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“Why Should I?”                                                                                          

Amos 7:7–17                                                                                                 

Gunby Presbyterian Church                                                                            

July 11, 2010 communion

^{(Amos is speaking) 7}This is what God showed me: the Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand. ⁸And the Lord said to me, “Amos, what do you see?” And I said, “A plumb line.” Then the Lord said, “See, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass them by; ⁹the high places of Isaac shall be made desolate & the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste & I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword.”

¹⁰Then Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, sent a message to King Jeroboam of Israel, saying, “Amos has conspired against you in the very center of the house of Israel; the land is not able to bear all his words. ¹¹For thus Amos has said, ‘Jeroboam shall die by the sword & Israel must go into exile away from his land.’”

¹²And Amaziah said to Amos, “O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, earn your bread there & prophesy there; ¹³but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary & it is a temple of the kingdom.”

¹⁴Then Amos answered Amaziah, “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman & a dresser of sycamore trees, ¹⁵and the Lord took me from following the flock & the Lord said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’

¹⁶“Now therefore hear the word of the Lord. You say, ‘Do not prophesy against Israel & do not preach against the house of Isaac.” ¹⁷Therefore thus says the Lord: ‘Your wife shall become a prostitute in the city & your sons & your daughters shall fall by the sword & your land shall be parceled out by line; you yourself shall die in an unclean land & Israel shall surely go into exile away from its land.’”

This ends our reading.

          This week's reading from Amos relates one of the most dramatic encounters in all of Scripture. If the dust-up occurred today, it would go viral on YouTube. The actors in the drama come right from central casting. The script should come with warning labels like "not recommended for children," or "side effects include severe political and spiritual discomfort."         

           Amos wrote 2,800 years ago, but his prophecy reads like an alert on the bottom of the TV screen. Amos is a good example of how in the Bible "prophecy" is more about telling the truth about the present than fore-telling events in the future. Amos lived under the renowned king Jeroboam II, who reigned forty-one years (786–746 BC) and forged a kingdom characterized by territorial expansion, the aggressive celebration of military ideals & unprecedented economic prosperity.

           Many people back then interpreted their fine times as evidence of God's special favor. But Amos saw things differently. Theirs was a privatized religion that ignored the poor, the widow, the alien, the orphan.    It was a type of religion that degraded authentic faith to mere cultural ritual. Worst of all, Israel's religious leaders sanctioned the political & economic status quo that exploited the weak; these priests pimped religion for Jer-o-bo-am's empire.

           Enter Amos. He preached from the pessimistic & unpatriotic fringe, his glass was half empty. He was blue collar rather than blue blooded. Amos admits that he was neither a prophet nor even the son of a prophet, in the professional sense of the term. Rather, he was a shepherd, a farmer, & a tender of big trees, a small town boy who grew up in Tekoa, about twelve miles southeast of Jerusalem & five miles south of Bethlehem. The cultured elites of his day despised Amos as a redneck. He was also an unwelcome outsider. Born in the southern kingdom of Judah, God called Amos to thunder a prophetic word to the northern kingdom of Israel.

           That was a difficult divine call, but that's what this rustic prophet did. His fiery rhetoric opposed the powers of his day. With graphic details that make us wince, Amos describes how the rich crushed the poor. He singled out the affluent with their expensive lotions, elaborate music & vacation homes with beds of inlaid ivory. He decried sexual debauchery where a man & his son abused the same woman & lamented a corrupt legal system that sold justice to the highest bidder. He named predatory lenders who exploited vulnerable families & religious leaders who aided & abetted all of this.

            To the priests who defended, legitimized, & justified Jeroboam's corrupt reign, Amos delivered an uncompromising word of warning.

           Am-a-zi-ah the priest warned Jeroboam the king that Amos's preaching was unpatriotic & conspiratorial. Am-a-zi-ah then tried to run Amos out of town. “Get out, you seer! Go back to the land of Judah. Earn your bread there & do your prophesying there” (7:12).

           Then Am-a-zi-ah said something that reveals just how completely he had identified religious faith with establishment power. It ought to send a chill up the spine of every religious leader who ever considered sucking up to power: "Don't prophesy anymore at Bethel, because this is the king's sanctuary and the temple of the kingdom" (7:13). With those words the religious justification of political empire is complete & faith is reduced to patriotic cheer-leading.

           Amos wouldn't be bullied; he had a word of his own for every priest who prostituted religion for empire: "Your wife will become a whore, your kids will be violently murdered, enemies will carve up the country, you will die far from home, & pagan Assyria will devour the political & economic empire you have tried to sanction in God's name" (7:17).

           Despite the church's checkered history in relationship to power, privilege & wealth, many people have followed in the footsteps of Amos. This past spring many Christians remembered the 30th anniversary of the martyrdom of Óscar Romero (1917–1980), the archbishop of El Salvador.

           Romero was an unlikely martyr. He had studied in Rome, distanced himself from leftist radicals & their violence & earned a reputation as a cautious conservative. The Salvadoran government was quite happy with his ordination as archbishop in 1977. But the priests who ministered among the poor, the campesinos were dismayed. Then Romero did an about face.

          A few weeks after his appointment as archbishop, Romero's close friend & Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande was slaughtered by machine-gun because of his ministry among the campesinos. The murder marked a decisive turning point.

 "When I looked at Rutilio lying there dead," said Romero, "I thought, 'If they have killed him for doing what he did, then I too have to walk the same path.'"

Romero refused to meet with any government officials until they did an investigation. That never happened & so in his three years as archbishop Romero never attended any state functions. The following week Romero canceled local services & held a funeral service in El Salvador to honor Grande; it was attended by 150 priests & 100,000 people.

           For the next three years Romero spoke forcibly against the atrocities of the Salvadoran government & its para-military guerillas — the terror, torture, death squads, rape & human rights abuses. Every week in his sermons, listened to on the radio by peasants all over the country, Romero detailed the horrors in an understated but explicit manner. He wrote a letter to President Jimmy Carter: "You say that you are Christian. If you are really Christian, please stop sending military aid to the military here, because they use it only to kill my people." Carter ignored the request.

          Romero became the most outspoken critic of the government & a passionate defender of the dispossessed. His first death threat came from none other than the Salvadoran President Arturo Molina, who warned him that priestly garments were not bulletproof. In his very last sermon, on Sunday March 23, Romero explained his Amos-like vocation:

 “I have no ambition of power & because of that I freely tell those in power what is good & what is bad & I do the same with any political group — it is my duty.”

           Romero’s sermon continued: "I want to make a special appeal to soldiers, national guardsmen & policemen: each of you is one of us. The peasants you kill are your own brothers & sisters. When you hear a man telling you to kill, remember God’s words, ‘thou shalt not kill.’ No soldier is obliged to obey a law contrary to the law of God. In the name of God, in the name of our tormented people, I beseech you, I implore you; in the name of God I command you, to stop the repression!"

           The next evening at about 6:30pm, a gunman shot Romero as he celebrated communion. Later investigations established that the assassination was contracted by the government military.

           One week later, 250,000 people attended Romero's funeral. Thirty years later, on the anniversary of his death (March 24, 2010), Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes officially apologized on behalf of the government for Romero's assassination.

A modern-day Amos, today Romero is honored as a 20th-century martyr sculpted on the west façade of Westminster Abbey.

But we don’t have to go back 30 years. It is as true today as it was then, that God calls people from their ordinary lives to preach in new situations. They may even be people who have had no formal links with the church. I think our text that Jim read this morning confirms the role of intercessory prayer. And there are those who find this is their special ministry. We continue to oppress the poor & behave in unjust ways to all sorts of people. Sometimes this oppressive behavior is on a global level, sometimes within the local community.

I was at Dr Plack’s in Snow Hill this week. Jaxon had broken a baby tooth & it needed to be pulled. As I sat in the office waiting I read the Salisbury Daily Times & this letter from someone in our community got my attention.

Read excerpt:

I was appalled that the I’ve got mine you get yours mentality expressed there. What would Amos say about a letter like this?

 As followers of Christ we need to hear both the prophet's word to us and that of the gospel of Jesus Christ who proclaimed the equality of all people whether slave or free, poor or rich, educated or illiterate.

           The judgment Amos declares wakes us up to God's intimate & persistent presence in our lives. It also calls us to examine our willingness – or unwillingness – to live lives reflecting that deliverance & mercy.
           As long as there is a contradiction between the absolute standard of righteousness & the corrupt & evil ways of worldly society, there will be righteous people who will rise up & call society & their rulers to account.

         These are the prophets & reformers who put their lives at risk to speak out for the welfare of the community.

         The prophetic mission in its broadest sense includes all people who struggle to remind the rulers of their day of the eternal divine message which was first spoken long before. But a prophetic ministry is not limited to Amos or Oscar Romero but in various ways, large & small, it is required of us all. Amen. 

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