Amos 7:7–15
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May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable
in your sight, O Lord our strength and our Redeemer.
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This morning I want to tell you a story. It’s an old story,
an ancient story about a dream. And the best thing about this
story is that it’s true; it’s as true today as it was
thousands of years ago. For the dream is God’s dream for his
children – children he has called into life to live in peaceful
engagement and deep wellbeing – with one another and with
him. Notice that preposition with. That’s the
crucial word, the crucial idea. God calls his people to live in
love and harmony with one another and with him. For
he is the wellspring of the love that makes the harmony
possible. Without him, the love dries up. Without him the
harmony disappears. That word with, that sense of God
with us – governing our conduct, enlightening our
vision — lies at the heart of God’s dream.
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Long ago and far away – on top of Mount Sinai, in fact – the
Lord God shared his dream for his children with Moses. “I am
calling a people,” he said, “who don’t simply want to
be comforted and be served – everyone wants that. I’m
calling a people who are willing to comfort and serve one
another. If they will let me, I will give them the courage, the
compassion, the strength to serve one another. If they will let me
I will live with them and through them – and I’ll incline
their hearts towards love – love for each other, love for me,
love for everyone they see.” This was the dream God offered
his people. The catch was that they would have to live into that
dream. They would have to work with God to achieve
it. He wasn’t going to do it for them – not all of
it, at least – nor was he asking them to do it all by themselves.
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And the good news is that the people of the Exodus began to respond to
God’s gracious invitation. It was like hearing John F.
Kennedy say, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask
what you can do for your country” – and then joining the
Peace Corps to go out and serve others. It was like hearing Martin
Luther King say, “I have a dream” and then stepping
off the curb to join the civil rights march – which, up to
that point, you had only been watching pass by.
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People wanted, you see, to be part of God’s inspiring
dream. So they began to follow after him and learn his
ways – first as they passed through the deserts of the Exodus
and then as they entered into the Promised Land. Delighted at
their response, God blessed them – with houses and land, with
grain and oil and wine. And true to God’s calling, they
shared what he’d given them with the widows and orphans, the
strangers who wandered into their midst – just as God had asked
them to. And wonder of wonders, despite all that sharing, not
one person lacked a thing. Everyone had enough.
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But in all of our lives there are two forces at work – an impulse
to love and share – which comes from God – and an impulse
to fear and hoard for ourselves. And I won’t venture to say
where that fearful impulse comes
from . . . but it is
prevalent . . . and it eventually
became prevalent in the lives of those ancient Israelites. No
matter that God had blessed them abundantly. Some of them began
to hoard what God had given them, not sharing a thing with their
needier neighbors. The richest among them began to build houses
of rare woods and Phoenician ivory. They drank spiced wine out
of golden goblets. They closed their ears to the cries of needy
people around them. And soon enough those cries reached the
ears of God.
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This time the Lord God did not come down to them directly – as he
had come to Moses on top of Mount Sinai. This time he looked
around for someone who still wanted to work with him – to
make the ancient dream a reality. The man the Lord found was
Amos, a herdsman and dresser of fig trees who lived in Tekoa, not
far from the northern sanctuary at Bethel.
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Amos was a herdsman, the text tells us. But he also tended to
trees that produced figs. One of his tasks was to cut the tops
of figs open. If the fruit was healthy this cut allowed the fruit
to ripen sooner. If it was infested his cut allowed invading
insects to escape. In this passage the Lord is commissioning
Amos to go to Israel and tell them what he, the Lord, had found in the
fruit of their lives.
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Amos’ report on the way the people were living was not good
news – not the way God saw things, anyway. In fact
Amos’ report had judgment written all over it. The herdsman
spoke with Amaziah, the chief priest at the shrine at Bethel. And
he spoke — not in the language of farmers, which Amaziah might
not understand — but in the language of builders of
palaces. For this was the language Israel’s ruling classes
now understood perfectly. “The Lord has examined your
religious shrines and your palaces,” Amos told the
priest. “He’s hung a plumb line beside
them – and the bad news is that those walls are now so crooked
they’re about to fall down. The whole structure’s about
to come down. And the Lord is holding you builders accountable.“
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Well, Amaziah knew who those builders were. He knew them
all. So after hearing Amos’ words, he rushed to Jeroboam,
the king, and cried. “That hayseed, that fellow Amos, now
figures he’s God’s own prophet – and he’s prophesying
against the king and the king’s own shrine,” the priest cried.
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And neither one of them caught the irony of those words – that
it wasn’t the king’s shrine or the priest’s shrine
at all. It was God’s holy shrine – that they
were meant to share with God’s people. But God, along with
the hungry and the homeless, had now been left out of the picture in
those northern tribes.
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They say the test of a prophet is whether his prophetic words ever
come true. Amos’ words of judgment over Israel
did – eventually – come true. Forty years later
Israel fell to the Assyrians, who sent those ten tribes into exile,
never to be heard from again. Sad to say, Amos had seen the
vision well. He’d interpreted it correctly.
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Now this would seem to be a bleak story this morning – except for
one thing. The sad end of the ten northern tribes was indeed the
end of them – but it wasn’t the end of God’s story,
and certainly not the end of his dream. The good news this morning
is that even today, God’s dream of a society where everyone
practices the love they have learned from him is still on
offer. Even today he invites us to live into that dream and bring
it to pass.
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The plumb line, too, is still in place – an independent
measurement of our actions and our words. Only today it looks a
little different than it did way back then. It’s no longer
a hunk of tin tied onto the end of a long piece of string. Instead
it looks more like Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who stands among us,
ready to help any who are willing to listen, willing to build
God’s kingdom here on earth . . . and
enter into God’s dream.
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And my hope is this morning that you and I will be those dreamers.
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Amen.
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