Ben's Sermon from Sunday

A sermon preached by the Rev’d Benjamin J King at Christ Church on Pentecost 17, 2007

You don’t need to be from New England to realize that there’s something different about southerners. You don’t need to be from southern California to know northern California is like different countries. You could be from Ireland or from Italy, from China or from India, and you would think there is a north-south divide. It was also true in ancient Israel. Since the death of King Solomon, the Hebrew people had been divided into two kingdoms – one ruled from Jerusalem in the south, and one ruled from Samaria in the north. Around 800 BC, the two kingdoms were still close enough to consider themselves as representatives of one people, the people of God, but they were like two different countries.

Of course a lot of stereotypes build up around the differences between north and south. People from the other place speak funny. Or they eat strange foods. Or they have no culture. Northerners in all the nations I’ve mentioned, think of themselves as the hardest workers and that that southerners enjoy their leisure a bit too much. In ancient Israel, though, the opposite stereotype was true. It was the people of the north who enjoyed themselves rather more than they should, and spent too much time building large estates and eating fine foods, and not enough time working.

So Amos says, anyway, about the northern kingdom. But he would say that, wouldn’t he? Amos was a southerner; his king lived in Jerusalem in the south, not Samaria in the north. But he was called by God to be a prophet to the north when, typically of a Hebrew southerner, he was hard at work herding his sheep. A busy man, with much to do, he didn’t have time to go tell those northerners that they had grown lazy and sinful with their wealth. But that is exactly what God wanted him to do.

In today’s lesson we heard Amos telling the northerners: “Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory, and lounge on their couches…; who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp…; who drink wine from bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of [their people]! Therefore they shall now be the first to go into exile, and the revelry of the loungers shall pass away.” (Amos 6:4-7)

What incredibly specific things to criticize. Amos doesn’t deal in generalities or preach pious platitudes; he has concrete examples of what must change: the ivory beds, the idleness of the songs, the size of the drinking vessels! Amos knew exactly what was wrong with this culture. Archaeological evidence tells us that the northern kingdom was going into general economic decline just at the time the very wealthy were building bigger houses than ever. Irresponsible spending was their sin. And getting rich at the expense of others. When a recession set in back then in ancient Samaria, when increasing numbers of people were starving, the wealthy went on living the high life. But, warns Amos, those who “trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain” shall not live in their houses for much longer (Amos 5:11). God’s punishment will be upon them. Indeed, the kingdom of Samaria fell soon after. In 721 BC, the Assyrians took some 27,000 Samaritan people into exile – at which point they disappear from the historical record, some of them probably ending up as far away as Asia.

Let us remember that the God of Israel, who sent Amos to the northern kingdom some 2800 years ago, is the same God whom we worship today. Kingdoms change. Empires wax and wane. But people are pretty much the same today as they were in the days of Amos. Our culture spends money on things which just aren’t important. Consider my friend who lives in California: he spends an outrageous amount of money having special water imported from Japan just to wash his face in! Think of all the airplane gas – not to mention money – that is being burned to transport water from one rich country to another one that already has more than enough of its own water. There are plenty of opportunities for a godly use of wealth instead of transporting water across the northern hemisphere.

It’s not just countries that experience the north-south divide. Splits between north and south operate today on a global level, splits about which Amos would have something to say. Think about the people in the southern half of our world. Our Presiding Bishop tells an interesting fact about the Millennium Development Goals: apparently the amount it would take to provide primary education to children in the southern hemisphere is one-half of the amount we in this country spend each year on ice-cream. One half! Now this is not to say we should eat less ice-cream, God forbid! Rather, what if ice-cream lovers like me considered giving half as much to Oxfam each year as we spent on ice-cream? Buy a four-dollar tub of ice-cream – send two dollars to Oxfam. That’s the kind of concrete change that Amos was calling for. His challenge to the Samarians and his challenge to us is to find real ways to do something better with our wealth. And all of us here are wealthy by comparison with the global south.

The prophet says nothing about wealth being wrong in itself, but wealth brings with it great responsibility. The wealthy Samaritans’ sin was not being wealthy; it was failing to recognize the “ruin” they were bringing on their people by spending money on themselves alone. In the story Jesus tells in the today’s gospel, the rich man’s sin was not to be dressed in purple and fine linen, nor to feast sumptuously, but rather his sin was to wear and to eat these things when there was a man with nothing lying outside his gate.

Today, as in Amos’s day, as in Jesus’s day, we in the north have a responsibility to do something with our riches. Instead of feeling guilty about all that we have, we need to put it to good use. Today, God is calling each of us to look outside of ourselves – not to be focused on our own desires alone, but upon the needs of others, and so to see the God who is bigger than us all.