Go away, seer…

Passage for reflection:

 Amos 7: 7 - 17

Amos 7: 12: “Get out, you seer! Go back to the land of Judah. Earn your bread there and do your prophesying there.”

 

There’s a version of the Handmaid’s Tale on Channel 4 at the moment. Here’s a quote from the book: “The Bible is kept locked up, the way people once kept tea locked up, so the servants wouldn’t steal it. It is an incendiary device: who knows what we’d make of it, if we ever got our hands on it? We can be read to from it, by him, but we cannot read.”

God’s word is on the move! 

 

I’m enjoying reading Lilian Chandler’s history of  Laverton and Dallowgill at the moment. In the chapter on Methodism she tells two stories of preachers at Dallowgill. One preacher was apt to shout and on one occasion as he shouted “and the Lord came down”, his false teeth shot out and over the edge of the pulpit. Another preacher got so excited in the pulpit when preaching a sermon on Jonah, that when telling how Jonah was thrown into the sea, he threw the Bible from the pulpit to demonstrate. If any of the congregation were having forty winks, they would get a rude awakening as the heavy Bible landed with a terrific thud.

 

God’s word is on the move! 

 

This Sunday I’m going to a new place to share God’s word. For the first time since moving here last August, the plan has sent me across the West Tanfield bridge over the river to the other bit of the Circuit to Masham. 

 

God’s word is on the move! 

 

Some of my churches are thinking about who to invite to take their special services later in the year like Harvest and Church Anniversary. We like a nice preacher for our specials. West Tanfield so wanted me for their 3pm Harvest service when I said I was already booked to do Sawley Harvest then they moved their service to 5 so they got me. What if I turned up to do their Harvest and upset them? What if  I unsettle the Masham folk? They’d send an e mail to Gareth our Superintendent and ask that I never be planned there again. 

 

“Get out, you seer, go back to the land of Judah, go back to Ripon. Earn your bread there and do your prophesying there.”

 

Friends, if God’s word is on the move unlocked from the cupboard or like the preachers false teeth or the Bible dropped from on high, then maybe it just might unsettle. Maybe we’ve forgotten its prophetic and radical nature. 

 

So let’s imagine this visiting preacher and seer, one who tells, comes first to achurch and then he looks at the market square. What will God’s word, through him, say to the people of God, and to where the world is. His name is Amos, and he’s come from somewhere to the south of you. You certainly won’t say “nice service” at the end, and when he starts shaking the town up a bit, well, you’ll all want him gone. 

Amos the prophet lived under king Jeroboam II, who reigned for forty-one years (786–746 BC).  Jeroboam's kingdom was characterised by territorial expansion, aggressive militarism, and unprecedented economic prosperity.

Times were good.  Or so people thought.         

The people of the day interpreted their good fortune as God's favour. Amos says that the people were intensely and sincerely religious. But theirs was a privatised religion of personal benefit.  They ignored the poor, the widow, the alien, and the orphan.  Their form of religion degraded faith to culturally acceptable rituals. Making things worse, Israel's religious leaders sanctioned the political and economic status quo.  

 

Amos was a shepherd, a farmer, and a tender of fig trees.  He was a small town boy who grew up in Tekoa, about twelve miles southeast of Jerusalem and five miles south of Bethlehem. He was an unwelcome outsider. Born in the southern kingdom of Judah, God called him to thunder a prophetic word to the northern kingdom of Israel. 

In the passage from today's reading Amos gives the illustration of God standing by a wall that has been built true and straight. He's also holding a plumb-line in his hand to confirm that the wall has been build true to plumb. If the wall's true, the plumb-line will prove it, if its not, then the plumb-line will show that also. The plumb-line can't lie, as anyone who's tried to build a wall will apparently testify.  

Amos holds up the measuring stick of the 'Word of the Lord' for the Israelites to judge themselves by, as a mirror in which they could look at themselves. He believed they were found sorely wanting. And its clearly an uncomfortable image for Amaziah, the prophet of Bethel, who immediately gets on the Israelite equivalent of the blower to inform his boss, the King, that trouble is brewing and suggests to Amos in the strongest terms that he should return back from whence he came. 

“Get out, you seer! Go back to the land of Judah. Earn your bread there and do your prophesying there.”

God’s word is on the move, and God’s so called people were threatened by it. So they said “what does this upstart from the south know?” Let’s get rid of him so we can back to our rituals and religiosity and our appalling ethics as we bask in luxury through the week. As long as we check in with God once a week, we will be fine. “This is the kings sanctuary and a temple of the Kingdom! How very dare you!” But you know what, their relationship with God was empty, they just went through the motions. You know the seven last words of a dying church don’t you. “We have always done it this way.”

God’s word is on the move! 

Risking never to be invited here again, I suggest there are two things to learn from this Scripture. One is about us being responsive and the other is about us being brave enough to be prophetic. 

Maybe God is saying to us “you need to listen to me again” and maybe God is saying to us “you’ve sung about me, you’ve read my word, you’ve worshiped me, now what? Are you ready to be rocked and rolled and challenged? Maybe I’m about to do a new thing.” I used this quote in my sermon last Sunday. The theologian Annie Dillard once asked, “Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?  Or (as I suspect) does no one believe a word of it?  The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.  It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.  Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.  For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offence; or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.”

 

Who are the prophets in our own community challenging us and do we want them to get out? 

Then maybe we need to be more prophetic as a church. Here’s my controversial bit. Maybe we aren’t growing any more because we just aren’t that relevant or interesting. Speaking into the world can be costly. It cost John the Baptist his head. Maybe we will be rejected or told to go home but maybe we will be more respected and listened to in our community if we are brave enough to engage with it and speak out where in our own age there is blatant injustice, prejudice and selfishness. The Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan who did time in prison for his civil disobedience against American policies on racism, nuclear proliferation, and Vietnam, when asked how many times he had been jailed for subverting caesar because of Jesus, he responded, "Not enough."

           

The frightening thing though about the Amos passage is that he isn’t  speaking to the world, he’s speaking to a people of faith or so they say. And even more frightening is it comes to Israel, the Northern Kingdom, in a time of peace and prosperity.

 

I wouldn’t dare have this as a text – words you would find if you read on in chapter 7 of Amos thundering: “‘Your wife will become a prostitute in the city, and your sons and daughters will fall by the sword. Your land will be measured and divided up, and you yourself will die in a pagan country. And Israel will surely go into exile, away from their native land.’ 

 

But rather these words from two chapters earlier: “Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, and righteousness like a never-failing stream!”

 

God’s word is on the move! It’s unsettling, unnerving and maybe not what we are used to. But maybe we just need an Amos to come and challenge us a bit. 

 

I remember preaching this sort of sermon once and someone saying  to me at the door afterwards “are you alright?” because I’d not given them something fluffy bunny and comfortable. 

 

Amos could do no other than say what God put on his heart. He was no professional. He was just told to go. A very brave man! 

 

Do you want to say “Get out, you seer! Go back to the land of Judah. Earn your bread there and do your prophesying there.” Will my Sunday congregation after my first visit to them go home and over the Sunday dinnersay “good grief we won’t want that minister to come again. 

 

Maybe. 

 

But I’ll just say this. Remember whose church we are part of. Remember how Jesus spoke out. Remember what happened to him. But also remember however rejected he was, on that cross he had the last word, the wounded prophet became the saviour of the world, and today we are his people, whatever that costs and however uncomfortable a bit of a divine shake up might be.

 

I’ll end as I began: God’s word is on the move!