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 Amos 5:14-15 and 7:7-8
There are a number of Psalms I love and cherish, that over my lifetime have enhanced my spiritual journey... Psalm 40: I waited patiently for the Lord...; 46: Be still and know that I am God...; 103: Bless the Lord, O my soul...; 121: I will lift up my eyes to the hills...; and others. But the one psalm I have the most intimate and passionate relationship with is the 23rd Psalm.
The Psalmist has made specific and concrete what God is like: The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. All of my important and basic needs are met. Whenever I read, He makes me lie down in green pastures, I see myself lying in the soft grass on a summer afternoon, feeling the warmth of the sun and a gentle breeze rustling the leaves in the trees. I look up to see birds making lazy circles in the sky.
Then when he leads me beside the still water, I become still inside--my soul is restored. When I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, darkness, hardship and evil, I have nothing to fear, because the watchful shepherd always is there with me. When enemies are causing me trouble, the shepherd sets a table before me, annoints my head with oil, blesses me and encourages me. I feel blessed, and my cup runs over. Then the final promise: I will walk in the way of the Lord for the rest of my life. It's a wonderful thing, to know that God is always with me, and with everybody else in God's flock.
I find that when I'm reciting this psalm to myself, I sometimes skip over one verse, as if to avoid it. This wonderful psalm of comfort and nurture suddenly confronts me with something I must do. It challenges me with major responsibility--to be honest, fair, courageous in taking stands against evil. As the King James version puts it, He leads me in paths of righteousness. He leads me down a path which says I must do the right thing. This is the challenge of life: to know what the right path is, to be on the right path and to do the right thing no matter what.
So for the next few minutes, I am going to talk about how we can get help in doing the right thing.
First, we need to know ourselves. It is my very firm belief that at our birth God has implanted a purpose in each individual, deep in the heart, the mind, the soul, the psyche. None of us is without some kind of inbuilt, inborn purpose, some reason for being. A major challenge of life is to discover and discern this purpose. "Why am I here?"
Each of us has something that we alone can do. Nobody else can do it just like we can. We are unique. Nobody else has ever been exactly like us. We might be concerned that what we are doing isn't big enough. But we're not called to do something big, we are called to be faithful to what we have been given.
Whatever that purpose is, whatever is instilled in us, embossed on our spirits, we must be faithful to it. God will determine whether it is big or little. Our faithfulness is the major thing.
A theologian of another generation, Lynn Harold Hough, said, "The great tragedy of the world today is that we give first-class loyalty to second-class causes, and these second-class causes betray us." What are we giving first-class attention to? Maybe some of us need to shift our priorities.
Recently, a mother who was frustrated with life told me she had said to her son, "I'm sick and tired of God's Plan B for my life," and her son, a high-school senior, had responded, "Mom, with God there is no Plan B."
What is embossed in us that requires our faithfulness? The prophet Amos has something to say to us. In the fifth chapter of Amos, God says, "Seek good and not evil. Hate evil and love the good."
That's pretty clear. Then God says, "Let justice roll down like waters"--what wonderful imagery!
"Let justice"--let the right thing--"roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream." Then God gets into a conversation with Amos. (Amos 7:7-8) He asks, "Amos, what do you see?" And Amos responds, "I see you holding a plumbline." God asks, "What is it doing?" "Lord, the plumbline is against the wall and is determining where the wall is straight and crooked." And God says, "I put the plumbline in the midst of my people." So that we seek goodness, we seek doing the right thing.
He leads me toward doing the right thing.
There is no promise it will be easy. It is likely to be challenging and sometimes hard. We may be in the minority. But right is right, straight is straight, wrong is wrong and crooked is crooked.
In my lifetime I have made the round trip between New York City and Portland, Maine, at least 350 times. Along the way on Interstate 495 is Lawrence, Massachusetts. Every time I go by Lawrence, a mill town, I see huge factory buildings built in the 1800s. They are very handsome buildings.
About five years ago something happened in that town which made newspapers and television news programs all over the world. Since then when I go by Lawrence I think about someone special.
One of those factories had a fire, and a business was burned out completely. The man who owned the business was in his seventies, had made a lot of money and was very comfortable. He considered calling it a day: "Life has blessed me, I'm wealthy, I've had a good run and I can just let the business go." Then it was as if he were holding a plumbline: "What is the right thing to do?"
The day after the fire, he called together all of his employees and said, "We are going to rebuild, and until the business starts again I will pay each of you your full salary." He felt the only reason he had been successful was the work his employees had done. Without their work, there would have been no business. He owed them something.
This happened when the environment in this country was out-of-control corporate greed. A number of individuals, many of whom have still not been held accountable, made millions and millions of dollars while their businesses went under. People lost their jobs and pensions, and there has been little accountability by the responsible executives. In the midst of all of this the wife of one of the CEOs whose company went under went on television to say that they were having a hard time because they did not have enough money left to run their five houses. That is how sick some elements of our society have become. But this man in Lawrence, Massachusetts, whose business burned down, because of the people who had made him successful, felt he owed something to them. I can see Jesus telling this story as a parable, and saying at the very end of it, as He did with the good Samaritan story, "Go and do likewise." Seek good, not evil. Hate evil, love good. Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.
I can see my friend Jim McCluskey sitting in the balcony now, as he did for many years. I can still see the intensity in his face. He was a successful consultant for an international firm, and traveled all over the world. But God was working on Jim McCluskey to do something else. Jim was doing his own Plan B, but God had a Plan A for him: "Go to seminary, Jim, go to seminary, go to seminary." He finally did; he went to Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey. His fieldwork assignment was to visit the state prison in Trenton. The very first inmate he talked to insisted that he wasn't guilty, that he had been framed. When you work in a prison, you are warned not to be taken in by all the people who claim to be innocent because most of them are not. But this man, named Chiefy, in telling Jim his story, convinced Jim he was really innocent. Jim did some research and found out that indeed, Chiefy had been framed. They had needed to arrest somebody, so they arrested him. Jim got him released.
Then he began to think of all the others in prison who had been wrongfully convicted, especially those on death row, and he wondered how many people had been executed who were innocent of the crime. So Jim started Centurion Ministries. Our Easter Offering that year provided the first $5,000 to help get it started. Jim was faithful to his purpose. By the time he retired he had gotten seventy-five innocent people released from death row. Jim was faithful to what he was called to do, and there are dozens of groups all over the United States today who have been inspired by Centurion Ministries to continue this work.
For the most part innocent people on death row come from the poor, the disenfranchised, those without power. They get shuffled through the system. We have seen, in the high-profile criminal cases, how many times the wealthy, the ones with the best lawyers, get off free.
Is not God calling for us to remember the poor, the powerless and the disenfranchised? Jesus saw the people in the dark corners; He saw the people in the shadows and He paid attention to them. Maybe what we need to do as a congregation is to be very alert, attentive and helpful sheepdogs, helping our Shepherd to do His work. Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.
It is easy to say, "The problem is so big. What difference am I going to make? What changes can I make with the little influence I have?" The point is to be faithful to what you're called to do.
A number of you will remember in the 1980s when homelessness became a big problem in New York, and all over the United States. It's still a criminal thing that so many people in this great, wealthy country are homeless. There were five welfare hotels near the church, populated with people who had no other place to live. Many of the families had children, who had very little direction and became problems to themselves and to society, and there was a lot of crime in this area. There was graffiti, there were robberies--we didn't feel safe at night.
People in the church would say to me, "Arthur, we've got to do something." The problem was so massive that I just covered my eyes.
One Sunday morning when I came up to my office a brick had been thrown through the window and lay by my chair. We put a wire gate on the window; that's the way we handled it. Still, people were saying, "Arthur, we've got to do something."
One night I was leaving my office and I noticed some fire engines a block away on 28th Street. I went to see what was going on, figuring it was safe because there were firemen, policemen and so many other people. I was about halfway down the block when I saw four teenage boys walking toward me. It had been raining, and one of them had an umbrella. I walked past them and the next thing I knew, bop, the umbrella hit me on the top of my head. I whirled around, and I was going to say something, but an inner voice stopped me. The inner voice was telling me, "Arthur, God may be speaking. Pay attention!" I walked home knowing that we had to do something.
The next morning we got busy. We discovered that the city was providing street workers from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm, but they had nobody to be with the young people from 4:00 pm to midnight, and they were left unsupervised. We provided the money to hire two street workers for the after-school and night hours. We made a difference. We didn't solve the homeless problem, we didn't solve the poverty problem, but we were faithful to a little cause. We helped many young lives, and we helped reduce crime in this neighborhood.
What do we do when we come up against an issue or a problem where there is injustice and unfairness, where things are wrong? We do best when we hold up a plumbline.
As God said to Amos, "I am holding a plumbline in the midst of my people." Let us, in our individual journeys, hold up that plumbline and do the right thing.
He leads me down the path of doing the right thing. Let us pray.
Lord, we give You thanks for the way You bless and take care of us. Lord, give us courage to be people of righteousness and justice and goodness and help You take care of others. Grant us courage and strength. AMEN |
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