[Propertalk] Proper 11 c rcl

[Robert P Morrison]

This is now open to editing and teasing, but has been written in stages through a workshop I've been attending this past week. I was asked to meet with some employees and union reps last Sunday afternoon - about disagreeable contract negotiations with national management of a chain of grocery/variety stores, and that set me off thinking about the Amos passage.

Happy wrestling with the texts!

Bob

ST ALBAN’S EPISCOPAL CHURCH, ALBANY	       THE EIGHTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
AMOS 8:1-12						    PROPER 11 C RCL
COLOSSIANS 1:15-28		    	           18th JULY, 2010
LUKE 10:38-42			  	                   PSALM 52

	Why bother? I mean, why are you and I here? I may have asked you this before, I know it’s crossed my mind several times. No disrespect or non-welcoming intended, but what DO we expect; for what DO we hope; what do we anticipate encountering within these sixty plus minutes out of the fourteen hundred and forty available to us today, and the ten thousand and eighty given us for this week?
	Or instead of what, should I say whom –  WHOM do we expect? For WHOM do we hope? WHOM do we anticipate encountering here at some point during these minutes together this morning? WHO is ACTUALLY doing the welcoming?
	Bishop John Robinson, who threw a very large cat among the ecclesiastical pigeons forty six years ago or so when he wrote “Honest to God”, wrote in that book, “The test of worship is how far it makes us more sensitive to the ‘beyond in our midst,’ to the Christ in the hungry, the naked, the homeless, and the prisoner. Only if we are more likely to recognize him there after attending an act of worship is that worship Christian rather than a piece of religiosity in Christian dress.” 1
	 Here, I think, is the one, the most accurate test of what we do on any given Sunday morning – or any other time we gather as the Body of Christ and in His Name.
	It doesn’t matter either, in this case, to which denomination we belong, or in what language we talk. It doesn’t even matter if we’re silent throughout much of the time we are together. The question, the really HUGE question, is “how far (our time here) makes us more sensitive to … the Christ in the hungry, the naked, the homeless, and the prisoner.”
	There can be a tendency, sometimes, to think that when people are accused in the Bible of somehow falling short of the behavior of the Good Samaritan of which we heard last Sunday – there can be a tendency to think that the prophets, or the letter writers or Jesus were talking to the power brokers of society – you know, the governors and rulers; the bankers; the higher-ups among the religious leaders; and so on. And, yes, they DO come in for their share of criticism for the lack of depth to their faith. But look at who’s being criticized by God though the prophet Amos, for instance. It’s anyone who sells such a basic necessity as food and clothing; anyone who makes this merchandise available for purchase. Granted, the number of people who would have been able to own large farms seven hundred years before Jesus was born would be relatively small. But the condemnation isn’t addressed to one group of people. Whether you run a small stall at the Saturday Market and hope to be able to sell some organic leeks and potatoes, and maybe some lavender and mint, or are one of the huge agricultural conglomerates, whoever sells to those who need to eat and keep warm, HAS – absolutely NO  question about it – HAS to be scrupulously honest.
	But there’s the criticism as plain as daylight – folk were coming together to worship, to mumble or shout their praises to God, but all the while champing at the bit so that they could use any crooked means possible to subjugate, to cheat, to strip people of any shred of dignity and value that they might still possess.
	I don’t know if there were any particular Sabbath readings God had in mind when Amos was inspired, but whatever the Torah passage was, it hadn’t made the slightest impression on the hearers.
	Granted, to our eternal shame, this sort of behavior is as old as dirt itself, the very dirt from which humanity is derived. From human’s messing with fruit trees, to a brother cheating his sibling out of his rightful inheritance, we seem to have the incredible gall to ignore what’s commonly accepted as decent behavior.
So it comes down to this very morning.
	Not only have we promised when we renewed our Baptismal Vows to be faithful in “the apostles’ teaching and fellowship” – that is, gathering as a community and listening to God’s saving Word for us – and “in the breaking of the bread” – that is, faithful and regular in joining in Communion with God and our sisters and brothers; not only that, but we promised to do everything to “respect the dignity of every human being” – no translation needed here!
	It’s so simple a child could do it – indeed, children DO do that, until they’re trained that it doesn’t matter if they skip Church services, or if it’s OK to tell a snide joke about someone else, or to take what doesn’t belong to them and refuse to listen to requests to give what is rightly theirs. The shame on us is the way in which we pick and choose how to behave, and which parts of what we call “Holy Scripture” we choose to ignore when it suits us.	
	Mind you, we MIGHT try to lessen our guilt by claiming that if President Thomas Jefferson was able to get away with “having taken his razor blade to the books of the New Testament and removed all ‘the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests,’” and ending up with a “46-page residue” 2then surely WE’RE entitled to pick and choose.
	Not so, though. It doesn’t matter who we are. It doesn’t even matter if we have five dollars in our wallets or not right now, how we behave towards others DOES matter – even if it means letting supper reach the table a little late so that we can listen to what Jesus has to say.
One the writers quoted at the conference I attended last week was Rabbi Ed Friedman. He wrote that one of the major hang-ups in government, in society and in religious institutions today is that we’re all governed by fear. 3
Is that what made the merchants of Amos’ time so incredibly vicious in their treatment of their customers, especially the poor, who had nowhere else to get supplies and no one willing to go to bat for them in getting their abuse remedied? Is it fear that makes people today so willing to sacrifice others for the sake of a quick and often unchallenged buck?
 	Friedman suggested that all agencies – religious as well as non-religious – can only get out of the problematic situation in which most are engulfed right now if they accept that to be fully human is to be filled with a sense of adventure and a willingness to encounter serendipity.
	A quick example. The BAC is talking to the Diocese right now about some back D.P.A. which wasn’t paid. This affects the B.A.C. here, it affects the congregation, it affects the Diocese – and it reaches out beyond that to The Episcopal Church and even the world-wide Anglican Communion. In other words, how you and I may feel challenged and threatened by an indebtedness on the local level may not only affect how we worship God in this place, and minister to the people who work in the stores of this community. But how you and I feel because of the D.P.A. situation here touches the lives of orphans in Africa, or homeless families in Haiti, or settlers in Gaza.
	Instead of being afraid of this indebtedness, however, Friedman suggests that we ought to be grateful for the challenge, indeed that we need to accept this as a privilege to engage in some thinking-outside-the-box. It’s a wonderful adventure – as is all of life with Jesus – in which we discover whether we’re going to allow money to control us, or whether we’re going to be creative in how we start to redouble our efforts to reach out into this congregation and into the community of Albany at large.
	If we allow fear to tie us up here, then it means that when we step through the doors of this building, and go out into the parking lot and are cut-off by someone trying to make a late turn through the light at the corner of Hill and Queen, and go on down to Freddy’s and meet someone in the hardware department – if we allow ourselves to be controlled by anxiety and fear, then whenever we meet anyone else at all our attitude is going to be such that the vision of Jesus in that person may be dimmed in our eyes.
	Nor is burying our attitudes to challenges going to help either. If Mary and Martha said nothing of their challenge – to each other or to Jesus – then every time Martha ran out to the kitchen to get something else for the table, she’d fill further up with resentment. She wouldn’t rejoice in Mary’s encounter to hear and to process what Jesus was saying, and her mind would be so occupied she wouldn’t be able to hear the conversation in the living room while she took the milk jug out of the fridge.
	Safety is the LAST thing Jesus promised. JUSTICE – LOVE – COMPASSSION – UNDERSTANDING – Jesus didn’t promise us any of these either – from our sisters and brothers, at any rate. YES, we’d receive all these and more from God – but looking for them from our neighbours – that would be a waste of time. Our time should be spent not in calculating what’s owed us, but in what we owe others; what we must do to ensure that people are treated fairly in our dining room here and at home; that people at FISH round the corner can find help; that workers can feel secure not only in having a job, but having fair compensation.
	Last week, a friend sent me a bunch of so-called “Truisms”. Here’s the first.
	 “Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.” Sounds good to me!  Instead, we are to wrestle with God’s contemporary prophets.
	This week, for some reason, my mind was drawn to think about Archbishop Oscar Romero. He was picked to be Archbishop in El Salvador because he was a safe, bookish, introverted priest who’d not rock any boats or disturb either the ones who controlled the markets or the governing bodies of the Church and the nation.
	But when he saw how the workers on the doorsteps of the country’s Churches were being treated – no better than the workers of Amos’ time – then he was compelled to speak out.
	Of course, he was gunned down in the midst of elevating the Bread and Wine in a Mass in his Church. And that MAY be one of the risks we face too when we put our proclamation of love and justice into actions. But if that happens, then is to be seen simply as part of the adventure of following Jesus, “the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might have first place in everything,” as Paul wrote to the Colossians.
	Don’t be afraid of anything, then – except of ignoring a cry for help from one of God’s other children whose voice may be being muffled at this very moment.
	Whoever said “Safety first” certainly wasn’t talking about being disciples of Jesus. Listen, then, to Marj as she dismisses us today, and at every celebration of our Communion. What she’s really telling us to do is to get out as fast as we, and to live recklessly in making the Gospel as practical as we possibly can.
	And that’s not half as scary as it sounds. You don’t want Marj giving you the eye next Sunday morning if you don’t at least TRY this week.


NOTES:
1 	John A. T. Robinson (1919-1983), “Honest to God”, London: SCM Press, 1963, Westminster John Knox Press, 2003, p. 90 See the book at http://cqod.com/r/rs450
2	Christopher Hitchens’ review in the New York Times Review of Books on July 1, 2010 “In the Name of the Father, the Sons . . .” By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS THE GOOD MAN JESUS AND THE SCOUNDREL CHRIST By Philip Pullman 245 pp. Canongate. $24
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/books/review/Hitchens-t.html 
3	Edwin Friedman in the Video “Reinventing Leadership”  




--
Robert P. Morrison
Interim Vicar
The Episcopal Church of St Alban,
P.O. Box 1556,
Albany, Oregon, 97321

541-921-1076 (cell)
541-967-7051 (church)