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The Better Way, July 22, 2007 |
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Written by Marcia Hauer
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Sunday, 22 July 2007 |
The Better Way
Amos 8:1-12, Psalm 52, Luke 10:38-42
July 22, 2007
Rev. Marcia J. Hauer
I was listening to “Fresh Air” the other day when Terry Gross interviewed Adam Shankman, who directed and choreographed the latest movie version of “Hairspray.” It’s a campy tale of a teenager who wants to dance on one of the dance shows that were popular in the late 50’s and 60’s—an “American Bandstand” sort of program. In the first movie version, Divine, a 300+ pound transvestite, played Edna Turnblad, the overprotective mother in the piece. In the Broadway musical version, Harvey Fierstein, a very out gay man, played the part. So it was intriguing to me to hear the answer when Terry Gross asked Adam Shankman why he had cast John Travolta, a straight, leading man, in the part. His answer was lengthy, speaking about the qualities that Divine had and how Harvey Fierstein played the part. Then he said that Edna’s character is written to tweak our ideas about what is and how things ought to be, and who better to play the part than someone no one would expect to be playing a woman. That bit of casting distorts our ideas about what how things are and how they ought to be.
I paid attention to this interview because the scripture lessons this morning are also about messing with the status quo and our ideas about what ought to be in the world. Amos, who lived in the mid to late 8th century BCE, was a Judean shepherd speaking to Israel’s elite. During the time of Amos’ prophetic witness, Jeroboam was the king of Israel and Uzziah the king of Judah. In Israel, the times were good. This was the era of Israel’s greatest prosperity and geographic expansion. Everything looked really good until one looked more carefully. Israel was, truly, a basket of summer fruit that was rotten in the inside but looked good on the surface.
God called Amos to go to Israel to preach judgment to the king, the priests and to the people who were benefiting from the prosperity of the country, but benefiting at the expense of the poor. You can imagine how popular his message was. Amos was, after al, a foreigner and a shepherd. The people of Israel were people who wanted all the trappings of the good life, but none of the responsibilities. They wanted to be able to make money at the expense of the poor and the needy in their midst—people who were all but invisible to them. These were people who wanted to worship and praise, but who were not interested in the hard parts of their religion. They wanted to put God in a human sized box and God was having nothing of it.
Amos’ mission was to call into question conventional wisdom and to speak God’s truth. Being a prophet is a difficult, unpopular job. Amos felt compelled to give a message that no one, even the priests and religious officials, were willing to hear. He wanted them to know that God was unhappy and that Assyria was on the verge of destroying them. He wanted them to be aware that their behavior toward the poor was at the heart of God’s judgment. It would have been difficult to hear and easy to ignore. It’s a message we, also, find difficult to hear and easy to ignore.
Amos was there to upset the status quo, and Jesus was from that same prophetic lineage. He had a lot to say about the status quo of his day, as well. In our Gospel lesson we find Martha doing the things that a woman of her time and place would have been expected to do in order to offer hospitality to travelers and Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet and listening to what he had to say. Mary was not doing what would have been expected of her. Martha was unhappy about having to do the work alone, complained to Jesus who that Mary had chosen the better way. What, is it better to sit and listen (there is no record of Mary’s participation in the discussion) than to do the things necessary to offer hospitality? Is it better to live the contemplative life than to live an active one? I suspect that the message here is not so simple. After all, even contemplative people need to eat and wear clean clothing. I suspect that both sorts of lives are to be valued, but that doing without contemplation, that is faith without works, is not the way to live any more than being wrapped up in the acquisition of the things that society deems valuable but which don’t lead to lasting joy is.
Jesus called from the margins. He advocated reform in religious life and he advocated reform in the governance of Rome. That is, he challenged people to live the faith they professed. He told the religious leadership that they were wrong to separate the way they lived their lives from the words they studied. He told the people that they needed to care for the widow and the orphan, that they needed to put others needs ahead of their wants. He told them that it’s difficult to be part of the Kingdom of God if you are a rich person. His message threatened the status quo of his time and the Romans crucified him as his reward. His followers, to a greater or lesser extent, lived on the margins of their society enduring horrible persecution up until the 4th century when Constantine claimed the faith as the official religion of Rome.
In our world, we are the rich folks that the prophets called to account. We like our comfort. We like fine things. We’re susceptible to the advertisers wanting us to buy the latest and greatest. We ooh and aah over the new things our neighbors show off and over the vacations they take. We watch celebrities and often want to emulate their life styles. In many ways, we’ve just like the people to whom Amos was speaking. How can I say that, you might ask. We’re good people. We donate to charity and to our church. We try to do the right thing. All that is true and was probably true for most of the people of Amos’ time, as well. We don’t mean to do harm to our neighbors, but we do it none-the-less. We are interested in getting ahead, in becoming rich, in living the good life, the comfortable life.
One commentator talked about having spent several months in Nicaragua living in the home of a woman who worked for a maquiladora. “She got about 30 cents for a
blouse, and she could make two per hour and she worked about 12 hours a day on a treadle powered sewing machine. People would bring [her, and her co-workers] the cloth and even the labels for the garments. The law kept her or others from selling their wares inside the country. They were prohibited from organizing and the International corps said that if anyone tried to raise their prices, they would relocate to Asia. We don't have to/want to know the details but we love it when blouses are $5.99.“ I suppose that any work in such circumstances is better than no work, but I believe that we have a responsibility to see to it that women and men earn a living wage no matter where they live. When we go for the cheap goods, we are not living out that responsibility.
We don’t like it when we read what the prophets have to say to us. We don’t like the message. We want to believe that what we do is enough. There’s a song that I remember singing as a kid. We sang it a couple of weeks ago. “Lord, I want to be like Jesus in my heart, in my heart. Lord, I want to be like Jesus, in my heart.” Is that really true? Do any of us really want to live a life that leads to crucifixion because what we have to say so upsets the status quo that those in power are threatened by the message? Do we really want to be asked to leave the places where we stop, because we make other people uncomfortable? Can we truly call ourselves disciples of Jesus if we don’t? We church folks really want to be nice. We want to love everyone and to have everyone love us. We are called to build the realm of God, and the realm of God is where everyone has enough and no one has too much. It’s where people are all valued for their gifts and not for what they can do for us. It’s where Martha’s hospitality is balanced with Mary’s contemplation and where the poor are the ones who count the most. It’s a challenge to us to live that way. It’s a difficult road, but if we are to be the Church, it’s a road we have to travel. Among the things we promise at our baptism in the United Methodist Church is that we “accept the freedom and power God gives [us] to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.” Do you, do any of us really believe that God gives us the power to do all that. Do any of us believe that how we live our lives, our relationship to money and possessions has an effect on resisting evil and injustice? I believe that we not only have the power and the freedom, we have the mandate from God to do just that. Do you?
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