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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 you're here and we hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2:For those of you I haven't met personally, my name is Scott. I am part of our team of pastors here at Commons, and more specifically, I actually have the privilege of hanging out most of the time at our new parish on the East Side in Inglewood. And, guys, we're in week five already over there. Isn't that crazy? And things have been going really well, and we're excited to see how this community grows and develops and matures and the fact we're doing this together.
Speaker 2:With this said, there really is no way around all of the work that it takes to start and initiate community. So we wanna continue making a big deal of all of the contributions being made by all kinds of volunteers both here in Kensington and over on the other side in Inglewood as well. This venture, it really is a shared journey that we're on, and I'm deeply humbled by the energy and the resources that so many of you are lending to the process. It's also meaningful for me to come back here and to be asked by so many people over and over again, how's it going? Is it going okay?
Speaker 2:And to feel a sense that we are sharing this work together as an extension of who we have been for just a few years here in Kensington and stretching further into our city. So thank you for your attention. Thank you for your care for our entire team. Now today, we find ourselves in the middle of a series that's entitled truth to power. And if you missed Bobby's brilliant introduction to that last weekend, you're gonna wanna start by going to YouTube.
Speaker 2:Maybe don't do it right now, but you can go to YouTube or you can check out our podcast at any time. We jumped right into the middle of this book called Amos in order to take on some of the wide and expansive themes that we find there. And I'm sure there's at least one or two people in the room here today that are thinking, Amos, I'm not sure I'd know where to find that in the bible, and that's totally legit. Okay? Don't feel self conscious about that because this is really coming from an obscure part of our scriptures.
Speaker 2:We tend to steer clear of the middle of our bible if we're honest, and that goes for us nerds here at the front too. I mean, I love old and mysterious things, but I'd be lying if I said that delving into Amos isn't marked with its share of challenges. Perhaps more than any other genre of literature in the Hebrew Bible, the prophetic books require us to pay attention to the context and to the history of the ancient world, and that can feel a bit daunting for those of us who aren't students of those areas, which is why last week we started by talking a little bit about Amos' identity as a prophet in this tradition. And Amos wasn't part of the elite levels of society. He was a sheep herder, and he may have been a temporary worker.
Speaker 2:And on top of being more down and out than up and in, he was from a different country than the people he was sent to talk to. And like most of the others referred to as prophets in the Hebrew tradition, Amos found himself speaking truth to the power structures and brokers of his day. And while he was an outside voice to many in his context, Bobby encouraged us to take note of the unexpected carriers of truth that we might come across in our journeys, especially those who challenge the assumptions that we carry with us each and every day about who deserves what and about who is spectacularly wrong and about who is due for a reality check like those people, whoever they are over there, or that driver who just cut you off, or that former partner in your past, or that troll in the comments of your Facebook page. Amos speaks so clearly to us about how we have to be careful in how quickly we name and then start handing out judgments, which is really easy to do. It comes easy.
Speaker 2:What's far harder to do is the profound and painstaking work of self evaluation and maturing, where we come clean about who we are and about how our actions are impacting those around us, and ultimately to see ourselves potentially as on the side of power in need of divine correction. And Bobby did a splendid job of talking through how Amos looks at this idea of correction by depicting god as a roaring lion, a prowling, stalking presence in the text. And, yeah, that's a little terrifying if we just happen to glance over it until we realize that god wasn't just looking to tear something apart. No. This divine fierceness in the text was directed at, and I'm gonna quote Bobby directly here, the toxic ways of empires and nations and how they had infected the very best parts of god's people.
Speaker 2:God's people, their security, and their affluence had led them to start shirking justice, and they had started taking advantage of each other. And all along, they started to blur the lines of what it meant to be god's people. And like them, we too were encouraged in the text to consider how god's voice might be calling to us, might be breaking in on us, and asking us to take stock of where we are and maybe even to change. And the best part is that Bobby offered us some hot tips for justice. So so good if you didn't check them out.
Speaker 2:They they were pretty simple. They're things like to find new faith heroes who can bring a prophetic edge to our belief and our practice today, or to pay attention to the discomfort in our lives because the discomfort that comes to us is often a venue for the kind of self awareness that god inspires. And then she sort of suggested to us, why don't we simplify our lives and be aware of how excess is a source for so much injustice in the world? And the truth is that we wanna be a community that does this kind of work here at Commons, where we graciously live and we really see our surroundings, and then we throw our energy into helping others discover that the God we see in Christ isn't angry at anybody because they're screwing everything up. No.
Speaker 2:We affirm that god calls for justice, and we admit that this call begins in the workings of our lives. And we also hope that in our tender and gracious and engaged way of living, the people can begin to hear God's affectionate invitation to be whole and to be better and to be made new. And today, we're gonna explore a little bit more about how Amos' message to Israel can resonate all the way through the years to our religious practice and to our generosity. But before we go any further, would you pray with me as we get going? Gracious God, of the text that we come to today and also of the stories that we are writing with our lives, we come together in this moment, and we celebrate your great work as we have worshiped, as we've come to your table, as we pray, and as we center ourselves again on your kindness.
Speaker 2:I pray that you would guide us toward your character as we come again to these clarion texts from ancient time, that we would hear your voice ringing clear, inviting us closer into your holy community, and then leading us further out into this holy world that you love. We ask these things in the name of Christ. Amen. So here we go. As we discussed last time around, the book of Amos or the beginning of it is all about god sending these messages or these oracles to several nations around Israel and also including Israel.
Speaker 2:And god is saying things like, I'm not gonna tolerate what you've been doing anymore. Justice is coming. But unlike those early chapters where Yahweh's dealing specifically with Israel's enemies, the next few where we're gonna spend our time today deal exclusively with god's people, and god does not pull any punches. And as Amos starts to lay out all that Israel has done, he starts using this interesting or he starts by using this little phrase in chapter three, and it goes something like this. Surely, the sovereign lord does nothing without revealing his plan to his servants, the prophets.
Speaker 2:This is interesting because Amos is effectively saying, yeah, I know this seems a little farfetched but god said it to me and god only talks to the real prophets which be a little bit like me saying to my wife. I know it sounds crazy but god told me to go buy all those books I want and god only talks to people who are listening after all. To which she would probably reply, well, I'm listening and you're a moron, and that reasoning's completely circular. Right? But here's the deal.
Speaker 2:Circular religious reasoning and and bravado are not what's going on when Amos says this. The truth is that there were lots of people going around back then saying that they'd heard a divine message. Lots of people saying they knew the truth. Lots of people saying that they were the spokesperson for some kind of cause. And so what Amos is trying to do is just solidify his position over and against the other voices.
Speaker 2:And what's interesting is that that kind of posturing was how these people stake their place in the world. And one of the clearest examples of this that we have in the text is on the book of Jeremiah, who was another one of these prophets. And he tells the story about this colleague of his, a guy named Hananiah. See, Jeremiah, as a prophet, had been pretty consistently telling God's people that they were out of line and that things were gonna get worse and that they were gonna lose their kingdom, and he signified this by walking around with a yoke, like a wooden harness around his neck. Well, Hananiah's buddy comes up to him and says, actually, I think God's gonna come and defeat all our enemies.
Speaker 2:I don't know why you're so depressed. Like, cheer up, Jeremiah. To which Jeremiah replies sarcastically. It's in the text. Right.
Speaker 2:Right. I hope god does what you say he's gonna do. That'd be nice. The problem is that everybody, including me, has been saying that he won't do that. But sure.
Speaker 2:Go ahead. Leave what you want. And that's when the story descends into a bit of a, like, a junior high lunchroom fight because Hananiah gets angry, and he comes and he grabs that yoke that's on Jeremiah's neck, and he just snaps it in his face. And then he goes and says, I think what God's gonna do is he's gonna snap the powers of our enemies and set us free. And the story goes that Jeremiah ended up being the one who is right.
Speaker 2:And if you wanna know all the juicy bits, you're gonna have to go read the rest of it for yourself. The point is that this kind of grappling between two characters, between two voices, it's important for us because as we look at Amos, we should hear him defending himself with the assertion that god spoke to me, but we should also be reminded that there were always or there are always multiple voices in our lives vying for our attention. And these voices, they tell us how to proceed, and they encourage us to be or become a certain way. And this applies to all sorts of areas of our lives, our relationships, our careers, our spirituality. And if there's anything that reading the prophetic literature teaches us, it's that we have to learn to decipher which voices are inherently self serving.
Speaker 2:It's not necessarily that they'll tell us what we want to hear so much as that they'll keep us from taking honest stock of ourselves, or they'll keep us from considering the needs of others around us. And it's true. You and I probably don't have people walking up to us saying extraordinary things like this and then expecting us to believe that they've had some sort of divine message given to them. Right? We wouldn't let people like that shape our future, but we will have people expect us to take a certain career path.
Speaker 2:And we might have somebody expect us to spend or save our money a certain way, or we might feel pressure to advance and acquire and stock up a variety of things because the people that we admire or our peers have done the same. And it's not that any of these things are actually morally wrong. It's just that as we find in this series, sometimes to be honest and to be passionate and to be Jesus centered means that we'll sometimes hear or we'll sense a gentle intuition that contrasts with the voices and tendencies all around us. And those intuitions might encourage us to begin spending our time differently, maybe as a volunteer or encouraging us to support an organization or a relief effort financially or by going to do work or encouraging us to choose life balance over a lucrative payoff. And in each of these, the easiest way to decipher them potentially as the mysterious guidance of the divine is to acknowledge how they lead us beyond ourselves and toward those in need and against the systems of power that are destroying us and our world.
Speaker 2:And that's something that Amos' hearers couldn't decipher apparently, and they hadn't been able to for quite some time. So in chapter four, Amos writes, hear this word, you cows of Bashan on Mount Samaria, and Samaria was Israel's capital. You women who oppress the poor and crush the needy and say to your husbands, bring us some more drinks. The sovereign Lord has sworn by his holiness. The time will surely come when you will be taken away with hooks, the last of you with fishhooks.
Speaker 2:Go to Bethel and sin, and go to Gilgal. And these two places, they're they're holy places or shrines. He's saying, go there and sin yet more. Bring your sacrifices every morning and your tithes every three years. Burn leavened bread as a thank offering, and brag about your freewill offerings, and boast about them, you Israelites, for this is what you love to do, declares the Lord.
Speaker 2:Now that's a pretty crazy text. Right? And first things first. It doesn't matter if you read this as most scholars do or as the NIV presents it as powerful women bossing their husbands around. Okay?
Speaker 2:Or as some scholars suggest, maybe the pronouns are just a bit ambiguous, and this is actually a story about powerful oppressive men celebrating their gods. Either way, there's some underlying misogyny in the text, and we need to name it, whether it's through the calling of calling women names or through the feminizing of men who have poor morals. And that kind of misogyny should make us uncomfortable when we read an ancient text. And it's okay. We can be thankful then for good feminist scholars who come along and they name those things, and then they help us to understand the potency of what's going on.
Speaker 2:Because, for example, many ancient cultures used images and references to powerful animals like lions or eagles or bulls to describe their male leaders. And scholar Nai Nung or Lai Nung points this out, and she points to the fact that the reference to cows of Bashan is more of a geographical point than a thinly veiled insult to these women. Because Bashan was a fertile area East of the Jordan River, and its healthy its healthy livestock are referenced throughout the Hebrew Bible in places like Deuteronomy and in the Psalms as well. And this just means that the cows reference might be a description of women from prominent households in Israel who were enjoying an overly indulgent lifestyle, and it's not a comment on their physical appearance. Thank god.
Speaker 2:They were simply enjoying the benefits of their status. However, it's important to recognize that these women were participants in a patriarchal society, and therefore, it's likely that they were relegated to the domestic or the private spaces. And this didn't mean that they were powerless. It just meant that they had access to power and authority in their house, and especially over their servants or those of lower socioeconomic status. And what feminist scholars help us to see is that these women represent those who rely on the structures of power present in a culture.
Speaker 2:Maybe they don't get up every day and think about how to maintain them, and maybe they don't even know about the full extent of the abuse and the injustice that's happening as a result of the system. But Amos is clear that these women are culpable and responsible for what's going on in Israel because they have encouraged and participated in a lifestyle that perpetuated oppression, which if we're honest about this crazy text, if we start thinking about it that way, it starts to hit a little closer to home for us. Because most of us will never participate in municipal or higher governance and find ourselves making policies that exploit the working poor or the displaced, I hope. And most of us won't ever run a company or business that intentionally siphons public money intended for education or health care into our own pockets or gain. Right?
Speaker 2:It's also highly unlikely that we'll become lawyers or judges that will distort justice for our gain and others' loss. These are easy examples of injustice to name, and Amos talks about these in the text. So we might not do those things, but we do engage in a number of activities daily, weekly perhaps, where there's potential for us to unwittingly participate in cycles of oppression. And for me, one of the moments where I came face to face with this reality was in 2013 in the aftermath of the Raina Plaza collapse in Bangladesh. Some of you might remember this.
Speaker 2:And I have a a photo here from the New York Times from when that happened. And in this event, more than 1,100 clothing workers perished when a poorly built and misused nine story building caved in on them. And at the time, I was already familiar with the global sort of make it sound like I was in business or something. I wasn't. I was com I I was aware of the global clothing trade, which makes hundreds of billions of dollars every year, and I was aware sort of in my imagination of the need for consumers to be thinking about where their clothes came from and how workers are being paid or if they're being paid.
Speaker 2:But what made this disaster especially tangible for me was the fact that our Canadian company, Joe Fresh, was one of the 29 brands that had their clothes made in this factory. And Joe Fresh is not a designer brand with markups as high and extreme as some. Their clothes were sold at the Loblaws where I went to buy bananas. And that's when I realized that buying kids' pajamas for a baby shower in Waterloo, Ontario, which is what we did, it had the capacity to contribute to injustice and death on the other side of the world. And the truth is that it's hard to find clothes sometimes that we know are ethically made.
Speaker 2:Right? And there are more local and more responsible clothers, but these generally cost more than we wanna pay sometimes. And companies are being held to higher standards, but there are many that are still rumored to be using child labor. Yeah. But that's not the only thing about this issue.
Speaker 2:Perhaps the most pressing thing is the fact that the average North American tosses eighty one pounds of textiles or clothes into the garbage every year, which is a lot of single socks hanging around the house. Right? 81 pounds. It's ridiculous. And when you pair that waste with the reality that one pair of jeans can take 1,800 gallons of water to produce, it becomes clear that even just on this one issue, we can all be guilty of wanting more and more without knowing where it comes from, just like the women in the text, where we would blindly oppress and blindly destroy by saying, bring us some more.
Speaker 2:And, yes, there's so much change needed. Fair enough. And this is just one example of how Amos' words are loaded for us today and how maybe how they jolt us awake and help us to see that the first step towards justice is recognizing that it starts in my daily choices to demand and consume less, and that it grows in my daily awareness that my actions impact those near me, but they can also join with others to form a crushing weight on those I will never see or know, and ultimately, too, on our planet's future. Now these women aren't the only people that Amos addresses, though. One of the recurring references throughout the book is to Israel's ongoing religious practice and them following the guidelines and stipulations of mosaic law.
Speaker 2:In fact, we read about this or we read about it briefly earlier from chapter four when god, in the middle of calling his people to task, acknowledges that they bring sacrifices every morning, and they tithe appropriately, and they get the right offerings together, practices that clearly have left them feeling pretty good about themselves. And god doesn't appear to have any patience for this, which is curious. In chapter five, the people are faithfully meeting, and they're following the rules, and they're worshiping loudly. They're checking all the religious boxes in sequence. And the problem is not that they lack generosity, or that they're not participating, or that they're not performing the right rituals.
Speaker 2:The problem is that in their giving and their practice of religious life, that those things have become part of the status quo. In their organizations and their places of worship, they might be flourishing, but as Amos makes so apparent, they are not addressing the issues that are all around them. And where people have been faithful in bringing offerings, and in some cases, been extravagant in their generosity without being obligated, this has not resulted in any kind of lasting social change around them, and God can't stand it. We hear the divine say multiple times in the text, seek me and live. Don't seek your holy places or your shrines or your gatherings.
Speaker 2:And, of course, the inference is that true seeking and true devotion and true spiritual life aren't found in generosity and worship that fail to work for the kind of change that god wants. And that kind of prophetic change was always at the center of what God wanted for the Hebrew people. He wanted them to be a just and a fair society, to be moral, to be engaged, to be a light, and a beacon of hope. But maybe like us, sometimes those people just got busy following the rules and given the offerings and doing the things in the book because, well, it's just easier. It's easier to quantify.
Speaker 2:It's easier to measure. It's easier to feel a sense of accomplishment. But the point is that it's also easier to find ourselves far from the divine in doing so. And this this is part of what we work towards here at Commons, where we realize that generosity isn't the only metric for God's work in the world. Or in other words, that to be generous with our time and our affection and our resources doesn't necessarily mean that we're actually speaking truth to power.
Speaker 2:No. To recognize that our in order for our generosity to be prophetic, in this way, it has to be informed, and it has to connect with organizations and individuals that work for change, and it has to stretch beyond the boundaries of our community. And this is why our board and our development team and a host of volunteers are diligent in pursuing opportunities for us to push for justice. It's why we work hard to find local partners who advocate and defend the most vulnerable. We invest with hands at work in Africa in the hope of supporting local community development in a sustained way.
Speaker 2:And then we keep our ears open for needs that are present all around the world where we can intentionally share our resources to affect real and lasting change for individuals, for families, and for communities. Now all of this connects with something that Amos writes a little bit later. In chapter five, he records the divine frustration, and it sounds like this. I hate. I despise your religious festivals.
Speaker 2:Your assemblies, they're a stench to me. And even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Though you bring choice fellowship offerings, I'll have no regard for those. Away with the noise of your songs. I won't listen to the sound of your harps.
Speaker 2:And then this passage sort of culminates in this divine expression, which is now one of the most famous verses out of Amos, where God says, but let justice roll on like a river and righteousness like a never failing stream. And, yes, we hear again that Yahweh isn't nearly as interested in the sacrifices and worship of Torah as in a community committed to the equality and justice of Torah. Now what's interesting is that this phrase, let justice and righteousness roll on, it's curious because the terms themselves, mishpat, which Bobby mentioned last week, which is the word or the term for justice, and then this word tzedakah, which is the word for righteousness in the text, they offer this depth that we sometimes miss. Because mishpat actually refers to judicial systems or judicial fairness, but then it expands to include all of society. It refers to the practice of doing good, prioritizing goodwill and shared community and collective concern for each and every person.
Speaker 2:And then this term tadaka refers to the obligation to do right and to share and to offer charity. And in the law of Moses, this translated into the people leaving the corners of their fields for the poor to come and harvest, and it translated into them giving interest free loans to each other and into ultimately forgiving each other's debts. But more than these terms, this imagery of water is what I want us to note. Because scholars debate if translation should attempt to make the water sound a little less like a stream that you might step into accidentally and get your socks wet and more like the raging primordial weight of the sea. But it doesn't matter where the scholar lands on that.
Speaker 2:What they do agree on is what Amos is trying to say, and it has far less to do with how much water we're talking about. Francis Anderson says it like this. Amos's point is that righteousness should be constant, not intermittent. And less like the sporadic and torrential and temporary streams that would appear after a storm in the deserts of Palestine, Amos imagines justice and righteousness as a steady, lasting source of life. And in this way, he called God's people away from occasional expressions of charity no matter how generous they were and away from their intermittent attention to the issues of the day and toward a slow and enduring commitment to a certain type of living.
Speaker 2:And I think that's an idea that we could all take hold of, where we could each start to see our careers, our daily work. When it's conducted with honesty and with social awareness, that's an extension of justice making in the world. And where we might start to feel a little less pressure to give more of our time and our money in big chunks and commit instead to regular expressions of gratitude and sharing our things that we have regularly with people around us or in choosing to volunteer and engage with organizations that extend our efforts in ways that are marked by justice explicitly. And I like this imagery of water too because so often I don't know about you, but it can feel like what difference can I make? I mean, really, I have limited resources and limited strength, and I certainly have limited time.
Speaker 2:And then these issues that I care about and the things that Amos is freaking out about, they're so big and they're so heavy. What I love about Amos' poetry is that it calls me to bring my limits and my weak attempts and to cast them into the river of God's enduring work in the world. And there, they join with yours and with our communities and with communities like ours, with organizations and initiatives the world over that turn small things and limited reach into justice and righteousness that roll on and on. Now as a community that believes that Jesus gives us our clearest picture of the divine, it's important for us to see that this work that Amos was calling people to, models of it pop up all over the story that we have about Christ. In the gospel of Luke, there's an example of this.
Speaker 2:In chapter four, it tells us that Jesus launched his ministry by going home. He went to his hometown. He goes to his home synagogue. He asked for the text of Isaiah to be brought out, and he reads a section of it, and it goes roughly like this. The spirit of the lord is on me to preach the good news to the poor and to prey or proclaim freedom to the prisoners and to release the oppressed and to proclaim God's favor for all.
Speaker 2:And in reading that passage, Jesus positioned himself in a long line of truth speakers all the way back to Amos and beyond with those who were taking on the systems of power of their day. And he wasn't just using spiritual language or using metaphors. He actually intended to bring good news to the actual poor and to bring freedom to those who were actually oppressed. And for the rest of the story we have about Jesus, he offers us this steady example of what Amos called for. Just prioritizing people over our liturgy and giving steadily so that the poor and the sick and the outcast can be reconciled to society wherever they find themselves.
Speaker 2:And in an effort to live a kind of everyday justice and everyday generosity until the whole world could see that the kingdom of God had actually come right next to them. And I don't know about you, but for me, it really helps to break Jesus' story down into a bunch of every days like that. Where like us, he had opportunities for justice making and generosity that was prophetic, and they came to him in the passing of all that is normal, in a meal shared with somebody who's lonely or hungry, or in restoring dignity to a person that we might know that's been abused or neglected, or in offering our time and our attention to someone who might be a stranger or a foreigner or a newcomer. And what what is it that makes those simple everyday things so prophetic? I think it's because they paint a picture of what life can look like, and the picture is God's.
Speaker 2:And broken down into steady daily pieces, all of a sudden, the grandness of God's picture gets a little more accessible. And so as we live together in this everyday way, in Kensington, in Inglewood, in neighborhoods all around, my hope is that we'll begin to see our city a little bit differently. And as you go into the week ahead, it's looming and you work and you engage and you serve, my prayer is that you would be generous with all that you are and all that you have so that actual change can occur in some small way, your life and mine given to the steady flow of God's renewing work that's all around us. Let's pray together. Loving God, we are present to you here, and we need your help as we consider all the ways that your gentle spirit has come to us and will come to us in these texts.
Speaker 2:God, we need your clarity as we attempt to decipher your voice in the middle of all those other ones that come to us and blind us to the need that you might be stirring up around us. And we need insight into the ways in which we unconsciously participate in oppression and how we unwittingly add to suffering in creation. And we ask that as these things are revealed to us, as we begin to see them, would you forgive us and shape our hearts with your kindness? Would you also fill us with gratitude that begins to blossom into generosity, and the kind of generosity that displaces power and builds up the broken, generosity that ultimately works to steadily reveal your good heart to all people. And we pray with Amos that justice and righteousness would roll today and every day.
Speaker 2:We ask in the name of Christ. Amen.