The Necessity of Weeping

The lectionary gives us two prophets this morning: Jeremiah and Amos. We had Jeremiah a couple of weeks ago. Jeremiah is speaking God’s Word in the midst of everything falling apart. Israel was conquered by Assyria and then became the battlefield as Egypt invaded and then endured Babylon’s invasion and is living under siege with deportations into slavery. Amos speaks God’s Word about 150 years earlier – before their land had become a battlefield, before Assyria invaded – when the people you would ask – the landowners, the business owners, the establishment folks – would tell you everything was going great. It was a roaring 20’s sort of culture – the rich got richer while the poor got poorer…and the Great Depression and Stock Market fall hadn’t happened, yet.

No one wanted to hear the message Jeremiah spoke, but they were ready to listen because they were desperate. But 150 years earlier, no one wanted to hear the message that Amos spoke because the party was going strong! Sure, the poor and needy were being crushed, trampled, oppressed, but the profits were soaring! Gerhard von Rad, a prominent Old Testament scholar of the mid-20th Century notes that during the time of Amos bribery was the order of the day. While side by side the same people were comfortable to deal dishonestly in business, while exhibiting great passion for religion.

So that is what is happening in the world when Amos has a series of visions – perhaps the most familiar one is of the plumb line…part of how the rich are getting richer is that they are cheating the weights for buying and selling. If you pick and bring in the fruits of your labor, they have fixed the weights so that they weigh your harvest light and they pay you less. And, when you come to buy, they have fixed the weights so they weigh your purchase heavy and you pay them more. One Biblical scholar summarizes the situation this way: “The growing commercial life of the kingdom with its aggressive business practices has driven many Israelites off the land that was their family inheritance. An elite class of wealthy landowners and merchants arises while a growing number of Israelites are forced to sell their labor and buy basic goods from the commercial interests of the cities. Many of these Israelites live on the edge of poverty and need.” There’s a “company store” model of control of the work force going on.

Finally, the problems that come with systemic poverty overwhelmed the ability of the wealthy to insulate themselves. Until, and, just so that it doesn’t seem like this is a new assessment of what is going on in the 8th Century BCE as a comment on our current context, I’m quoting Old Testament scholar James Limburg’s Interpretation commentary from 1988, “The result of these practices will finally be to
‘solve’ the poverty problem by the extermination of the poor.”

God gives Amos a vision of the nation being like a plumb line. The problem may not be obvious at first, like if you start to build a building without dropping a plumb line…it looks like the foundation is level…you start going up…maybe notice it’s a little off…but, you keep going and a little off is a LOT off, and your building is not going to have structural integrity.

God gives Amos a vision that taking advantage of the least leads to a lack of structural integrity for a nation… It was as the nation began to turn on itself, as the rich began exterminating the poor that the country weakened to the point that Assyria was able to invade and conquer them.

The next vision God gives to Amos, the one that Becky read this morning is of a basket of ripe fruit. I’m making a fruit salad for Wednesday that has blackberries in it…and I’m waiting until Tuesday night to go buy them. I know that, beautiful though it may be, ripe fruit doesn’t keep. God tells Amos, “The time is ripe for my people Israel; I will spare them no longer.” Israel thinks all is well, but the nation is suffering moral decay within. God’s compassion and mercy are not limitless; grace does not exclude accountability. The covenant we have in Jesus places upon us not only the Old Testament commandment to love God first and foremost and with all that we have, but also to love other human beings with the love Christ has shown us. The mercy of God is that we get lots of chances…the faithfulness of God is that we will ultimately, like Israel, be measured.

Dean Emeritus at Wesley Theological, Bruce C. Birch wrote about this passage for a commentary published in 1997, “The image of the summer fruit might be a particularly apt one for the church in our American setting. The tendency to optimism and positive thinking that is so strong in our culture affects both church and nation. We tend to extol our virtues and successes while paying too little heed to signs of injustice and failure of righteousness in our midst – those things that might suggest all is not well and attention must be paid. Why is violence so prevalent in our society, extending now in new and deadly ways even to children in our schools?” Pause here…this book was published 2 years before Columbine. He goes on to ask, “Why is the population of homeless people on the streets of our country growing rather than shrinking? Why have there been renewed and seemingly more extensive outbursts of racial tensions and intolerance?….there comes a time when excuses and mitigating circumstances are not enough, and we must face the tough questions that suggest all is not well. Such a message is one of difficulty and disruption. It will often be seen as negative thinking and doom-saying. But Amos’s visions suggest that if we wait too long to examine the difficult and disruptive questions that focus on the problems of our church and societal life, we run the risk of being too late.”

Whew. By the time of Jeremiah, it was too late. In the passage I read this morning, God is mourning. God is mourning and asks, “When people go astray, do they not turn back? I have listened, but they don’t speak honestly; no one repents of wickedness saying, “What have I done?” God is mourning and laments, “They have rejected the Word of the Lord, everyone is greedy for unjust gain. They acted shamefully, and were not at all ashamed. They do not know how to blush.” God is mourning and the ripe fruit is in the basket, “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved. For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.”

God’s people now recognize what is happening to them. They thought it wouldn’t, that it couldn’t, that God wouldn’t let it. “My joy is gone,” God mourns, “grief is upon me, my heart is sick.” Then God asks “Why?” What is happening that my people are in this situation? “Is there no balm in Gilead?” The balm in Gilead is from the sap of a gum tree native to Gilead, a region east of the Jordan River, that has remarkable healing qualities – a natural way to heal. God has provided natural ways of healing; God does not want us to hurt, to be wounded and in pain. But, they don’t seek them. Then God asks, “Is there no physician there?” God has given us the ability to care for one another, but they aren’t taking care of one another. God provides wholeness through nature and through relationship. “Why then,” God asks, “has the health of my poor people not been restored?”

UCC Pastor and professor at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis John Bracke, comments on this passage, “God’s anger is understandable. The surprise of these verses is the Lord’s anguish and hurt.” The surprise is God’s mourning.

When I was in seminary I read a book for a class on Death and Dying, and I made the mistake of reading it on a plane flight…pretty sure everybody on the plane was concerned about me by the time I finished it. It was a father’s reflections on his 25 year old son’s death, beginning with the numbing phone call on a sunny Sunday afternoon that told him there had been an accident and Eric had fallen while mountain climbing.

The father, Nicholas Wolterstorff reflects that it was only in the midst of his own suffering that he saw that God suffers. He knew the Old Testament warnings that no one sees God’s face and lives. He writes, “I always thought that this meant that no one could see God’s splendor and live. A friend said perhaps it means that no one could see God’s sorrow and live. Or perhaps,” he reflects, “the sorrow is the splendor.” What a wonder that God’s heart breaks!

When Jesus stood at the tomb of his friend Lazarus, he wept. He felt the pain. Walter Brueggemann, wrote about Jesus weeping, “Jesus knew what we numb ones must always learn again: first, that weeping must be real because endings are real; and second, that weeping permits newness. His weeping permits the kingdom to come.”

What if the image of God in us is our ability to mourn? To allow our hearts to be broken?

It was during the time of Jeremiah, during their exile in Babylon, that God’s Word of instruction came to the Israelites, recorded in Second Chronicles 7:14, “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

I know that it is tempting to say, “Well, this is all Old Testament. Jesus came and died for our sins, so we are forgiven.” But when Jesus healed, his blessing was “Go, and sin no more.” Our world is broken. God mourns, and we need to as well. It is only as we weep that God is able to wipe away every tear.