Am 7:7-17, Lk 10:25-37
11 July 2004
“Reforming our Faith, Part 1”
(“Have You Been Served?”)
“Have you been served?” That’s a question one often hears at a restaurant or maybe while waiting in line somewhere. It’s a question that engenders hope that your wait will soon be over. It’s something that we normally like to hear. The more declarative form, “You’ve been served,” may be received with less…affection—especially if it’s uttered while somebody hands us a court summons.
Being served. Sometimes it’s something we welcome. We put ourselves in the position of expecting service. When something breaks down, like an appliance or an automobile, we’re hoping for service—efficient, honest, non-rip-you-off-type service.
Sometimes being served is something we do not welcome. It could be the aforementioned court summons, or it could be the invitation to a party at which a particular person will be in attendance—a person that we might wish to avoid for certain unspecified reasons! (I’m sure none of you have ever been in that position!)
Being served is very similar to being chosen. Sometimes we can work the system; we can set ourselves up in order to be chosen. And sometimes it comes right out of the clear blue sky. It’s a lot like being the elect of God. There can be clear signs that we are the elect: things we can and do control. But ultimately, it is God who disposes; God who is in control; God who is sovereign.
That’s one of the central themes of Reformed Christianity, of which the Presbyterian Church is part. It reaches back to the time of the Protestant Reformation, to John Calvin. On a bigger scale, we also identify with Protestantism in general, and with the church universal, which includes the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches.
Today is the first of a four week series of sermons on the Reformed tradition, taken from chapter 2 of our Book of Order. “The election of the people of God for service as well as for salvation” is my focus in this sermon. The Old Testament reading in Amos and the gospel reading in Luke help show this.
We are both recruited and drafted by God. On the one hand, we do make a decision; we make decisions every day of our lives. And on the other hand, the decision is made for us; decisions are made for us every day of our lives. Once again, we run into that cooperation / contradiction of free will and predestination. Our scripture readings tell stories about people who choose to participate in the giving and receiving of service, as well as those who are compelled to.
In Amos 7, we hear of the argument the prophet has with Amaziah, a priest who acts as counselor to King Jeroboam II. Amaziah doesn’t like the way Amos has denounced the king for his corrupt policies. What’s worse, Amos is from Judah, the southern kingdom. How dare he come up to the northern kingdom of Israel and run off at the mouth like he’s been doing?
I want to draw our attention to verses 14 and 15. Amos makes what might be considered a surprising denial. “I am no prophet,” he claims, “nor a prophet’s son.” Maybe he wants to distance himself from the bureaucratic, yes-man approach of the official prophets. If so, it’s no wonder that Amaziah might have a problem with him. Instead, he says that “I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees” (v. 14).
It appears that Amos would be content to continue with his agrarian lifestyle if not for one thing: “the Lord took me from following the flock, and…said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel’” (v. 15). Amos has been served with his own kind of summons from the Lord. He has been both pressed into service and chosen to serve. (You know, he could still refuse to serve.) His service has been his salvation, his liberation—though it may not seem so at the time.
How many of us would prefer to remain in the quiet life of the countryside, rather than get drawn into an argument with a wicked government? To stay under the radar, out of sight, rather than raise our profile and receive unwelcome attention? The vast majority of people are reluctant to confront evil in such an obvious way—thus, the existence of a “silent majority.” (I won’t claim to not belong to it!)
Our gospel reading in Luke is a familiar one. A certain lawyer asks Jesus, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (v. 25). (Which is a rather strange way of putting it. One normally doesn’t do anything to gain an inheritance.) Luke’s use of the phrase “to test Jesus” suggests that the lawyer isn’t the earnest seeker of truth he might seem to be.
After Jesus asks him what he has learned from the law (which is his area of expertise), he mentions two primary confessions of the faith: love of God and love of one’s neighbor. Jesus agrees, but that’s still not good enough. As if negotiating a contract, the lawyer then wants to know, “And who is my neighbor?” (v. 29). The unspoken question is: who do I have to love and who can I legally ignore?
Jesus responds with the story of the mugging victim left for dead, and the priest, Levite, and Samaritan who encounter him at the side of the road. I won’t rehash the details of the parable (you can read it again if you like). Basically, Jesus lets the lawyer know that for someone supposedly interested in eternal life, he’s asking the wrong question.
Sometimes we’re asked to think about which characters in the story we identify with, for better or worse. Are we the Samaritan, who, despite being a member of a hated group, still decides to take the time and effort to show mercy? Are we the priest or the Levite, respectable folks, more religious than we are compassionate? Are we the innkeeper, who gets the whole bloody mess dumped in his lap? Are we all of these people?
There’s another perspective to this parable that’s often overlooked. And that is, of the victim himself. It’s been suggested that Jesus wants the lawyer to identify with the victim. To ask a Jew to identify with the Samaritan would have been intolerable. Why is that?
Not too long after Amos’ warnings to Israel, in the late 8th century B. C., the Assyrians invaded the northern kingdom and its capital in Samaria. Many of its citizens were taken into exile, and the ones left behind began to intermarry with settlers brought in from other countries. The “pure” Jews in the south began to despise these “half-breeds” in the north. The Samaritans developed different worship practices, even to the point of looking to Mt. Gerizim, not to Jerusalem, as their focus of worship. By the time of Jesus, there was an entrenched hatred. Jews would travel miles out of their way to avoid Samaritan territory.
The victim in Jesus’ parable, a Jew, is not served by his fellow Jews, the priest and Levite. Instead, it’s a dirty, filthy Samaritan who comes to his rescue. It’s been observed that “[t]he parable therefore forces upon its hearers the question: who among you will permit himself or herself to be served by a Samaritan?”[1] Who’s willing to get into the ditch, so to speak, and be served by your enemy?
Is this a case of service we do not welcome? To be served by someone we despise…someone who, in our heart of hearts, we must admit makes our skin crawl? Okay, imagine being there while Jesus tells the story. He’s just told how the Levite passes by the man. “But a Samaritan [immediate feelings of disgust in his hearers] while traveling came near him; and when he saw him…” “…he finished off the victim, the filthy swine,” the hearers of Jesus might complete the sentence. To hear Jesus continue, “he was moved with pity,” would have been a bit of a surprise.
I find increasingly that first impressions are dead wrong. And in this case, it’s the one least expected to be “moved with pity,” to have compassion (v. 33). The Greek “word itself [esplagcnisqh, esplagchnisthe] describes a guttural response to suffering. Literally, it means; ‘His bowels turned to water.’”[2] This is truly a Christlike response to the man left for dead.
As the elect, as the chosen, of God, we’re called to serve and to be served. Period. That is our salvation.
In a few moments, we’ll sing the hymn, “When We are Called to Sing Your Praise.” This is from one of the worship services at Montreat a couple of months ago. I like this one. First of all, I like the tune, “Kingsfold,” to which a number of songs in our hymnal are set. To me, it has a kind of sad beauty.
Then there are the lyrics. They acknowledge the reality that, as the people of God who are elected for both service and salvation, there is pain that goes along with the joy. Sometimes our calling leads us to things that we simply don’t want to do, to places we don’t want to go. That could be for whatever reason, or as the hymn poetically testifies, when we feel the weight of the world pulling us down. It is then that we especially need to cast our cares on the one who invites us to do so, the one well-acquainted with the shadowed way. We exchange our heavy burden for the burden of Christ, a burden that lifts us up.
So, as a way of wrapping up: are we Amos, the one served with a summons to leave the tranquil life for a season, to enter the rough-and-tumble of the world? Are we one of the characters in Jesus’ parable? My first thought is to ask: in heeding the call to serve and to be served, do we set aside our own agendas in favor of the Lord’s agenda? But maybe a better question is: do we allow the Lord’s agenda to become, more and more, our own agenda? What is the Lord’s agenda?
Amos’ younger contemporary, Micah, helps us with that. It is “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with [our] God” (6:8). We are elected by God for salvation and service. When we accept this election and are transformed by God’s Spirit, then we live God’s agenda in doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with our God, now and forever.