Sermon: “Turning Feasts into Mourning”

Dave Bush

Text: Amos 8:1-12 NRSV

Crescent Hill Presbyterian Church

Louisville, Kentucky

July 22, 2007

This scripture reading comes from Amos 8:1-12.  Listen for God’s word.

8:1 This is what the Lord God showed me — a basket of summer fruit.  ²He said, ‘Amos, what do you see?’ And I said, ‘A basket of summer fruit.’  Then the Lord said to me, ‘The end has come upon my people Israel; I will never again pass them by.  ³The songs of the temple shall become wailings on that day,’ says the Lord God; ‘the dead bodies shall be many, cast out in every place.

Be silent!’ ⁴Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land, ⁵saying, ‘When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the Sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale?  We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, ⁶buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat.’ ⁷The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds. ⁸Shall not the land tremble on this account, and everyone mourn who lives in it, and all of it rise like the Nile, and be tossed about and sink again, like the Nile of Egypt?

⁹On that day, says the Lord God,
   I will make the sun go down at noon,
   and darken the earth in broad daylight.
¹⁰I will turn your feasts into mourning,
   and all your songs into lamentation;
I will bring sackcloth on all loins, and baldness on every head;
I will make it like the mourning for an only son,
   and the end of it like a bitter day.

¹¹The time is surely coming, says the Lord God, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord.  ¹²They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.

This is the Word of God.

Our Old Testament scripture reading is a challenging word.  When I think of Biblical passages I prefer to think of more comforting verses: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” (Psalm 23:1 NRSV) or “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1 NRSV).  For these, and similar verses, I find myself not only glad, but eager, to say at the end of the reading, “THIS IS THE WORD OF GOD.”  But today’s prophetic scripture does not seem very comforting at all.  “I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation.”  To this scripture, I don’t find it easy to say that weekly refrain, “This is the word of God.”

Disturbing as it is, we could simply dismiss this scripture as irrelevant to us.  We could, like some of our conservative sisters and brothers in Christ, read these words literally.  Using bumper-sticker theology – “The Bible says it; I believe it; that settles it!” – we could declare this scripture irrelevant to us.  We are not farmers using the Sabbath to contemplate fraudulent grain sales, so we can safely put Amos back on the shelf and turn to more pleasant scriptures.

But there is a problem with this convenient solution.  As Reformed Christians we profess faith in the Living Word of God – and that makes this scripture relevant today.  We must take Amos off the shelf and listen for God’s word.  Amos’s message is not simply about farmers or even commercial dealings.  This prophet of God is condemning those who ignore God’s call for justice.  Amos is prophesying terrible events for those who fail to do what God requires of us.  And what does God require of us?  In the words of another prophet we are called to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.  And for those who ignore God’s call, God “will turn [our] feasts into mourning, and all [our] songs into lamentation.”

While I don’t particularly enjoy thinking of such terrible prophesies, this verse from Amos has been pushing itself to the fore of my consciousness for the last several weeks, even when I was out of town for a conference.  As some of you know, I am a community college history instructor, and in early June I had the privilege of participating in a National Endowment for the Humanities conference on the American Civil War and memory.  Now this was not a conference on the Civil War, per se, rather the topic was how the Civil War has been remembered – particularly the battle for THE memory of the meaning of the Civil War that took place in the sixty or so years after 1865.

The debate about the meaning of the conflict, actually, preceded the first shots fired across Charleston Harbor.  Lincoln and Congress, reflecting the mood of most whites in the North, took pains to emphasize that the conflict was not about equality and justice, but that it was a fight to preserve the Union.  However, even in those early days (May 1861), the prophetic voice of Frederick Douglass (a former slave and prominent author and abolitionist) could be heard in the land, "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time; but the 'inexorable logic of events' will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery."[1]  And the prophet’s words were soon fulfilled.

Within just a few years of trying to placate the conservatives seeking to maintain an abusive and unjust system, the attitude of many white Northerners began to change.  From the Battle Hymn of the Republic “As [Jesus] died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,” to the Emancipation Proclamation (which fifty years after it was signed James Weldon Johnson, an African American poet and statesman, called an act of God), to the Gettysburg Address – in which Lincoln argued that the living should be dedicated to seeking justice, to the three Civil War constitutional amendments: ending slavery (Thirteenth), defining citizenship and guaranteeing equal protection under the law - the Fourteenth Amendment, and guaranteeing voting rights (at least for men) (Fifteenth), and even to the passage of a civil rights act in 1875 forbidding racial discrimination - the war came to be seen as something more than just a means of preserving a political institution.  Instead it was a fight for justice.[2]

But hearing this, one is compelled to ask the obvious question, “What happened?”  Most people describing the United States, and particularly the South, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, rarely, if ever, use adjectives like “equality” and “justice.”

 “So how did a struggle for justice yield to the evil of Jim Crow?”  Many Northern whites increasingly concerned with peace and unity began accepting the Southern memory of the Civil War which was devoid of the issue of equality and instead emphasized the courage of individual soldiers and presented white Southerners as victims and survivors.  As white Northerners became increasingly tired of the ongoing struggle for justice that just never seemed to end, uncompromising Southern conservatives worked diligently to slowly and persistently codify segregation a little bit at a time.  Compromises for unity at the expense of justice allowed Jim Crow to march forward, and in 1883 the Supreme Court tossed out most of the 1875 Civil Rights Act.  (A judgment sadly echoed in the recent Louisville school re-segregation decision handed down mere weeks ago.)   And over the next several years activist judges undermined those three constitutional amendments.  In the case of the Fourteenth Amendment (guaranteeing equal protection), the Supreme Court decided that, for all intents and purposes, it did not apply to African Americans but did support the rights of corporations!

Soon segregation became the law of the land with the Court’s decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson.[3]  The violence of Jim Crow intensified, and in these days, it became an increasingly regular occurrence to see aging white Union and Confederate veterans coming together for friendly reunions (think Ken Burns’ The Civil War).  While many white Americans celebrated the peace and unity these events seemed to bring, if anyone stopped to listen, they would have heard the words of Amos, “[God] will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation.”[4]

Reflecting on these events, W.E.B. DuBois wrote, “We fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order [to] make peace in the present and guide policy in the future.”[5]  For most of those in positions of power, then, peace and unity were more important than justice.  And whenever and wherever that is the case, the words of Amos can be heard, “[God] will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation.”

I think those prophetic words are also important for the denomination to heed in our day.  Today there is much talk of peace and unity. But what price do we pay for this?

When celebrating unity through supporting overtures or in seeking unions which ignore or devalue women – even just a little bit and maybe not too obviously, the words of Amos can be heard.

With the goal of creating peace and unity in the denomination, if we heed those who imply that the problem of the color-line was only the problem of the twentieth century, if that, and so in the twenty-first century the church should not speak against secular court decisions that dismantle efforts working to create a just community, the words of Amos can be heard.

If we celebrate compromises with our sisters and brothers in Christ who argue that it is not the church’s place to be so active in the struggle for the just treatment of workers (doesn’t Yum! Brands and Berger King need our support too), the words of Amos can be heard.

If, in seeking unity with our sisters and brothers in Christ who use the Bible to bolster the bravado of a nation, we are willing to censor our denunciation of everything from cluster bombs to military occupations that destabilize regions while increasing terrorism resulting in incalculable amounts of suffering - if we censor our denunciation of these and similar issues, the words of Amos can be heard.

When we compromise in the pursuit of peace and unity by failing to unambiguously recognize the full humanity of all God’s children by maintaining a two-tiered membership system based on a person’s orientation, we do not do justice, and “[God] will turn [our] feasts into mourning, and all [our] songs into lamentation.”

But there is good news!

The good news:  the good news of the Gospel is that God loves us and that before the creation of time we were predestined to reconciliation with God in Christ.  There is nothing we can do to earn this gift of love.

The disturbing news of the Gospel is that God calls us to be steadfast in our faith – not to earn what we already have been given – but to always act as God requires: to walk humbly with God, to love kindness, and to do justice.  Not to simply do justice when it promotes peace and unity - but simply to do justice.

I invite you to pray we me.  Gracious God, Through the words of the prophet Micah you have said what is required of us – to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with you.  Do not take your word away from us, but give us the courage, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to be steadfast in faith and in your call for our lives.  Amen.

[1]Fredrick Douglass, quoted in William Lloyd Garrison to Oliver Johnson, April 19, 1861, W. L. Garrison Papers, Boston Public Library; Douglass’ Monthly, May 1861, quoted in James M. McPherson, Ordeal by Fire:  The Civil War and Reconstruction, 2^nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1992), 265.

[2]James Weldon Johnson, “Fifty Years,” The New York Times, January 1, 1913, quoted in John Hope Franklin, “The Emancipation Proclamation: An Act of Justice,” Prologue 25, no. 2 (Summer 1993) http://www.archives.gov/ publications/prologue/1993/summer/emancipation-proclamation.html (accessed July 19, 2007).

[3]In 1896 the United States Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” was not discriminatory.

[4]On the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, The Louisville Courier-Journal declared, “Thank God for Gettysburg, Hosanna!  God bless us everyone, alike the blue and the Gray, the Gray and the Blue!  The world ne’re witnessed such a sight as this.  Behold, can we say ‘happy is the nation that hath no history’?”  Quoted in David W. Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 138.

[5]Blight, Beyond the Battlefield, 93.