God’s spirit floweth free, high surging where it will
In prophet’s word he spoke of old; God speaketh still. Amen.
These words are part of the final hymn we’ll sing as we leave the church today. And in just a few minutes, at the Offertory, we will sing these words to each other: Gird up your loins, ye prophet souls, the day is near.
Today’s readings present us with the stories of two prophets—Amos and John the Baptist. Today’s hymns press us to think about the prophets God speaks through today. And about ourselves as prophet souls.
It is very easy to misunderstand the word “prophet.” In the ancient world, many religions had soothsayers—fortune-tellers, people who claimed to predict the outcome of a battle, or the fate of a king.
But in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, the tradition inherited by John the Baptist, and by Jesus, and by us, the word prophet has a different meaning. Instead of being fortune-tellers about the future, prophets are people who see clearly what is—right here and right now—and they see the likely consequences if we continue on the same path.
Amos tells us he had a vision of God dropping down a plumb line from the heavens—the string with a weight that builders use to determine what’s upright and what’s crooked. They use it because a tower that isn’t plumb will eventually fall down—not from some special act of God, just from the laws of gravity. Amos had this vision of God measuring up the people of Israel, measuring up the society they had built. And by God’s measure it was crooked—it was arrogant, and reckless, and allowed a growing divide between rich and poor.
Amos comes up from the southern kingdom of Judah, and arrives at the sanctuary of Israel in the North to deliver this message—this society is so crooked that the kingdom will fall—under its own weight. The priest in the sanctuary basically says to him: You foreigner—Why don’t you go home and bother somebody else. We don’t want your message.
All through the ages, this is what happens to clear-eyed people of faith. To people who are listening for God’s voice, looking for God’s plumb line, people who name the consequences of what we can see right in front of us. They are ignored or ridiculed, they are beaten, or banished, or killed.
I don’t know how many of you remember the space shuttle Challenger, and the disaster caused by failure of a skinny rubber gasket called an O-ring. Lots of people saw there was a problem, but they also felt the pressure
they were getting from their bosses to get this space ship launched. Only one man, an engineer named Roger Boisjoly, constantly refused to go along. He kept saying do not launch, right to the very end, no matter what it would cost him professionally. We know what happened…the natural consequences of the laws of physics. Those people died.
In Miami this summer, there was an engineering firm that warned the condo association of major structural problems. The warning is there in the report, but the language is pretty general—and the people reading it
were volunteers on a condo board, not fellow engineers. The prophets those people needed were pretty polite and cautious in their report, they didn’t really make any waves. There was nothing about the floors pancaking down on each other and killing everyone inside. And so the natural consequences finally happened.
Prophets are not fortune-tellers…they are truth-tellers. They open their minds and hearts to God’s wisdom and guidance, And then they tell the truth, even when their community and their leaders don’t want to hear that truth, don’t want to see it, don’t want to believe it. They tell the truth even when they are shunned as outsiders and trouble-makers, when they are branded as disloyal or unpatriotic.
But first, they often try to run away. Not me, God, I’m not the prophet type! This isn’t my job! I’ve got so much else I’m worried about, so much else to do.
Has this ever happened to you? You wanted to speak up about something that just seemed wrong, or dangerous, cruel or unfair. But you didn’t want to be the one to say it. You didn’t want the blow-back,
you didn’t want your family members saying you ruined the birthday party By objecting to a slur about black people, or women, or gay people, or immigrants.
I want you to know I’ve spent the last ten days running away from information about our city I did not want to hear, did not want to know, did not want to have to deal with, because I had a lot of other things to do.
Two Sundays ago, just after we were together for the Holy Eucharist, a small, peaceful group of our neighbors experienced an act of intimidation right down near the Haverhill boardwalk. They were doing a little showcase of products from black- and brown-owned businesses in our area. When some of those folks came back to their cars parked on Merrimack Street, they saw a few armed men placing stickers on cars, stickers with the symbol of a white-supremacist group called the Patriot Front.
When I first heard about this, I was really busy with other stuff—my whole mind and heart were saying—I don’t want to hear this, I don’t want to know this. And I certainly don’t want to have to do anything about this right now. We’re all so tired of pandemics and politics, we’re all trying so hard To return to some ordinary gatherings and pleasures…. And then I realized…
Oh, right—that’s what those neighbors of ours on the boardwalk were trying to do with their little Sunday market place—just do something human and normal, something gentle and friendly and positive for our Haverhill community. For this, they seem to have been targeted for racist intimidation. Most of us in Haverhill probably didn’t know this little event was even happening. So it looks as if this neo-nazi group was watching, looking for an opportunity to make themselves visible in Haverhill—and to test out our community response.
By speaking these words to you today, I am asking that we—together—carry this painful situation to the altar, along with the bread and wine and money…those symbols of our everyday lives that we place into the hands of God week by week to be blessed, and broken, and given back to us again—transformed and transforming.
And I am asking us—together—to listen, and learn, and pray, about this troubling event. Some Trinity members will be attending an MVP Haverhill Chapter meeting this week. If you would like more information about this, please email me: am1111@comcast.net, and I will make sure you receive it.
God’s spirit floweth free, high surging where it will
In prophet’s word he spoke of old; God speaketh still. Amen.
The Rev'd Alice Mann
