The Word of the Lord

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
July 22, 2007

The Word of the Lord
Amos 8:1-12
Luke 10:38-42

Did you hear what God was threatening
as he spoke through the prophet Amos?
He was not threatening another flood,
he was not threatening a consuming fire,
or lightning bolts from the heavens.
He was not threatening pestilence,
disease, or invading armies.
No, what God was threatening was worse,
worse than any of those calamities,
worse than all of them combined.

God was threatening his people with silence.
Not their silence; his silence:
“a famine on the land,
not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water,
but of hearing the words of the Lord.
[You] shall wander from sea to sea,
and from north to east;
[you] shall run to and fro,
seeking the word of the Lord
but [you] shall not find it.”
(Amos 8:11-12) (emp. added)

Could there be a worse punishment?
That they would no longer have the word of the Lord,
that try as they might to hear it,
to listen for it,
it would no longer be there,
not in prayer, not in worship,
not in music,
not in the voice of the preacher,
or friend or stranger,
not in the wind or waves.
Nothing.
Silence.

No longer would they have the comforting word of God,
the affirming word of God,
the encouraging word of God;
the teaching word,
the healing word,
the forgiving word,
the merciful word,
the soothing word,
the loving word of God.

Silence,
Nothing but silence.
The chatter of their own voices,
the birds still singing, dogs still barking,
wind blowing through the trees,
waves crashing on the shore,
thunder booming in the heavens:
Those sounds would still be all around them,
but devoid of life.
The symphony composed by God,
turned to cacophony
thrown together by all God’s creatures.
as loud and as lifeless
as a traffic jam in the heart of New York City.

Why would God do such a thing?
Something so drastic?
Because his children were not listening.
It was as simple as that.
His children had stopped paying attention to his word.
They were saying they were listening;
but God saw that their actions spoke
much louder than their words.

It isn’t hard to imagine what God must have been thinking.
“Okay, if you are not interested in listening to me;
if, when I speak,
you won’t pay attention;
if you are too busy to hear,
or if you are going to take my simple words
and make them complicated,
interpreting in ways that suit your life
rather in the ways I intended,
then let’s just stop this little game,
end this charade here and now.

I didn’t covenant to be your God,
and I assume you didn’t covenant to be my people
so we could play a game called ‘religion’.
You won’t listen,
so there’s no need for me to talk.
Let’s stop wasting each other's time.
Go do what you want to do:
Chase rainbows,
accumulate money and power,
go off to war whenever you want.

The Sabbath is now your day to do as you please,
to do business, or anything else you feel like doing.
The Commandments are nothing more than a list
hanging on the wall of a building:
lie when it profits you,
covet, steal,
live for pleasure,
live for yourself, for the moment.
As you say, as long as no one’s hurt,
what’s the harm?

Words like “righteousness”, “mercy”,
“forgiveness”, “peace”, “justice”:
you can define them anyway you want,
bend them to fit your life, your political outlook;
you can even eliminate them from your vocabulary.

I will not speak,
so you don’t need to listen.
You don’t need to learn,
You don’t need to think about growing in faith.
If you think you are fine as you are,
then live your life just that way.

Of course, I will not listen, either.
(Isaiah 1:15)
So don’t bother with prayer,
not that you spent much time in that anyway.
“I will hide my eyes from you”
(Isaiah 1:15)
and look away,
the door between us will be closed,
the window shut.

Ah, but you protest now, do you?
You say, ‘Lord, we have been listening!
Don’t we offer our sacrifices,
and bring our gifts to your holy house?'
Okay, let’s take a look.
What have I said to you?
‘Cease to do evil,
learn to do good;
seek justice,
rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan,
plead for the widow.’ (Isaiah 1:16)

Let us reason this out:
how well have you done?
I know, I know: you’ve been busy,
so many other things to do,
you intended to do better,
when life wasn’t so busy.
So you say.

Haven’t I called you to feed the hungry?
so why do the number of hungry people
increase in your own community with every year?
Haven’t I told you to look after the sick?
So why have you simply dismissed them;
waving them off,
saying, ‘oh they have plenty of options for care’?
Haven’t I told you not to oppress the aliens
who live among you,
for you were once aliens…[yourselves]? (Exodus 23:9)

How many times have I told you
that I long for the day when you will live in peace,
and yet you march off to war,
thinking that through war
you will make your lives more secure.
Have you not seen?
Have you not heard?
I am your security!

But you don’t listen;
You don’t listen.
You ‘…do not understand’
(Isaiah 1:3)
and so I shall be silent.
I shall speak no more.”

The good news for us is that God,
in his infinite love for his children,
did not remain silent,
could not remain silent.
God's harshness melted away,
and in his infinite patience with us
God looked for new ways to share his word,
ways that might capture our attention,
culminating, of course, in God giving us
the Living Word of the Lord
in his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

And did we get any better at listening?
The story of Mary and Martha provides us with our answer:
Mary listened, but
Martha was busy with too many other things.
And as much as any of us wants to think,
“Oh, I am not like Martha at all;
I am much more like Mary”,
God puts the question squarely before us:
“Really? Do you really think that?”
Remember the story Jesus told
of the Pharisee who prayed,
“God, I thank you that I am not like other people…”
(Luke 18:11)

God doesn’t question us to make us feel bad;
God puts the question before us to help us to realize
that for as much as we think we do,
there is more we can do,
more we ought to be doing.

God’s word is comforting, soothing,
forgiving, and merciful – yes, absolutely.
But God’s word is also prodding,
pushing, pulling, calling.
As Gene reminded us last week,
God’s word challenges us,
it disrupts us to keep us from growing complacent.

Do we dare take the Word of the Lord
for granted?
Do we dare compartmentalize it?
Do we dare reinterpret it,
Taking bits and pieces of it selectively
to suit our lives?

Do we dare risk the sound of silence?
A famine of the Word of the Lord?
AMEN