The 1st United Methodist Church of Napa

⁷This 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; ⁹the 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

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. ¹¹For thus Amos has said,

¹²And 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.”

¹⁴Then 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.’

¹⁴King Herod heard of [the stories of healing done by Jesus and his disciples], 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.” ¹⁵But others said, “It is Elijah.” And others said, “It is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old.” ¹⁶But 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 protected 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.” ²³And he solemnly swore to her, “Whatever you ask me, I will give you, even half of my kingdom.” ²⁴She 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.” ²⁶The king was deeply grieved; yet out of regard for his oaths and for the guests, he did not want to refuse her. ²⁷Immediately the king sent a soldier of the guard with orders to bring John’s head. He went and beheaded him in the prison, ²⁸brought 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.

If I were a first-time visitor to this morning's worship service and heard today's gospel reading for the first time, I'd be seriously concerned about why Christians could refer to stuff like this as "good news." The story of John the Baptist's death is, when you think about it, just awful. Now, we're no naïve teenager like Herod's step-daughter, Salome, but we should be careful from whom we ask for advice. There might be a vendetta behind the one who gives it. This whole story reads more like a telenovela – those soap operas so popular on Spanish-speaking television: a vindictive wife, the beleaguered politician, an exotic dancer and the grisly beheading of an innocent man.

Like Amos, John was called a prophet; and we should be reminded that biblical prophecy isn't about detailed predictions of the future – as if the prophet hovered over a crystal ball to literally see how the future would unfold. Biblical prophets of the likes of Isaiah and Jeremiah, Sarah and Miriam, Amos and Hosea had the gift of seeing deeply into the current situation, then being able to say, "If things don't change there's going to be hell to pay." And, yes, sometimes the hammer hellishly falls upon the prophet himself: John was killed, ultimately, because he spoke up against the corruption of morality – especially within the king's own household. Jesus was executed by Rome for much the same reason.

Both John and Amos would be marked men in the midst of the political and religious elite of their day – of course, so was Jesus. Amos was "just" a farmer. John…well he dressed funny and ate bugs, while Jesus was constantly in violation of the purity codes of his day because he simply hung out with the wrong people. Being socially presentable is just as much a problem in our own culture as an article in the New York Times reported awhile ago:

Never mind the biblical injunction to feed the poor and shelter the homeless. Increasingly, many Americans do not want the social service programs of religious institutions in their neighborhoods. They frequently don't want the parking problems or [noisy activities] that come with churches. They don't want the hungry and homeless that these institutions often feed and shelter.^³

Closer to home: the "use permit" for the HOPE Center operating out of our church is currently under review for renewal by the Planning Commission; if you'd like to attend the meeting about it, it's to be held this Thursday, at 7:00 P.M. in City Hall.^⁴

In all of this, it's the first reading (from Amos) that gives us a startling warning as we live out the ministry that is ours together by virtue of our connection to The 1^st United Methodist Church of Napa, California. The story of Amaziah and Amos dramatizes a familiar conflict: between those who would support the status quo in collision with the drive for change. Amos demands a radical change from the people in power so that a truly humane social order can be established. His hard message to the king's holy right-hand-man and all of the rest of the wealthy Israelites is that they will end up the opposite of what they think they are.

His words are just as prophetic in our day and age; they're a warning that we ignore the forces of our own unconscious at great peril. To deny those parts of ourselves that empower prejudice and protectionism is to unleash a negative force that will end up turning against us. We dare not speak what, all too often, we're really thinking:

"How in the world could you have ever supported her? She's in favor of the war in Iraq?"

"Why do those good-for-nothing people want to hang around here anyway? Let somebody else deal with their messy lives!"

"You should've heard what the kids were saying about that – as if they knew what they were talking about!"

Once we set off as Amos did, it can be a lonely road. The power to whom he spoke the truth in turn tells him, "Get lost! Take your message somewhere else! Why don't you tell it to Judah? Don't tell me that I'm part of the problem here!"

In other words get out of the neighborhood. And as that reporter from the Times noted,

It is a new twist on 'Nimby,' the not-in-my-backyard syndrome. Usually brought on by incinerators or commercial development, Nimby now extends to charity.^⁵

What I hear in the lives of those like Amos, John and Jesus is a clarion call for courage when by choice I'm wrapped up in my own sense of self instead of standing out from the crowd whom I may, in fact, be following. I may consider myself a Christian, but without courage, I'm just another conformist – or maybe I just waffle back and forth depending upon which crowd I'm with. I'm reminded of yet another biblical prophet whose message to the church in Laodicea, in part, was:

I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either [one or the other]. So, because you are lukewarm…I am about to spit you out of my mouth.^⁶

To choose yet another analogy: you can't have both of your feet comfortably planted with one foot on one side of the fence and the other one on the other side. We have a choice to make. Whose voice will we listen to: the one that cried out from in the wilderness that our path be made straight, or the voice that called for his head on a platter?^⁷

In a world still confused about its values, one value seems to have been lost: the innate worth of every human being. It must be held sacred, no matter who or what that person is.

I'm reminded of the following conversation between an adult and a young teenager:

As long as the most vulnerable people in our society are consigned to places that the rest of us want to run away from, I fear that the degradation of our environment – social, political, as well as natural – will be inevitable. As long as there are ghetto neighborhoods and ghetto hospitals and ghetto schools, there will be a kind of ghetto desperation that will lead to the kind of ghetto fear and violence that we see now erupting, not only in Israel and Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq, but also on the corners of Randolph and Fourth Streets of downtown Napa.

If we really did see the people in these neighborhoods – both next door and on the other side of the world – as part of the same human family to which we all belong, we'd never put them in those kinds of places to begin with. But somewhere along the line we stopped thinking about them in that way. That's one area of the "breakdown of the family" that newspapers seldom speak of. Instead they speak about the failure of those mothers and fathers that we've exiled to do the right thing in their places of exile. We rarely condemn the pharaoh, or take a long and honest look at ourselves in the mirror.^⁹

"Those homeless people scare me," a well-dressed woman said to her priest. "The poor are always scary," he answered, "as scary as God's justice."^¹⁰

So what was the trouble with Israel? The king and his kingdom had been quite successful from a political and military point of view. The affluent were powerful, with winter houses and summer houses, and furniture inlaid with ivory. Amos makes two basic criticisms: king and country have forgotten their covenant with God – with all that was to be held sacred. This infidelity is expressed in his second major theme: the lack of social justice.

…they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals – they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted out of the way.^¹¹

All of this while people went to worship services and observed the laws of the Sabbath, which then leads Amos to speak presumptuously for God and say:

…I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings…I will not accept them….Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.^¹²

Amos didn't desert his call to prophesy the destruction that he saw coming. And in fact Israel was overcome by Assyria not long after that. In some ways our social situation today is very different from that of 8^th-century Israel. But if we do still claim to be "one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all," then why hasn't that yet come true?

It seems to me that we still have both kinds of prophets in our country today, even though we don't call them that. Like the court prophets of Amos' day, we have the self-assured Amaziahs and "spin-doctors" of our own telling us that everything's fine. But there are also those prophetic voices that give us a truer picture of the call to justice. Sadly, that a point like this still has to be made in these United States may be one more piece of evidence of just how far our nation has wandered off into the wilderness again since the death of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and of the dream that seems to have died with him.^¹³

The source of our moral courage has got to come from the same place that it did for Dr. King – and did for John, Jesus, and Amos before him: from our own sensitivity to the suffering of fellow human beings. So it becomes a matter of "seeing," of allowing ourselves to experience what the evil really is, so that we'll then be compelled to do something about it. John came to witness to a greater morality, but his courage and witness took on new light and life in the compassionate person of Jesus of Nazareth – compassion that refuses to separate the love of God from the love of one's neighbor. To hear that is to hear the "good news."

1 Here's a short but powerful enticement to study the work of Amos, this Judean herdsman who, somewhere around the year 760 BCE, has shown up in the hallowed halls of Israel's King Jeroboam. This is during the time of the kingdom's division from Judah. Amos has come to warn the king, and all of his supporters, against reliance on military power. What's more he delivers indictments against the presence of social injustice, immorality and shallow religiosity that he sees has infected society. Not surprisingly, the king's official priest, Amaziah, isn't happy with Amos – in effect, telling him to "mind his own business." So this is a compelling encounter between the representative of a state-sponsored religion that really only serves the people in power, and a man who feels so moved by God to bring the truth to people who don't want to hear it.

2 Our readings for today, then, deal with the kinds of life-and-death choices that all of us will have to make – eventually. John, called the Baptist, is in prison for speaking up against the king and his family. And like Elijah who found himself at risk because of the wrath of Jezebel, John has crossed a queen who can't stand an honest evaluation of her shortcomings. It isn't just that Queen Herodias had been Herod's sister-in-law, before she was his wife, but it was Herod's divorce from his first wife that had plunged the countryside into war.

7 Cf. this call from Isaiah 40: 3 with John's echo of it in Mark 1: 3. It led to the event described in Mark 6: 24-25; but it's worth noting that Salome did not have to listen to her mother – she could've answered her own question, "What should I ask for?" The same choice is given to us.

8 Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation (HarperCollins Publishers Inc., New York, N.Y., 10022, 1996), p. 217.

12 Op. cit., portions of Chapter 5, in verses 21-24. Interestingly enough, the word for "burnt offerings" here in verse 22 is the Hebrew word whose root is the same as our word "holocaust." It's a word that we've come to use, regularly but inappropriately I'm told, for the extermination of the Jews during World War II. This act of genocide should be named as the act that it truly is: "shoah" – "chaos" let loose against humanity and all that is sacred in creation.