A FAMINE OF GOD’S WORDS

Amos 8:1-12

Luke 10:38-42

            I attended a workshop at a Presbyterian conference a couple of years ago because the title intrigued me.  It was called something like “The Future of Worship.”  I thought as a pastor that I should attend such a workshop.  The leader was fairly young, in his early 30’s.  He had his whole presentation projected on PowerPoint.  He began by saying, “Here is how you begin planning worship these days.”  I thought he would hold up a Bible.  But he did not. He held up a blank piece of paper.  “This is how you start,” he said, "with nothing, from scratch."  He then proceeded to tell us that worship should revolve around the culture in which the church resides, that the music should reflect the music of the area.  So if country is the popular music, he said, use country music in your worship.  If rock music is most popular, use rock music.  Sing a lot of songs, he said.  And then pick a popular topic to talk about.  For instance, he said he was currently doing a series on “Desperate Households.”  Up on the PowerPoint appeared the opening logo from “Desperate Housewives.”  He never mentioned using Scripture to help with the theme of the day. And he said to aim worship at those who do not know church, and to not accommodate those who have been at church forever, that they would adapt.  Worship of the future, he said, will appeal to the non-churched, and will bring them in excited and pleased.  They will leave having enjoyed the service and feeling better. I left the workshop depressed.  If that is the future of worship, I said to myself, then I may not be able to continue leading worship.   

            I recently attended worship elsewhere (and it was Presbyterian).  We sang and sang and sang, all contemporary songs that I did not know, but that I could pick up quickly, because they were very repetitive.  If there was a theme that tied the songs together, I could not determine it.  We never had a prayer.  We did have a Scripture reading and meditation.  But I could not see how it fit with the songs we had sung.  And afterwards I did not feel as if we had worshipped well.

And the prophet Amos said: “The time is coming, says the Lord God, when I will send a famine on the land:  not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord.  They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east, seeking the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.”                                 (Amos 8:11)

Amos was written long ago, to a different people, but I wonder if we have not yet again reached a famine of the words of God.  We talked about this some a few weeks ago on Pentecost Sunday, as we examined the scriptures of the Tower of Babel in Genesis, and the gift of understanding languages at Pentecost.  Ours is a world full of words and noises.  We have a hard time finding silence in our world.  Many of us do not even want silence, as we always have the radio or TV or MP3 player running, or a cell phone glued to our ear.  There is too much to be done, and we stay busy and occupied, trying to accomplish many things at once.  Multi-tasking is a trait to be admired these days, and also very necessary.

            But when Jesus went to visit Mary and Martha, Mary stopped working in the kitchen or attending to the other guests.  She sat at Jesus’ feet and listened.  Her sister Mary, perhaps the original Martha Stewart, was busy with “many tasks.”  The Greek word is actually “diakonos,” (from which we get Deacon) and it means “service.”  So she was busy serving, and that was a good thing to do.  Joanna Weaver wrote a book about the three appearances of Mary and Martha in the New Testament (The other two are in John).  Ms. Weaver says of these two women:

“Mary was sunlight to Martha’s thunder. She was the caboose to Martha’s locomotive. Mary’s bent was to meander through life, to pause to smell the roses.  Martha was more likely to pick up the roses, quickly cut the stems at an angle, and arrange them in a vase with baby’s breath and ferns. That’s not to say one is right and one is wrong.  We are all different, and that is just as God made us to be.”  (Weaver, p.5)

But the text also says that Martha was “distracted” by all of these services.  To be distracted implies that she was distracted from something.  That something, we find out, was “the better part” that Mary chose - to listen to Jesus. 

            This text in Luke has been interpreted in many interesting ways through the years.  It can be used to say that worship of the Lord is more important than service, and so some churches concentrate more on themselves than on mission.  But that interpretation may be taking this passage out of the context of the story just before it, which is the Parable of the Good Samaritan.  At the end of that parable, Jesus asked the lawyer who was the neighbor of the man attacked.  The lawyer correctly answered that it was the Samaritan (hated by Jews) who stopped to help the man when the priest and Levite, supposedly men of God, had passed him by.  Jesus said to the lawyer, “Go and do likewise.”  So just verses before telling Martha that Mary was correct to sit and listen, Jesus told someone to go and do.  So it is perhaps a matter of timing.  There are times to sit and worship and to pray and to hear the Word of God.  And there are times to serve, times to go and do. 

            There are also those who have used this Scripture to point out the place of women, and that would be either in the kitchen serving, as Martha was, or sitting silently in worship, as Mary did.  Mary did not question or speak to Jesus, she merely listened, as some will point out.  That is the place of women, they say. 

            But that, it seems to me, takes the text further than it goes.  Jesus never told Mary not to talk in church.  And, as we will see next week, the text following our passage today is the text where Jesus teaches us all how to pray, as we do aloud each Sunday, in what we call the Lord’s Prayer.  Using this text to say that women should not preach or teach is simply a misuse of the Word as it is given here. 

            So, in this one chapter of Scripture alone, we see that there is a time to go and do, and a time to sit still and listen to God.  All of these are necessary components to a whole spiritual life.  And all inform one another.     

            Taken together with the passage from Amos, which talks about the famine of words from God, this passage may push us a little further than we want to be pushed.  For the famine of words from God is not just a personal thing.  We all have times when we do not think God is listening to us, and times when we cannot seem to determine what God might be saying to us personally.  But the Amos passage indicates an absence of God from a whole people,  a people who wandered from sea to sea, and all over the land seeking, and yet could not find the word of God. 

            When we pray together the Prayer of Confession, we pray corporately first.  Some folks tell us that they don’t understand or even like this prayer because they do not commit the sins listed in those prayers.  And yet at that point we confess the sins not just of our own lives, but of all the Christians around us, here in this church, and this community, as if we were one.  After that corporate prayer, we have moments of silence in which to confess our personal sins.

            This famine of God’s words may be a corporate matter as well.  Are we, as a church, taking the time to sit at Jesus’ feet and listen to God’s word for us as we begin our search for a new Head of Staff?  We hope so!  And we hope that the Pastor Nominating Committee will not just jump into going and doing, but will sit at Jesus’ feet with Bible study and prayer as they begin their hard task.  And we may pray for them as they prepare to move forward, and have patience as they prepare to do their work.

            Are we as a denomination listening to God?  When we argue over issues of ordination, each side thinks they are interpreting God’s Word correctly, and so compromise is very hard. 

            Are we as a nation listening to God when we continue to send soldiers to war-torn and violent places?  Are we paying attention to the signs that we are polluting the earth that God gave us to care for so badly that the polar caps are melting?  Do the rich help the poor, as God calls us to do throughout the Scriptures, or do the rich just get richer while the poor get poorer?

            I am not sure how we find God’s words again in the famine that spans the whole Body of Christ, if that is indeed the state of the church as a whole. This famine in truth might only affect parts of the Body, but we know from the apostle Paul’s writings that if one part of the body suffers, the whole body suffers. And so if some of our churches or denominations suffer a famine of God’s words, then so do we.

  Barbara Brown Taylor makes the point that “In Christ, the revelation of God comes to us in a whisper.”  “In order to catch it,” she says, “we must hush, lean forward, and trust that what we hear is the voice of God.”  (Taylor, p.57).  She also points out that the word comes forth from the silence in each of the Gospels.  “For John,” she says, “it is silence at the beginning of creation.  For Luke, it is the silence of poor old Zechariah, struck dumb by the angel Gabriel for doubting that Elizabeth would bear a child. For Matthew, it is the awkward silence between Joseph and Mary when she tells him the prenuptial news, and for Mark it is the voice of one crying in the wilderness – the long-forgotten voice of prophecy puncturing the silence of the desert and of time…Silence was the backdrop against which the Word began to be heard.”  (Taylor, p. 74)

Barbara Brown Taylor’s advice to us preachers in order to bring the Word of God to the people is that we must use words that are simple, honest,  from every day life, and words that “have more silence in them.”  Now, that is a challenge, almost an oxymoron.  But we have to try, and I have to give you another Barbara Brown Taylor quote to explain more, because few people can use words better to communicate the mysteries of God.  She says:

“Our words are too fragile. God’s silence is too deep.  But oh, what gorgeous sounds our failures make:  words flung against the silence like wine glasses pitched against a hearth.  As lovely as they are, they were meant for smashing.  For when they do, it is as if a little of God’s music breaks forth.”  (Taylor, p. 21)

  As we seek God’s words for ourselves, for our church, for our denomination, and for our nation, we, both individually and as one Body, must take time to listen for the sweet, tingling music of God’s words.  This is something we will have to work at on our own, with Sabbath time and prayer, and together, with Bible study and worship and prayer.  For only when we take time to sit at Jesus’ feet and listen, really listen, will we hear what God needs for us to “go and do.” 

            I want to close with a prayer by Walter Brueggemann, a professor of Old Testament and author:

            AGAINST YOUR ABSENCE, by Walter Brueggemann

(Let us pray)

All power, honor, glory be to you!

You…sometimes hidden, silent, absent, unresponsive.

We are so privileged that we seldom sense you hidden, silent, absent, unresponsive.

But we know people who do, we think of places where you do not appear.

We imagine you defeated, weak, held captive. 

And we wait a day, two days, until the third day.

And then, most often then, quite reliably then, you appear then in full glory.

This day we pray against your absence, silence, and hiddenness.

Come with full power into deathly places,

            And we will praise you deep and full.  Amen.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Taylor, Barbara Brown, When God is Silent  (Cowley Pub., Mass., 1998)

Weaver, Joanna, Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World  (Waterbrook Press, Co, 2002)