August 23, 2020 “Ripe” – Amos 7, 8

Amos 7, 8 (Immerse Prophets pp. 13-15)
“Ripe”
August 23, 2020

Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

“You need this too,” said my father-in-law, and dropped a heavy metal slug wrapped in orange cord into my cart at Jerry’s. As I prepared to set posts for a back porch cover at our home in Springfield, Dad decided I needed a plumb line.

As early as 2,600 B.C., the Egyptians used plumb lines. Just a weight, a stone back then, on a string, the plumb line is a simple instrument operating solely by the law of gravity. It’s a tool to establish a vertical line against which one may build a wall or any other vertical structure, keeping it perfectly straight.

In chapters 7 and 8 the prophet Amos, the earliest prophet who wrote down what God spoke to him, tells of four visions. The first two were visions of locusts and of devastating fire on page 13. For those Amos interceded for the nation, saying “please forgive us or we will not survive, for Israel is so small.” And Amos says, “So the Lord relented from this plan. ‘I will not do it,’ he said.” For whatever reasons, our contemporary world has not been spared either devouring locusts or devastating fire.

The third vision was less obviously destructive, a plumb line, a plumb line for a nation that was out of true, off kilter, and soon to fall. That nation was the northern kingdom of Israel, ten out of twelve tribes, often called simply “Israel” in contrast to the southern kingdom of Judah. The two kingdoms were united under Israel’s first three kings, Saul, David and Solomon, but they split when Solomon died in 930 B.C. The rebel Jeroboam led the secession. He set up golden calves as idols to worship in Bethel and Dan. He separated those northern tribes not just politically but spiritually.

160 years later in Amos’ time, a second Jeroboam was on the throne of the northern kingdom. Israel still had its idols and sanctuaries built by Jeroboam I. On page 13, verse 12 of chapter 9 in regular Bibles, we hear Amaziah tell Amos to go back where he came from, to Judah in the south. They don’t need any foreigner to straighten them out. Their sanctuary and national religion are just fine. Israel is as great as it’s ever been, say their false priests and prophets. They were strong, prosperous, and proud of themselves.

That spiritual plumb line revealed the disastrous lean of Israel’s walls, the pagan shrines and alternative temples which they had set up, mentioned on page 13, regular verse 9. But it was not just the vertical dimension of their relationship with God which was off. Most of what Amos had to say was about their skewed horizontal relationships, their dealings with the poorest and humblest of their own people.

Go back to pages 9-11, chapter 5 of Amos, and you find that as God calls the people to Himself through Amos, the specific complaints have to do with taxes on the poor, with oppression of the innocent, with bribes corrupting the justice of the courts in favor of the rich. What God wants is not more worship or hymns of praise, he says near the bottom of page 11. He wants what Covenant songwriters Bob Stromberg and Rick Carlson wove into a praise song, justice rolling down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. God hates phony worship and offerings brought to Him when the poor are being neglected. He doesn’t want empty hymns and choruses. He wants the actual justice we sing about.

As we begin to read the prophets, then, Amos gives us the basic dimensions of their message. God’s people have failed in their relationship to Him and to each other. They have broken what we sometimes called the two “Great Commandments.” Jesus said all of the law and the prophets hang on these, to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. The prophets were sent to tell God’s people they had failed in both. Both lines were off kilter. The whole building was about to collapse.

A few years after our Gathering Place church building was constructed, I got fed up with its north door. It wouldn’t close properly. It didn’t latch when shut. There was a 3/8 inch gap that let in cold air in the winter and warm air in the summer. I called Stan and he brought out a rep from the company that made the door. We stood and held a long straight edge up against it. That steel door was bent by a long bow curve all along its vertical dimension. It couldn’t be straightened. The only solution was to take it out, throw it away, and put up a new straight, true door in its place.

That’s what God saw in Israel there in 762 B.C. The wall had warped out of line beyond any repair. People’s hearts were twisted away from God and away from their neighbors in need. God’s only solution was to throw it all away. So on page 13, verse 9, we read, “The pagan shrines of your ancestors will be ruined, and the temples of Israel will be destroyed; I will bring the dynasty of King Jeroboam to a sudden end.”

God held up His plumb line and saw that Israel was tilted, askew and out of line beyond any hope of repair. He waited about 35 years, but then the Assyrians came and fulfilled the prophecy of Amos I just read and the prophecy at the top of page 14, verse 17 “the people of Israel will certainly become captives in exile, far from their homeland.”

Another prophet delivered a similar message. In Isaiah 28:17 God says, “I will make justice the measuring line and righteousness the plumb line,” and then tells how God will sweep away all the places His bent and selfish people try to hide from their sins and lies.

The fourth vision in our text today appears in the middle of page 14, the beginning of chapter 8 in a traditional version. Like the plumb line, God once again asked the prophet, “What do you see, Amos?” This vision was close to home for Amos. At the top of the page we read how he made his living in agriculture. He was a shepherd. He took care of fig trees. So he immediately recognized what God put in front of him, “A basket full of ripe fruit.” “Ripe fruit” was literally one word which meant “summer fruit,” the harvest you gather at the end of the season.

Think of what is coming out of some of our gardens or off our fruit trees at the end of summer right now: fat tomatoes, huge zucchini, crisp apples, juicy pears. I’m not sure what the actual produce would have been there in ancient Palestine, but it would have been like that, an abundance of fruits and vegetables growing lush and ripe for the picking.

The Hebrew word for the fruit of the summer is something like kitz. It sounds like another Hebrew word, keetz, which means “end.” I like puns and so, it seems, does God. The translation tries to capture it here by Amos seeing “ripe fruit” and then God saying, “Like the fruit, Israel is ripe for punishment.” But literally God said, “Like the kitz you harvest at the end of summer, the keetz, the end, has come for Israel.

Amos and other prophets to the northern kingdom announced a real, solid end. As we will see when we turn to Isaiah, Jeremiah and other prophets for Judah, the southern kingdom would end as well, then return, be restored. But Israel in the north became what are sometimes called the “lost tribes” of Israel. Their national identity was obliterated. They were scattered. In Amos’ time they were headed toward a final, total end.

Amos was sent during the “summer” season for Israel. On pages 8 and 9, chapter 4, we read how God previously sent famine, drought, plagues and other disasters, all followed by the refrain, “But you still would not return to me.” Now God takes a different approach. He lets Israel grow fat and happy and complacent and soft. You’ve read throughout Amos about their prosperity under Jeroboam II, about the abundance of meat and the bowls of wine they enjoyed. Like Richard says at the start of Shakespeare’s Richard III:

Now is the winter of our discontent,
Made glorious summer…

It was glorious summer in Israel. Then God sent Amos the prophet to proclaim that summer was about to end. It was a spiritual and political late August or early September for Israel. It would soon turn into the terrible winter of discontent, a nation overrun by foreign powers and devastated to the point of extinction.

Like a person I spoke with about this earlier in the week, some us dread the end of summer. The days are growing shorter, temperatures will soon be cooling, and probably in less than two months the rains will begin. The sunshine, the clear air, the gorgeous evenings and crisp mornings will again, for a little while, be just a memory. But as much as we might not want summer to end, we should be even more worried about what time of year it is spiritually, whether our own “summer” with God is growing short.

Here in this chapter 8, the vertical deviation of Israel shows up tangentially just after the middle of page 14. The people of Israel were observing the Sabbath and other holy days, but their heart was not really in it, not connecting with God. Instead, they just wanted to get back to business, dishonest business at that, “cheat the helpless… measure out grain with dishonest measures… enslave poor people for one piece of silver or a pair of sandals.”

We might get a tiny grasp of what Amos is talking about if you or I think about how often we’ve sat and endured a Sunday morning service, all the while just thinking about work to be done, homework for students, a deck to be repaired, a presentation to get ready for Monday, bills to be paid. We may not feel like any of that is dishonest or exploits anyone. Yet it still distracts us from attention to God.

Amos is more concerned with a whole society that makes an outward show of religion while just marking time until it can get back to business, to profit, to creating wealth that allows us to live in luxury. Amos is talking about things like prayers before sessions of Congress which then do nothing for those in need or which pass laws that actually hurt the poor. He is talking about business people and politicians and judges who attend church but then fail to protect the lives of unborn babies and the lives of families seeking asylum and the lives of those unjustly condemned to death. Amos talked about the kind of national leader who holds up a Bible while at the same time chasing off those calling for justice.

It’s not either/or, not just personal or not just systemic faith and justice which Amos and the other prophets are talking about. Yes, you can’t just stick a Black Lives Matter sign on your lawn without thinking about how you relate individually to your next door neighbor. And you can’t justly participate in a protest against police corruption and racism while wrecking the property and livelihood of homeowners and merchants on the street where you’re marching.

Yet we also can’t be just if all we do is talk about our Black personal friends or have a nice, friendly worship service with an Hispanic congregation while failing to inform ourselves or care about the way businesses and social services and immigration and the justice system treat people who look just like our friends. It doesn’t matter whether we worship on-line or in-person or for how long, if we are unwilling to consider or to do anything about what life is like for the people who pick the fruit and vegetables we eat or who make the sandals we wear. Personal justice is not enough. Amos and the rest of the prophets are telling us to seek systemic justice as well.

The rest of chapter 8, which is the bottom of page 14 and most of page 15, is Amos’ prophecy of the Day that will be coming, a day when God quits holding back, a day which God says is going to be shorter than any winter day we might worry about,

I will make the sun go down at noon
and darken the earth while it is still day.
I will turn your celebrations into times of mourning
and your singing into weeping.
You will wear funeral clothes
and shave your heads to show your sorrow—
as if your only son had died.
How very bitter will that day be!

In fact, on page 11, chapter 5 verse 18, Amos wonders why the people, in their current spiritual state, want the day of the Lord to come. He says “You have no idea what you are wishing for. That day will be darkness, not light.” Then there is God’s parable that reads almost like a joke. A man runs from a lion only to meet a bear and then escapes the bear into his house only to lean against the wall and be bitten by a snake.

When I was growing up, our church and many more conservative, evangelical churches were caught up in anticipating “The Day of the Lord,” the day Jesus comes back. We were taught to look forward to it with joy and anticipation. But both the prophets and Jesus warned there is a dark side to that day. In my youth we thought that darkness was all for the bad people, the ones left behind, the ones who don’t know Jesus. But the prophets and Jesus both tell us it’s more complicated than that. There is judgment coming for those who say they know God but don’t act like it, who claim a spiritual heritage and culture but who are complacent about what happens in society around them.

There was a kind of spiritual pride in that old evangelical anticipation of the Second Coming. We thought we’d be leaving this earth. Who cares what happens here or to the unbelievers left in the world? So there’s war? That just means Jesus is coming sooner. So there’s natural disaster and disease? That just shows us Jesus is almost here. So there’s violence and injustice? Jesus will be here soon to take us out of it all.

No, the prophets and our Lord are not going to let us escape responsibility for this world and its troubles by flying off to some other world. That attitude is only going to give us a false sense of security before the snake bites. For all our Christian heritage and culture, the prophetic message is still for us. Let us confess how we have failed God and our neighbors and then begin to make some changes, not just in ourselves, but in the world in which we live.

There is one more social catastrophe here in chapter 8, on page 15. “‘The time is surely coming,’ says the Lord, ‘when I will send a famine on the land—not a famine of bread or water but of hearing the words of the Lord.’” Then Amos talks about people going back and forth, hungering, thirsting, to hear something from God. Instead, people will be focused on idols which leave them starving for spiritual nourishment until, “they will all fall down, never to rise again.” That is a famine which you and I must address at the very same time we are addressing the physical hunger experienced by those whose food was eaten by locusts in East Africa or those who have lost income here in America. Our mission as God’s people is both, but we must not forget that spiritual mission.

Wednesday morning, the missions group talked with a man in South Africa who works with tribes that had Christian teaching in the past but, like Israel, blended that true religion with African animism and all sorts of mixed up ideas about the Old Testament. That missionary told us how excited many of those tribal people were to simply hear the Bible taught, to learn the truth that they didn’t have to make sacrifices or fear evil spirits, but simply trust in Jesus. People are starving to hear the good news from God, the good news of Jesus who came to save us from our sins, to save us from ourselves.

It’s not part of the text I selected, but Amos does end his book with good news, on page 17, the end of chapter 9. He talks about a great harvest, a new glorious summer. He says God will bring His people back and they will rebuild their cities. They will plant crops and enjoy the harvests because God will plant them back in their land. Of all the sweet promises of hope I find in God’s Word this is one of the most incredible. Amos was speaking to the “Lost Tribes.” As a people they dissolved into the nation which conquered them, into the great melting pot of the world. How could they ever come back? How?

The only answer I have to that question is Revelation 7, verse 9. John the apostle, who was also a prophet, wrote, “After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands.”

That is where all the prophecy of Scripture is pointed. That is what we as people of God are called to work for now: a great congregation that includes all the peoples of the world and is centered on our Lord. The good news is a great congregation that lives and worships together in a social structure where everyone is equal and everyone enjoys true blessing and justice. The time is certainly ripe for you and I to get back in line with God and start working on that vision once again.

Amen.