September 23, 2007
“A Basket Of Rotten Fruit”
Amos 8:1-12

Do you think how we treat one another is any indication of our spiritual well-being?  Does the way in which we communicate and interact with people around us have anything to say about how healthy our faith is?  Do you find our behavior toward others as more or less or the same in importance as your personal relationship with God?

I ask these questions not to trap you or set you up for “a fall.”  I ask because I firmly believe this tension is one of the critical points of distinction between people of faith and between institutions of faith.  The difference between the suicide bomber with a load of explosives strapped around his waist in a marketplace in Baghdad and the devout Muslim saying his prayers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia might hinge on this very question of the personal and the interpersonal. 

The difference between the Evangelical Christian who posts on the internet pictures and addresses of doctors that provide abortions to women and the church member who is marching in Washington to protest the war in Iraq probably revolves around the nuances of one's take on the personal and interpersonal aspects of faith.

The difference between a devout Jew who supports Palestinian rights to a free and independent country and the devout Jew who is against Palestinians from being given control of a piece of the ancient land of Israel might be explained in large part by learning their approach to faith as either chiefly personal or chiefly interpersonal.

The Women's Movement of the last century brought us the phrase, “The personal is political” (1).  What I understand that to mean is that we should never discount something which is extremely personal as having no impact on the larger political world.  In fact, those things which are seen as being primarily in the realm of the private sphere, such as child-rearing, housework, sexual expression, or even household finances, do, have implications for our larger world, if we but are willing to recognize the connections.

However, I would enlarge that maxim to say “The spiritual is also political.”  That is to say, when we are dealing with facets of faith or a spirituality that intensely connect with our innermost thoughts, passions, and convictions they should necessarily have an outward expression and have an impact on the world. 

There is no place where this truth is made more clear than in the prophets of scripture.  Rev. Marvin McMickle, of Cleveland's venerable Antioch Baptist Church, says of the prophets, “There is no other genre of biblical literature that approaches the prophetic corpus in terms of the breadth of history and the depth of human experiences that are included among its pages.” (2)  Certainly Amos, from whose writings come the text for today, was no exception to this. 

Amos confronted the religious establishment of his day that was so intent upon getting its liturgical rituals right and enforcing its complex set of religious codes of conduct, that it had completely lost sight of how the people were being treated.  He begins, “Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land…” and proceeds to render a scathing reprimand to the leaders and the people alike that they had allowed their personal spirituality to overtake their political responsibilities.  The prophets, Amos first among them, never saw a distinction between the personal and the political.  For them, they always went hand in hand.  How one treats one's neighbor was a direct indication of how healthy one's personal spirituality was.  What you do with your hands for God verifies what you do with your heart for God.

What were they doing?  Well, it's quite obvious.  They had terrible financial practices that took advantage of the poor and the weak in their society. Mocking the words of the religious leaders, Amos writes, “We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat.”  He knew that you couldn't pretend to love God and then treat your neighbor poorly - especially those weakest amongst you.  The spiritual is political, and the political is spiritual.  That's the message of the prophets.

How does this translate in our day?  Pretty clearly, I would say.  Unfortunately Cleveland has too many examples to choose from: predatory lending practices, sub prime mortgages, outrageous fees at check cashing establishments, and on and on.  I think that payday lenders would be a close parallel to the leaders of Amos' day.  Did you know that even though payday lenders market their loans as “short-term” help for people in crisis, only 1% of borrowers pay off their original loan in the standard two-week cycle?  Were you aware that the fees in Ohio for these so-called “short-term” loans amount to an annual percentage rate of 391%?  Have you heard that the number of payday lending stores licensed in Ohio catapulted from just 107 locations in 1996 to 1,562 in 2006, growing by a multiple of fourteen, and that there are now more payday lending locations in Ohio than McDonalds, Burger Kings, and Wendy's restaurants combined! (3)

This is not simply a political or social issue, this is fundamentally a spiritual issue.  Until we recognize that how our neighbor is treated directly reflects and affects our personal spiritual lives, we will never live a fully biblical faith.  There is a movement in our state right now to create a percentage cap for payday lending which I would urge you to seriously consider, not simply as legislation, but as a spiritual discipline.

One of the best clarifications about this whole personal and political tension that I've ever found has been in Jim Wallis' book, “God's Politics: Why The Right Gets It Wrong And The Left Just Doesn't Get It.”  He writes,
“The lesson is this: God is personal, but never private.”  He begins by affirming that we do need a personal relationship to God:  “If God is not personal, then there is little meaning to faith.  It merely becomes a philosophy or set of teachings from religious figures who died long ago.  Without a personal God, there is no personal dimension to belief.  There is no relationship to God, no redemption, salvation, grace, or forgiveness.  There is no spiritual transformation without a personal God, and no power that can really change our lives beyond mere self-improvement.  In today's world, there is one overriding and key distinction in all of the religion that is growing - a God who desires relationship with each person.  Much of liberal religion has lost the experience of a personal God, and that is the primary reason why liberal Christianity is not growing.”
     But he doesn't leave us there.  He points out, “However, that personal God is never private.  Restricting God to private space was the great heresy of twentieth-century evangelicalism.  Denying the public God is a denial of biblical faith itself, a rejection of the prophets, the apostles, and Jesus himself.  Exclusively private faith degenerates into a narrow religion, excessively preoccupied with individual and sexual morality while almost oblivious to the biblical demands for public justice.  In the end, private faith becomes a merely cultural religion providing the assurance of righteousness for people just like me.”(4)

Let me make this political issue very personal.  When my mother died of a heart attack in 1995 my sister, brothers, and I had no idea the state of her financial matters.  As we began to go through her affairs, we came across credit card bill after credit card bill.  I was stunned to see that some of her interest rates were upwards of 40%.  Almost all of her credit card debt was paying on the interest, some of which she had been paying interest only for years!  I believe to this day part of the crushing load with which my mother was burdened was the debt made crippling by out of control corporations intent on getting the most money from the weakest of our citizens.

The world around me asks me harsh questions:
¢     Was my mother an adult with all her faculties?  Yes. 
¢     Was she forced to take out these credit cards.  No. 
¢     Can laws ultimately prevent someone from doing harm to themselves?  No. 

But rarely do we go to the next set of questions, which I believe show the true health of our faith (and our nation):
¢     Was my mother vulnerable?  Yes!  She had a son addicted to alcohol and heroine and she was desperate in her love to save him. 
¢     Do we need laws to set the boundaries of what a society will and will not claim as acceptable?  Yes!  The free market within a civilized society will always push the boundaries beyond where they are, and the citizens of the nation have the responsibility for naming and claiming what is the point where we must push back. 
¢     Do we need policies that protect the weak, the vulnerable, those who are most at risk of making bad choices?  Yes!  As I said last week, it is a sign of a healthy Representative Democracy that we defend the least among us, protect the rights of the minority, for they have value and worth and deserve dignity. 
As a person of faith, hearing the words of the Prophet Amos ring in my ears, I say to this second set of questions, “Yes, yes, yes!”  My faith is personal, but it can never be private.  The Bible calls us to seek justice in the public realm.

The image God gave to the prophet was a basket of fruit.  Once the image is set before Amos, it is never referred to again.  I think this is done on purpose.  The basket of fruit symbolizes the fruit of our faith.  Our spirituality, our religion, our faith can never be contained simply within our minds, our hearts, our souls… It must bear fruit, and that fruit must be shared with others.  To hold our faith in, making it personal AND private, never letting our faith effect the world around us, forbidding our church from being involved in the political world around us, is to hide the fruit.  If we hide the fruit, you know what we will have?  A basket of rotten fruit. 

But it doesn't have to be that way.  We can choose wisely what we will do with the fruit of our faith.

If we do, then - and only then - we will have the joy of hearing the concluding words of the prophet's oracle:
The time is surely coming, says the Lord,
   when the one who ploughs shall overtake the one who reaps,
   and the treader of grapes the one who sows the seed;
the mountains shall drip sweet wine,
   and all the hills shall flow with it.
I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel,
   and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine,
   and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit.
I will plant them upon their land,
   and they shall never again be plucked up
   out of the land that I have given them,
says the Lord your God.   (Amos 9:13-15)

If we allow our faith to be both personal and public, but never private… If we recognize that our spirituality is necessarily political if it is to mean anything like what God's prophets intended… then we shall enjoy the rich, ripe fruit of our faith that will gladly be shared with all around us.  May it be so!
Amen.


(1) From a blog:
Date: Sat, 7 Feb 1998 08:33:53 -0500
From: "dbic6066 @ uriacc.uri.edu" <dbic6066@URIACC.URI.EDU>
Subject: Re: origins of the personal is political?
Carol Hanisch has a brief essay called "The Personal is Political" in the
Redstockings collection *Feminist Revolution* -- her essay is dated March
1969 (204-205).  The essay defends consciousness-raising against the charge
that it is "therapy."  Hanisch states "One of the first things we discover
in these groups is that personal problems are political problems.  There are
no personal solutions at this time."

Donna M. Bickford
dbic6066  @  uriacc.uri.edu
Department of English and Women's Studies Program
University of Rhode Island
315 Roosevelt Hall
Kingston, RI 02881

(2)     Where Have All The Prophets Gone: Reclaiming Prophetic Preaching In America, Rev. Marvin A McMickle, Cleveland, OH: 2006, Pilgrim Press, p. 4.
(3)      “Trapped In Debt: The Growth Of Payday Lending In Ohio” and Executive Summary, Policy Matters Ohio at www.policymattersohio.org.
(4)     God's Politics: Why The Right Gets It Wrong And The Left Just Doesn't Get It, by Jim Wallis, 2005, Harper San Francisco, pp. 34-35


Rev. Allen V. Harris
Franklin Circle Christian Church
www.FranklinCircleChurch.org


 

Copyright 2007 -- The Rev. Allen V. Harris

Franklin Circle Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)

1688 Fulton Rd., Cleveland, OH 44113-3096