Sermon by Pastor Mike Buttonnn

A Tale of Two Prophets
Amos 7: 7-17; Mark 6: 14-29

^NRSAmos 7
⁷ This is what he showed me: the Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand.  
⁸And 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;
⁹ the high places of Isaac 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."
¹⁰Then Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, sent to King Jeroboam of Israel, saying, "Amos has conspired against you in the very center of the house of Israel; the land is not able to bear all his words.  11 For thus Amos has said,
            'Jeroboam shall die by the sword,
 and Israel must go into exile away from his land.'"  
¹² And Amaziah said to Amos, "O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, earn your bread there, and prophesy there;¹³but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king's sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom."  
¹⁴ Then Amos answered Amaziah, "I am no prophet, nor a prophet's son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees,¹⁵and the LORD took me from following the flock, and the LORD said to me, 'Go, prophesy to my people Israel.'
¹⁶"Now therefore hear the word of the LORD.
                        You say, 'Do not prophesy against Israel,
                        and do not preach against the house of Isaac.'
¹⁷Therefore thus says the LORD:
                         'Your wife shall become a prostitute in the city,
                        and your sons and your daughters shall fall by the sword,
                         and your land shall be parceled out by line;
                        you yourself shall die in an unclean land,
                        and Israel shall surely go into exile away from its land.'"

^NRSMark 6
¹⁴ King Herod heard of it, for Jesus' name had become known. Some were saying, "John the baptizer has been raised from the dead; and for this reason these powers are at work in him."¹⁵ But others said, "It is Elijah." And others said, "It is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old."¹⁶ But when Herod heard of it, he said, "John, whom I beheaded, has been raised."
¹⁷For Herod himself had sent men who arrested John, bound him, and put him in prison on account of Herodias, his brother Philip's wife, because Herod had married her.
¹⁸For John had been telling Herod, "It is not lawful for you to have your brother's wife."
¹⁹And Herodias had a grudge against him, and wanted to kill him. But she could not,
²⁰for Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he rotected him. When he heard him, he was greatly perplexed; and yet he liked to listen to him.²¹But an opportunity came when Herod on his birthday gave a banquet for his courtiers and officers and for the leaders of Galilee.²²When his daughter Herodias came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his guests; and the king said to the girl, "Ask me for whatever you wish, and I will give it."²³ And he solemnly swore to her, "Whatever you ask me, I will give you, even half of my kingdom."²⁴ She went out and said to her mother, "What should I ask for?" She replied, "The head of John the baptizer."
²⁵Immediately she rushed back to the king and requested, "I want you to give me at once the head of John the Baptist on a platter."²⁶ The king was deeply grieved; yet out of  regard for his oaths and for the guests, he did not want to refuse her.²⁷ Immediately the king sent a soldier of the guard with orders to bring John's head. He went and beheaded him in the prison,²⁸ brought his head on a platter, and gave it to the girl. Then the girl gave it to her mother.²⁹When his disciples heard about it, they came and took his body, and laid it in a tomb.

 

Sisters and Brothers in Christ, may the blessing of the Lord rest and remain upon you always; for the sake of Jesus the Messiah. 

This morning’s readings feature the tale of two prophets. One of those prophets is Amos, from the 8th century b.c. in the northern Kingdom of Israel.  The other prophet is John, known as the Baptizer, a contemporary and, according to St. Luke, a kinsman of Jesus who prophesied from the banks of the River Jordan.  Though time, space, and a whole lot of socio-economic context separate the two, both men embodied what it meant to be a prophet, and they both speak to the moral dilemma facing each of us and our world today. 

I mean this in the kindest way possible, but the twenty or so prophets we know from the Old Testament and the New Testament prophet John are a strange lot, indeed.  They often said strange things, and they did things still stranger.  We all remember from Sunday School how John dressed in camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist and lived off a diet of honey and locusts.  He could have been a fashion plate for Prophet’s Quarterly.  But even with all their idiosyncrasies, all the prophets were deeply grounded in the tradition of Moses. Some had relationships to the Temple or to the religious establishment of their day, but for the most part, they were uncredentialed speakers of the word of the Lord.  Nobody ordained them to be prophets, neither did they go to prophets’ school where they earned diplomas in prophecy.  They had no authority except that residing in the power of their word.  When in today’s First Lesson the priest Amaziah wants to shoo Amos out of the royal Temple at Beth-El,  Amos insists, “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees, and the Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’” [By the way, just to be clear, ‘a dresser of sycamore trees’ was like a gardener, not somebody who put dresses on trees.  The prophets were strange, but not that strange. Okay?

Conservative Christians tend to portray the prophets as predicters of future events, especially the coming of Jesus the Messiah.  Liberal Christians are more likely to cast the prophets as social activists who take up the causes of the poor and downtrodden.  Yes and no.  I believe that Jesus is truly the fulfillment of all prophecy, but when the prophets spoke, they were primarily speaking to the urgent issues of their own day, not just to events and people centuries down the line.  Likewise, the prophets were passionate about the poor folk Jesus referred to as “the least of these our sisters and brothers,” but you don’t see the prophets advocating for specific programs and policies the way modern social activists do.  Amos famously prophesied, “Let justice roll down like waters” (5:24), but he didn’t present the king with a 12-point plan for economic reform. 

What all prophets, past, present, and future, Amos and John alike, have in common is a moral vision of life founded on the covenant that God originally established with Israel at Sinai.  That’s a challenging thought in itself, a moral vision of life based on God’s expectations of how we are to live as individuals and communities.  But that’s exactly what anchored the prophets in the Mosaic tradition.  When God had, through the leadership of Moses, delivered Israel from slavery to freedom, the Lord invited the people of his salvation into a relationship defined by specific moral parameters.  This covenant relationship is emblemized in the Ten Commandments, which Jesus would later summarize as love of God and love of neighbor.   These commandments are not intended to be a quick checklist of do’s and don’ts, but rather they are put forward as the pillars of a moral universe that stands in starkest contrast to the Pharaoh’s order of oppression and exploitation.  By the terms of this covenant, God says, in so many words, “Trust me and the vision of life I have set before you, and you will live, live well, live long, live abundantly.  But if you depart from this covenant, then good luck, because you’re going to need it.”  Ouch. 

John and Amos were people called out by God to give voice to the great peril their respective societies faced for having departed from the terms of God’s covenant.  Literally and figuratively, they held a plumb line to the moral character of their worlds, with in plumb, or in line, defined by adherence to the Sinai tradition.  When the prophets found their world off plumb, or out of plumb, they did not mince words; in fact, they were often pitiless, brutal even, in prophesying the consequences that would ensue from this unfaithfulness.  In decrying the moral bankruptcy of Israel’s religious establishment, Amos announces that the Lord will lay waste to that land’s sanctuaries and see to it that King Jeroboam dies by the sword.  When Jeroboam tries to silence Amos and deport him south, the prophet declaims, (and I quote), “Your wife shall become a prostitute in the city, and your sons and your daughters shall fall by the sword, and your land shall be parceled out by line; you yourself shall die in an unclean land, and Israel shall surely go into exile away from its land” (7:17). 

You’ll also remember that when Jerusalem’s elite came out to the Jordan to hear John preach, he did not greet them or welcome them or offer them any kind of assistance, but instead called them “a brood of vipers.”  Far from being glad to see them, John asked, according to St. Luke, “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” (3:7), whereupon John then proceeded to strip them of any comfort they might seek in their faith, declaring, “Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.  Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees” (3:8).  John clearly never attended any of the mega-church seminars I’ve been to where rule number one is always, “Make people feel comfortable.” 
These were tough, tough men, and they needed to be, because their mission to declare covenant faithfulness often pitted them against the most powerful elements of their societies.  They challenged their whole culture because the moral order enshrined in the Sinai covenant encompasses not only the mores of our individual lives, but also the public morality that is to guide our families, towns, cities, states, and economic regimes.  Make no mistake, what we do with our individual lives, what priorities we set and what decisions we make, matter to God; sometimes I think they actually matter more to God than to ourselves.  But God takes no less interest in the priorities we set and the decisions we make as communities.  That’s why the prophets inevitably ended up crossing swords with the dominant political powers of their day. 

In Amos' day, King Jeroboam ruled over an Israel where a very small group of people was getting richer and richer at the expense of a vast majority who were getting poorer and poorer.  Amos lampooned the high rollers who “sleep on beds of ivory” and lounge on fine furniture, eat the finest food, drink big bowls of wine, and then proceed to fleece the poor by paying for rulings that work to their favor.  No wonder he was escorted out of the royal sanctuary at Bethel.  When John challenged Herod’s incestuous marriage to Herodias, his brother’s former wife and his niece, the Baptist was not just pointing out a moral failure on the king’s part, but he was declaring the illegitimacy of Herod’s whole sick reign.  Desperate to hang on to power at any cost, Herod serves up John’s head on a platter to his equally desperate wife.  But just imagine the terror that must have gripped Herod’s heart when he heard about Jesus and concluded that he was John the Baptist resurrected. 

Is the voice of prophecy still alive today?  Are there prophets in our midst?  There’s a lot of finger-pointing.  There’s plenty of acrimony with all sorts of people lining up to call down curses on other people’s heads.  We’ve become quite excellent players of the blame game.  We’ve all learned to be great critics, finding fault with others while avoiding any responsibility for the mess we find ourselves in.  There are great throngs of cranks, and masses of even more cranky people, but are there any prophets?  Do we even know what a prophet would sound like? 

That’s hard to say, because to recognize a prophet’s voice we’d have to tune out the false prophets who are constantly telling us it’s all good, it’s all right, everything’s going to be okay.  We’d have to have to open our ears to the people, the land, the earth, sky, and sea, for whom it’s not all good, it’s not alright, and for whom there’s not a snowball’s chance that everything’s going to be okay.  We’d have to look outside our own backyards and beyond whatever’s good for just me and mine.  We’d have to abandon race and tribe, class and clan before we could hear the prophet’s call to shalom for all and justice for everybody.  We’d have to surrender the fantasy that technology will solve all our problems, that we can do whatever we want for however long we want to and before we ever have to reap what we’ve sown there will be a god that will pop out of some box that we can buy from somewhere who will save the day.  To see, hear, and recognize the prophets in our midst we’d have to tear down the altars to the false gods who promise cheap grace, cut-rate forgiveness, and phony love that asks for nothing, demands nothing, and changes nothing. 

I believe that God still speaks, and there are prophets among us to prove it, but we have to start listening. 

In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

 

In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen