The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, Year C, 2016 – Amos 8:1-12; Colossians 1:15-29; Luke 10:38-42
From the prophet Amos, a vision of devastation.
Shall not the land tremble, says the Lord, and everyone mourn who lives in it?
Shall it not be tossed about and rise and sink again, like the Nile of Egypt?
God speaks to his people Israel in their well-being, and accuses them of failing to live the word of the Lord.
Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land… The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob, surely I will never forget any of their deeds.
It is in part their wealth, which is never won without injustice. It is in part their idols, the other gods they have made for themselves. They trample on the poor so that they may live in their houses of hewn stone and they afflict the righteous; they take a bribe and corrupt, for their own gain, the due process of law.
It is all these things, and in them all, this thing most of all: Israel does not hear the word of the Lord—though He speaks to them in Torah and in Temple, and in the prophet’s words. The result is disintegration.
It does not look like disintegration, though. It looks like plenty.
Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory,
And lounge on their couches…
Who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp.
The people have a party while the land burns; untruth and the judgement that inevitably follows look at first like a basket of summer fruit.
Amos, what do you see? And I said, A basket of summer fruit.
Have any of you seen The Big Short? We watched it as a family this week. It tracks events leading up to the worldwide economic meltdown in 2008. A mountain of wealth, a whole kingdom was built on the greed of people like us and on the greed of the banks, with a little fraud to help them out. For a while it looked really good. The fruit was luscious and ripe for the picking; small-time buyers could own four houses on borrowed money and small-time sellers could make $10,000 in a morning on a subprime mortgage deal. It looked like a basket of summer fruit. But there was no truth in it. The kingdom came tumbling down. (8 million people lost their jobs. 6 million people lost their homes. And it was mostly the little people who suffered.)
Amos, what do you see? That which looks pleasing to the eyes is not always so.
How is one to know? Not by looking with the eyes of the world; not by trusting in the world’s desires. That is what Israel did in the days of Amos. That is what we did, in the run-up to 2008. Even the very few people who saw that the structure was false and that it was going to fail used their knowledge to make money on the disaster. They saw with the same eyes as everyone else: money is surely good. When the two most likable characters, two young guys who saw the problem and got rich quick, asked their mentor why he had helped them—against his own principles—he said simply, “You wanted to be rich. Now you are.” That’s it, in a nutshell. You wanted to be rich. Because rich is good in our eyes, these eyes that see with the wisdom of the world.
Rich is good. But it is not the word of the Lord. “Hear this, you that trample on the needy And bring to ruin the poor of the land.” Hear this: it is the poor who are blessed. You are wrong. You are utterly, fundamentally mistaken about what you believe to be true about life. It is not even a matter of being unjust. You are just wrong. We are wrong. We cannot see with our own eyes what is true. Blessed are the poor.
This is the word of the Lord, against all words of the world.
It is the Word of the Lord that stands at the still centre of the whirling world.
It is in the Word that we know what is true. It is here in God’s word in the Bible, in the Christ, that truth for the world may be found.
And so it is here that we must turn to find it.
That is what Mary does.
When the Word comes to her home in Jesus the Christ, she sits at his feet and listens.
Only this. She sits at his feet and listens.
And Jesus says it is the one thing necessary.
“Martha, Martha,” he says to her sister, dear Martha, Martha so like us—Martha who in the eyes of the world does in fact have justice on her side. Martha, Jesus says, you are wrong. There is need of only one thing. Before and behind everything else in this life, sit at my feet and listen to my word.
Mary has chosen the better part.
And it will not be taken away from her. Mary sits at Jesus’ feet and listens to his word. In the eyes of the world it does not look fair. But it is the one thing necessary.
This is the great gift Jesus offers us. We are a world like Israel in the time of Amos. We do not know what is true; we do not do what is true. On our own, with our eyes only, we cannot see. The Big Short proved that on a world-wide level. Where is our help? Our help is in the Lord.
For God has seen our need and heard our cry and he has sent his son, Jesus the Word, Jesus, truth and grace, to live with us and walk with us and be for us the light in a world that cannot see. Jesus who is the image of the unseen God.
And the word was with God and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God, and all things came into being through him. In him was life, and the life was the light of all things… And the light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.
Jesus who walks with us gives us this gift. Light in our darkness, God’s word spoken in his own person so that we might again hear. God’s word lifted up over all the world on the cross, so that all the world might see. In the cross of Christ I glory, because it is our hope. Jesus enables us again to draw near. He enables us again to hear.
The word is very near us in Jesus the Christ. Christ gives himself to us, gives himself for us on the cross, so that the Word might be written on our heart. So that we might turn again and see, so that we might turn again and hear, so that we might follow.
He asks of us only this. Sit at his feet and listen. Listen to the Word of God written in the Scriptures of the Church. Listen to the Word of God sung in the hymns of the church. Listen to the Word of God prayed in the worship of the church, our Daily Offices and this Eucharist, the centre of our worshipping life.
Listen to the Word of God, because in it alone is our truth.
This brings me to what is most worrying about the decision made at our General Synod last week (to revise the definition of marriage so as to remove the gender distinction). Here is why I cannot trust this decision, why I do not believe it is true.
It is not just that it contradicts Gods’ Word written, on many levels, though it does do that.
It is that it is a decision made without the Word.
There is in the Resolution to change the marriage canon no mention of the Bible or the Prayer Book or the long teaching of the Church. For its new vision of marriage this Resolution turns instead to the world. Marriage shall be, it says, that which is in accordance with civil law. The law of the land is the touchstone and foundation for the vision of marriage this new canon offers. Where is the Word of the Lord? It is nowhere to be found.
The time is surely coming, says the Lord God,
When I will send a famine on the land,
Not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water,
But of hearing the words of the Lord.
This way lies only disintegration.
Jesus has offered us something more. He has given us the one thing necessary. He has given us again the possibility of hearing the Word that is true. I pray that we may at St. Matthews sit together at his feet and listen to him.
