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June 18, 2006
Putting Up with Nuisance Prophets
Amos 7: 10-17 / John 4: 43-45
Heidelberg Catechism, Q & A 21
June 18th, 2006
This morning I want to think with you about the wry statement Jesus made, that a prophet has no honor in his own hometown. We may think Jesus is making a comment about “them,” people not like us. But I wonder if John reminds the Christians to whom he wrote that Jesus said this because if anyone is a hometown boy to Christians it is Jesus.
Jesus said some things that I’m tempted to say receive from Christians the ultimate indignity—they are simply ignored. Jesus said to His followers at the close of the Sermon on the Mount, “Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house upon the rock . . . And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house upon the sand.” We have our children sing a cute song with motions about this.
We reply, “We accept the Bible as the authoritative word of God. It is an article of our faith: “The Bible says it; that does it.” Jesus did not talk about articles of faith; He spoke of doing something, a way of life built on Him.
Is Jesus a popular prophet now? “Well,” we reply correctly, “He was not a prophet, but the Son of God.” And we say well.
The other three Gospels report this saying a bit more fully. In Mark Jesus says it most emphatically, “A prophet is not without honor except in his home-town (patridi), and with his next of kin, and in his own house.”
What was wrong with the prophets that those who knew them best didn’t like them at all?
Why? Well, for one thing, prophets sure could be grumpy. We prefer people who smile to people who frown. We picture Jesus as kindly and serious, the kind of man to whom children are attracted. The prophets frowned a lot. “Go to Toastmaster’s Amos,” I wonder if someone told him. Learn to smile more.
It is no wonder that the high priest of the royal shrine of the northern kingdom of Israel at Bethel told Amos, “Go back south to Judah and prophesy there.” Amos frowned far too much.
He frowned partly because he didn’t want to be a prophet to begin with. He preferred his peaceful job as a shepherd. Sheep don’t talk back. Sheep graze, willingly following the shepherd as “he leads them beside still waters,” anointing their heads with oil when they are hurt.
As a prophet Amos said some things nobody wanted to hear. He knew they wouldn’t like to hear it, and maybe that’s why he frowned too. Though when we read the beautiful poetry of the little Book of the prophet Amos, it lets us know that he had an eye and ear for beauty. Beauty would have made him very happy, as happy as evil made him sad.
He prophecied during one of the most prosperous times in the history of Israel. King Jeroboam II reigned forty years. During this long reign Israel stretched its boundaries and grew prosperous. People were optimistic and proud of their country. They saw their prosperity and military power as signs of God’s blessing—even if they didn’t worship strictly as Moses had commanded. They did what we might call “blended worship,” which I don’t intend as a cheap shot at what today is called blended worship. For them it was a blend of their own required standards and the most appealing of the neighboring countries’ religion.
They worshipped at shrines older than Jerusalem, where the Temple stood that Solomon built. Their shrines were more historic than Jerusalem, at Bethel and Gilgal. Bethel was where Jacob saw the ladder reaching from earth to heaven with angels ascending and descending on it. He called it Beth–el, “house of God,” and said, “Surely God is in this place and I didn’t know it.”
Gilgal, just east of Bethel near Jericho, was the place where Joshua met the Commander of the Lord of hosts. There he “fell on his face to the earth, and worshiped.” Israel had launched the conquest of Canaan there. There Joshua set up the first sanctuary and altar as Israel claimed God’s promise of a Land. Bethel and Gilgal had history in their favor more than the Jebusite capital of Jerusalem.
But Amos saw what was going on behind all the religious pomp and circumstance at these two centers with such a rich heritage.
“Come to Bethel and transgress; to Gilgal, and multiply transgression; bring your sacrifices every morning, your tithes every three days . . . for so you love to do, O people of Israel.” “I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies . . . Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
It was after stirring words like this that the high priest at Bethel told Amos, “Get lost!” But Amos kept right on going. “Hear this you who trample upon the needy, and bring the poor of the land to an end, saying ‘When will the new moon be over that we may sell grain? And the Sabbath, that we may offer wheat for sale, . . . that we may buy the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and sell the refuse of the wheat?”
I sometimes wonder why Christians have used the prophets as though all they had to say was to predict the coming of the Messiah. Amos spoke from God. He was the voice of God; as we speak of being God’s hands and feet, so he was God’s voice. And this voice spoke timeless guidance. How we treat the poor is very important. How we show justice to people who are poor and in their very poverty are often trapped in ways of life that we then pounce on because of points of law. It is so much easier to administer harsh justice to the poor than to the rich. They can’t defend themselves and must have pro bono lawyers. We’re intrigued when Kenneth Lay and company get the book thrown at them because this has been so rare. We’re fascinated; and many CEOs are hoping we don’t get too intrigued with justice coming to the doors of the rich.
We sometimes hear Amos prediction quoted as pertaining to our day: “The days are coming, says the Lord God, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, to seek the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.”
We quote this in defense of biblical preaching even when it is not popular. Biblical preaching I take to mean preaching that is prophetic, that lays it all out there for you to hear—as Amos did. I do not forget that he spoke God’s words of warning--but also words of blessing.
His prophecy ends, “In that day I will raise up the booth of David that is fallen.” How ironic to refer not to the “house” of David, or the “kingdom” of David, but just the booth of David. It’s the Hebrew word succah that refers to the huts made from leafy branches. How welcome even a booth would be after having had the palace and the Temple itself in Jerusalem destroyed and Israel scattered to the ends of the earth. Oh, to have a booth, just a hut to call by the name of Israel’s great king. Oh to have a moment of genuine nostalgia for the golden days.
Amos’ promise was really generous. “The days are coming when the plowman shall overtake the reaper and the treader of grapes him who sows the seed.” It would be a day of such plenty that the harvest couldn’t be gathered in time to plow the ground for the next planting. If he said only this the high priest would have welcomed him.
Jesus’ situation was somewhat like Amos’. He was born in Bethlehem in Judea to the south, but spent his childhood up north in Galilee. The last public event where Jesus was present was at the Feast of Passover, at a moment when the Temple grounds looked like a market for sacrificial animals. He drove out the sheep and oxen with a whip of cords, and routed the moneychangers. No wonder He makes this wry remark: “A prophet has no honor in his own country.” There were those in the Temple that day who said, “Go back to Nazareth to do your prophecying.”
It was in Samaria, midway between Jerusalem and Nazareth, strange to say, that He found public honor. There not only did an outcast woman receive Him gladly, but she brought her entire town to receive Him gladly. He was on His way to His adopted town of Nazareth from His birth-village of Bethlehem. Cana was nearby, where He changed water into wine. Capernaum was there, a village on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee, where He healed the son of a Roman policeman. In time, He would rouse skepticism in the region of His adoptive home too. But not yet.
Let us focus just a bit more on why a prophet is so unpopular. If nobody took a prophet seriously then it wouldn’t matter what they say. Treat them just as crazy blokes, malcontents who can be written off as frowning misanthropes. “Get a life,” we might say to them.
But we can’t do that because everyone knows that a real prophet is a public voice that resonates in that private place in us all called conscience. Conscience is where God speaks—if we will listen. I am troubled at how the great conscience clause in the Westminster Confession has been reduced and quoted in such a way that it seems to mean what it does not mean at all. How often have you heard someone say, “God alone is Lord of the conscience.” And who, we ask, is to determine what God has said that pertains to conscience? The term “spirit” is widely used today as though the ways of life that have become popular are the voice of the Spirit of God. Thus we listen to the “spirit” of things and say, “This is the voice of God to which my conscience listens.”
But the Westminster Confession is clear: “God alone is Lord of the conscience, and has left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are in anything contrary to his Word, or beside it in matters of faith or worship.”
It is this voice of conscience that is the immediate, personal prophetic voice in us all if we will listen.
It is the voice to which David refers in Psalm 139, “O Lord, you have searched me and known me . . . You understand my thought afar off.”
Whereas we may so easily think that this or that place where we find ourselves we are away from the presence of God. So we act in a way we think nobody can see, or speak in a way that we feel safe from the ears of those we would want to impress better with our words. David admits to us: “Where shall I go from your spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend up into heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall your hand lead me . . . If I say surely the darkness shall cover me, even the night shall be light about me . . . the night shines as the day.”
The prophets called peoples’ attention to the real God, the One who is everywhere, not the God-substitute of their creation, the kind that liked their kind of people and took seriously their religious posturing. Someone wrote, “There is no reason to flee from a god who is nothing more than a benevolent father, a father who guarantees our immortality and final happiness.”
I proposed to our children this morning that we may think we’re healthy because we can do our pushups and crunches and we checked out OK with the dentist. But a doctor checks our blood and takes an X-ray and may find a lethal tumor inside us where the eye can’t see. The prophet was worse than a doctor, but better than one too. Because he could see with the eyes of God deeper than an X-ray or a blood test, into the heart, into the conscience.
We are fond of the prayer that comes at the end of the 139th Psalm: “Search me, O God, and know my heart, try me and know my thoughts; and see if there be any wicked way in me and lead me in the way everlasting.” The God to whom David offers this prayer is the God for whom Amos spoke to Israel and to Judah, and to other nations too. Why? Because “God so loved THE WORLD that He gave His only-begotten Son, that who-so-ever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” The God to whom David spoke this prayer is a God we cannot escape, whose image we cannot shape, whose idea of faith demands belief, that is obedience from the heart.
This is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in whose presence we live every moment of every day and night, who sees into our depths, not looking to discover where He might find us thinking badly, but who looks at us with enormous love—a love so great that He cannot let us be content with a shabby faith.
The prophets were unpopular because they held people to account when their consciences went to sleep. They had no honor of the kind that people give to public figures who make them feel good. But in the end, look, we’re still reading Amos. And we’re still reading Isaiah, even though he was put to death cruelly in his own day by those who wanted their consciences left alone. And we’re still claiming Jesus as our Lord as well as our Savior.
And if Jesus is indeed our Lord, He is Lord of our consciences. Conscience is the deep place where we know God knows all about us. Many of us often drown the voice of conscience. We have shaped our prophets according to our idea of what we’d like God to say that we would like to hear. And we suffer the consequences. It is good that we become weary and heavy-laden, having come to the end of ourselves, thoroughly miserable and distressed. Because then we can come to Jesus and find rest. What kind of rest does Jesus give?
He gives His gentle yoke of actual meekness—to those who are finally aware how wearying a thing it is to pretend they are what they know they are not. He gives to them His burden of lowliness of heart—to those who have grown tired of posturing they are better than they know they are. Indeed, Jesus gives joy unspeakable and full of glory; a kind of happiness that martyrs had in their hearts facing execution; a kind of peace that the world cannot give.
I imagine sitting down at the table with Amos and Jesus. I wonder would Amos say to me, “What I really want to say is the last thing I said in my prophecy. The last word—‘I will plant them on their land, and they shall never again be plucked up out of the land which I have given them says the Lord your God.” And I would think, “What an optimist! What a gracious man!”
And Jesus would say, “I did not come to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through me.” And I would wonder why Jesus and Amos were not popular in their hometowns, among their own kinfolk, in their own houses? Doesn’t it have to do with how we want to hear them? If I defend my sins, calling them by other names, and try to make my conscience agree with me, then how irksome is the voice of Jesus, or of the prophets who came before Him.
Let me close with Jesus’ words at the end of the Sermon on the Mount: “Everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise person who built a house on a rock; and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, but it did not fall, because it was built on the rock. And every one who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish person who built a house upon sand; and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against the house, and it fell; and great was the fall of it.”
Let us pray: Thank you, Lord God, for your prophets, for Amos, and Isaiah, and Jeremiah and all these who spoke your word, and for Jesus who is your final word to us. Grant that we may love your prophets, and love more than them, your Son Jesus. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at June 18, 2006 09:30 AM