July 21, 2019
Texts:
Amos 8:1-12
Psalm 52
Luke 10:38-42
“Martha, Martha. You are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or, indeed, only one.”
Good morning, 8th Day. I’m happy to be here with you, and I’m excited to dive into the mix of scriptures that the lectionary offers us this morning. I’m also excited to be here because of 8th Day’s flexibility; as you may have noticed, these aren’t the scriptures on our online calendar. I originally read through the Common Lectionary, which has alternate Old Testament and Psalm readings for this morning. But the readings from Amos and Psalm 52 had already intrigued me too much to go back, and I thought you all wouldn’t mind too much.
But what a mix these readings make! From Amos and the Psalmist, we have something like an edition of Biblical Threats: Greatest Hits.
I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight. I will turn your religious festivals into mourning and all your singing into weeping. I will make all of you wear sackcloth and shave your heads. I will make that time like mourning for an only son and the end of it like a bitter day.
Wow! In terms of Biblical rebukes, that’s up there with “Get behind me, Satan.” But in Luke, we have a deeply reassuring story where Jesus seems to tell us not to worry so much. Yes, there’s plenty of work to do, Jesus seems to say, but Mary has something important figured out when she simply sits and talks with him.
Of course, hundreds of years and some major cultural shifts separate these texts. It would be easy enough to say that they don’t have much in common—or even that they have contradictory messages. But I think that there’s a deeper theme that connects Amos and Luke, one that challenges our ideas—and Martha’s ideas—about what it means to succeed and to fail.
First, let’s dive into the context of Amos. If we’re not listening closely, we might sometimes just hear the prophets as an upset, older-generation, finger-wagging at the youth. There’s a lot of talk from the prophets about people no longer properly respecting holy days and the Sabbath. If Amos were from the 21st century, maybe he would have written a think piece about how “Millennials Are Killing the Holy Day of the New Moon.”
But as I’m sure you all know, that’s a grossly simplistic way to read the prophets. Amos isn’t just making a call for more prayer or more attention to religious practices, although that’s clearly important to him. More than that, there seems to be a clear understanding of what is meant to come out of those practices: Justice. Economic justice.
Amos rails against the dishonesty of the rich, saying that the crooked dealings of business owners overshadow even the Sabbath. And the line about “buying the poor with silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals” is probably literal. Scholars say that as the rich grabbed more and more land, the poor were forced to sell themselves into debtors’ slavery.
Less explicit but also present is a call for environmental justice. Dr Hilary Marlow, a professor at the University of Cambridge, wrote a paper titled “Justice for Whom?” in which she points out that Amos and other prophets tie the fertility of the land to the righteousness of the present ruler. When kings are just, the harvest is good. When they’re not, the crops wither.
It doesn’t feel like a stretch to say that this isn’t only about God’s judgment. A ruling class that is exploitative and disdainful towards the poor is more likely to treat the land the same way, ignoring proper soil care and land management in a push for more money.
Whatever the case, whether you read it as God’s judgement, cause and effect, or—as I do—a combination of the two, the result of all of this injustice is clear: destruction. We’re back to the weeping and the sackcloth and the head-shaving here.
So how exactly does this all fit with Jesus, Mary, and Martha? Well, it’s important to note that Jesus didn’t just see himself emulating the prophets spiritually. He also saw himself living in a very similar time.
His calls for economic justice are well known to us at 8th Day. We’ve heard the reminder that when we see the poor, the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the sick, and those who are in prison, we’re really seeing Jesus. And the reverse—in Jesus’ words, about the rich entering heaven being like a camel going through the eye of a needle—we see that God is not only on the side of the poor. Wealth, in fact, inhibits our relationship with God.
Perhaps it’s easy to see how this applies to an individual ethic, but Jesus and the religious authorities he clashed with so often clearly saw a systemic dimension to his ministry. During college I studied abroad in Israel and Palestine, and our professor talked a lot about how Jesus’ ideas about “the Sabbath serving people rather than people serving the Sabbath” and about the temple being a “den of thieves” were a direct challenge to a very oppressive—and very lucrative—economic system of worship that the religious authorities had established.
These authorities not only charged taxes to worship, but they also set the standards around what kind of animals needed to be sacrificed … and then were often heavily invested in the animal trade that happened right outside the temple. You needed temple currency for these transactions, which they were happy to supply—for a heavy transaction fee.
All of this amounted to a system that would have looked very familiar to pre-reformation Christians. The rich were viewed as being closest to God, while the poor struggled and went into debt in an effort to measure up to “God’s” desires. All the while, the priests got richer and richer through their role as the only access point to God.
And, like the prophets, Jesus saw an endpoint for this oppressive, ungodly system: destruction. Jesus spoke multiple times about a coming apocalypse of some kind, and what exactly he was predicting is hotly debated by scholars. But what we know is that only a few decades later, Rome destroyed the temple and drove the Jewish people out of Jerusalem, in a move so violent and horrific that the cycles of trauma and re‑traumatization from that event still play out today, 2,000 years later.
It’s not at all hard to draw parallels from the injustice of the prophets’ era and Jesus’ era to our own. We know that minimum and low-wage jobs trap people in cycles of debt and poverty only marginally better than those that Amos speaks about. We know that, because of centuries of racist policies, some of which continue to this day, the average white family in DC has a whopping $81 of wealth for every $1 that the average black family has. And we know that in our own community and communities across the country, people of color have to fear interactions with law enforcement that white people take for granted.
But perhaps scariest of all—our own looming Roman invasion—is how ever-building environmental disasters threaten to impact our already deeply unjust systems. In DC, we’ve already seen longer heat waves and more frequent flooding. Across the country, natural disasters, helped along by an unnatural element, have become more frequent, more destructive, and more geographically widespread.
We saw an example of how racism, economic injustice, and natural disasters mix after Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans was and is, like most American cities, heavily segregated. Lines of race fell fairly predictably, with wealthier, whiter communities living on higher ground while working-class and middle-class black neighborhoods sat in the floodplain. When the storm came, not only were black households hit the hardest, but they also had the least resources to rebuild. And when the justification for every police shooting of an unarmed black man is fear, in the wake of a disaster, fear runs wild.
As climate change makes these storms and other disasters ever more frequent, we’re moving into a system of climate injustice where those with the most will increasingly wall themselves off from disaster, while those with the least will be left to bear the brunt of the pain.
Worst of all, that’s exactly the opposite of where responsibility lies. Those of us with the most money use the most resources, emit the most greenhouse gases, and contribute the most to climate change. Our wealth has made us camels, and the eye of the needle isn’t getting any bigger.
I want to recognize that 8th Day is a diverse community, and we have members who have not had their fair share of resources in life. But for myself, the Psalms reading today particularly resonates.
“Here now is the man who did not make God his stronghold but trusted in his great wealth and grew strong by destroying others!” To reflect on the rest of the psalm, I have not been blameless, I have not always been righteous, and I have done wrong to a neighbor.
So what can we do? As with Jesus’ example, I think there are both individual and systemic changes we can make. We can change our travel habits by driving and flying less and supporting public transportation. We can change our dining habits by eating less meat, and especially less beef, one of the most greenhouse gas-intensive foods.
Another easy change is to change your energy provider, something Brooke and I did recently. Just by filling out a short form, we were able to direct PEPCO to buy our electricity from wind farms rather than coal and natural gas plants. Our bills haven’t changed much, but our carbon footprint has. I have more info up front, and I’m happy to talk more about the process with anyone who is interested.
We also, of course, need systemic change. An important step in that change locally came in December, when DC passed a law mandating 100% renewable energy by 2032. That’s the kind of aggressive target we need, but it’s also the kind of target that only gets met with continued public pressure. Joelle Novey, my new boss at Interfaith Power and Light, is here with info about how you can get involved with our work and get updates when that pressure is needed.
But like in the days of Amos and in the days of Jesus, the question looms over all of this work: is it too little too late? Some climate scientists think we may have already crossed the tipping point—that even if we stopped emitting all greenhouse gases today, we’ve already started a warming cycle that’s building on itself at this point. Things like melting polar ice, wildfires, and melting permafrost start—or worsen—because of global warming, but they also contribute to global warming.
So is it time to give up? Looking at the climate modeling, it could be fair to say yes. It might be too late. Maybe we’re a failure.
But if we’re already a failure, then most of the prophets were failures. Jesus was a failure.
Here is where it’s important to bring Mary and Martha back into the story. “Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to Jesus and asked, ‘Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!’”
I think Martha has our mindset: there’s work that needs to get done, or we’re a failure. We are defined by our work, by our outcomes. And if the work isn’t done, well, there’s no way to sugar-coat it.
But Mary and Jesus have a different idea. “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”
It’s easy for us to hear this story and feel some injustice on Martha’s part. After all, her role was needed! Culturally, being a host to guests and providing food was the right thing to do. But Jesus seems to be pointing out that in order for everyone’s needs to be met—for people to be fed, housed, and welcomed—relationships need to come first. Relationships build communities where we can address our needs together.
To put that another way, the community that comes out of our work will be at least as important as the work itself. I think that’s something that we see throughout Jesus’ ministry, and it’s what makes it impossible for us to think of his work as a failure.
Like the prophets, so much of Jesus’ teaching and ministry came in the context of building a sacred, radical new community. Jesus centered women in his work, which in and of itself would have been incredibly controversial. But not just any women: Jesus built community with poor women and sex workers and women from different religious and ethnic backgrounds.
He made followers and, almost certainly preachers, out of women. In fact, women were so central to Jesus’ ministry that it’s at least caused me to wonder from time to time where the idea of the twelve male disciples came from. Was that really Jesus’ label, or was that something that the disciples came up with themselves? If that sounds like heresy to you, don’t worry—I’m not a biblical scholar, and I don’t have anything beyond suspicion to back it up.
In any case, the centrality of those radical relationships is clear. Times like the one spent sitting and talking with Mary and Martha, even when there was so much work to do, that is what kept the early church alive and helped it to thrive, even in the midst of the destruction Jesus predicted—the destruction he failed to prevent.
When I first reread the story of Mary and Martha in preparing for today, the very first thing I thought of was L’Arche and the ways that it embodies the radical community. Whenever Brooke describes her work to someone who hasn’t encountered L’Arche before, whenever she says the phrase “a community of people with and without intellectual disabilities living together,” you can see a look of polite confusion pass over the person’s face.
“But … that’s it?” the question seems to be. “You just live together?” In some ways, of course, L’Arche is a lot more work than that. But in a lot of ways, that’s exactly what it is—just living together.
That’s been a real learning experience for me. I’m definitely Martha—looking for the work that needs to be done, and measuring myself against it. But when I would hang out with Mo, listening to him cackle as he insisted that it must have been a ghost who stole my phone, it was somehow easier to understand the deep value of just sitting in community.
Of course, there are still concrete things we need to work toward. L’Arche depends heavily on Medicaid, and I think we’re responsible for fighting to protect and expand that health coverage. Amos and Jesus pushed very specific social changes for which they were willing to risk everything.
But when you look at the community that L’Arche has built, when you see how many people Mike knows as he rolls around Adams Morgan, you get the sense that the bonds of L’Arche are so strong that some version of it would survive even in catastrophe. The community is too strong to disappear in “failure.”
We definitely have a responsibility to drastically change our consumption habits and limit the damage that warming will do. The more the planet warms, the more we and our neighbors with the least privilege and the least money will suffer. But as we stare systems of injustice and the possibility of disaster in the face, we can draw lessons from Amos and Jesus. This work demands interracial and cross-class, cross-political spectrum coalitions, the kind of coalition we’re working to build at Interfaith Power and Light. If we do that work and “fail,” we can still build a community.
“8th Day, 8th Day, you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one.”
Let us go forth and build the sacred, radical community.