Trinity 17. The Lord of Life

So have you been paying attention to our readings today?
Can anyone remember what they were - without glancing down at the service sheet?
Did anyone make any sense of them?
And would you like to share with us your response to what you read?.....
Did the texts have any meaning for you?.....

The story, brought to us from the writer we call Mark (and in his usual uncomplicated style)
the story of the man who had so much - and who only wanted to be good....
Do you only want to be good?

And the story, brought to us by Amos, from Tekoa a nowhere place near Bethlehem,
a pruner of sycamore trees and, out-of-season, a part-time shepherd,
the story of what God will do to those who choose not to seek the Lord of life... and live.
Is that you?
Do you desire to find the Lord of life, and live?
Do you only want to be good?
Listen on a while....

Every time we come to Sunday,
Every time we come to Sunday text-time - the space when we break open the word of God (before we break open the Bread of Life) -
Every time the preacher stands up to preach - again - on these familiar stories
Every time the church stands before these scriptures
we need to ask what it is we are doing
what is it we are expecting
what it is we believe will happen when we pull apart the threads of holy script, decypher the sacred hand,
and tease aside the tissues of the text,
and contemplate its secret hiddenness,
and reveal its somehow forgotten newness. Its surprise!
You see I could reassure you, I could put your minds at rest, I could tell you, that the text of Amos
is all about what happened 700 or 800 years before Jesus was born.
I could tell you that it's now all over. Don't worry. Go back to sleep...

I could produce for your edification famous books written by famous Old Testament scholars
I could offer you interpretations that are agreed on, settled, proven by numerous cum laude doctorates,
I could give you the 'common-knowledge' wisdom that doesn't cause a stir.... Anywhere.

Or I could ask you to take a risk; the risk of God taking you for a ride. A journey. An ex-cursion....

All too often today in the west (and increasingly elsewhere)
we allow ourselves to read these cunning-crafty texts according to our easy assumptions.
Easy assumptions that thin the texts, that water down their strangeness, newness, surprise and challenge.

We cannot endure revelation
We are the crown of creation; everything looks up to us: so we cannot endure revelation
- and so, too often, we hide behind the scriptures,
because we feel we have them under control. Safe. Non-threatening. Laid out in some museum display. Stuffed. Dried. Mummified.

We have lost the sense of living words.
We have lost the sense of their authority (And 'authority' in the original Latin means their ability to nurture, to give life)
We have stopped them from feeding us!
We have caged their imaginative power, power to offer to us and for our time, an alternative enactment of the world.
A different way of being.

'Seek the Lord and live, says Amos.
'Seek the Lord and live,
'Seek the Lord and live,
'Or there will be fire, disaster, wormwood and bitterness.
'Seek the Lord and live. 'Cos you're almost dead.
'Listen now. Hear the truth and speak the truth.... Just imagine:
'They will hate it, those guys sitting at the main gate and lauding it over the market place and doling out their wisdom;
their set ways of doing things.
'They will hate it and loathe you; they will threaten you, send their thugs after you and come unbidden into your home.

'But don't remain silent. Speak out! Tell anyone who will listen.
Shout it to the mountains.
Shout it with every fibre of your being.
Shout it with your dying breath.
Write it on your tombstone.
Bequeath it to your children......

The Lord God is the Lord of Justice, the Lord of life-for-all.
The Lord who raises up the poor, the exploited, the deprived, the excluded, the better-kept-out-of-sight -
in whatever age, whatever country, whatever regime and in whatever terms you want to describe them.

But the poor cannot be hidden behind political rhetoric, behind clever statistics, behind media opinion, behind religious precepts.
Behind 'the usual ways of doing things around here'.
Because the poor are those amongst whom God chooses to dwell.
And you cannot get to God unless you make friends, sisters, brothers, family with the poor.
You cannot. If the outsider isn't here, then God isn't either.

That's why the guy who had done everything he'd been asked and taught and brought up to believe
still had one thing more to do. As Jesus tells him.
Go and meet the poor. Go find them.
Go and see how they live. Go and make friends.
Go and let them into your life.
Go make them your family. Bring them back home with you.
Go give them everything you've got. Let them change you.
For it's only by moving towards the interests of others that God can find us on our own journey.
But this is no end for a sermon.
Nor is it a start, or a middle. It not even a beginning-soon......

What difference does anything we have read or heard this morning make to where we are now? In this pregnant space. This waiting room.
And to those around us. Outside us.
Curious to come in and find family.
Eager to fill our vacuum with their new life....

That all depends on what difference we allow these words to make;
what difference we allow the scripture-script, the hand-writing of God, to make to the page of life which is - just for now - still ours.
Can we bear the hand of God on our lives?....

I could ask you again to take the risk; the risk of God taking you for a ride. A journey.
A moving from where-you-are-now, to somewhere else.
A relocation. A dis-location
A re-orientation; a turning east again to the dawn of a new day
A setting-out-in-hope towards the unknown......
A stepping out over your familiar horizon......
But do you want to go? That's my dilemma as the new boy here. Do you want to go?......

Can you - Peter's people - be persuaded, again, as you once were?
Are you prepared to let go of your easy assumptions?
Are you prepared to step out of the past, to shake its dust off your shoes, and its mustiness out of your clothing?

Dare you imagine how things might be other - here, for us and for those still outside?

Amos calls us,
Jesus calls us,
to imagine new life amongst us.

And by our imagining, just for a moment, we get to see ourselves in a new light, a new context.
In a new place born of the challenge of scripture.

The texts we have before us today - are for us today, for us here, and for us now.
Not at second hand; not by indirect inference or analogy,
not by some strange internal logic of a clever hermeneutic.
But for us now. Direct. Text to context. Face to face.
Challenging us now - as they did, for others, back then.
Daring us to choose life and live again.

So wake up and listen.
Stretch yourselves.
Look around.
See what new things need to be done to welcome the stranger, the gift-bearer, the life-bringer sent to us by God.
See what new things need to be done to include those still outside; those afraid to come in. Those longing to come in.
Those who sing to different tunes.
See what needs to be done to dismantle our old assumptions, our hallowed-and-untouchable ways of doing things here.
Our great but out-of-date ecumenical pussyfooting.

We are here with the highest calling.
We are here to celebrate the glimpses of eternal life that God offers us in this place.
And we are here to welcome those from afar who have their own God-given wisdom to share it with us.
That the whole world might believe
And that God might be glorified. Here. By what we do.

Choose life, brothers and sisters, choose life now.
Before the old ways do us unto death.
Seek life; seek life that we might live and receive a blessing.
For it is the LORD who speaks.

Terry Biddington