What can we say July 10? 5th after Pentecost

    Amos 7:7-17. My first sermon ever, when I was 20, about to enter Div school, and so very clueless about what to talk about, was on this text. Somehow I’d latched on to verse 14, “I am no prophet,” and I assured my hapless listeners that “I am no preacher.” He’s preaching and – he’s right, he’s no preacher. Amos is of course distancing himself from those professional prophets who were mere yes-men for the establishment, who curried royal favor and profit – and who, no doubt, believed firmly and passionately in what they were saying! Firmness and passion, and being able to stir a crowd to cheer, are not signs that you’re actually speaking a word from God.

   I’m not a hold-up-an-object-lesson kind of preacher, but Amos was. A familiar construction item: the plumbline, used to detect if a wall under construction was straight enough. I love the opening of Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth. Mason/builder Tom began work on a cathedral: “At first he had treated it like any other job. He had been resentful when the master builder warned him that his work was not quite up to standard. But then he realized that the walls of a cathedral had to be not just good, but perfect. This was because the cathedral was for God, and also because the building was so big that the slightest lean, the merest variation from absolutely true and level, could weaken the structure fatally. Tom’s resentment turned to fascination. The combination of a hugely ambitious building with merciless attention to the smallest detail opened Tom’s eyes.”

   Israel’s wall, Israel’s life, is far from perfect. The lean is disaster waiting to happen. Amos comes to name it. The prophets, and even many of Jesus’ sermons, call into question (for me) the standard I was taught and have lived with lo these many years: a sermon is “good news.” Where’s the good news? Amos’s sermon is unflinchingly bad news. When we get askew with God’s good news way, it’s bad news for us. Does that preach?

   Marvin Sweeney points out that ’anak could mean “plaster” – as if God is a renovator. The walls of the kingdom’s lavish sanctuary and palace were in superb condition – or so they presumed. Marianne Williamson suggested that when we invite God into our lives, we expect a decorator to appear to spruce the place up a little. But instead, you look out the window, and there’s a wrecking ball about to tear it all down and start over.

   Colossians 1:1-14. Unless you quibble over authorship, Paul (I’m okay with him as author here, and a sermon’s no place to dispute the issue anyhow) dubs himself “an apostle by the will of God.” Not for the sermon, but in your own soul: are you a preacher “by the will of God”? If so, in some mysterious way, does that alter not just what you say but how you prepare, how you field praise or criticism?

   Timothy is a “brother,” and these brothers have siblings in Colossae. Church as big extended family – which may explain why we don’t always get along so well. Sibling rivalry, competing over toys, resentments, favoritism, secrets… Families get undone. Yet families are families, stuck with one another, intimate to the end.

   Verses 3 thru 8 form a single sentence in the Greek! Paul gets on these rambles… Paul is amazed by what has unfolded in the church in his absence. As Christopher Seitz suggests, “Paul is witnessing the church being born before his eyes and without his missionary exertions… a development not foreseen by Paul.” I wonder if we might hope/pray/even preach for the same in our day? Indeed, Paul is in prison as he writes. Could this imprisonment have “its own sacramental efficacy and providential intention”? (Seitz).

   A ringing message of Hope bursts forth in all this. I recall being delighted in some phase of my reading when I found Martin Luther King, Jr., late in his life, saying “I am no longer optimistic, but I remain hopeful,” and Christopher Lasch’s spot-on wisdom: “Hope doesn’t demand progress; it demands justice, a conviction that wrongs will be made right, that the underlying order of things is not flouted with impunity. Hope appears absurd to those who lack it. We can see why hope serves us better than optimism. Not that it prevents us from expecting the worst; the worst is what the hopeful are prepared for. A blind faith that things will somehow work out for the best furnishes a poor substitute for the disposition to see things through even when they don’t.”

   Or Henri Nouwen (in Here and Now): “While optimism makes us live as if someday soon things will go better for us, hope frees us from the need to predict the future and allows us to live in the present, with the deep trust that God will never leave us alone but will fulfill the deepest desires of our heart. When I trust deeply that today God is truly with me and holds me safe in a divine embrace, guiding every one of my steps, I can let go of my anxious need to know how tomorrow will look, or what will happen next month or next year. I can be fully where I am and pay attention to the many signs of God’s love within and around me.”

   Hope, for Paul, “bears fruit.” Are you fruitful? Is your church fruitful? Nouwen again distinguished between productivity and fruitfulness in Our Greatest Gift. When we no longer can work or earn, we can still be fruitful, by speaking words that will be recalled, by dying in a way that is a gift to the living. It’s not just churning out this or that, but bequeathing something that is you, that is love manifest, that lingers beyond you and what you happened to get done.

   And then I can’t help but contrast this text with all the prayer requests with which I am peppered, most about health or a job. Paul’s prayer? “That you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work, and as you grow in the knowledge of God.” Pray that for me, for yourself, and for your people.

   Luke 10:25-37. So easy to misfire on the Good Samaritan. One of my preaching rules (enunciated in my The Beauty of the Word) is never ever to say what people expect you to say. On this story, they expect you’ll say Don’t be in too much of a hurry to stop and help somebody! Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. It’s way more complicated. I recall teaching New Testament to some adolescents at a Catholic camp years ago. To get them thinking, I asked With whom in this story do you identify? – hoping they’d say, Ah, not just the busy dudes, and not just the helpful Samaritan, but the guy beaten up by the side of the road. 

   This was St. Augustine’s approach. Jesus is the stranger who stoops down, binds up our wounds, and takes us home. Alternatively, Jesus is the one beaten and bloodied – to save us. My adolescent boys, snickering and not in the spirit of things, blurted out We’re the guys who beat him up and left him! Light bulb on in my head. Indeed. Who’ve we wounded, even unwittingly, and left behind?

   The strangeness, the enemy-ness of the Samaritan, the enmity between his people and the Jewish people, is interesting, but fishing for modern parallels is a challenge. Jesus’ punchline is that the neighbor is the one “who shows mercy” – and to those who haven’t earned it or even seem like fitting targets of mercy. In our mercy-less world, any giving or receiving of mercy, genuine mercy, feels miraculous, counter-cultural.

   I love that this is one of Jesus’ made up stories – which are the best, truest kind! In Israel, you can actually visit “the Inn of the Good Samaritan” – which isn’t a real place... I love this photo of my daughter Sarah, aged 8 (and now a pastor herself!), with Jason Byassee (great theologian and teacher), at this spot! A terrific quote, if it helps: G.K. Chesterton wrote, “St. Francis loved everybody, but especially those others disliked him for liking.” Who is hard to love? and who is the stranger?