I Also Took Care of Sycamore-Fig Trees

Amos 7: 7-17, page 651
This is what he showed me: the Lord was standing by a wall that had been built true to plumb, with a plumb line in his hand. And the Lord asked me, “What do you see Amos?”
“A plumb line,” I replied.
Then the Lord said, “Look, I am setting a plumb line among my people Israel; I will spare them no longer.
The high places of Isaac will be destroyed and the sanctuaries of Israel will be ruined;
With my sword I will rise against the house of Jeroboam.”
Then Amaziah the priest of Bethel sent a message to Jeroboam king of Israel: “Amos is raising a conspiracy against you in the very heart of Israel. The land cannot bear all his words. For this is what Amos is saying:
“Jeroboam will die by the sword,
And Israel will surely go into exile, away from their native land.”
Then Amaziah said to Amos, “Get out, you seer! Go back to the land of Judah. Earn your bread there and do your prophesying there. Don’t prophesy anymore at Bethel, because this is the king’s sanctuary and the temple of the kingdom.”
Amos answered Amaziah, “I was neither a prophet nor a prophet’s son, but I was a shepherd, and I also took care of sycamore-fig trees. But the Lord took me from tending the flock and said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’ Now then, hear the word of the Lord. You say,
“Do not prophesy against Israel, and stop preaching against the house of Isaac.”
Therefore this is what the Lord says: “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 certainly go into exile, away from their native land.”
Sermon
Last Sunday’s paper was full of patriotism – there was anticipation for 4th of July parades, there were advertisements, but with a patriotic flare - as the likes of Walgreens threw in the stars and stripes for the backdrop of their normal circulars, and there was concern that our country was turning away from her true foundation – faith in God, even in the advertisements.
The Hobby Lobby paid for a full insert of quotes from great figures of American History – Ben Franklin, John Adams, and George Washington. I’ll read the quote from Thomas Jefferson: “And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that His justice cannot sleep forever.”
Not bad for a deist.
Even better for a guy who produced his own Bible by cutting out the parts he couldn’t believe in by the standards of his own logic.
So as a Christian I value his words even more as they take seriously the judgment of God – and his words serve as a good introduction to today’s lesson that begins a series of sermons from the prophets Amos and Hosea.
Though it seems clear that Jefferson did believe in God, we know that he was not a run of the mill Christian. He was a radical in his time, and that makes him an even better introduction to prophetic literature as the prophets were not run of the mill religious types either. They prove that God speaks where God chooses to speak – not necessarily from the holy of holies, but from the radical voice that we are reluctant to hear.
The prophet is a distinct office, though like the priest the prophet is called to “mediate between the worlds of the sacred and the profane.”
The priest however mediates with authority – the authority of blood-line, son of the priestly lineage – the authority of purity, fulfilling the requirements of diet and lifestyle mandated by scripture – the authority of the Temple, administering in the holy places – and the authority of the Bible, serving as scripture’s chief interpreter.
The prophet on the other hand is of no particular lineage, is not particularly pure, preaches not from the pulpits of society but from the street corners, and only interprets that scripture engrained in memory, come to life on the street.
Amos the prophet is an outsider – and in our lesson for today his words are ignored by one who should have known enough to listen but didn’t hear.
The priest in our story is Amaziah, and if you have any notes in your Bible they may tell you a little something about him – he wasn’t a priest at the Temple, the one in Jerusalem – he was a priest at the temple at Bethel. There was only supposed to be one temple in Israel, but when the northern tribes started doing so well economically they just decided to build their own with their own group of priests appointed by the king.
The Temple in Jerusalem was built to be a house of God, and I suppose Amaziah and the other priests assumed that it would be nice for God to have a second house – a summer cottage I guess they were thinking.
They made it nice – full of gold, incense, there was even a nice gold calf for God to sit on.
The priest Amaziah must have assumed that if God had anything to say, then surely God would say it while sitting in the temple – why listen to the prophet Amos, what could he know?
He wasn’t from a priestly family, didn’t appear particularly holy, had the wrong accent, and didn’t preside at the temple so what could he know?
In fact, Amos incriminates himself saying, “I was neither a prophet, nor a prophets son, but I was a shepherd, and I also took care of sycamore-fig trees.”
Not much of a résumé, not much of anything in the eyes of a priest – but more than enough in the eyes of God.
Amos becomes one of those few people in human history who know that they’ve seen God face to face – and it turns out that God didn’t need a golden calf to sit on – in fact God is more like Amos than we would dare to imagine as God doesn’t embody one of the holy priesthood or the powerful monarchy, but one of the carpenters constructing a wall.
The book of Amos is a book about God’s love for justice and God’s hatred of injustice. What specific injustice God sees in the world of Amos isn’t immediately clear from our passage for today – what God is so angry about isn’t mentioned - but what is clear is that Amos knows where to find God while the king and the priest do not.
What is clear is that God is out among the people, and not just out among them supervising or observing, out among them holding a plumb line as one of them.
We have a big problem in the world today and I tell you it’s not so different from the problem that Amos’ world faced – we need God but we don’t know where to look – so we go looking in the holy places and among the holy people – we separate ourselves from certain segments of society, we find ourselves all alone, and we find ourselves convicted by the judgment of God.
Amos calls us back however – reminds us that God is among the people – and not the ones who we would call special or important – among the ones who we would shy away from, ignore, devalue, and hardly give the time of day.
God’s word came to Amos through God the carpenter – and the one who cared for sycamore-fig trees wasn’t too uppity to recognize God there.
So I charge you to go and do the same.
Go out into the world today remembering that God is out there at work.
Go out into the world today knowing that God is speaking from the mouths of the afflicted.
Go out into the world today expecting to come into the presence of the holy when you are in the presence of the lowly – for when Amaziah and the King confined themselves to the sanctuary of the temple they cut themselves off from God.
There were three who passed by a wounded man on the road, but only one stopped to help. Only one Samaritan remembered that in serving the oppressed, in hearing their cry for help, you are walking into the presence of God.
Unlike the politician who serves in the sanctuary of Washington, you must hear the cries of the people.
Unlike the priest who serves in the sanctuary of religiosity, to hear God you must hear the voices of God’s people.
You must be like Amos, the gardener, who never distanced himself so far from the poor, the oppressed, the immigrant, the afflicted, the downcast, the unemployed, the underemployed, that he forgot that their voice calling for justice is the word of the Lord calling for justice.
Amen.