Summer Fruit

Amos 8:1-12

This is not one of those fun, encouraging scriptures. Not a depiction of God who gathers us close in her arms, and holds us his palm. Amos encounters a different face of God. A God who tosses our clothes out onto the pavement and leaves us standing cold and naked with shame.

This passage is about why we are all doomed, and it’s not why you might think: it’s not about personal immorality, adultery, or war: it is about the poor. Specifically, a lack of concern for the poor. God cares about our individual morality as well, but as far as this passage is concerned, that’s not why we’re all doomed. It’s the sneaky, less obvious ways, the injustices we’re trained not to see. The rich rulers are cheating the poor and ruining the land. God’s mercy concerns not the rich, but the poor. God stakes a claim to say that the divine One cares deeply about how humans are treating each other. And to demonstrate this care and concern, God shows Amos a basket of summer fruit.

When I was little, my grandparents had a basket of plastic fruit sitting on their kitchen table. It was pretty and shiny, and I knew it was fake, but once I chewed on it either just to be sure or because it looked so good. The plastic had a nasty, harsh taste, and bounced between my teeth and my tongue. This was fruit that could not be consumed and digested. This is like the basket of fruit that I imagine God showed to Amos. The image is only visual, Amos does not touch or taste the fruit to experience how this fruit also shows the difference between good and evil.

Imagine with me, for a moment, that our nation is like Ancient Israel. Imagine that we have a shrinking middle class, while the rich seem to get richer and fewer and the poor poorer and more numerous. In which we don’t have a living wage, and yet blame folks for being poor, while we can shop discount and bulk because the workers aren’t paid enough, while a $40 sweater cost $2 to make, but the profit goes to the company and not to the knitter, when the hands in the middle make all the profit, cheating the maker and the buyer, when a grande nonfat latte costs $4.50, but for every pound of coffee sold in the United States farmers get less than 35 cents and coffee pickers less than 14 cents. And all along we exchange the ephah for the shekel and buy the needy for a pair of sandals. We don’t even have to wait for the sabbath to be over, we can do this all on Sunday if we want to. But the God of love and mercy and justice says: I see you over there and I will not forget. The God of Jacob is the same God of Jesus, the same God who holds the poor close to the divine heart. Just Imagine. Our resources not being used in ways that can sustain all people. Our rain forests trampled, oil seeping into our coasts, sweatshop laborers working for pennies so that we can have more wardrobe options, many layers of hands in the middle, from producer to buyer, marking up the prices all the way from shrub to cup.

We’re all linked in this system together. Just as the whole nation of Israel is indicted. God says “No, you are not taking care of all of my people; you are cheats and scamps and things we can’t say in church and I don’t know you. You are not my people and I am not your God.” God will cause the land to revolt and nature will have a final say. Not locusts or a shower of fire, but silence. To the people who will not listen, God has nothing to say.

God threatens that the sun will go down at noon and the earth will collapse into itself and there will be massive amounts of death and mourning. Natural disasters are just that, natural. And we have eclipses frequently and understand what’s really going on. But the literary merit of drastic measures is appropriate for God. We need a drastic reorientation before we recognize that the poor are exalted and that the fortune of God has nothing to do with economics.

The basket of fruit, is a pun and a metaphorical turn: in Hebrew “summer fruit” and “the end” are linked as terms that look and sound similar, so the original audience had a better clue about where this was going. The NIV plays on this stating that the “ripe” fruit indicates that the time is “ripe” for Israel, and while this shows an explicit link it doesn’t do justice to the richness of the original pun. Amos has no easy defense for the fruit that signifies the end. In the earlier vision reports, God showed Amos locusts and a storm of fire and Amos was able to say, no Lord, please not that. But the fruit looks pretty benign. Amos can’t say to God, oh no not the fruit, because how is God going to bring about the end with a pile of produce? But God has a trick here, linguistically at least. What looks healthy and rich, the fruit that is ripe, and the people who are wealthy, are poor in spirit and are withering and dying though they look well.

We are not just like Ancient Israel, the US is not chosen by God, but we do find ourselves in a position of global power. And we also suffer the same problems of labor and land. We can wait for Jesus to make everything right. Israel waits, but by the time of Christ, Israel has long fallen and the Romans are in charge. We thought we were safe and indestructible once, but we are starting to know better. We fear the threat of other nations, of our own economic structures, of our ability to contain and control oil in the gulf.

If we trample and exchange dollars for cents and get rich at another’s expense and do nothing and say nothing. If we turn out shopping carts away and do not look at the roots of our social evil and see the magnitude of our smallest actions, if we do not recognize that this is not God’s way. In the New Testament, James picks up this theme that our existence in God makes us rich, that earthly possessions do not ultimately satisfy and that we are not allowed to oppress others for our gain and comfort. He says: “Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you. Your riches have rotted, and your clothes are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you, and it will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure for the last days. Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts on a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous one, who does not resist you.”[1]


At the end of the book of Amos, God does leave us hope of restoration, but only after all has fallen, and the earth has sunk: until we recognize this, we’re on a dangerous path of shortchanging our neighbors and ourselves from God’s fulfillment….

“The time is surely coming, says the Lord,
when the one who plows shall overtake the one who reaps,
and the treader of grapes the one who sows the seed,
the mountains shall drip sweet wine
and all the hills shall flow in it
I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel...
I will plant them upon their land, and they shall never again be plucked up out of the land that I have given them”[2]

God says to Amos, what you think is a basket of healthy summer fruit, was grown in overworked soil, and picked by underpaid hands, and sprayed with chemicals to appear ripe. The fruit that looks like health and harvest is bitter and poisonous...

You see fruit, says the Lord God, but I am showing you the end.
God will not destroy us, we can do that on our own.
God will not take the word from us, but we will silence our own lips.

---

[1] James 5: 1-6

[2] Amos 9: 13-15

Live Like Christians

Galatians 6:1-16

In Paul’s letter to the Galatians we find a bitter struggle in the early church to define mission and identity. Paul argues that Christians are free from much of Jewish law, including ritual observances and circumcision. He emphasizes that we are righteous not through works of the law but by faith in Christ.

It’s a bit strange to us today since we don’t spend a lot of time differentiating ourselves from Judaism. But for Paul and the church of Galatia, the Christian church was still settling into itself. Paul was a Jew who became a Christian after meeting the risen Christ. The people of Galatia were gentiles, pagans, not Jews, who had learned of Jesus from Paul. One of the issues concerned the nature of being a Christian and whether or not one had to be Jewish first—like Jesus and Paul—or just jump straight to Christianity. We don’t worry about this now. We can go right to the Christian part, while acknowledging the importance of Judaism as our religious ancestor, studying the Old Testament and learning about the religion of Jesus and Paul, without having to actually practice or observe it for ourselves. This frees us too. We are able to respect Judaism and Jews, without having to compare ourselves, without having to find one superior and one inferior, without having to take on a successionist idea: that the New Testament is infinitely superior to the previous one, but to recognize that the Old Testament can stands on it’s own with it’s own inherent value as the Hebrew Bible, and isn’t always answered or fixed with Jesus. We don’t think of ourselves as “freed” from Judaism, from the law, and ritual the Hebrew religion, because most of us were never Jews in the first place. Instead, we think of being free from whatever we were before, from our previous condition of sin or darkness that Jesus saved us from: maybe we were lost, maybe we were overly self-reliant, whatever it was that held is in bondage—or that holds us in bondage—Jesus frees us from: whether it’s addiction, abuse, self-loathing, whatever it is, whatever sinful condition we are all in, Jesus offers us freedom.

And that’s Paul’s point in this letter: the Galatians don’t need to worry about other religious rituals, he compares following the rites of Judaism to the rites of their former pagan religions, basically, living as though nothing has changed. For us today, this would mean living as though Jesus doesn’t make a difference, keeping our same habits, attitudes, fears, going through the motions, going to church, making the outward effort, but not changing anything on the inside, not experiencing a change of the spirit. The Galatians are concerned about circumcision as an outward and visible sign which was important when it symbolized the covenant between God and the people of Israel, but unnecessary for the new Christian communities. Paul is concerned that the only reason the Galatians would do this is to mark themselves differently, to differentiate themselves from other people, but in a way that is only physical, instead of being different in spirit and in action—like wearing the cross or the Christian t-shirt without the spirit of belief and service to back it up.

Paul says that through baptism in Christ, we become united—marked all the same, neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. Circumcision was only for a portion of the population, but baptism is for everyone (3:28).

In turn, we are enslaved, not to ways that divide, not to status symbols, but to each other, in loving service. Being a Christian isn’t about playing nice in any kind of false sense.

This is still a widespread problem for us today. Whenever we hear someone say, the problem with church is that it’s full of hypocrites, that’s what they are talking about: a group of people who go to church, claim to be different, claim to be following Jesus, but then go out the door and are just as mean and nasty and back-stabbing as the next person.

Of course, we’re all human, we’re all sinners, and none of us is perfect—but does it make a difference that we are Christians? Are we living into that freedom? The freedom that is in Christ, the freedom that is not self-indulgent, but that looks out and cares for others?

Living like a Christian is seriously different, not like living like others. It’s about authenticity, not just a good showing.

This week we mourned the passing of long-time member Ruth Harvey—in every remembrance of her, friends spoke of her kindness, how she reached out to new people at church and made them feel welcome, how she reached out to new teachers at her school and helped them along the way, how she was kind and nice, living out her faith with hospitality and kindness, not closed off, not ignoring new people, but warm and welcoming. At church and at work, she lived out her commitment to serve others.

Being a Christian means living with hope, living with love, living in service and love to others. The outward signs of our faith matter: but those signs should be the love we have for other people. Paul urges the church to not grow weary doing what is right.

Our Director of Christian Education, Rachel Miller is not doing something normal, or totally understandable, by living in a country where she doesn’t know the language or the customs, where the food is strange and upsets her stomach, but she’s there because of Christ. She’s doing what is right. She is testing her own work. Carrying her own load. Living out the fact that freedom in Christ isn’t a personal freedom, but means a freedom to help others, including children who don’t have the same opportunities—for medical treatment, for education—children with the same hopes and dreams, but not the resources to achieve them. And when asked why she’s doing this, she can only say that God has compelled her to do so, she could have spent the summer as usual, going to work, swimming, spending time with family and friends, but instead she’s in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, serving others out of the freedom she has in Jesus. She may grow weary, she may get homesick, she may be stressed and frightened, but she’s pushing on, learning as she goes, sharing the love she has with all those little girls out of the freedom God gives her.

As we celebrate our freedom and independence as a nation today, may we be mindful of how much greater our freedom is in God. Not just freedom from tyranny and oppression, but freedom from sin and death. Thanks be to God.