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.

Kentucky Fried Wisdom

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
06.03.07; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Readings: Psalm 8; Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; John 16:12-15

Life sure does change. As the heat hangs heavy in the air and summer descends around us like a great mound of sweaty socks, I vaguely recall that the coming of summer was a time of great joy. When I was a kid, this was pretty much the time when all of the teachers had finally given up. The year’s basically over. The testing is done. Summer would press in to the fabric of our regimented days, and suddenly we’d be having assemblies, watching more “educational” films, having more assemblies, doing field day. Even if you technically had three more weeks of school, it was summertime, and the livin’ was easy. But we don’t always live as children. We have to grow up.

During the college years, sure, you work. But you also travel, and do plenty of nothin’. But now...now that I am suddenly and inexplicably a grownup...and a parent, summer takes on a whole different dynamic. The kids are around, and need to be shuttled from camp to swim team to playdates. All those blessed hours in the day when they were off learning have suddenly vanished, and you’ve got to figure out how to keep them distracted enough that they don’t decide to start disassembling your car mid-way through the first week. As the summer wears on, it grows more and more tempting to let them just run wild, to let them live outdoors hunting squirrels and descending into that feral animal state that...quite frankly...most little boys seem to prefer.

And nowadays it seems like you have to keep them active…keep them moving…so that they don’t disappear into their DS or their Wii for the entire summer. All you’d have to do is set out a big bucket of fried chicken at the beginning of each week, and they’d be happy as clams…and come out the other end missing sixty IQ points and weighing as much as a small beluga whale.

Fortunately, there are countless things to do. You can drop your bundles of joy off at soccer camps and swim camps and computer camps. You can trundle them off to playdates, or turn them over to relatives. Better yet, you can fill their mornings with educational opportunities. They can take trips to the zoo, or to one of the countless museums that fill our area. Once you’ve run your way through those options, you can schedule in a road trip or two. Somewhere educational, like going up to Mount Vernon or Gettysburg or Hershey Park. Yeah, Hershey Park is educational. Rollercoasters are a great way to teach kids about physics.

For those parents who are struggling to come up with new ideas for summer outings, there’s a new option in town. It’s a bit of a drive, but it guarantees that your kids will be learning things that they won’t learn...well...anywhere else. It’s the new museum of Creation in Petersburg, Kentucky. Here, you and your children can wander through exhibits that reveal all kinds of new and exciting facts about the world in which we live. That becomes apparent the moment you walk into the museum and are presented with four animatronic statues. Two of them are kids, dressed in primitive clothing. The other two are their velociraptor friends. According to the Creation Museum, human beings and dinosaurs coexisted perfectly with each other...6,000 years ago.

Now you might be thinking...well...what about the fossil record? Or geological strata that indicates that human beings and dinosaurs never co-existed? Or the carbon dating that tells us that the fossils of dinosaurs are billions of years old? Irrelevant. The folks at the Creation Museum have used the Bible to determine the universe is only 6,000 years old, and are telling that story through multimedia presentations and animated statuary.

They’re also making other assertions that they say are based on the Bible. Did you know, for instance, that Tyrannosaurus Rex was originally a vegetarian? Ken Ham, the founder of this Museum, is happy to explain why. We know that no creatures ate meat in Eden. We know that T-Rex lived in Eden...but didn’t survive after the flood. Therefore, T-Rex was originally designed as a vegetarian. Well, one might say, what about the huge razor-sharp teeth, which are a clear indicator of a carnivore? Well...bears have big teeth too, says Mr. Ham, and they eat vegetables. But...they’re omnivores, you say, and they have molars for chewing. T-Rex didn’t have molars. Well, says Ken...it’s in the Bible. But, say you, what about the huge slashing foreclaws of a Deinonychus? Did they use them for ice climbing? Digging in the garden?

Yes...it’s a museum about creation that completely ignores the witness of creation. This is, of course, meant to be a defense of the Bible against the pernicious influence of science. The only problem with that is that it...um...doesn’t really seem to jibe with the witness of Bible, either, not if you read what it actually says. Let’s take a look at some relevant passages. This morning, we’ve read three different passages from Scripture.

The first was the eighth Psalm, which we all read together at the very beginning of the service. This is one of the many Psalms ascribed to King David, and is a hymn that praises God for the immensity of God’s creation. The theological focus of this hymn is amazement, sheer wonder that the God who could create a universe so vast and immense should care for we human beings in our smallness. It rejoices in the majesty of God and the awesomeness of his works. Looking into the endless fastness of space, at the stars and the glory of the heavens, the Psalmist expresses awe that God should have placed so much trust in us to be stewards over creation.

There’s no fear that somehow the size of the universe...or it’s age...or any of the humbling reality of the vastness of spacetime...should be any threat to our faith. That the scope of creation is beyond our easy grasp is seen...right here in scripture...as yet another affirmation of the power of God.

The second passage comes to us from the great ancient collection of Hebrew Wisdom literature, the Book of Proverbs. In Proverbs, Wisdom is seen as more than just the ability to make a correct decision, like buying 25,000 shares of Apple stock the week before the first iPod was sold. Wisdom in seen as something more than that...as either an angelic being created by God or as a manifestation of God’s own creative power. Wisdom both witnesses to and is part of God’s act of creating the universe. Much of this is expressing the nature of God the only way you can: through poetry and images.

Today’s passage from Proverbs affirms what we’ve heard from the Psalmist...that God’s creative power ordered and made the the universe. Wisdom, which is the knowledge of how the world works and how we are to live in the world, is a central part of that. God’s creation and the knowledge of it are woven up together, as part of God’s plan for us and for our world.

The third passage, from John’s Gospel, comes from the final talk that Jesus has with his disciples before his arrest. In it, Jesus explains that the Spirit of God still has much to say and speak in this world. There is much yet to teach, and much yet to learn about the truths of this world and of our purpose in it. This is picking up a vital theme from John’s Gospel, which reminds us again and again that when Jesus leaves, the story doesn’t end. There’s much left to know, and much left to learn.

Taken together, these three passages tell us that we don’t need to fear the size and age of the universe, which only bear witness to the creative power of God. They tell us that knowledge of that universe and how to live in it is blessed by God. They tell us that Christ taught that there is still more to learn and know about him and the creation he came to redeem.

But none of that wisdom and none of that teaching would be found in the Creation museum. Instead, the universe is constrained to something easily grasped, something that does not challenge. The knowledge of creation is rejected as somehow corrupting, and replaced by an approach to the Bible that betrays both the purpose of Scripture and the magnificence of God’s work. The idea that there may be new teachings for which we are going to gradually become aware of is rejected.

I don’t doubt that the Creation Museum is a fun place to take the kids. But the vision it gives of the world is not real, and rejects the witness of creation itself. The Creation Museum takes the living witness of Wisdom to the glories of creation, kills it, batters it, then deep-fat fries it until it’s all nice and crispy and dripping with tasty transfats. The end product sure does taste good…just like chicken…but it isn’t alive. Instead of guiding our hearts towards the mystery and majesty of God, it clogs them with easy falsehoods.

Yes, it is simple, simple enough to be grasped and consumed by a child. But we don’t always live as children. There comes a time when we must set aside childish ways.