Summer Fruit
Amos 8:1-12; Luke 10:38-42

July 18, 2004

I have let some people know that if I quote poetry too much there are serious grounds to worry about my mental state. Still, there are a few poems and lines that make me always remember.

“This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper” - perhaps the least happy ending line in English literature. Yet T. S. Eliot was not far from the same thoughts as the Israelite prophet Amos. Eliot was mocking the decline of Western civilization in the poem “The Hollow Men.” Amos was lamenting the rotting away of the great kingdom of Israel, God’s country.

To talk about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and all our other empires has always been a popular conversation. It is exceedingly satisfying to conclude and forcefully declare that our beloved way of life is terminally ill, that now we have it all wrong. Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler achieved the same with the cold prose of history in multi-volume works, The Study of History and The Decline and Fall of the West.

Jane Jacobs, the guru of the modern city, has just published Dark Age Ahead, no happy title. Her opening sentence is honest: “This is both a gloomy and a hopeful book.” She believes Western civilization shows serious signs of slipping into a dark age we thought only reserved for early medieval times.

To stand up and bellow that something is wrong with our society and the way we do things is still very popular - and not much of a matter for rocket scientists given the fact that we are all human and capable of copious sin. Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Instead of being the all-wise pundit who alone sees the way the world truly works, many of our greatest social critics are Chicken Little who find it easy to say that “the sky is falling” and raise everyone’s anxiety to the nth degree. Chicken Little succeeded in alarming all of her friends that the sky was indeed falling and so they went to tell the King so he could fix it. Unfortunately, in the non-nursery version of the fable, they tell Foxey Loxey last about the impending doom and he agrees to take them to the King. He leads them, however, to his lair where they all become finger licking good supplements to his diet. Don’t make your decisions based upon the fears of other people.

It is easy to say that the sky is falling, the world is coming to an end, this system is corrupt, if you are not the first person to say it. Woe to the person who speaks the truth first.

Amos did not live in a happy era. Things were outwardly prosperous in the northern kingdom of Israel, in fact, the best politically and economically in the over 200 years of its existence since Solomon reigned over the commonwealth of God. Amos was sent to speak “harsh words in a smooth season.” One of his complaints was that the wealthy took advantage of and exploited the poor, that the merchants cheated on their measurements - made the candy bars smaller for a greater price - and were impatient for the Sabbath to end so they could sell their wares.

Along came Amos who brought the word of the Lord in unhappy tones. It wasn’t that things were going to collapse in a big bang or stockmarket crash, but like the fruit hanging in the kitchen, Israel was turning brown, slowly rotting at the core. Not with bang, but a whimper. Several decades later after the Assyrian military machine steamrolled through the region, there was not even a whimper, for Israel was never to be again. Maybe the sky does fall every now and then.

Almost eight centuries later, things weren’t a lot better. The military occupier had changed - and now was the greatest of all early civilizations, the Roman Empire. Weren’t the descendants of Israel in Palestine privileged and lucky to have such a distinguished oppressor?

A teacher named Jesus was bringing the word of the Lord again. He spoke, however, as much to the oppressed as to the oppressor. We don’t know the personal background, but he arrived to stay at the home of friends in Bethany, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Martha was the organizer and the model of the good householder. Everything was in its place, everything was in control, hospitality was precise and appropriate. Except for one detail. She forgot to sit with her guest.

Martha was a distracted person, another way of saying that she was anxious. Jesus more than once counseled against anxiety – the worry that something somewhere must be wrong. Luke’s account of this conversation is very brief and succinct. Other things had to be said and done, so one cannot be too sure about every detail. Martha had to greet Jesus when he entered the house, yet now that he is settled and Martha is fully distracted, her first words to him are a personal form of the end of civilization and the sky is falling. Mary hasn’t helped a bit, she is just sitting there listening to you. Make her do her rightful societal duty and get to the house work.

Jesus does not condemn what Martha has been doing. She hasn’t done anything wrong. She just hasn’t done the one necessary thing. Mary, he declares, has chosen the better part and no should take it away from her.

Christians have been trying to figure out what is that better part ever since. The medieval church thought it was the difference between Christians living and performing works of charity in the everyday world and the monks who devoted themselves to the life of contemplation and prayer away from the bustle of the world.

Protestants have had trouble with this pair, for we certainly have opted towards the virtue of doing good works, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, healing the sick, helping the poor and visiting the imprisoned. Yet, we need to do more than help. We need to listen to the poor and sick and imprisoned, to pay attention to them. We have programs galore to help people, but listening to their anxieties, their multitude of distractions, I have come to understand, is a true gift of the spirit.

Mary, Martha and Jesus were not sitting in quiet suburbia – it was an occupied country with police and soldiers all about them. Every day someone was thrown into prison, brutalized by the police, or even killed or executed. It was not a peaceful time, no Renaissance. A dark age to be sure.

If this is the beginning of a new dark age, as some prophets will definitely proclaim, then it is no simple matter to turn things around. Programs will not be enough. Sitting and listening to one another, hearing what another person says, is a radical movement for a dark age. Listening to one person with all your heart and soul and mind and strength requires abandoning for the few moments all your own distractions and anxieties. It may also require giving up making money and preparing meals. Listening is free, but it also is not profitable in dollars and cents. The call to listen is the theological reason for having coffee and fellowship hours and church dinners.

Worship of God is listening to and for God. After worship, maybe the best part is yet to come downstairs.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan