Sometimes I wish I could take scissors to the Bible. A lot in the Bible that inspires and encourages me, but some things bother me, like our first two readings this morning. If I had my way, we would jump right over Amos and that Psalm, and skip to the better part, to Mary and Martha. If I had my way, we’d cut out all the hard or angry or scary parts, and skip to love, and peace, and joy. Luckily, I don’t always get my way. Otherwise, we’d only have one text to work with today and not three, which would make my sermon two thirds shorter and you’d get out of here early, and I know that would just break your heart.
So let’s go back to Amos, chapter 8, verse 4. “Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring ruin to the poor of the land, saying, “When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the Sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat.”
Sooo…. Great. Ummmm. What’s a shekel? They call this a translation. Ever feel like you need a translation of the translation? Never fear, your paid professional clergy person is here to save the day. I went to school for this stuff, and learned biblical languages so that I could answer questions just like this one. So I drew upon the skills developed in my years of schooling and looked it up on the internet. The internet says that a shekel is a measure of weight, and an ephah a measure of volume.
Put yourself back in time, and imagine you’re trading at the local market. You bring whatever it is that you grow or make, and throw it up on the scale. The merchant pulls out a pile of weights and adds them one at a time until the two sides balance. What you don’t know is that the weights are heavy, and you’re being cheated. So you take your coins in trade for your goods and go to the next shopkeeper. This one takes your coins, pulls out a big scoop, and measures grain into your bag. What you don’t know is that his scoop is small, and you’re being cheated again. You don’t figure it out until you get home and find that only half of the grain in your bag is not actually grain; the other half is sweepings from the floor. You’d be angry, but your too busy trying to figure out how your family going to eat for the next week.
Now here’s the kicker. The people cheating you? They’re religious. According to the text, they’re talking to themselves saying, “When will the new moon pass? When will the Sabbath be over?” Those are Jewish religious rules. These are church people! They’re sitting right here in the pews thinking, “Man, I wish he would wrap up this sermon, so I can get back to my penny stocks. I want to over-inflate the market price and then unload them for a profit, but I have to wait until church is done, and he just keeps talking.”
Let’s skip ahead to the Psalm. “You love evil more than good, and lying more than speaking the truth. You love all words that devour, O deceitful tongue. But God will break you down forever; he will snatch and tear you from your tent; he will uproot you from the land of the living. The righteous will see, and fear, and will laugh at the evildoer, saying, ‘See the one who would not take refuge in God, but trusted in abundant riches, and sought refuge in wealth!’ But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God.”
The psalmist, enraged, calls down vengeance on the evildoer, to the point of death, and then proceeds to dance on the grave, all the while claiming to be serenely planted in the house of God. Even just emotionally, it’s jarring, much less spiritually. I can’t imagine Jesus talking that way. But that’s not the big reason why these two texts bother me. The big reason is part of me loves this stuff.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever been cheated. Of course you have. We all have. But that’s just the start isn’t it? In this room there are people who have been cheated, betrayed, lied to, rejected, bullied, and belittled. In this room people have been physically attacked, had their property stolen and vandalized. You know how I know? Because that’s all happened to me. And some of you have been through worse. I know there are people here today that have been through stuff that would make me cry like a baby. The fact that stuff like that happens is bad enough, but it gets worse.
I can deal with it if someone steals from me to feed their family. I can even deal with it if someone steals from me to feed their drug habit. I won’t like it, but I can deal with it. But there are two kinds of people that I just can’t stand: evil people, and hypocrites. Not only will these people hurt you, they’ll smile when they’re doing it.
The percentage of people who are just plain evil is amazingly small. (Unless you’re reading Harry Potter, and then they’re everywhere.) But in real life most people just want to live and let live. But even if it’s only one percent, in the course of a lifetime, you’re bound to meet a few. We all have memories, and some of us have scars from people who enjoyed making us suffer.
As bad as that is, I think I prefer them to the hypocrites. If you’ve got an enemy, a real enemy, that honestly wants the worst for you, at least you know whom to punch. But a hypocrite will stab you in the back and then bring you flowers in the hospital. Hypocrites take the very things of God and turn them into weapons, into snares. They turn grace into a power-play, and love into abuse. Now that makes me angry.
I heard a story once about two girls who came to church the day after prom. Excited and proud of their dresses, they wanted all their friends at church to see. So they got all dressed up again, make-up and everything, and came to church. When they got there, a woman pulled the pastor aside and said, “You need to do something about those girls. Their dresses are completely inappropriately for church.” Turns out one dress had a skirt that rode a little too high, and the other had a neckline that plunged a little too low. She demanded that the pastor do something, and do it immediately, before the service was ruined for everyone.
I’m really glad that this didn’t happen to me. Because I would have been gravely tempted. I try to keep my temper under control, but I’ve spent a good chunk of my life trying to get teenagers to come to church, and here are these two girls who are not only coming to church, they’re putting on their very best because they actually give a care what all these people think, and then you tell them they’re not welcome? What are you thinking?!
Suddenly I am right with Amos and the Psalmist, I am cheering for God to reach down from heaven and smack somebody. I want to see some smiting! Thankfully, the pastor in the story is much more loving and gentle than I am, and he said something like, “Those girls are giving of their best today. Let’s honor their intention instead of critiquing their execution.”
Which brings us to our last story. Jesus, the good teacher, comes to the home of Mary and Martha, and Martha is working hard making sure her guests are fed and comfortable. She’s practicing hospitality, welcoming the stranger and feeding the hungry.
And yet here’s Mary, and she’s not helping at all. Not only is that not fair, that’s not right. She’s not making people feel welcome, she’s not obeying the scriptures. And finally, for the first time ever, here’s the son of God, ready and available to administer the proper smiting! The promise of Amos and the hope of the psalmist will finally be fulfilled!
But that’s not how the story goes, is it? Jesus says that Mary has chosen the better part, that experiencing God is more important even than following God’s rules. So now we have to go back to Amos again. It’s ok for the psalmist to be angry, because the psalms are songs, they express our emotion, and righteous anger is a very real human emotion. But Amos is a prophet talking about the very nature of God. How can his message and Jesus’ life seem so different?
Looking at the end of the text, Amos says that when God’s great day of judgment comes, the ground will shake, and the people will weep, and the sun will go dark in the middle of the day. Does that sound like anything you’ve heard of in the New Testament? Sure does. Sounds like the crucifixion story.
It turns out that God fulfilled the prophecy of Amos, but not in the way Amos expected. Amos is like me. He wants God to get with the smiting. But God says, “You want someone to be punished? Fine. Punish me. You want to point the finger of accusation? Fine. Point it at me. You want smiting? This is what smiting looks like.”
Suddenly, the anger in my heart cools. Suddenly, pointing the accusing finger doesn’t seem like so much fun any more. Now I look down and I see blood on my own hands and I finally understand that every sin I see in someone else I carry within my own heart. Turns out I was wrong all along. I don’t need God to come down and punish the hypocrites. If God did, there would be no one left. I need God to forgive my enemies, because my enemy is me. We don’t need God to come cut the angry parts out of the Bible; we need God to cut the hatred out of our hearts.