St. George's Episcopal Church | Arlington (Redesign)

Category: Sundays after Pentecost

Speaker: The Rev. Dr. Robert W. Prichard

During the summer we have had a variety of lessons from and about the Old Testament prophets.  Today we hear from Amos, a prophet of Israel from the 8^th century before Christ.  It was a period relative prosperity and military security for Israel.  Many of the people in the nation were content, but Amos saw a problem: growing inequality between the rich and poor, and the acceptance on a wide scale of business practices that he regarded as fraudulent.  In the chapter following that from which we have heard today Amos provided details.  “Merchants make “the ephah small and the shekel great.”  That is to say that they undersize the measure of volume by which they count out what has been purchased—you buy 16 ounces and they give you 14—and they use heavy weights to balance out how much in weight you must pay.  If that is not bad enough, the balance itself is not honest and the wheat that you buy has been mixed with the chaff.  Amos sums up the problem by saying the rich buy “the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals,” and “trample on the needy.”

One of the devices that effective preachers sometimes employ, particularly with the young, is to use props.  I can still remember sermons that I heard in children services in the 1950s because of the props that were used.  Amos was an early master of this technique.  In today’s lesson he uses a builder’s plumb line to make a point about the morals of Israel.  God, he says, has held a plumb line in the midst of Israel and has found the people to be crooked.  In the next chapter he uses the image of a basket of summer fruit, ripe and ready to be consumed, just as Israel is ripe and ready to be consumed by the judgment of God.

This past Friday the Washington Post carried a story about  the trial of “a former Army Corps of Engineers program manager” who apparent was making “the ephah small and the shekel great” by inflating charges, faking invoices, and accepting kickbacks.  He stole “more than $30 million” for himself and his collaborators.[1]  He was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years in prison.  I find it assuring that someone who has been dishonest over a long period of time, has been--despite thriving for season—finally found out and punished.  It gives me a sense that there is a moral balance in the universe that cannot ultimately be discounted.  If you are dishonest and take advantage of others, you will ultimately be punished.

I think Amos would have agreed.  God is not fooled.  The dishonest person will not prosper for ever; that person will fail.

Amos’s certainty about God’s judgment did not make him popular in Israel, particularly among the rich and important.  A leading priest from the shrine at Bethel, whose name was Amaziah, came to him and tried to shush him up or at least to convince him to move to some other place.  The attempt only made Amos more certain and his prophesy more personal.  Not only will the nation suffer, but Amaziah’s own family will be torn apart.  Amos will eventually leave Israel, but he went on to write down the prophecies that he had uttered, playing a critical role in the transition from prophets who were primarily oral in presentation to those who left a literary record.  Because he wrote down his words, we can read them in relationship with other authors who address the same topic.  Today, two of the remaining biblical authors from which we have heard do, in fact, talk about the justice of God.  They are not in entire agreement with Amos.

The Psalm that we have heard today—Psalm 82—is one of the 12 psalms ascribed to Asaph, a figure about who we know relatively little.  There are other psalms that share the kind of assurance that Amos has about the impending punishment of the dishonest.  Psalm 1 ends with the observation that, “The Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked is doomed.  Psalm 9, one of my favorites, warns that “The ungodly have fallen into the pit they dug [for others], and in the snare they set is their own foot caught.”  But Asaph has some doubts.  In Psalm 82 he frets that God is too slow in acting.  In the short term it appears as if God shows partiality not to the weak and the fatherless but to the wicked.  Asaph has no answer for the question that he raises, and can only end the psalm with a plea to God:  “Arise, O God, judge of the earth; for to thee belong all the nations!”

Our Gospel lesson today, which is the familiar story of the Good Samaritan, is at heart a story about justice.  An innocent man, who is traveling on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho and is causing no harm to anyone, is beaten, robbed, stripped, and left by the road side in such poor condition that others who pass by assume that he is dead.  Luke’s account never says anything about the punishment of the robbers, though it is clear from elsewhere in the Gospels that Jesus had a strong expectation that in this life or in the Last Day God’s justice will be vindicated, and the wrong doers brought to judgment.

Here the account focuses on another question—on that period about which Asaph cried—the period between wrong doing and the arrival of God’s justice.  When others go unpunished, one is tempted simply to follow suit and seek gain in the dishonest ways that seem to be working for everyone else.  But Jesus’ parable pint in another direction.  This is precisely the moment for the claiming of neighbor and the loving of neighbor and the joining in the effort to set matters right in the midst of injustice.  Crying for God’s justice is not enough, we need to follow the example of the Good Samaritan, and to begin to set things right.  The effort, to be sure, is only a beginning, but it is the beginning to which our Lord calls us. 

And the Lord said, “See, I am setting a plum line in midst of my people Israel.”

© Robert W. Prichard

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