I do this all the time. It sounds like this. And I will always be terrible at low lunges.
Speaker 1:And I put way too much of my identity in new black sweaters from Gravity Pope. And I overthink the smallest decisions like which lotion to buy at Shoppers during these dreadfully dry winters. Can I get an amen about that? It's ridiculous here. I can be so hard on myself.
Speaker 1:But what good are any of those bleak criticisms if I don't balance that with a penetrating love of God's kindness towards me? And what if I could actually do that for others? Maybe today, you need a whole list of and statements to remind you that no matter how much you've missed the mark, God's got you. And I see your pain and it moves me. And the wrongs you've done don't cancel my love.
Speaker 1:And your story is not over. And there is so much more to come. But we are not quite done yet. The lion's roar is heard one more time before the end of chapter two, and we read, now then, I will crush you as a cart crushes when loaded with grain. The swift will not escape, the strong will not muster their strength, and the warrior will not save his life.
Speaker 1:Even the bravest warriors will flee naked on that day, declares the Lord. And the theologian, Amy Erickson explains it like this. Like their neighbors who wage war to expand their territories, Israel, its leaders in particular values wealth over the wholeness of the community. Israel is more interested in acquiring wealth than it is for caring for society's most vulnerable members. Indeed.
Speaker 1:Don't you just love a good indeed? I do. Indeed. The actions of Israel and Judah are even more deplorable, perhaps even more violent because they do not occur during the stress and duress of war. These injustices are committed in a context of relative economic stability in everyday life and in the name of greed.
Speaker 1:Israel got bogged down with wealth and comfort, the pursuit of more, the power over others instead of empowering others. And take note, it took a voice they would be so used to ignoring to speak up and tell the truth about themselves. So here's the thing. I know how hard it is to listen to the voices that speak truth to power. I don't really like to be called out about anything.
Speaker 1:Sometimes, God whispers hard to hear convictions in our own hearts. And other times, God uses surprising voices to call us to a better and more equitable life. We have examples everywhere right now of people speaking up and saying no to power that has trampled on them for far too long. There are women speaking up about the abuses in their workplace and in competitive sport. There are scientists speaking up about oil spills and climate change.
Speaker 1:There are comedians and late night hosts doing brilliant work to highlight offenses we've all been comfortable with for far too long. But what if we even just drop down a little closer to home and think about it like this. If we wake up in the morning and the first thing that we think about is what we can buy rather than how loved we are and how much love we have to give, then we are going to make for ourselves a very certain kind of world. It will be a world that fills insecurity with stuff that hoards rather than distributes and that is so closed and so super guarded that it will take a firestorm to crack it open again. And if you aren't sure where to start with any of that, then let me give you three hot tips to move you forward towards a more just world.
Speaker 1:And by the way, I get that we don't normally do this, follow these three things, but just humor me. So here they are, the three things to work on this week. Number one, find some new faith heroes. If the only voices shaping your faith sound and look just like you in race, in socioeconomic status, in gender, in history, then diversify. Diversify.
Speaker 1:There are ancient and current voices that have so much to teach us about justice. Try Sung Chan Ra, Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero. Number two, pay attention to the things that are uncomfortable in your life. A story of someone's pain, a confrontation, an opinion you don't share. Ask yourself, why is it hard for me to hear this right now?
Speaker 1:Truth can be brutal before it's beautiful. And number three, aim for simplicity. In all things, simplify. The people Amos told these truths to were powerful for a time because of their wealth and their comfort. But the stuff that we amass has a very sly way of halting our ability to live justly.
Speaker 1:Without an Amos or a Francis or an Oprah modeling how to speak truth to power using their voices and lives and platforms to inspire prophetic justice, then we are going to miss out on what it means to be humans together in the world. And I don't know about you, but I don't wanna miss out on any of it. I don't want my possessions or my privilege to possess me. I wanna be open to the fullness of God's voice even if it's a lion calling me into something so much bigger and wilder and divine. And I hope that you want that too.
Speaker 1:Let us pray. Loving God, we acknowledge that the message of Amos can be hard for us to take in and even harder for us to live out. Will you invite us into the life of your son who gives power and life away? And with your spirit, will you show us the places in our lives where we can work for justice, where we can listen to and speak out truth to power. And on this prophetic path, may our joy be complete.
Speaker 1:You are beautiful, God. You are patient. Sometimes you're a bit terrifying too. Oh, what a mystery you are. And still we can rest in your love.
Speaker 1:Amen.