Too Long on the Vine

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

07.17.2016; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Amos 8:1-12

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

I made another mistake this month, one of those classic mistakes of omission that tends to come when you’re a little scatterbrained.

It’s like leaving to go to the store, but forgetting your wallet.  Doh! Or getting back from that trip to the store, and realizing you didn’t actually buy the milk.

What I forgot, this last month, was to buy stock in Nintendo.  Every time I’ve see a little cluster of kids or teens wandering around Whalen Commons in lazy concentric circles, hoping against hope that a Snorlax might appear, I’m reminded that this was one of those times when a stock purchase might have made sense, one of those “double your money” moments that’s dangled like grapes before a capitalist Tantalus.

If only, you think, and then you start daydreaming about the fabulous things you could have bought if you’d only bet the house and the entire contents of your 401(3)b on Nintendo to ride.   Hmm.  Do I get my Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat in Go Mango Orange, or Maximum Steel Gray?

But I waited too long.  It’s been an incredible run for all stocks recently, truth be told.  After taking a pummeling during the collapse of the subprime market back in the last decade, the markets have roared back.

Home prices have also bounced back, with the average sale price of single family home in the Washington metropolitan area setting a new high water mark in June.  The median price for a single family home hereabouts: now $555,000.  This is great news if you already own a house, and perhaps not such good news if you don’t.

Wealth is piled upon wealth, rising as high and bright as the advertising that blares from the screens in Times Square. For those with the means to take advantage of it, this 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 capital. 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 going on 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 had been a peaceful time in the history of the Hebrew people.

No wars.  No uprisings.  Nothing.  Honestly, that’s pretty unusual.

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 influence and wealth, 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 near the heart of power, 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 into 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 is that two-foot zucchini that’s been left on the vine just a tiny bit too long, huge and mealy and barely edible.

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 its 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.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.