Amos 6:1a, 4-7; Psalm 146; 1 Tim 6:6-19; Luke 16:19-31
Amos, the writer of our psalm, the writer of the first letter to Timothy, Jesus––they all have harsh words for us this morning. To a person, they are condemning God’s people for doing nothing when confronted with people in need. We don’t like to hear this part of God’s message to us, but here it is: God has given us the resources and the opportunity to help those in need, and when we don’t, God gets upset. Amos takes his listeners to task for not being “grieved over the ruin of Joseph,” by which he means the exploitation and abuse of those in the community. The writer of the psalm warns people not to put worship human leaders as if they are gods, since they are no more powerful than any of the rest of us, and likely to have gotten their riches off the labour of the poor. The writer of 1 Timothy says that all kinds of evil grow from loving money more than anything else, and Jesus makes it very clear to his listeners that God has already warned us, through Torah and the prophets, to take care of the poor, and that if we ignore those words, no one is going to save us from the consequences.
We call these four bearers of God’s Word prophets. A prophet is a person sent by God to point to the truth that nobody else wants to see, that often nobody wants to admit is coming, and then the prophet clearly lays out the consequences if nothing changes. Anybody, actually, can be a prophet––Martin Luther was one, Desmond Tutu was one, we even have them today.
The trouble is, prophets are seldom popular in their own time. We like prophets in retrospect, but not if they’re actually speaking to us. Mostly because they always seem angry, and they seem intent on shaming or berating us. Their accusations put us off, their anger allows us to dismiss them as irrational, we might even label them as “crazy” and stop listening. And yet they continue. It’s only later, years later or even thousands of year later, that we look back and realize that what they were saying was and is still true. Prophets like Amos, or Jesus, or Luther only get credit and respect in hindsight.
I suspect, though, that the real reason we don’t take to heart what prophets say to us is because what they’re saying is incredibly overwhelming. In their righteous anger, they come across so strongly that we feel defenseless. “I hate, I despise your festivals,” are the words Amos uses to describe God’s feelings towards those who walk past the needy on their way to worshipping God. Jesus says that if we act like the rich man and don’t care for the poor at our doorstep, we will be flung into a place of fire and torment, with no chance of escape. Prophets demand, with divine authority, that we change in significant, life-altering ways. They tell us that we need to dismantle entire systems. And so we stop listening, because even though they are speaking the words of God, they’re asking us to do the impossible.
But it’s only a twisted God who would tell us to do the impossible and then condemn us when we can’t. And that is not our God. Instead, we have a God who has and does give us what we need to change. God has given us the resources to care for the needy in our midst. God has always blessed us with more than we need, and has always provided opportunities for us to use those blessings to help others. For example, in Amos’ time, as well as in Jesus’ time, and in the time of the early church, societies were structured so that those with more were obligated and expected to take care of those with less. “Moses and the prophets” say that if you have land producing food, you are not supposed to harvest it, you’re supposed to leave the edges of the field, or grapes on the vine, or fruit on the trees so that those who are poor can come along later and take the leftovers. Roman and Greek societies were built on patronage systems, and the Middle Ages on feudal systems, where those with riches and power understood that God or the fates had caused them to be born into their stations in life in order to provide for those who were born lower. It was expected––it was the divine order––that we would take care of those around us. It’s just that, in our love of money and power, we twisted what God had given us to serve ourselves rather than others.
So what does that mean for us today? Well, we’re in a bit of a new situation here, because today we’re living in a society that Amos and Jesus and the early church and even Luther couldn’t possibly imagine. Today we live in a world where we believe that people aren’t born into power, like the rulers of old, but that we elect them to power. Today we live in a democracy––something that the people of the Bible could not even imagine. And living in a democracy means that we live in a society where we regular people actually have way more power than those in previous times ever did. We have the power to affect government policy, which is a power far greater than simply feeding the poor out of our own kitchens. We have been born into a time and a place where our individual vote has the power to affect the lives of millions of Canadians, and even billions around the world.
Now, before anyone starts worrying, I’m not about to cross that important distinction between church and state and tell you which party Christians should vote for. We do misunderstand what that concept means, which Luther himself actually invented, but that’s for another day.
But what I am going to say is that our readings for today tell us that God expects us to use the riches and the power we have to improve the lives of those in greatest need, to love our neighbours as ourselves, and today, those riches and power comes in the form of our vote. You see, each of us here is doing okay. It is highly unlikely that any of us will end up literally starving and begging at the gates of rich Calgarians if one or another of the political parties win. We might gain some, we might lose some, but our basic necessities will still be cared for. But there are people in Canada, and around the world, whose lives will be fundamentally altered depending on which party comes into power, and which promises they choose to keep. And so God is calling us to hear the words of the prophets of our time, to look at the difficult reality before us, and to vote for the party that has the best platform for the Lazaruses around us, for the disadvantaged in need in our communities, whether we think of those communities as our ridings, as the whole country, or even the whole world. And so I don’t think it’s going too far to say that God is calling us to “give away” our vote to those most in need, to turn it away from serving ourselves to serving the least among us, to serving the Lazaruses of our world. To listen to Torah and the prophets, to listen to Jesus, and to love our neighbours as ourselves by casting our ballot as if their needs are our own.
The prophets’ words tell us to take care of those in need amongst us, and we can listen because we need not be overwhelmed. God gives us the means and power to shape the systems, and God gives us the opportunity to actually do it. We are not, in fact, like the rich man who has already died and is left on the wrong side of the chasm. God is not twisted, setting us up for a failing task. The task––to treat our votes as riches to be shared with the larger community––is challenging, but it is not impossible. God has given it to us to do, and so we can. And for this opportunity and for the resources to serve, we say, Thanks be to God, Amen.
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