Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Oct. 14, 2012 Proper 23
Amos 5:6-7, 10-15
6 Seek the Lord and live, or he will break out against the house of Joseph like fire,
and it will devour Bethel, with no one to quench it.
7 Ah, you that turn justice to wormwood, and bring righteousness to the ground!
10 They hate the one who reproves in the gate, and they abhor the one who speaks the truth.
11 Therefore, because you trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain,
you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not live in them;
you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine.
12 For I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins--
you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate.
13 Therefore the prudent will keep silent in such a time; for it is an evil time.
14 Seek good and not evil, that you may live;
and so the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with you, just as you have said.
15 Hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gate;
it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.
I was living in Louisville, KY when we first adopted our infant daughter from Korea. I was, of course, married at that time..... as hard as that may be to believe for some of you who know me best. We had to endure a number of rather peculiar questions about our decision, some of which were insanely personal and others were just, well, really stupid. I will not reveal which family member asked us if we planned to tell our very Asian daughter that she was adopted. The strangest inquiries came from total strangers in public places.
One day, when Valerie was more than a year old and had come into her beautiful long black Korean hair, her mother and I were grocery shopping with Valerie riding along in the cart. A woman came up beside us and said, "What a beautiful child, did you adopt her?"
Being a bit weary with these impromptu invasions of privacy, without answering the woman, I turned to my wife and said, "See, no one thinks she looks like me, isn't there something you want to tell me?" My former wife did not universally enjoy my sense of humor but when that woman grabbed her purse and abandoned her shopping cart to sprint for the front door, even she was able to enjoy my extemporaneous "why don't you mind your own business" lesson that day.
There are things that are so obvious that they shouldn't have to be said and yet, we end up saying them and even then, the obvious does not always win. I'm reading a new book that I recommend to you very highly. It is written by an Episcopal priest who was previously unknown to me. His name is Harry Cook and the book is entitled, "Long Live Salvation by Works". I was first drawn to this book by a single quote from it that a friend emailed to me. Cook says, "It is an axiom of human behavior that you cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place. However, a person who did reason himself into a position might be reasoned out of it and into another more reasonable position."
That single sentence sums up a lot of what I have found difficult in my life as a religious person. There is so much about religion that we do not arrive at by reason. We are told to believe certain things, and we are told to believe them emphatically and never to let them go.
You would not, through observation of the world or through any personal experience, come to believe in the divinity of Jesus, or the sanctity of sacraments. You would not reason your way into believing in incarnation, heaven and hell or substitutionary death.
And so, when we try to apply reason to the practice of our spirituality, we find ourselves constantly at odds with those who refuse to allow reason to be a part of their thinking.
Religious people are so often like the Queen in "Through the Looking Glass" who, when Alice objected: "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
Lewis Carol, of course, was not simply writing humor for children. Once you can get a person practiced to believe impossible things then you can get them to believe almost anything. And, I'm afraid, a lot of our early religious training works to anesthetize our ability to think critically.
Sometimes we miss a lot of what even the Bible says because we have been trained to look at it as if it were a book full of magical spells.... it becomes so holy in our minds that it becomes incomprehensible. We tend to think of the word "prophet" to mean someone who has divine insight into the future, like a saintly Nostradamus. That is not true at all. The prophets rarely foretold the future. They almost always talk about the present. The meaning of the word "prophesy" is no different that the meaning of our word "to preach."
The prophets were said to speak in a way that made the people's ears to tingle, to make them want to cover their ears. They were not foretelling distant future events, the coming of a later messiah nor the end of time.
They mostly talked about the present time with such naked honesty that it made people put them into prison or kill them rather than to deal with what they were saying. We say that the role of the prophetic church is to speak the truth to power but power rarely wants to hear it.
It was the prophetic church that stood up to the abuses of our colonizers. It was the prophetic church that challenged the practices of child labor in the early textile industry.... that challenged the institution of slavery.... the relegation of women to second class status.... the labor abuses of immigrants and defenseless workers.
Institutional religion has a whole long laundry list of social justice issues in which they were on the wrong side of ethics.... but that's not because they were accustomed to speaking truth, it is because they were well practiced in believing six impossible things before breakfast.
The emerging church of the 21st century must stop asking people to believe what cannot be known and that which is inherently unreasonable. Faith is compatible with hope but not with ignorance. The prophets were not magical diviners who had angels whispering in their ears, they were people who were able to speak the truth to power.
Consider this text before us today from the 5th chapter of Amos. Sure, he is pronouncing divine judgment on the people but look at why:
in verse 11 he says very clearly that their nation is going to fall apart "because you trample on the poor." He says in verse 12 that they take bribes and push the needy away from the gate. Can the modern church hear the voice of its own prophets?
Let me give you an example that we have never talked about before..... a clean slate issue.
Let's just look at some facts about voter fraud and voter suppression. There have been lobbyists working across the nation to change voter laws to require that every voter present a photo ID. It is estimated that over 20 million voters do not have a photo ID which is normally associated with owning a car. Of that 20 million people who do not have a driver's license, almost all of them, statistically speaking, are poor and many are minorities.
By both instituting photo ID's and restricting pre election day voting, lobbyists are potentially removing more than 20 million votes in the name of protecting our elections from voter fraud. How many cases of voter fraud do we typically have in a year in the USA? Between 5 and 20. So, when politicians are willing to keep 20 million poor and minority voters from voting to avoid 5 to 20 cases of voter fraud, can you possibly make yourself believe that the motivation is to avoid voter fraud?
You see, we are interested in calling out the public to embrace the truth. This week, billboards began appearing in minority neighborhoods in Cleveland, OH that read, "Voter Fraud is punishable by a 3.5 year prison sentence and a $10,000 fine." These billboards are only appearing where there are immigrants and poor blacks who are generally expected to vote democratic in this very important swing state.
You can understand that there are people who are inspired to try and get Obama out of the White House, but once they decide that they can trample on the poor to accomplish that goal then they should not expect persons of conscience to act like we are willing to believe that they are not enemies of democracy and justice.
Now, Plato, in The Republic, advocated that philosophers should be kings. In our age, we could say, for example, that only people who have an IQ over 140 should be allowed to vote. So if only geniuses could run the government, we would have a very efficient and dependable government.
But one of the interloculars in Plato's Republic, once Socrates had described this wonderful state run by philosopher kings, asked, "But who would want to live there?" An America run only by and for the rich or an America run only by and for the elite would not be an America we would long want to live in.
As sloppy and inefficient as it is, the beauty of our nation is found in striving for equality among all people..... we are nowhere near there..... as religious people we can say that being rich is not a blessing and being poor is not a curse but when you have lived on both sides of that fence you can say with the pigs in Animal Farm that some of us are just more equal than others.
Traditional religious people want us to show kindness to the poor, the hungry, the sick, as sort of the icing on top of our self congratulatory religious beliefs that we are heaven bound travelers on a sacred highway. The prophets asked us to be more devoted to the absolute truth than to any dogma or religious ritual.
In our very complicated world in which politicians play dice with deciding which sick people get health care, which people will live in mansions and which live under bridges, and who gets to vote and who doesn't..... then we should be considered to be dangerous people who will always take the side of the truth rather than the powerful and that devotion to compassion and reason is now our sacred scripture and our holy quest.
