Overripe

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
07.22.07; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Amos 8:1-12

It’s a new Gilded Age!

At least, that was the headline that proudly blared out from the front page of the New York Times that showed up at the door of my hotel room this last week. As I sat recently in the back of a Manhattan deli and that third cup of coffee cleared the haze from staying up way past my bedtime the night before, I dug deep into that eager little article.

Gilded Age, you say? What does that mean? Somewhere in the hazy and distant past of an American history class, you might remember that term. It means...well...what does it mean? The Gilded Age was an era in American history that began in the late 19th century. It was called “gilded” because it was...for some...a time gilded with gold, an era of unparalleled prosperity for the richest of the rich. For those who owned or financed the businesses of the newly industrializing America, the level of wealth generated was unprecedented in modern history. This was the era of the Rockefellers and the Carnegies and the J.P. Morgans, the captains of industry who guided and profited from the explosive growth that was sweeping across America. They commanded a huge portion of the wealth of this country. In today’s dollars, for example, the Rockefeller fortune would ring in at $178 billion dollars. By that standard, Bill Gates seems lower middle class.

For the people who own and fund today’s global economy, that warm blanket of gold seems to be returning. Once again, wealth is concentrating itself in the hands of an elite few, for whom the first decade of this millenia has them soaring higher and higher above the rest of us. There are few places in this country where that surging concentration of wealth are more evident than walking around Manhattan in 2007. That part of the city is fat and happy, glistening with new construction and newly beautified parks. The concentration of wealth is stratospheric, stunning, almost impossible. It isn’t just that some hotels in that city now require you to put down one of your kidneys as a deposit. It’s not just that even apartments the size of a refrigerator box are beyond reach of most mortals. Buying a parking space on the upper West Side will put you back $250,000.

Wealth is piled upon wealth, rising as high and bright as the advertising that blares from the screens in Times Square. It seems like an age of plenty, a time of harvest, when the fruit from all of the labor of all of the world is gathered into the larders of the wealthy. With the average American corporate executive now pulling down a salary 400 times that of their workers, and with the growing concentration of wealth among the very few, it sure must seem like that way...to them, at least.

Throughout history, this pattern has repeated and repeated itself. Wealth concentrates, as riches create power that seeks to gather more riches. It’s a pattern as old as humanity itself, and that’s exactly the pattern that the prophet Amos was shouting about nearly 2,800 years ago. The passage we heard this morning comes to us from around 760 years before Christ, during the reign of King Jeroboam the Second of Israel. For all of the chaos that had wracked both the Southern Kingdom of Judah and the Northern Kingdom of Israel, this period was a had been a relatively calm time in the struggles of the Hebrew people.

For half a century, the wars between the great Empires of the Ancient Near East fell into a lull...Egyptian and Assyrian armies no longer swept back and forth across the land like a plague. In that brief time of peace, the cities of both kingdoms prospered. The educated and literate power elite that gathered around the throne of kings grew in power, as taxation and the strengthening of the monarchy gathered in the wealth. But that prosperity wasn’t something shared by all. For those who didn’t live in the cities, things were not as good as they had once been.

Amos came from just such a place. He was from the village of Tekoa, in the southern kingdom. He was a shepherd, whose flock would have wandered the hills just to the south of Bethlehem. A series of visions drove him to travel to the north, across the border into Israel and up in to the area around Bethel, where he made himself a nuisance to the priests and authorities of the north.

The vision he shared might seem a bit odd to us. Does God show him a golden throne surrounded by many-winged angels? Does he see radiant glory? No...God shows him a basket of...summer fruit. A fruit basket? That’s his vision? What sort of vision is that? That’s not a message from God...it’s the kind of gift you give to a co-worker you barely know. No self-respecting televangelist is going to get up there and say...”Brothers and sisters, the Lord came to me in a dream last night...and in his radiant glory and power he showed me...a fruit basket. He also showed me a nice Hallmark card with a picture of a kitten.”

But Amos didn’t know we’d be hearing his voice nearly 3,000 years later. He was talking directly to the people of Ancient Israel, in terms that they would have understood. This is a passage that requires a little background knowledge about both Hebrew and ancient agriculture.

When Amos says basket of summer fruit, the thing we miss is that he’s making a pun in Hebrew. When God shows him a basket of summer fruit, and then tells him that the “the end has come upon my people Israel,” those are two related words. “Summer fruit” is, in Hebrew, the word qayits. “The end,” in Hebrew, is the word qets. Summer fruit and the end don’t just sound alike, though. Like many Hebrew words that sound alike, they’re related.

When we think of “summer fruit,” we think of sweet buttered corn and watermelon juice dripping red down our chins. But for the ancient Israelites the term “summer fruit” meant the harvest that came at the very end of the season. It was the last of the gathering in, the crop that was brought in just as the growing season was over. Summer fruit didn’t last long. You had to eat it or store it quickly, because it wasn’t going to keep. It was like that banana that starting to brown and tomorrow will be nothing but blackened mush, like that watermelon that seems fine today, but when you cut into it tomorrow, the meat has turned to watery foulness. Summer fruit doesn’t last, and after it’s done, there’s nothing to follow it. The harvest is over.

From the vision of Amos came a word of God’s judgement against those denizens of the ancient cities of Israel. All of the law codes of ancient Israel served to keep their society in balance. Those ancient law helped to maintain a balance in society, a balance under which no one individual or group was to gather too much power or control to itself. The point of the Torah, which is affirmed and lived out by Christ, is that power and material wealth weren’t allowed to become the goal of God’s people. When they do, a society has lost it’s center. It is no longer focused on God’s love and love of neighbor, and is doomed to failure. The eloquent warnings that this shepherd from Bethlehem delivered to Israel proved to be true...as within a generation, Israel had fallen.

Hearing Amos...really hearing him...is as important in our age as it was in his. As amazing and impressive as the riches of the new global economy can be, we’ve got to look hard at them through that prophet’s eyes. When wealth and power become the whole focus of our lives, we lose our sense of responsibility for others. We no longer seek their good, but instead allow ourselves to believe that profit justifies itself. When profit seeks after profit, the world is thrown out of balance. When a few are sating themselves on a harvest of summer fruit, and literally billions are struggling just to have the very most basic staples in life, the world is thrown out of balance.

Such imbalances aren’t part of God’s covenant desire for us, and as the taste of that fruit rests on our lips, we have to be mindful of the warning that Amos bore.