Sermon for Pentecost 7
Amos 7:7-17; Psalm 82; Colossians 1:1-14; Luke 10:25-37
July 11, 2010
John Wall

In the Name of God: Our Creator, Our Redeemer, Our Comforter. Amen.

Beloved of God, we are gathered in this place on this day as the people of God, the people who “by water and the Holy Spirit have been made a new people in Jesus Christ our Lord,” people “worthy to stand before God,” people invited by God to be God's friends, the people whom God promises to be with, always.

I often think of church as a school, a school of Christian living – I think it's a reasonable metaphor for someone who works in the academy – ad so we come here each week to grow in our Christian identity, to get clues from the scripture lessons we read each week as to what God is calling us to do in His service, in this time and place.

We come to hear – as we say – what the Spirit is saying to God's people. And I think today we have to conclude that the messages are mixed. On the one hand we have the wonderful, warm, fuzzy lesson about Christ's Summary of the Law, and the parable of the Good Samaritan – all about love and compassion. And we also have Amos, in which God has become, literally, the enemy of His people, those called to live up to the strictest accounting – that Plumb Line – of their behavior, and who fail, and who are promised that their sanctuaries are laid waste and their children murdered, and they will be sent into exile.

Now, I know that some preachers, somewhere, are going to make the lesson of the Summary of the Law into God's Plumb Line, and promise that if we don't live up to this law we are in for a really bad time.

But whenever confronted with a really angry lesson, a lesson of judgment, we need to start off by remembering who we are. For we are a people whom God has chosen to associate with, not a people who need to earn our place in God's kingdom, but people invited by God to this table, week by week, this table where Jesus is our host, a Savior who comes not to be served, but to serve us, and, as we are reminded in this week's lessons, invites us to join Him in His work of serving by serving others.

We are not here to get orders; we are here to discuss how we might participate, at God's invitation, in God's work of reconciling the world to Himself. We do this, in the words of the Collect, in sure and certain hope that God gives us the “grace and power,” or whatever it is, we need to do the work God calls us to do.

So we turn to the lessons, and in looking at these lessons, I want to make two points. One is that the Bible is part of developing tradition of experience and understanding in which we still participate today. It is not a closed and final document that speaks God's unchanging Word to us, but a record of people's efforts to understand the experiences of their lives in terms of their relationship to God. And the second is that because this is a living tradition and not a sealed one, the tradition of which we are a part receives today Jesus' call to love God, love our neighbor, and love ourselves, open to discovering Jesus' call to the Christian life as one of the most ancient of biblical callings.

Immediately in today's lessons, we see a reminder that the Bible does not speak in one voice, that the Bible is a collection of over 70 individual books written over a thousand years of time, by a wide range of people who – each in his or her own time – sought to understand what was happening in their lives in terms of their relationship to the divine.

We should not expect consistency among these many voices, nor do we find it. For their understandings of the divine changed over time. And traces of those changes survive in the text that comes down to us.

In the Psalm for today, for example, Psalm 82, we hear God speaking, but in a situation that should give us pause:
In verse One, we sang, just now,
God takes his stand in the council of heaven; he gives judgment in the midst of the gods.

In the midst of the gods? But I thought there was only one God. When we recite the Creed – and even when we recite two creeds – we proclaim that we believe in one God. Now God might come in three persons or three flavors or some such but there is only one God. And yet, here, in Psalm 82, we hear that God is speaking in the council of heaven, in the midst of the gods. That's gods. That's plural.

What we have here is a trace of an ancient polytheism in Israel, a trace of an understanding of the divine that, like other ancient near eastern peoples, imagines the divine as existing in many forms, in multiple divinities. Only gradually, over time, did the tradition emerge of God as One.

Last week, in fact, we saw another trace of an older understanding of God – one of the lessons last week reflected a state in Israel's understanding of God in which God was their God, and they, and they only, among the peoples of the earth were the people of this God. We noted the benefit of this was that Israel thought it could look to this God to take care of it, to show it special favors, presumably at the expense of other peoples and nations.
That view – that our God is the God of Israel – fits in well with a polytheistic understanding of divinity. If there are many gods, and each nation or tribe has its own god, then Israel's God is the one identified in the Bible as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who brought us out of slavery in Egypt, our special God, who brings us to the Promised Land, and who takes care of us.

But what happens to your theology if things don't work out as is predicted by your theological understanding? What happens to your sense of a special place in the world – a place that reflects God's favor towards you – if one day you look around and discover, to use the words of the Prophet Amos, that the high places of Isaac had been made desolate, that the sanctuaries of Israel had been laid waste, that your wife had become a prostitute, your sons and daughters had fallen by the sword, and Israel is going into exile in an unclean land?

This is the perennial dilemma of why bad things happen to people. In Amos' understanding, God himself had risen up against the house of Israel with a sword. In this vision, God holds a plumb line in the universe, a standard for Israel's behavior, and when Israel falls short, God is angry and bad things happen.

Now, that's pretty grim news – and if there is any good news in Amos, it's that for God to do all these bad things to Israel, God needs to be the God of all people, and not just of Israel, to get other nations to act on God's behalf, defeating Israel in war, killing lots of its people, and taking the rest into exile.

Hence, Israel's understanding of the divine has made another development. God is now the only God at home in the realm of the divine – the only one in charge in the universe -- and, although right now he's angry with His people, he has the power to do things differently if and when He wants to.

Happily other prophets came to understandings somewhat less grim than those reached by Amos – Isaiah, for example, finds God grieving over the bad things that are happening to his people. God decides that he will give up on Israel's being able earn divine favor by obeying the law, that we are just too forgetful and stony-hearted to do that – instead, God promises to act for us, to give us new hearts, hearts of flesh and not stone, and promises to write His law in our hearts.

This notion of God's compassion for us, God's acting for us, God's intervening in human history for our salvation, is of course the tradition that the early Church picked up to talk about Jesus. We see that in Paul's proclamation in his Epistle to the Colossians, that we are called to give thanks to God joyfully, for Paul says God has acted through Jesus to enable us share in the inheritance of the saints in the light. God in Christ has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”

So, now we come to the Gospel, and to Jesus' conversation with the lawyer – well, first, since I've talked about how the Bible is more fluid than we often think, I need to say that this account of Jesus and what we have come to call the Summary of the Law is the one in which the lawyer is the one who conflates all the laws of Israel into these two. So this is the reading in which the lawyer gets the good lines. The one over in Matthew is perhaps more familiar and in it Jesus is the clever one, rather than here, where Jesus simply recognizes the lawyer's astuteness.

Here we have the Summary of the Law – and I am reminded that in the Summary of the Law, we start with our self-centered, narcissistic selves, and suddenly we are called out of those selves into a relationship, a relationship characterized by love, and with God, no less. We are suddenly in a much larger world, and ourselves are now in relationship to the ultimate power in the universe.

And then that world expands again to include our neighbors, again bound to them in love, and then finally we get our selves back – “love your neighbor as you love yourself” – but now our selves have been reinvented, redefined, as selves in relationship to God and to others. It's not just a call to love, but to understand who we are in the context of loving relationships.

And here, in Luke, we have the Summary of the Law joined by the parable of the Good Samaritan, a wonderful example of the power of literature, of stories, to bring issues or points of view alive. Here Jesus defines the relationship to which we are called to have one with another in terms of compassion and care and regard for another's humanity and dignity. And, of course, in this story by using the Samaritan as the neighbor tells us that our neighbor is not the person next door, or another member of our town or tribe, but could be anyone, even those whom Jesus' fellow countrymen regarded as outcasts or unclean.

The Summary of the Law, together with the Parable of the Good Neighbor, provide a gloss for us on Jesus' teachings we usually call the Beatitudes in which we of course are told that it is the poor and the weak and the hungry and those who mourn whom God finds blessed, and in Jesus' teaching that when we feed the hungry and visit the prisoner and look after the widow and orphan – after all who are the least of these – we do these things with and for Jesus.

In fact, at this point, it's worth saying that we are at the point in the biblical narrative where things don't change. If we remember the Psalm, which I said dates from a time in the history of Israel in which people were still polytheistic, we remember these words:

In the Psalm God says,

Save the weak and the orphan; * defend the humble and needy;
Rescue the weak and the poor; * deliver them from the power of the wicked.

And indeed throughout the Bible, from the formative days of Israel, through all the changes in images and understandings of God, we find God remarkably consistent in God's concern for the weak, the humble, the orphan, the needy, the poor – and all through Jesus' teachings, as we have seen, these concerns keep surfacing.

Jesus calls us to these values, not to earn a place in God's kingdom, not to obey the rules, not to save the world – God knows, if it's up to us to save the world, we're really done for, but because the God whose servants we are calls us – as the redeemed people of God – to share in God's saving work, to join with God in this effort, to be with God where God is to be found.

We are called to share in this work, to live according to these values, first of all in this community of St Mark's, as we conduct our lives together. Second, in our daily lives, with our families, our neighbors, those we deal with in our work and in our leisure and in our decisions about what to buy and how to invest our resources of time, talent, and treasure. And, of course, in the ways we exercise our civic duty in the voting booth and on the campaign trail.

And, of course, also when opportunities arise to serve God's people as we support or participate in activities that take us out of our comfort zone – to shelters and soup kitchens and Habitat projects and tutoring opportunities and to other countries to teach and to build and to care for God's people – as our time and treasure and talents permit and as opportunities arise.

This is the life to which we are called, in thanksgiving for all that God has done and is doing for us, and in companionship with the God who has chosen us to be his people and has invited us to participate in God's saving work. Thanks be to God for this life, for joining us in this world, for freeing us from faithless fears and from worldly anxieties, for opening to us a future with God, for hosting us at this table, for welcoming us into God's kingdom.
Amen.

©2010 John Wall