Prayer:   “May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts and minds here together be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.”

“Teach Your Children” has always been a favorite song of mine – I once stood with 15,000 other Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young fans in the Greensboro Coliseum back in the 1970s to sing it, our lighters held aloft.  It was the anthem of our generation.  But Psalm 78 testifies that “Teach Your Children” was already a theme song of God’s chosen people – Jesus’s people – for countless faithful generations before that. 

Psalm 78 reminds us to teach our children about all the marvelous things God has done – our God who comes to set the captives free and release the oppressed from their chains, our God who parted the Red Sea and led the children of Israel to the Promised Land.  (If you read on in Psalm 78, you get practically the entire Exodus story retold – like a great hymn for Passover.)  But not only that, it reminds us to teach our children to fear the Lord and to follow God’s law – the 10 Commandments, which by the way is the lesson our Church School is studying at this very moment.  This is God’s dream for the world – that if we actually do it, if we can teach our children to follow God’s way of love – we might one day be able to inhabit the Peaceable Kingdom that God wishes the world to become.  But if all our work and prayers for peace fail – and the stakes have never before in human history been so high – we may not be able to prevent this world’s destruction.  That’s a very frightening thought, isn’t it?

You know, when the prophet Amos says, “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream,” it all sounds very pretty – all green and peaceful, like springtime.  When I lived in California, I used to enjoy taking my children to the Moscone Center in San Francisco to see the memorial there to Martin Luther King.  Everflowing waters come down a wall into a beautiful basin rimmed with this line King so famously quoted from Amos, “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.”  Children laugh and splash and play there in safety.  But when I took my kids camping at Yosemite Falls at the height of the early spring snowmelt, I had a different feeling about rolling waters.  I clung very tightly to little hands and reminded my children that under no circumstances could they play on the slippery rocks beside the “everflowing stream,” because as the signs there said, “Fatalities have occurred as people have been swept away by these waters and carried away into the rapids downstream.”

God’s justice is like this – it is something powerful and relentless – it is not something to be taken lightly. You simply cannot stop the tide of God’s justice because it has the force of God’s love for all of God’s precious children behind it – especially for the downtrodden and the oppressed.  If you doubt the power of that liberating tide, just ask Sadaam Hussein or Hosni Mubarak, or Moammar Khadafi.  Although we do pray that one day God’s justice will prevail, we are wise to heed the warning of the prophet Amos, “¹⁸Alas for you who desire the day of the Lord! Why do you want the day of the Lord? It is darkness, not light; ¹⁹as if someone fled from a lion, and was met by a bear….”

In other words, we better be sure that we are on the right side of the stream of justice before those mighty waters of begin to roll down into the desert canyons.  Amos touches on an awful truth behind that – before we start congratulating ourselves for our Christian faithfulness and piety, we might remember these words from the prophet Amos, “²¹I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. ²²Even though you offer me your …offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of …your fatted animals I will not look upon. ²³Take away from me the noise of your songs…. ²⁴But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.”

As my husband said when he first looked at the scripture he’d have to read this morning, “That Amos was in a bad mood.”  No kidding.  But Jesus often sounded that angry too – as he followed very much in the tradition of the great prophets of the Hebrew Bible.  Amos was a very ordinary guy – a shepherd and a dresser of sycamores – a “tree man,” whose calling we particularly appreciate in a week like this one!  Like Amos, Jesus was tradesman and not a Temple-trained religious leader of any priestly pedigree or educational distinction.  Perhaps both Amos and Jesus felt called to preach on behalf of the poor because of their real-life and up-close experiences of poverty and injustice.  Last week, if you were here, you’ll remember the Gospel text from Matthew was the famous “woe to you scribes and Pharisees” speech of Jesus – his stern warning about the hypocrisy of political and religious leaders who like the show of public religion but don’t want to get their hands dirty helping the needy, or the sick or outcast. 

Sounds like Amos, doesn’t it?  During his time, by the middle of the eighth century B.C., the rulers of Israel had become materialistic and corrupt – remember the evil done by the greedy King Ahab and Queen Jezebel?  More and more of the common people were losing their land (being foreclosed on) and being sold into slavery. Wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few while the many were left with "cleanness of teeth" – an elegant phrase Amos uses to describe those who had no need for toothpicks because they had no food to eat.  Doesn’t this sound like what Jesus and his people faced during the brutal reign of the Caesars?  Doesn’t it sound a lot like our world today?

There has been a lot of talk since the millennium about the end of the world, most recently the prediction that it would come on May 21, 2011 – and when that date came and went, that it would be October 21^st instead.  And now, with October behind us, we have 12-21-2012 to look forward to next – the date that the ancient Mayan calendar runs out.  We seem to enjoy scary stories apocalypse – it plays well at Halloween. 

But Christians like us – moderates whose beliefs are far less extreme than those preached by most TV evangelists – we mainline Christians tend to downplay talk of “Judgment Day.”  For one thing, we believe what we learned in Sunday School – “Jesus Loves Me.”  We base our faith on a conviction of God’s grace, that the Lord is merciful, slow to anger, and full of steadfast love.  And that theology doesn’t jive with the “wrath of God” passages of the Bible. Prophetic predictions of “the Day of the Lord” seem to many of us like a distant ancient memory – something antique and misguided, like the Salem Witch Trials.  But it’s more important than ever, I think, for thinking Christians like us to understand the history of prophetic witness in the Bible and to realize that we are still called to care for those in need.  Otherwise, it is not hard to imagine how life on earth might disappear as a result of our own sinful self-indulgence, apathy, and inaction. 

I heard an impassioned plea at last fall’s annual meeting of the United Church of Christ in Connecticut by Robert Orr, who was the highest ranking civilian official at the United Nations.  He grew up in our UCC church in Santa Barbara, California, and it was there that he learned to have hope – real hope – for world peace.  In fact he has dedicated his life to that cause.  But what he warned us against was our moderate complacency – especially in the face of diminishing numbers in so many of our mainline Protestant churches.  He reminded us that it was ordinary middle-of-the-road Christians like us who helped found the UN (there were members of my Congregational Church in Berkeley who were in San Francisco for the signing of the UN charter).

As the Psalmist says, we have much to learn from the stories of our elders – in learning our history and vowing never to repeat it.  Hard lessons learned after World War I led world leaders after World War II, both Jews and Christians, to preach reconciliation and international aid to starving people overseas – eventually the active rebuilding of nations we had recently helped to destroy, through the Marshall Plan.  War, we know, becomes much more likely when essential supplies become scarce.  So despite what extremists might say, fighting for peace by eradicating hunger and poverty is not a political issue – it is a Biblical one, for Democrats and Republicans alike. Here is one place where we would do well to take our Holy Scriptures literally – in our compassion for the poor, following Biblical principles of charity, but also working for justice.

I don’t know about you, but I learned this at my mother’s knee – to help out with those canned food drives at school, but also to help her drive Mobile Meals and teach at Head Start.  She even marched with me against the Ku Klux Klan.  And so my children went with me to help out at homeless shelters and food banks.  They marched with me in the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade.  This is just what good and God-fearing parents are called to do.  And so today, God still calls this world to a new way of love and justice – let us continue to teach our children to break their bread and share generously with others in Christ’s name. 

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.

 

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Amos 5:18-24 and Psalm 78:1-7

¹⁸Alas for you who desire the day of the Lord! Why do you want the day of the Lord? It is darkness, not light; ¹⁹as if someone fled from a lion, and was met by a bear; or went into the house and rested a hand against the wall, and was bitten by a snake. ²⁰Is not the day of the Lord darkness, not light, and gloom with no brightness in it?

²¹I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. ²²Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. ²³Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. ²⁴But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.

 

Amos 5:18-24 and Psalm 78:1-7

¹Give ear, O my people, to my teaching;
incline your ears to the words of my mouth.

²I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings from of old,

³things that we have heard and known, that our ancestors have told us.

⁴We will not hide them from their children;
we will tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord,
and his might, and the wonders that he has done.

⁵He established a decree in Jacob, and appointed a law in Israel,
which he commanded our ancestors to teach to their children;

⁶that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn,
and rise up and tell them to their children,

⁷so that they should set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God,
but keep his commandments...