Monday, October 15, 2018

The Justice at Our Gates

Amos 5:6-7, 10-15
Mark 10:17-31

When I was at Oklahoma State University in the late 90s, there was one person on campus that everyone seemed to know. He would show up intermittently, usually around the library, and draw great crowds of people. His name was Preacher Bob and everyone seemed to know exactly who he was. If you were to ask him - he would probably tell you he was a prophet. Standing on a box and shouting into a megaphone, he would tell us college kids that God had called him to condemn our evil ways and said if we didn’t change our ways, we would go straight to hell. Crowds would gather, to jeer and mock him - and he would banter back and forth - calling girls sluts and people he deemed gay abominations. I always wondered exactly who he thought he was actually going to save. For awhile, this was my view of prophets - crazed men who stood on boxes shouting warnings of hell at the masses.

And yet, during Seminary, I came to a much different understanding. I came to have a deep admiration and love for the prophets. I spent an entire semester studying eighth century prophets and found that yes, most might be crazed men - but it takes a bit of chutzpah to leave one’s home and deliver a challenging message from God to a people that don’t want to hear what you have to say. But unlike Preacher Bob, Biblical prophets did not condemn people to hell. They may have warned of consequences and impending doom, but they always offered a word of hope and redemption, as well. They were watchmen, servants, messengers of God. What I discovered was that prophets revealed God’s love to the world; they revealed God’s heart.

I love the prophets because even though their message was for specific people, in a specific place and time - their words can speak to us, too. Their words are alive and active, even now. And so, I would like for us to spend some time with the Hebrew Bible lesson from Amos in hopes that the heart of God might be revealed to us in a new way and we might hear his message of hope and redemption in the midst of our reality.

Amos lived in the 8th century BCE during the reign of Jeroboam II when the kingdom was divided - Judah to the south and Israel to the north. Amos was a shepherd, a highly respected sheep-breeder from Tekoa, a village southwest of Bethlehem in the Kingdom of Judah. God calls this man from south of Bethlehem and sends him all the way up north into the Kingdom of Israel.

The Kingdom of Israel was experiencing its greatest time of peace and prosperity under the rule of King Jeroboam II. The book of Amos describes the great pride of the Northern Kingdom. It speaks of the splendor of the land, the elegance of the cities, and the might of its palaces. It tells us the rich had summer houses and winter palaces adorned with expensive ivory and gorgeous couches with damask pillows for the people to recline upon. Life was good in the Kingdom - unless it wasn’t. Although there were great riches and wealth for some, it was also a time of great poverty and suffering for others. The poor were afflicted, exploited, and even sold into slavery. And so, a great divide existed between them - the rich and the poor.

In our text, Amos’ audience was the wealthy upper class of Bethel. Bethel was one of the great religious centers of the Northern Kingdom, the place God’s chosen people would gather for cultic worship and ritual. They believed their wealth was given to them by God because of their perfected rituals in their grand sanctuaries. They also believed, as God’s chosen people, that they held special status, which made them exceptional and blessed just because of who they were.

Of equal importance to the grand sanctuaries of Bethel was the city gate. As in all ancient towns and cities, the city gate was the place where all public activity took place. And it was also where legal disputes were decided. The ruling elites controlled the courts. These officials were corrupt in every way, manipulating the system, doling out unfair fines and taking bribes so the rich could get richer at the expense of their neighbors. Anyone who tried to speak truth to power, anyone who tried to act with integrity, was despised and ridiculed by the ruling class. The very court that was established to protect the vulnerable with no power or influence was the very court destroying and subverting justice, pushing them further into poverty. We hear Amos say: “They hate the one who reproves in the gate, and they abhor the one who speaks truth.”

It is into this particular moment in human history that Amos is called by God to speak. Amos is called to offer divine understanding to this human reality. Amos confronts the dissonance between what is happening in worship and what is happening at their gates of justice. Amos reveals the heart of God - a heart that longs for justice and righteousness.

Justice and righteousness are paired throughout the writings of the prophets and wisdom literature. For prophets like Amos, justice and righteousness were intimate companions; they were not abstract concepts but were lived out in real ways both individually and as a community. Justice, mispat in Hebrew, refers to behavior and practices that come from moral and ethical living. Justice is ethical action; acting based on one’s morals. And righteousness, sedeqa in Hebrew, refers to a right relationship with others that flows from a right relationship with God. Amos pairs these words in verse 7, and says to the people, “You turn justice to wormwood and bring righteousness to the ground.” Amos calls them out, saying their pursuit of justice has become wormwood, a plant that smells beautiful on the outside, but inside it contains a bitter extract. Justice in the gate may have looked fancy and elite, but the people had turned it bitter and made it useless. And they had thrown righteousness to the ground. Instead of being in right relationship with the poor, they trampled the poor into the dirt of the earth. The needy who sought justice were pushed aside and treated unethically. The people’s sin was their disregard of just practices and right relationships.

It seems the neglect of just practices and right relationships has always plagued humanity. We hear the familiar words of Amos echoed by Dr. Martin Luther King: “But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.” Isn’t it amazing that the same cry for justice and righteousness has been proclaimed for thousands and thousands of years? It was the cry of Amos, the cry of MLK - and it is still our cry today.

Yet, we are more like the ancient Israelites of the Northern Kingdom then we’d like to admit. Too often we seek God by going to church and performing our rituals. We try our best to follow the rules, thinking we can earn our way into heaven. As American Christians, we have an air of exceptionalism, thinking of ourselves as God’s chosen people. “God bless the USA,” we say. Even as Oklahomans we sing, “We know we belong to the land and the land we belong to is grand…”

And yet. And yet Oklahoma has the highest incarceration rate in the country. We have the highest incarceration rate of women in the whole entire world. In Tulsa, black teenagers are more than three times as likely to be arrested as white teenagers and black people are more than twice as likely to experience officer use of force as white people. What is is it about the justice that happens at our city gates that produces so many inmates and so much disparity between peoples?

Through the Criminal Justice work of ACTION, I heard the story of one Tulsa attorney whose client is part of our state’s disparaging statistics. Her client was a woman who was caught shoplifting shoes for her child because her child had no shoes. Maybe it was time for school or maybe winter was coming and she was desperate. When she was arrested, she was not charged with a misdemeanor, but with a felony for child abuse. She was kept in jail for such a long period of time that she lost her housing, her job, and her transportation. Her situation went from bad to tragic. In the end, the felony child abuse charge was dropped, but her time in jail already had terrible consequences for her and her family.

Detained immigrant children are currently being adopted to American families without the consent or knowledge of their own parents. Elderly people are the victims of fraud and exploitation everyday, falling through the cracks of our justice system. Black men die, women are sexually assaulted - and their assailants go free. What is is it about the justice that happens at our city gates that fails to protect the vulnerable? And what are we called to do about it?

Perhaps our calling is found in Amos’ message of hope and redemption. Standing on his box, holding his megaphone, Amos does not condemn the people to hell but offers them life. Four times in Chapter 5, Amos calls the people to seek the Lord, and the result of their search is life. In Hebrew, the word life is a word that means much more than mere existence. Life isn’t just having a pulse but it is living abundantly. Life is vitality, health, honor and prosperity. All of these things are yours, Amos says, if you seek God. Amos says, “Seek good and not evil...hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gate.” There may be many ways to seek God, but for Amos, seeking God is to seek and love good and establish justice. Seeking God looks like actively working for a just society. When the privileged of a society manipulates the system for their own selfish gain at the expense of the poor and marginalized, “seeking God” involves publically rejecting these forms of evil and working towards the establishment of justice and righteousness.

In our Gospel lesson, a young ruler with many possessions comes to Jesus seeking life. He knows the commandments and has obeyed them all. The proof was in his great blessings! And yet something was missing. He asks Jesus what more he needs to do. Jesus reveals the heart of God - sell all of your possessions, give the money to the poor, and come and follow me. It seems the man had things backwards, too. He had been seeking life through rule following and the accumulation of wealth and power, instead of seeking God through active love of neighbor. It is seeking God that leads to life. Both Amos and Jesus invite us who seek the way to life - to seek the heart of God first. For it is in seeking the heart of God - actively pursuing God’s goodness, God’s justice, and God’s righteousness - that we find abundant life has been ours the whole time.

1 comment:

  1. Justice this side of heaven always works out to be a process of correcting issues that extend beyond most people's understanding. It's good to continue to improve and grow to achieve more than current system allows. Thanks for reminding us to be more like Amos than Preacher Bob.....

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