Confessions of a Hard-of-Hearing Heart

Confessions of a Hard-of-Hearing Heart--September 26, 2017

"Hear this word, you cows of Bashan who are on Mount Samaria,

     who oppress the poor, who crush the needy,

     who say to their husbands, 'Bring something to drink!'

 The Lord GOD has sworn by his holiness:

     The time is surely coming upon you,

     when they shall take you away with hooks,

     even the last of you with fishhooks.

Through breaches in the wall you shall leave,

    each one straight ahead;

    and you shall be flung out into Harmon, says the LORD.

Come to Bethel--and transgress;

    to Gilgal--and multiply transgression;

    bring your sacrifices every morning,

    your tithes every three days;

bring a thank offering of leavened bread,

    and proclaim freewill offerings, publish them;

    for so you love to do, O people of Israel!   Says the Lord GOD.

....Hear this, you that trample on the needy,

    and bring ruin to the poor of the land,

    saying, 'When will the new moon be over

       so that we may sell grain;

    and the Sabbath,

       so that we may offer wheat for sale?" [Amos 4:1-5, 8:4-5]

May I tell you something that frightens me, something that keeps me awake and nags at me during the day time?  May I tell you something that genuinely scares me?

It is the fear that I could be utterly out of sync with what matters to God... and not realize it.

It is the fear that God might well be saying, whispering, shouting, pleading to me what really matters, and that I could be missing God's voice because I can't hear it over the sound of my own religiosity.

And the reason that fear haunts me is that, like all persistent and potent fears, it is grounded in reality.  It has happened before.  It will happen again.  It is happening right before our eyes.  Over and over and over again in the story of God's people, folks convince themselves they have God's priorities, as they get fixated on symbols and ceremonies, gestures and rituals, only to have God say to them, "You are missing the point!"  And over and over and over again, no matter how loudly or how often God cries out, "It is about people, not things!  It is about justice and mercy, not the objects or songs or rituals or ceremonies you associate with religion!" the people of God dig in their heels and obsess over those symbols--and miss what they were always supposed to be about in the first place.

Amos puts it starkly.  He was by no means the only prophet tasked with helping the privileged and powerful in Israel to see that they had missed the point, but he is certainly one of the most direct about it.   He just outright calls the privileged women of Israel "cows" who lounge around asking for more to drink while they ignore that there are others in their society who are getting trampled on.  Amos is blunt. He is grim. He paints an awfully frightening picture of those privileged and complacent elite ladies of power being led out like livestock when the invading Assyrians come (which they did, in 722BC).  Very few people choose this dark passage from Amos' collection of sermons to embroider on a throw pillow or frame for their wall.

But in fairness to Amos himself, the old farm hand from a small town knows, as Flannery O'Connor put it once so well, "When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures." Well, God sent Amos to a populace so hard of hearing that the prophet had to shout, and so dim in the eyes that he had to draw big and bold.

The real trouble was that the majority of the people to whom Amos was sent didn't see a problem.  They thought things were fine in Israel... because things were fine for them.  If you don't have cancer, it's easy not to think that you should care or worry about it... but once you or someone you love gets it, all of a sudden, you start to make a fuss.  Well, it was the same for the people to whom Amos spoke: they had been so comfortable in their avarice and insulated from the way others were being ground into the dirt, that they didn't think anything was wrong in Israelite society.  After all, during Amos' day, the markets were up... up... up, and all having record closes.  But Amos knew that from God's perspective, the real value of a society is not in how the markets finish at the end of the business day, but about how the most vulnerable people are treated, regardless of what it does to the bottom line.  The people to whom Amos was sent were just about blind and deaf, and didn't want to be bothered with anyone showing them anything different.

And part of what made it even harder for the people who heard Amos was that they had told themselves that as long as they did good, respectable religious things, they were righteous.  As long as they observed the official civic ceremonies and religious rituals of the day--offering sacrifices, bring their offerings, muttering a prayer on the Sabbath day, and recognizing civil observances like new moons and national holidays--they thought that was all that mattered to God.  So, who cared that others in Israel were treated as less-than, as marginal, as unimportant--the "cows of Bashan" didn't have to think about that as long as they convinced themselves that they were doing right on the rituals and symbols.

There's this other scene in the book of Amos where the prophet goes up to one of the official national government-approved worship sites in Israel, and the priest is all upset that Amos isn't showing proper deference there. He's not being respectful... he's not keeping quiet... he's not just nodding his head and letting the faceless crowds be pushed to the margins.  And on top of that, Amos was getting--gasp--political.  In Amos 7, the priest sends word to the king that Amos is not just a troublemaker, but he is now ruffling feathers with the politically connected, too, by speaking against the king.  And the priest tells Amos to go somewhere else, or to shut up, because the people there don't want to have to hear all that Amos has to say.  If they hear him speak against the king, a thread will begin to unravel, and their religious cover that allowed them to ignore the way other people were being stepped on would also come undone...and if that happened, well, it would mean the whole reinvention of all of Israelite society!  And since the priests and the king and the people didn't want to have to deal with that, it was simply much easier to ignore the prophet and turn their attention to the next religious or civic observance.  Focus on the symbols, hold on only to the rituals, and you won't have to think about the faces.

This is what scares me: a whole society--the whole nation of Israel in Amos' day!--that had prided itself on being godly and good, still so completely missed the point of what mattered to God that they wanted to silence the prophet God sent because he said things that forced them to confront the stuff that made them squirm.  They chased the prophets like Amos out of town, and were convinced they were in the right for doing it, because this Amos was just an agitator who was threatening their cherished religious and civic symbols.

And that's what just about kills me: the religious leaders and the king's official policymakers were convinced that Amos was the real problem in Israel, because he was disrespecting their idol (the king had set up a literal golden calf at his state-sponsored worship site in Bethel) and he was poking at the arrangement they had all made not to have to look at the most vulnerable in their society or hear the cries of the marginalized who had been trampled on.  They saw it as their religious and civic duty to silence and shame Amos because they didn't want to hear what God had sent him to say.

And if the religious and political so-and-sos...as well as a whole nation full of respectable religious folk in Israel... could get it so completely wrong back twenty-seven hundred years ago, how would I know if I am in danger of the same thing... today?

So often, we do just what the priests and kings of Amos' day did, too.  We do not want to have our worlds shaken, so we simply drown out the noise of the prophets God sends in our path... because we do not want to be compelled to be jolted out of the way things are.  So often we are the ones, like the folks Amos spoke to, who get hung up and fixated on symbols and ceremonies and rituals, and then do not see anything wrong with raising another glass while other people are stepped on or forgotten.  So often, we get mad at the ones God has sent to us to wake us up, because they see through the symbols and ceremonies and get right to the things that really matter to God beneath them.

We do not want to listen to the voices God sends, because we know the consequences of listening--we will be compelled to see our world differently, and to revise our pictures of our own lives.  And we would rather not do that--we would much rather just be angry at Amos for causing a ruckus in the temple and disturbing our rituals.

And because we can read about that actually happening like here in Amos' day, I have this fear that I will do the same.. will become the same... will stop listening for God's voice and drowning out the sound because I don't want to have to deal with it.

I have to admit: Amos doesn't have a lot of good news for his stubborn hearers here in these verses.  He is relentless and bold and angry and heated.  And I'll be honest, too, it is hard to make myself read his words or listen to his message.  But Flannery O'Connor is right: sometimes you have to shout to get through to people who are hard of hearing.  And maybe in all of this, that is what I most need to confess: I am hard of hearing in this complacent heart of mine. I need the loud voice of Amos.

And if it feels like Amos' words are being shouted at us, it is a sign that the living God has not yet given up on getting through to us.

Thank you, good Lord.  Thank you, for not giving up on us.  Where you see that you need to, please keep speaking up to us... and make us to listen, even when we would rather not.