Monday, November 27, 2017

Ordinary Miracles: A Sermon on Matthew 25:31-46

Today is the New Year’s Eve of the liturgical calendar. Next Sunday we switch from Matthew to Mark and start the cycle of Year B readings. I used to always feel like we should celebrate Christ the King Sunday with some sort of a bang. The white vestments and the weird readings always seemed to warrant that. And I will admit, I was probably also swayed by the way calendar year New Year’s Eve is celebrated. If the world gets fireworks and streamers for New Year, how come the church doesn’t?

But I actually don’t really like or care about New Year’s Eve. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like fireworks and streamers as much as the next guy. But I don’t really like being cold or staying up late or traffic, so the whole holiday ends up kind of anti-climactic to me. I would much rather be in bed at a decent hour, and then wake up and watch the Rose Parade in my pajamas. It hasn’t helped that last year New Year’s Day was a Sunday, and the year before that I had the flu, so I’ve totally gotten out of the habit of New Year’s Eve anyway.

The other thing I struggle with about the New Year is that I’m not a big resolution person. As you have probably noticed from my ministry style here, I prefer slow, measured consistent steps to big, bold moves. I’m a marathon runner, and you don’t train for a marathon by all of a sudden going out and running twenty miles. You build it, one mile at a time. So for me, part of the New Year is two weeks of riding out the sudden increase in Y membership until I can consistently snag a treadmill again.

Before you think I’ve become some grumpy, fun-hater, there is one thing I love about New Year. I love the retrospectiveness of the holiday. I love the invitation to look back on the year, both the joys and the sadness, and to think deeply about what those next small, consistent steps will be, so that in this next year, the joys will be increased and the sadnesses decreased. I don’t tend to make New Year’s Resolutions, as those feel too big and overwhelming to my fairly risk averse temperament. But I do love a good “January resolution.” I like to use this holiday think about what is the next small thing I should tackle. This tends to lead to a resolution list like, “get a haircut, get new shoes, get a mattress.” But let me tell you, as unexciting as that list sounds, those three resolutions marked the start of the year I was called to be pastor here, so that year turned out pretty darn awesome.

All this to say, I’ve been changing my mind recently on how to celebrate Christ the King Sunday. Part of that shift comes from the design of the liturgical calendar itself.
What you’ll notice about this calendar is that it is a circle. Each year and season does not stand in isolation to each other, but we can look clockwise around the circle to see where we’re going, Advent into Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, and so on. And looking back we can see how we got here, Easter coming out of Lent, Lent contrasting with Epiphany, the light of Epiphany the afterglow of the birth of Christ.

Today we are right here, this little white wedge of Christ the King Sunday. And looking at its place in the calendar we can see how it is just another piece of our journey, the shift between the harvest of the end of the season of the church and the stillness of beginning of the season of Christ. In fact the readings of late November and the readings of Advent don’t even differ all that much from each other, despite coming from different Gospels. We pick up next week in Mark just about where we leave off this week in Matthew. Some liturgical scholars have stopped making the distinction altogether, morphing the end of November and the beginning of December together in a season of apocalyptic hopefulness, an unveiling of the promise of the coming of the Savior.

Apocalypse literally means unveiling. From the Greek apo meaning under and kalypto meaning veil or covering, these apocalyptic Matthew and Mark readings are Jesus’ final revelation to the disciples before his crucifixion of who he is and what the coming kingdom of heaven will be. This morning’s reading gives us a vision of that kingdom. Like all of Jesus’ parables, the intention here is for us to read this seriously but not literally. With this image, Jesus offers the disciples, offers us, a peek behind the curtain into the promised reign of God.

The reading starts out with a grand vision. “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him…” This description conjures for me a vast throne room bedecked in gold, stretching beyond measure with people from all corners of the globe. From this vast array of humanity, the Son of Man begins to sort the sheep from the goats. And here we have to acknowledge a bit of a translation error. Verse thirty-two in the NRSV reads, “All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another…” This makes it sound like a separating of individuals. But the Greek doesn’t have the word “people,” the Greek reads “he will separate them,” the “them” being the nations. So the judgment described here isn’t a judgment of individuals, but of the collective whole. The question to ask ourselves is not what did I do, but what did we do? How well did we, collectively, as a community, as a nation, as the world, do in feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, welcoming the stranger? Yet again, Jesus described a relationship that is not individual, but collective. As God so long ago pronounced to Cain, we are our brothers’ keepers. Rugged individualism has no place in the kingdom of heaven. We are responsible for each other, for caring for each other, for lifting each other up, and also for holding each other accountable. An interesting thing I didn’t know until Laurie pointed it out to me, Christ the King Sunday is a fairly recent holiday. It was established by Pope Pius the Sixth in 1925, at a time when rising global nationalism was becoming an increasing concern. As nations increasingly turned inward, putting their own needs above the needs of the global community, Pope Pius’ hope for the holiday was that it would help remind us that Christ is our King, and that both the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of this world are under the sovereignty of God.

But what strikes me the most about this reading is the sheep’s response to being blessed. “When was it,” they asked, “when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink, a stranger and we welcomed you, sick or in prison and visited you?” When was it that we did these things? And the goats too, when they were accursed asked, “When was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or sick or in prison and did not take care of you?” When would we have not done such a thing? The amazing thing about the required tasks is the overwhelming ordinariness of them. So simple, so commonplace were the events that led to judgment that neither side recognized them. The sheep didn’t know the power of their simple acts, while the goats missed simple opportunities as they looked for something greater.

Both the hope and the challenge of this description of judgment is that Jesus isn’t asking us to change the world here. Or, he is, but he’s asking us to do it in simple ways. The sheep weren’t sheep because they figured out the solution to world peace or ended hunger or brought an end to oppression. They were sheep because they fed, clothed, cared for, visited, the people immediately in front of them. These small acts of care are insignificant on an individual scale, but remember Jesus wasn’t talking on an individual scale, he was talking about nations. It may not matter much to the world if I feed one hungry person. But if I feed one hungry person, and you do, and you do, and you do, and then those once hungry people who are now no longer hungry also go out and start feeding people, that’s the way change happens. There isn’t a magic formula for bringing about the kingdom of God; rather this story describes it as a million tiny actions, a million little gestures, that one by one change the course of our existence.

So as we gather here this morning, on this closing of one church year and the dawning of another, the invitation this passage offers to us is to reflect back on the year with wonder. What were the overlooked acts that may have been part of the unveiling of the kingdom of God? We did a lot of things this year. Things we may not realize mattered as much as they will prove to matter. We increased our welcome to neighborhood kids. We became the neighborhood spot for fresh vegetables. We built tighter relationships with the Co-op and St. Peter in Family Camp. We put in new furnaces, and soon a new roof. We joined together just last week with over eighty people to celebrate the joint ministry of Trinity and Co-op.

And the flip side of New Year, the looking forward. If these are our reflections, what are the next small steps we are being called to take? This passage allows us to resist the temptation to become overwhelmed by the seeming size of the work and instead focus on the next small victory. Where are we going from here? Who is the next one hungry, thirsty, sick, lonely, or in prison person whom we are being called to serve? The apocalypse, the unveiling of the kingdom of heaven is not one grand gesture, but a million tiny peeks until the whole creation is revealed. This apocalypse has been happening since the beginning of creation, and it will continue until all is clothed in God’s glory. So this year, dear people of God, what small revelation are we being called to uncover? For the mystery of God is in the power of the ordinary miracle. Amen.

Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Conversation Points for Matthew 25:31-46

Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?

Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• This is it! The last words of the last discourse, the climactic point to which Matthew has carefully built. This scene is not a parable, it is an apocalyptic drama. Before we proceed, let’s unpack the word “apocalypse.” It is not, as commonly portrayed, a cataclysmic battle at the end of time. The Greek apokalpsis comes from the Greek apo meaning “under” and kalypto meaning “covering.” Apocalypse literally means uncovering or revealing, in religious terms it usually means the disclosure of something that had been kept hidden or secret. At the very end of his earthly ministry, Jesus reveals for the disciples what the judgment day will look like. Again, in story form, so we have to resist the urge to read it literally. But we can and should read it seriously. Jesus’ final words highlight for his disciples the importance of seemingly ordinary, this-worldly deeds.
• One of the major themes of Matthew’s Gospel is the conflict between the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of the world. In this final image, Jesus reveals that the conflict of the two kingdoms is not the ultimate reality. There is, in fact, only one kingdom, the kingdom ruled by God.
• This image’s focus on humanitarianism comes not out of a general preference by God for being a good person, but is a mark of who Jesus is. Humanitarianism is a descriptor of Christology, not the other way around. Yes, we are to care for our neighbor, but it is because who Jesus is, not because love and mercy are nice things.
• For Matthew, the criteria for salvation is not right belief or correct confession of faith, but action. What counts is how one has behaved toward people in need.

Works Sourced:
Boring, M. Eugene. “The Gospel of Matthew.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.

Monday, November 20, 2017

Everything to Gain: A Sermon on Matthew 25:14-30

Not going to lie, my first read through of this story is always, huh? I’m never quite sure what to make of the conclusion, which seems so different from the rest of the Gospel. How did Jesus, who earlier said “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” and “the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed,” also say, “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” It just doesn’t seem like the same guy.

Because there are so many sayings and stories of Jesus, it is tempting, even easy, to pick and choose our favorites and downplay the ones we find more uncomfortable. To focus on the Beatitudes, or the healing miracles, or his clear preference for the outsider, and to pay less attention to all the stories that end with that classic Matthean phrase “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

But the parable of the talents and the determined sower of seed are the same person. Jesus told all of these stories. The seeming harshness of this story is no less a truth of the kingdom of God as the feeding of the five thousand. But it is also no more a truth than that. It is a piece of the picture that Jesus is painting. An important piece, but just a piece. And we know that Jesus spoke in parables because stories expand our imaginations to hear deeper truths than explanations ever could. This balanced perspective invites us to wonder, what is the piece Jesus was unveiling here, and how to we allow this piece to both change our understanding and be changed.

We hear this parable at the very end of Jesus’ ministry. After the triumphant entry into Jerusalem, after sparring with the Pharisees in the Temple, Jesus gathered his disciples together for one final lecture. The parable of the talents is from the end of that lecture. Just a few verses later, in chapter twenty-six, Jesus and his disciples will gather for a meal in an upper room. And we all know where the story goes from there. They break bread, they go to a garden, Jesus is betrayed, he is beaten, and he is killed. We have reached the end of the road. There is nothing else between this parable and the passion story. So given the location, and the urgency of the moment, what might be Jesus’ reason for telling this story?

Fun fact for you, the English word talent, meaning an innate skill or ability, derives its etymology from the Greek word talaton. This parable is very much a story about money, but even back at the creation of the English language, theologians already had a sense that Jesus had more going on. And the Greek talaton, here translated “talent” was no insignificant amount of money. A talent, you may remember, was the largest currency denomination in circulation, equal to about fifteen years wages for a day laborer. The amount of money in question here immediately raises the extravagant impossibility of this story. Even the slave who received one talent was given an impossibly generous gift. For the one who received five, the amount is astronomical. And then to take that five and turn it into another five, that’s one-hundred and fifty years worth of wages. The scope of the gift is inconceivable.

The other thing you may or may not have noticed about this parable is that no instruction was given to the three slaves. The story simply says the master “entrusted his property to them… each according to his ability. Then he went away.” The question then becomes, what was intended by the word “entrusted.” Entrust simply means to give responsibility to. Given the simplest definition of the word, the third slave absolutely completed the task. When the master returned, he was able to give back the amount of money given to him. At no point during the master’s absence was the money at risk of being lost or mishandled. One could question the third slave’s tactfulness, “I knew that you were a harsh man” is possibly not the best thing to say to one’s boss, but still, one cannot argue that the entrusted sum was kept safe.

The same degree of safety cannot be said for the money entrusted to the first and second slaves. Yes, in the end, they both were able to double the amount given, but I don’t know a single investment strategy that offers that high a reward without an equal or even greater risk. The first and second slaves too were entrusted with the master’s money, to an even larger degree than the third slave, and while their gambles paid off, it cannot be argued that it was a gamble. Now, one certainly could interpret “entrust” to mean “return this better than it was when you got it,” but it is not the safest interpretation. Any number of things could have gone wrong, that could given this story a very different conclusion. We can only wonder what the master’s response might have been, had the first and second slaves returned with nothing to show for their efforts, while the third slave triumphantly handed over his carefully guarded talent, with only a bit of dirt to show for its time away from the master’s possession.

We can only wonder, but in the end, the wondering doesn’t really matter, because that is not the story Jesus told, this is. We know in the real world that gambles don’t always pay off, that risks don’t always lead to rewards, but in the story Jesus told, they do. So what is the carry over from the world of the parable to the real world of Jesus’ disciples?

The parable tells of a man going on a journey. And what we know, though the disciples do not yet, is that Jesus himself was preparing for a journey. A journey not to a far off country; but through betrayal, suffering, and death itself. A journey that will lead through the cross, to resurrection, to accession, and beyond. A journey that, even today, has been completed by Jesus, but is not yet fulfilled until he comes again glory. So the question for the disciples is not about finances, but is what will we do with the extravagant gift which we have been given, this gift beyond measure, this gift of relationship with Christ? Will we, out of fear of losing it, hid it away and try to keep it safe? Or will we risk loosing it all, for the promise of greater reward? I almost wonder if the “ability” the parable referred to is not the ability to make skilled investments but the ability to rise beyond fear to trust. Do we trust the rest of the teachings of Jesus? That the poor, the meek, the merciful are blessed, that the kingdom of heaven is like yeast, that five loaves and two fish can feed a multitude, and that the people most in need of care are the ones most ignored by the world? Are we able to get beyond fear and trust that? Or are we so captive by fear that like the third slave we grumble, “we know you are a harsh man,” and we hid what little we have been given away, believing that if we fail, there will be no chance for forgiveness or redemption?

Of course, the twist in this story is that in the end, when the third slave hid the talent in the ground, it was at least there for him to find again. Imagine what would have happened if the disciples, held captive by the fear of Jesus’ death on the cross, had been unable to gather the courage to go to the tomb. Had never again shared his teachings with another person. Had kept the treasure of this relationship hidden among themselves out of fear of losing it. Had the disciples held their knowledge of Christ hidden they would not, like the third slave, have preserved it as is. They would have in fact lost it all. When Christ comes again, he would not have needed to take away what they had and give it to another, for they would have had nothing left. The weird truth of the kingdom of heaven is the only way to preserve it is to risk losing it all, trusting in the promise that forgiveness, redemption, and resurrection always follows even the darkest loss.

This parable is challenge for us, because it tells us that being a “good and faithful” servant in this time between Christ has come and Christ will come again is about taking initiative and being willing to risk it all. Faithfulness is not strict obedience to a set of instructions, for as much as we might wish it were so, no instructions were given. Nor is it about passively waiting for the day when Christ will come again and fix all of the things that are broken. Rather, this parable tells is that being a good and faithful servant is about wading into the brokenness, trying something, even if it may be the wrong thing, and hoping against all hope that the reward was worth the risk.

And the courage to take that risk comes from the fact that, unlike the third slave, this parable is not the only story we have. We know from the entire rest of the Bible that the slave’s description of the master was wrong. God is not “a harsh man,” or at least, that is not all God is. We hold this parable in tension with the words of Jonah, God is “a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.” And the Psalmist, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.” Even our other readings for today highlight that tension. In Zephaniah, the “Lord is bitter,” and in Psalm ninety “the Lord is our dwelling place.” In Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians, the day of the Lord is both “a thief in the night” and “the hope of our salvation.” All of these descriptors are simultaneously true.

Dear brothers and sisters, the time of playing it safe has passed, if it ever really existed. And one of the things I love about being the pastor at Trinity, is you all know it already. You know the way we’ve always done things doesn’t work anymore. I tell my colleagues that as hard as redevelopment work can be, I feel blessed to be doing it, because we already know the ship of how its always been done is sinking, so we don’t have to waste any time rearranging the deck chairs. What this parable also tells us is that we also don’t have to sit around quietly, patiently hoping that God will send a new boat before this one sinks. Rather we can be about the work of building something way better than a boat. Yes, it’s a risk. It’s a huge risk. It would be way easier to hunker down in here and hope that our future looks the same as our present. But the promise of this parable is that if we take the risk, we have the chance of growing beyond our imagination, and if we hold tight, at best we end up with a talent covered in dirt. And the promise of the Gospel is that if we lose it all, we’ve really lost nothing, because there is always a new beginning after even the most decisive of ends. So let us take the risk, dear people of God. We have nothing, and everything, to lose, and we have everything to gain. Amen.

Thursday, November 16, 2017

Conversation Points for Matthew 25:14-30

Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?

Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• A talent (Greek talanton) is an amount of money equal to about fifteen year’s wages for a day laborer. The etymology of the English word “talent” (a natural aptitude or skill) comes from this parable as a term for a God-given ability.
• The conflict in this story is which characterization of the master do the hearers accept as true. Is he generous, as was indicated by his treatment of the first two slaves, giving them large sums of money and then rewarding them further? Or is he harsh, as implied by the words of the third slave and indicated by his response to the third slave?
• Matthew moved the location of Jesus telling this story to in Jerusalem immediately before the Passion (in Luke it appears in chapter 19, before the entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday). Matthew used the story to add to the image he was building in the parable of the Ten Bridesmaids about the nature of Christian life as one of active waiting. For Matthew, being “good and faithful” is not about passive waiting or strict obedience, but about active responsibility, taking initiative, and risk. The master gave no instructions to the three slaves about how they were to use the money, so faithfulness is not merely following directions. Each slave had to decide on his own how to use his time while the master was gone.
• There are two other parables in Matthew that also involve household slaves. Matthew 18:23-35 is the parable of the slave who racked up a massive debt against his master, and the master forgave him. Then the slave went out and refused to forgive a fellow slave a much lesser debt. Matthew 24:45-51 tells of a slave who took advantage of the master being gone to abuse his fellow slaves. These differing stories serve to frustrate attempts to simplify the way God works into neat, coherent systems. These parables speak of the reality of judgment and the need for decision and responsible action, while obscuring a straightforward, systemic understanding.

Works Sourced:
Boring, M. Eugene. “The Gospel of Matthew.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.

Thompson, Erick J. “Commentary on Matthew 22:15-22.” Working Preacher. . Accessed 16 October 2017.

Sunday, November 12, 2017

Says the Lord your God: A Sermon on Amos 5:18-24

Karl Barth encouraged preachers to approach sermons with the Bible in one hand and the newspapers in the other. But I have to tell you, I am finding that suggestion increasingly difficult these days. Not so much for the divisiveness, although, oh man, the divisiveness. Some days it feels like the color of the sky is up for debate. But the real struggle for me is the sheer volume of news. Mass shootings in Texas and Las Vegas, genocide in Myanmar, the uncovering of an epidemic of sexual harassment, Korea, Iran, the Paris Climate Agreement. To pick any one topic is to neglect a dozen others. So I want to dig into Amos this morning. Because, as I will share with you, the time of Amos too was a period of human history that felt dark and overwhelming.

Let’s first take some time and put Amos in his correct historical context. And here I’m going to have to apologize, because I tend to geek out on this stuff. So bear with me if we go a bit into the historical weeds here. But a) I think it’s important that we know the time in which Amos was writing in order to understand his message, and b) I think history is just super fascinating and I get carried away when I get excited.

The beginning of Amos dates itself to the reigns of King Uzziah of Judah and King Jeroboam of Israel, which would place it around 760 to 750 BCE. This was a period of relative peace for Israel. Israel had long been threatened by the growing Assyrian empire. But in the early eighth century, internal struggles turned Assyria’s attention away from conquest and left Israel and its neighbors more or less alone. Free from the Assyrian threat, Israel prospered. Archeological evidence confirms the scriptural description, the religious and political elites of Israel lived in wealth and luxury. Based on the theology prevalent at the time, that God’s favor was demonstrated by prestige and military power, it seemed like God was indeed favoring the people of Israel and not the conflict plagued Assyrians.

All of this changed very suddenly in 745 BCE, when the Tiglath-pileser the Third usurped the Assyrian throne. By 722, the luxurious capital of Israel’s northern kingdom was in ruin and the kingdom itself was a province of Assyria.

But before Tiglath-pileser came Amos. And Amos brought strong words of judgment into Israel’s wealth and prosperity. This is from chapter two: “Thus says the Lord,” said Amos. “For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment… because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals—they trample the heads of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted out of the way… and in the house of their God they drink wine bought with fines they imposed.” Israel’s sin was building its prosperity on the backs of the least of God’s people, the needy, the poor, and the afflicted. The covenant God made with Israel had two aspects, love of God and love of neighbor, and so much had Israel failed at this second aspect, that no amount of the first would save them. In the section we read this morning, God railed against the Israelites shallow worship, “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies… Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

The message of Amos is clear, the guilt of Israel was driven by their own selfish desires. The luxury and wealth of the elite was gained at the expense of the poor and needy. It was not peace and prosperity gifted from God that the elite were experiencing, but peace and prosperity gained from the oppression of others of God’s family. Even their worship was selfish, meant not to lift up God and build the community of God’s people, but to make themselves feel good about their faithfulness. And if we’re honest with ourselves, while maybe not to the degree of the northern kingdom, we too are guilty of such selfishness. Our confession all fall has referenced it, “we confess that we turn the church inward rather than moving it outward.” We don’t always “speak for what is right and act for what is just.” Amos’ harsh words to Israel should feel challenging, because they could also convict us.

But believe it or not, this harsh condemnation is one of the reasons I love and find such deep and powerful hope in the prophets. Because here’s the thing about Amos. These words were written twenty-eight hundred years ago. Twenty-eight hundred years ago, Amos came to proclaim God’s judgment, and the fact that we are reading this judgment today is a testament to God’s love. Because what Amos threatened would happen, happened. In all of human history there have been few times as dark and dangerous as living in the northern kingdom of Israel during the rise of Tigleth-pileser the third. Israel was destroyed, completely and totally demolished and desolated. And we are still here. The book of Amos is the first glimmer of the promise of resurrection. That no matter how dark and broken and scary things get, no matter how much it looks like the end, the promise of God’s covenant is that the end is never the end, because resurrection always follows death. And we don’t even have to wait twenty-eight hundred years to see that. Amos was one of the earliest of the prophets. Even before the time of Jesus, this whole destruction and redemption thing happened a bunch more times. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hezekiah, all of these prophets brought the same harsh message and the same promised redemption. Again and again and again in the Bible we read this message of the people of God wandering away, and God firmly refusing to give up on them, to give up on us. That the harsh condemnation of Amos is the first of the prophets, and not the last, is proof of God’s unconditional, unwavering, deep, and powerful love for us. God hasn’t given up on God’s people in twenty-eight hundred years, so I have a hard time believing that God is giving up on us now.

The other powerful message of hope I find in the prophets is that God loves us enough to speak hard words to us. I don’t know about you, but I really hate conflict. I hate feeling like people are angry at me, like I have hurt someone. I am probably conflict-avoidant to a fault. And it has hurt my relationships. When faced with conflict, I would much rather walk away from the person than address my hurt and ask for forgiveness. What the prophets show us is that God loves us too much to avoid conflict with us. God did not ghost the people of Israel until they went away. God walked right into the middle of the muck and the mire and called them out on their complacency and self-absorption. The prophets’ harshness show us what real love looks like. Love is not soft and cushy and everything goes. Love can be confrontational and hard and painful. But it is from love like that, love deep enough to call us out on our failings, to speak truth to us even when it hurts, and love us through our anger, that real relationship is born. That is the kind of love God has for us.

Brothers and sisters, the hope and the promise in the prophets is that God loves us so powerfully, so deeply, and so fully, that nothing, not the powers of this world, not the attacks of our enemies, not even our own sin and failings are enough to keep God away from us. So firm, so fierce is God’s love that God will wade into the fire of conflict and anger to refine us into God’s people, that God will go to death and beyond to bring us to resurrection. This is a powerful, powerful message of hope and love and commitment in the middle of a world that feels so full of fear and death. For twenty-eight hundred years this has been God’s promise to us, and I am not so arrogant as to think that a message with such resounding historical truth could be ending today.

So that is the good news. Here is the challenge. Amos was a reluctant prophet. He was not even a professional prophet. He was a sheepherder from the southern kingdom of Judah who was called, against his will, to bring this hard and painful message to Israel. The challenge is that sometimes God calls us to be prophets. Sometimes God calls us to wade into places of conflict and pain and to speak hard words of truth of the need to care for the poor, the needy, and the afflicted. The times in which Amos spoke were not all that different from our own times, and we may be the ones God is calling to remind God’s people of God’s covenant. A covenant God set not just between us and God, but also between us and our neighbor. God’s love for us is cruciform, it is cross-shaped. It is not only lived out in this up-down relationship between us and God, but also in this side to side relationship between us and our neighbor. And friends, let me be the first to tell you, that speaking truth in love in this world is hard. It will cause conflict and it will cause division. And so again, I find hope in Amos. Because twenty-eight hundred years ago, when Tiglath-pileser the Third took the throne in Assyria and the kingdom of Israel fell, I bet Amos felt like he failed. He came with this word of warning, and the people of Israel did not hear it, and Israel was destroyed. But, here we are, twenty-eight hundred years later, and the words of Amos still ring true. The words of Amos still bring hope and challenge and promise. The words of Amos still matter and still bring justice and peace, and still lift up God’s care for the poor, the needy, and the afflicted. What the book of Amos tells us is that we do not always get to see the results of our labors. We are, as Bishop Oscar Romero famously said, “prophets of a future not our own.” God’s timing is not always like our timing. We may never get to know the effects of our actions. But our work matters, we matter, the love and the care and the challenge and the hope that we bring to this world in the name of God makes a difference. So keep on, dear sisters and brothers. Keep on in hope. Yes, it is dark right now, but it has been dark before. And let us close with the closing three verses of the book of Amos. “The time is surely coming, says the Lord, when the one who plows shall overtake the one who reaps, and the treader of grapes the one who sows the seed; the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it. I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel, and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine, and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit. I will plant them upon their land, and they shall never again be plucked up out of the land that I have given them, says the Lord your God.” Amen.