A Basket of Summer Fruit

Scripture Lessons: Colossians 1: 15-28 and Amos 8: 1-12 Sermon Title: A Basket of Summer Fruit Preached on July 21, 2019 A basket of summer fruit. That is the focus of our Second Scripture Lesson from the book of Amos. This image, on the surface, sounds nice. Summer fruit seems nice, but then what is lurking beneath the surface. It’s that way with many things about summer. Summer is nice, but then there’s the heat that comes with it. Summer vacations are nice, but then you have to come home. Have you ever come home from vacation and everyone who was so happy while you were at the beach is now grouchy and exhausted? You pull into the driveway and the grass is two feet tall. Coming back from vacation can be a little sobering. You’re greeted by a pile of yellowed newspapers. Bills are spewing out of the mailbox. You have to pick up the dogs from the kennel, and they have fleas. You’re afraid to open the milk in the refrigerator. The saddest part for me is going out to the garden. We’ve probably spent $200 on garden stuff, like fertilizer, plants, and seeds. We spent hours pulling weeds and terracing this hill so we can plant tomatoes and cucumbers, but when I go out there after we’ve been away the cucumbers are too long and the tomatoes have rotted on the vine. When you add up the cost and the labor, $200 is a big price tag for two rotten tomatoes, but what’s done is done. When you come back from vacation you have to deal with whatever you forgot to do. It’s the time for reaping whatever you’ve sown. You can’t do it over. What’s done is done. In our Second Scripture Lesson, God showed the Prophet Amos “a basket of summer fruit.” This is the second of the Prophet Amos’ metaphors that we’re encountering this summer. It’s a common enough image. Surely you have a place in the kitchen where you keep fresh fruit, but what does this metaphor mean and what does it have to do with our lives? It means that if the summer fruit is in a basket, then the time of planting is over. That time of new beginnings has come and gone. The time of fertilizing is over too. The time of pruning has passed as well. All that’s left is for the fruit to get picked. Even if the summer fruit is a bushel of bad apples, you can’t go back and do anything to change it. Amos is saying that now is the time for the people of Israel to reap what they’ve sown. As we’ve read the rest of the passage, we know that’s not a good thing. Sometimes it’s not, but that doesn’t change the fact that for them it’s too late to do anything different. It’s good to live life knowing that there is a “too late” for somethings. Hopefully living with the knowledge of “too late” in our minds forces us to do the things that must be done while we have the chance to do them. I once heard a folktale about a wild teenager who went into a forbidden forest, too disobedient to listen to everyone who warned him not to go. He was pulling down branches of ancient trees and upsetting the woodland spirits, who then, magically turned him back into a baby. The baby was returned to his mother, with the stern warning, “raise him right this time.” That’s not how it works, typically. Normally, once the summer fruit has made it to the basket, that’s it. Once the car has pulled into the driveway, back from vacation, there’s no point in regretting not having asked the kid up the street to cut the grass. All the neighbors are already talking about you, so live with it. The kids go off to college, and then for some things it’s just too late. My father-in-law told me a story about an Italian mail-carrier. He was lazy and would often put un-delivered mail in his attic. For years, maybe he intended to deliver it, I don’t know, but then one day the ceiled collapsed and fell on him in his sleep. It was too late to do anything about the undelivered mail at that point. The fruit was in the basket. For Israel it was too late too, but we can learn something from Amos, because it’s not too late for us. We can learn something from anyone who has reached this moment of finality, because we can change what we’re doing now based on what Amos wishes, especially the ruling class of Israel, done differently. You’ve heard the old anecdote, that no one lays on their death bead, wishing they had spent more time in the office. I imagine that’s true. If you remember the movie about the Holocaust, Schindler’s List, then you know that as Oscar Schindler leaves this huge group of Jews, 1,100 men and women whom he saved from the Concentration Camps, he looks at his car and the gold pin on his lapel and regrets that he never sold them. That he had the chance to sell these things and could have used the money to save one more life and didn’t. It’s a moment where he can’t do any more. The time for changing anything has passed. The opportunity to do more has come and gone and he knows in this moment, as any decent person would and as the Talmud proclaims: to save one life is to save the whole world. On the other hand, what had the wealthy in Israel saved? The book of Amos describes a world where those who had power did the opposite of Schindler. Not selling their goods to save people, but “buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals.” What is life, but our chance to make a difference and to make this world a better place? Yet in Amos we hear of those who cannot wait for the Sabbath to be over that they might reopen their stores and get back to cheating their customers, as though the point of life were making money. What is it about our society, that we have created so many people who believe that those who die with the most toys win, as though what we have in our bank accounts would somehow make us into bigger and better people? We too must heed this warning: when we reach the end of our days, when we, like summer fruit are picked from the vine, our regret will be not having shown more kindness and generosity while we had the chance. Ours is a world of investments, property acquisitions, mansions, and yachts. Last September, Business Insider, reported that the world’s largest private yacht, which cost more than $600 million to build, and has held the record for being the largest for more than five years, at 590 feet long, has been dethroned by an even bigger yacht. What would you do with a boat that big? Fish? Water ski? The new biggest yacht in the world was built by a Norwegian billionaire who ordered the construction of this new yacht to be 597 feet long, just seven feet longer than the current record holder. Why 597 feet and not just 590 feet? Because so many of us think that means something. So many of us join in the great rat race to have the nicest things. In the hope that wealth will provide happiness and fulfillment, we pursue it relentlessly. Some cut the salaries of coworkers to increase the bottom line, others wager physical health with endless hours, then compromise the wellbeing of their families by providing for their physical needs while disregarding their emotional needs. Only, here’s the problem. It doesn’t work. Money can’t buy happiness. I’m sure you’ve heard that before. It’s true. Think about it like this. Do you remember what happened to Mr. Banks in Merry Poppins? Little Michael Banks wanted to use his tuppence to buy crumbs from the bird lady. “Feed the birds, tuppence a bag.” You remember. Mr. Banks wanted him to invest that money instead. So did Mr. Daws Sr., who, played by Dick Van Dyke sang: If you invest your tuppence wisely in the bank Safe and sound Soon that tuppence safely invested in the bank Will compound And you’ll achieve that sense of conquest As your affluence expands In the hands of the directors Who invest as propriety demands Little Michael can’t decide what to do. He knows what Mr. Daws Sr. wants him to do. He also knows what his father wants him to do, only he naturally seems to know that what will bring him the most joy in this moment is feeding the birds. Watching this movie, we also know that Michael is right, for what does Mr. Banks know about happiness? What does he know about life? He’s the most foolish man, bumbling through his days, blind to everyone around him. Merry Poppins says he can’t see beyond his nose. Interestingly, he only finds joy once he’s been fired from the bank and spends an afternoon flying a kite with his family. Why? Because we choose the pursuit of wealth, but like King Midas, whose touch turns everything to gold, like Ebenezer Scrooge, who sleeps alone in a drafty old house, like those siblings that you know, who tore each other apart at the reading of the will, we have yet to learn that kindness, generosity, and love bring us what an excess of money never will. The tragedy of our Second Scripture Lesson isn’t just that the poor went hungry and the impoverished never pulled themselves out because of an economic system that privileged the rich, it’s that those who were rich died with regrets. They died having chosen money over people. Wealth over love. Greed over generosity. And when people who make such choices have a moment to reflect on the way they’ve lived and the choices that they’ve made, I’ve never heard of one who said, “I sure am glad I’m dying with a lot of money in my bank accounts.” No. Like fruit picked from the vine, when we go to meet our maker, it will be those who gave of themselves who leave this earth having known joy, and who go knowing that their joy will not end. Today is my birthday. Birthdays are always sobering. It’s a moment to realize that whatever I intended to do over the last year will not be done. Another year of my life is gone. Of course, I may have many more. Harry Vaughn also had a birthday this week. He turned 90, and now he is on his way to 100. When will we be picked from the vine, harvested at the end of our days? We don’t know and we can’t tell, but this passage from Amos warns us again to remember that it is coming. Like a thief in the night it comes, and when it does there is no do-over, no second chance. There will be no five-minute warning that we might quickly give away all that we’ve saved or make right what we’ve done wrong. There is no re-set button on life. And why not change now? Why postpone the joy that comes from living out our greatest purpose? We were created by the God who showed us how to live. He, who poured himself out in life, invites us to follow his example, that our joy would be complete. Amen.

Amos, What Do You See?

Scripture Lessons: Colossians 1: 1-14 and Amos 7: 7-17 Sermon Title: Amos, What Do You See? Preached on July 14, 2019 Scripture is full of wonderful metaphors. When God speaks through Scripture, we hear the divine speak in terms that we can understand, which is gracious in and of itself. God, who could so easily speak over our heads, is unlike those who use 50 cent words to make themselves sound intelligent, and instead, speaks to us of heavenly things using what we know about already. You can think of Jesus saying that God’s love for us, who are sinful and disobedient, is like that of a Father who welcomes his prodigal son back home or a woman who loses her fortune and then finds it again. Rather than using words like “predestination” or “limited atonement,” Jesus just says: faith is like a mustard seed. Then Paul says that the world is like a woman in labor, we suffer because new life is coming. Likewise, in our Second Scripture Lesson, God, through the prophet Amos, uses something that we know: a plumb line, to explain something that we don’t know or don’t fully understand, the importance of righteous judgement. Judgement is hard to understand, mostly because we don’t like it. No one likes the sound of judgement. Certainly, I don’t, but to explain God’s righteous judgement using the metaphor of a plumb line makes it a little bit better, because this metaphor helps us to see that life lived outside certain standards of behavior is like living in a house with a crooked wall. Sooner or later, it’s going to fall down, and what will hurt worse than fixing the wall is it falling down on us. That’s what a plumb line is for. A plumb line is basically just a weight with a string tied to it. When the weight is suspended it can show you a straight line up and down. I know you use it as a reference, though I’ve never actually used one. You can tell I haven’t by looking at anything that I’ve ever built, but I frequently used something like it in Mexico. Our church still goes to Mexico for mission trips. When I was in High School, we drove to either Monterey or Juarez in the old bus we called Woody (may he rest in peace) and there we’d stack cinderblocks to build houses. Due to our inexperience with stacking cinderblocks, brick lines were used to make sure that we stacked those blocks in straight lines to build a sturdy house for a family to live in. A Brick line is something like a plumb line. One hooks a wooden block on two corners, the string that stretches between provides a straight horizontal line to stack the cinderblocks according to. A plumb line does the same thing, it just gives you a straight vertical line. The brick line was the most important tool of the person we called, a “house builder.” That person was like the guy who holds the clipboard on a road maintenance crew. I loved these trips to Mexico so much that even after I was a high school student, I kept going back as a college student and was then promoted to this role of “house builder”. This was a big title, and my primary role was checking on all the brick lines. However, I wasn’t very good at it. In fact, the group of High School students stacking blocks got ahead of me. They had the whole back wall of our house stacked before I had had a chance to check their lines. This wall was bowed out so far, I didn’t know what to do, so I chose to just look the other way. My friend Dave Elliot was the other house builder, and if I took the wall down, he’d be way ahead of me. I didn’t want that, so I just kept going with one unstable wall to this four walled house. If that sounds like a horribly immature and irresponsible decision, that’s because it was. I hope you’ve never done anything like that, but it’s hard to know what to do sometimes when things are out of whack. It’s hard to know how to fix some things. There are times in life when we live in denial of problems that we’re afraid of dealing with. God doesn’t like it when we do that. Why? Because God cares as much about the family who’s going to live in the house as he does about the group whose building it and the college kid who’s overseeing it. Fortunately, God knows that sometimes we get caught up in the maintenance of our own ego and fail to face the truth of who we are and what we’re doing, and so, God sends righteous prophets, like Amos, to warn us of the results of our bad behavior. Our Second Scripture Lesson began this way: The Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand. And the Lord said to me, “Amos, what do you see?” And I said, “A plumb line.” Then the Lord said, “See, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass them by; The high places shall be made desolate, And the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste, And I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword.” The walls of the house of Israel are crooked, and God is going to tear them down to build them up again. That’s a terrifying idea, but what’s more terrifying to God is allowing his people to live in a house with crooked walls any longer. Can you imagine what it would have been like for this family to move into the house that I was building them in Mexico? Three straight walls, one crooked. I might have said something like, “Three out of four ain’t bad.” To which the mother would have said, “I’m not sleeping in this house. I’m not letting our children sleep in this house.” Fortunately for the family who lived in that house, and fortunately for the reputation of our church in Mexico, the guy who was supervising me came by to check the walls and made us take that wall all the way down to build it back up again. Dave Elliot’s house ended up being finished way ahead of mine, but it feels better to do the job right. Doesn’t it? It feels better to live a righteous life, according to God’s standards of justice. It’s best to live in a society where the poor and the voiceless are provided for. It’s best to live constructing walls for the wellbeing of all God’s children. What the book of Amos reminds us of is that God cares about all His other children as much as he cares about us, so God sends prophets who call us to tear down the crooked walls that we build which abuse the poor and the widow. And should we fail to listen, God tears them down himself. That’s sad in a way, but necessary, because sometimes we don’t listen. And sometimes we don’t listen because Amos isn’t the only one speaking. After Amos declared that the Lord is “setting a plumb line in the midst” of Israel, Amaziah, the priest said to Amos, “O seer, go, flee away…never again prophesy [here].” Why? Why would Amaziah say this? Because some people can’t handle the truth and don’t want anyone else to have to handle it either. Amos speaks an inconvenient truth. But the truth is inconvenient to some people. It always is! Some people benefit from crooked walls and are afraid of how it will look if one has to be torn down on their watch. Our society is not very forgiving of people who make mistakes, so rather than apologize we deny. Rather than start over, we cover up. The King of Israel is probably thinking about how he’ll be portrayed by his biographers and if he’s keeping up with the King of Aram, so as both Amos the Prophet and Amaziah the Priest are attempting to influence the King of Israel, Jeroboam, the king, must decide who he’ll listen to. That’s how it often is. The King is a lot like all of us. He’s glad to sweep things under the rug, which is wrong. However, under the right kind of pressure he’d stop. With enough grace and encouragement, he would change and would act right. Unfortunately, though, Amaziah is there silencing Amos the Prophet and justifying the King’s bad behavior. I wonder if you have a friend who’s like Amaziah. Whenever you call, she’s on your side. After talking with her you don’t feel so bad or so alone. I have friends like that. I have friends whom I call whenever I want to complain about anything, and no matter what it is, they’re ready to commiserate and slander whoever has been trying to correct my bad behavior. Then, once I’m ready to hear the truth I go talk to my wife Sara. We need people who love us enough to tell us the truth. If we’re lucky, then we’re lucky enough to have friends who love us and support us. So, I hope you have a friend, who loves you so much that most of the time she just listens, but who some of the time, loves you so much she can’t help but tell you when you’re being irresponsible and immature; that your crooked walls of behavior are about to collapse on top of the people you love. That’s why I don’t like it when the President talks about “fake news.” I know the press is hard on him, and I know they don’t get it right all the time, but I also know that while evil can be at work in those who stand in our way, sometimes the evil we must fear the most is the one who cheers us on while we’re running in the wrong direction. We can’t just silence the prophets. Crooked walls have to come down and there are times in our lives when God sends people who say hard things because He loves us enough to tell us the truth. And if we just brush off the prophets, the crooked walls will stay, then fall, when we could have fixed them. God holds a plumb line, that the crooked walls of society be rebuilt before they teeter and collapse on the desperate and the disenfranchised. God holds the plumb line up to our own behavior, because God cares for those who suffer under the crooked walls that we build. You see, God isn’t the housing inspector who walks around searching for code violations just to wield power. That’s not what God’s righteous judgement is. For our God is about rescuing us all from darkness. Even the darkness of our own making. And what is God’s will? That you and I and all God’s children have a house of four straight walls to live in. Amos’ great vision was that “justice roll down like water, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” May it be so. Amen.

Wash and Be Clean

Scripture Lessons: Galatians 6: 7-16 and 2 Kings 5: 1-14 Sermon title: “Wash and be clean” Preached on July 7, 2019 This Second Scripture Lesson is focused on a great and infamous man named Naaman who was healed by the power of God, but what nearly prevented him from being healed is what I’m most interested in this morning. There are things that get in the way of healing, especially when it comes to those who care a lot about what people think of them. You’ve heard of Wilt Chamberlain. According to some he was the greatest basketball player of all time having once scored 100 points by himself in a single game. That’s the most anyone has ever scored in a professional basketball game. It’s probably the most anyone will ever score in a professional basketball game, but what’s so interesting about this game that took place in Hershey, Pennsylvania in 1962, is that when he scored over 100 point by himself in this single game, Wilt Chamberlain made nearly all of his foul shots. Now why did he make nearly all of his foul shots in this game when he typically made less than half of them? It’s because for this season and only this season, Wilt Chamberlain shot his foul shots underhanded, using a technique I grew up calling “the granny shot.” From the foul line that night in Hersey, Pennsylvania Chamberlain made 28 out of 30 of his foul shots granny style when he normally made 12 or 13 out of 30 shooting them with his hands over his head. Now if Wilt Chamberlain, all 7 feet, 275 pounds of Wilt Chamberlain, could dramatically increase his ability to make foul shots by using the granny shot, why would he ever shoot foul shots any other way? According to Chamberlain himself, it was because he thought shooting underhanded made him look like ridiculous. In fact, in his autobiography Chamberlain wrote, “I felt silly, like a sissy, shooting underhanded. I know I was wrong. I know some of the best foul shooters in history shot that way... I just couldn't do it.” Generally speaking, one might say that there are two kinds of people in this world. The kind of person who can understand why Wilt Chamberlain went back to shooting foul shots the way that he did and the other kind of person who thinks he’s crazy to have cared so much about what other people thought. Which kind of person was Naaman? Right there at the beginning of our Second Scripture Lesson we read: “Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Aram, was a great man and in high favor with his master, because by him the Lord had given victory to Aram. The man, though a mighty warrior, suffered from leprosy.” You wouldn’t call a man who suffered from leprosy vain, but a man like this has to spend a fair amount of time thinking about how he is perceived. A commander or a general must spend time thinking about how he is seen in the eyes of his troops. That was true of George Washington. Just after the 4th of July it’s good to be thinking of him, but let it be known that as a general he executed his own soldiers if they deserted their post. Why? Because no one who gives orders can risk appearing weak. That’s true of both generals and parents, so if I make the declaration that everyone must eat five bites of soup before they leave the table, no one can leave until they’ve done it. Why? Because once the children see weakness, they’ll take advantage of it. Imagine then, how it felt to Naaman, commander of the army of Aram, that when he came with his horses and chariots, and halted at the entrance of the Prophet Elisha’s house, and Elisha sent out a messenger. I expect that Naaman rode up with a proper procession of troops on horse-back and troops in chariots. Maybe it was something like the ancient world’s equivalent to the parade through Washington DC last Thursday with tanks on display and fly-overs. Only in this case, after the pomp and circumstance, the great commander, the giver of orders, a severe man who demanded respect and couldn’t stand to look silly in front of his troops, is left waiting outside the house of a prophet he’s never met because Elisha won’t even pay him the honor of a proper greeting. All the way there, as they rode on their chariots, surely people were shaking in their boots. Children were climbing into their mother’s arms and rushing inside, the King of Israel tore his clothes and cried out in a panic. However, then they stop at the house of the Prophet Elisha, the dust settles, the commander dismounts, and Elisha didn’t even come out to see about the commotion. Then, Elisha sent a messenger to him, with directions so simple the foreign commander surely wondered why he had traveled so far: “Go, wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored, and you shall be clean.” The commander of an army just can’t be disrespected that way. After seeing how the Prophet didn’t even come out to see him, Naaman’s power and authority were in question. So, understandably, “Naaman became angry and went away, saying, “I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, and would wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy! Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them, and be clean?” I guess not, because sometimes the cure requires surrender. It could be that the cure even requires humiliation. Sometimes the cure requires that you and I address our vanity and stop worrying so much about what everyone else thinks to do finally what must be done. Now a statement like that assumes that people suffer from a level of vanity. I’m not trying to call anyone in particular vain this morning. I’m trying to call everyone vain this morning myself especially. Vanity is a problem because sometimes it’s vanity that keeps basketball players from being better basketball players, commanders of armies from being cured from their leprosy, sick people from getting better, aging people from aging gracefully, and sinners from being set free. Sometimes our Achilles heel is just so preventable. Sometimes we could all too easily do something about what ails us, but don’t. Why? Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once declared that “our thinking is often anthropocentric rather than theocentric.” What he means is that “the question which is usually asked is, “What will my neighbor think…” or “what will my friends think...” Somehow [we] forget to ask the question, “What will God think.” And so [we] live in fear because [we] are bogged down on the horizontal plane with only a modicum of devotion to the vertical.” What does God require of Naaman the General, but to wash and be clean. And what kept him from it? Pride, vanity, and the maintenance of his own reputation. If the great preacher William Sloane Coffin was right in saying that “faith is not believing without proof but trusting without reservation” than it might be safe to conclude that Naaman’s struggle to get into the water of the Jordan River isn’t like the leap of faith where you walk on water. It’s not so radical or dramatic as that. It’s maybe more like the struggle of every boy who’s been invited onto the dance floor by a young girl but is afraid because he thinks he can’t dance. Should he bow to vanity? Should he listen to the jeers of his friends? Should Naaman risk forsaking the respect of his troops? Thinking this way, it’s easy to see that the maintenance of reputation can be a problem, for while we all long for approval, some long for the approval even of those who hold them back from doing what is best. In the same way, the soul of our nation is threatened by an evil that we are afraid to really talk about, for fear of how we’ll be perceived. On the boarder there are children separated from their parents, a father drowned with his child on his back, but in the age of partisan politics we must be careful about what we say about it or risk being called a liberal. A man was nearly sent to prison for giving an illegal immigrant water as he crossed the desert, but it was hard for many to pardon him for fear of appearing soft on the immigration issue. I don’t know how to tell you to think or how to tell you to vote, but as a preacher I can say that if we don’t spend less time worried about how our neighbors and our friends perceive us and more attention to how we are being judged by God we risk winning an election while continuing to suffer with spiritual leprosy. That’s how it was with Naaman. That’s how it often is with us. Last Monday I read the front page of the Marietta Daily Journal. (You know, it’s been so many weeks that I’ve quoted the Marietta Daily Journal they ought to give me a free subscription or something.) Last Monday on the front page were the top causes of preventable death in Cobb County. Here in Cobb County the top cause of preventable death is heart disease, which might be managed with medication and diet. The second is suicide. Suicide is preventable. However, it demands we get the help that we need, and that’s where it gets tricky. Going to a counselor isn’t bad at all, but parking in the lot where someone might see us, that’s where the struggle is. We must take a lesson from Naaman. To see that only a fool stands in the way of his own healing out of concern for how he’s being perceived. In our First Scripture Lesson, the Apostle Paul wrote with his own hand: “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world [with all its pride, expectations, rumors, vanity, and shame] has been crucified to me, and I to the world [for what they say and what they think], it’s all nothing. But a new creation, that is everything.” May it be so with you. May it be so with me. Amen.