[Dialogue] Spong: 12/18/08: Amos: The Prophet Who Transformed God Into Ju...

Elliestock at aol.com Elliestock at aol.com
Thu Dec 18 21:37:45 EST 2008


 
You're welcome.
 
Hope you and your family have a wonderful Christmas.  
 
Ellie
 
In a message dated 12/18/2008 5:28:38 PM Central Standard Time,  
cdhahn at flash.net writes:

 
Hi Ellie,
Thanks so much for forwarding Spong to all of us.  I was afraid I  might lose 
touch when Dick Kroger.  Thanks for continuing the flame  bearing.
Charles Hahn


 
____________________________________
 From: "elliestock at aol.com"  <elliestock at aol.com>
To: Dialogue at wedgeblade.net;  OE at wedgeblade.net
Sent:  Thursday, December 18, 2008 11:26:04 AM
Subject: [Dialogue] Spong: 12/18/08:  Amos: The Prophet Who Transformed God 
Into  Justice





         (https://secure.agoramedia.com/manage_spong_account.asp)   
(http://secure.agoramedia.com/spong/calendar.asp)   
(http://forums.prospero.com/sp-bishopspong)   (http://secure.agoramedia.com/story_home_spong.asp)                 
Print this Article  
 
Not a member?_Subscribe now!_ 
(http://clk.atdmt.com/AGM/go/ups0120000005agm/direct/01/)   
 
____________________________________
Thursday December 18,  2008   Amos: The Prophet Who Transformed God  Into 
Justice  Not every character in the Bible  starts out to be a hero. Indeed, one 
of the great themes of  biblical literature is that it is the meek and the 
lowly who  become the channels through which God is known in new ways. Mary,  the 
mother of Jesus, is portrayed as expressing this theme in the  Magnificat when 
she is made to utter these words, "For he has  regarded the low estate of his 
handmaiden," but later generations  "will call me blessed." The Old Testament 
prophet who makes this  truth powerfully real is named Amos. Today we turn to 
his story.  
Amos was a citizen of the Southern Kingdom of Judah in the  8th century BCE. 
He lived in the village of Tekoa where he was a  herdsman and a keeper of 
sycamore trees, employment that hardly  demanded high academic achievements or the 
credentials that  produced great expectations. In those days Uzziah was king 
of  Judah and Jeroboam II was on the throne of the Northern Kingdom.  The 
major powers of the world were preoccupied with their own  problems and with each 
other, which allowed these two small Jewish  states to bask in an Indian 
summer of prosperity, peace and  wealth. The distribution of that wealth was, 
however, hardly  balanced. The worship places of the Jewish world were crowded on  
holy days and religion was popular among the greedy ones who  dominated the 
social order. There thus appeared to be little  relationship between the words 
of the popular religion and the  practices of people's lives in the public 
arena. In many ways that  is not dissimilar from the current situation in the 
United States,  where a few have achieved fortunes by greed and manipulation of  
the markets, creating a situation in which the wealthy are  increasingly 
wealthy and the poor are increasingly poor and people  even now seem not to be 
concerned. This dichotomy, however, burned  itself into the consciousness of this 
simple herdsman named Amos  and, like the proverbial "Hound of Heaven," it 
allowed him no rest  until he had addressed this issue overtly and publicly. Amos  
packed his suitcase and journeyed from Tekoa in the land of Judah  to the 
shrine of Bethel in the Northern Kingdom to make his  witness.  
When he arrived Amos entered the courtyard of this holy  place, where all of 
his suspicions were confirmed. He saw the  crowds dressed in their finery 
busily attending to holy things  while the poor outside the city gates were 
largely ignored. Amos  wondered how he might get the crowd's attention. He was a 
clever  man, however, and knew how to appeal to the instincts of the  people. He 
found a corner in the courtyard, set up a soap box and  then, using one of the 
oldest tricks in human history, he began to  solicit first the curiosity and 
later the full attention of the  crowd. Let me try to re-create the story.  
"Come closer," Amos shouted from his ma keshift pulpit, "Let  me tell you 
about the sins of the people of the city of Damascus."  Amos knew that everyone 
likes to hear gossip about the moral  weaknesses of their neighbors and so as 
he excoriated the  Damascans the crowds grew. Next he turned his judgment first 
on  the people of Gaza and then on Tyre, condemning the sinful  practices 
found in both cities. The crowd, loving it, grew even  larger as Amos continued 
to appeal to their prejudices about and  suspicions of their neighbors. This 
strange looking rube from the  south said the things they wanted to hear. Then 
Amos moved to  larger targets and his oratory rose to new heights as he focused 
 on the nation states surrounding the Northern Kingdom. First it  was the 
Edomites and about their sins Amos got more specific. The  Edomites had pursued 
"their brothers with a sword, showing them no  pity and they had allowed anger 
to tear perpetually" at the fabric  of their society. The ecstatic crowd began 
to shout, "You tell  'em, preacher." With every loud voice of encouragement, 
the people  gathered in ever greater numbers. Next it was the Amorites' turn.  
According to Amos, they had attacked Gilead and "ripped up the  women with 
child in order to enlarge their borders." As Amos  pronounced his message of 
doom on these nations, the people  gathered around him roared their approval. 
When he turned to the  very unpopular Moabites the frenzy of the crowd exploded.  
Next Amos, with the crowd in the palm of his hand and fully  attentive, spoke 
in a bare w hisper. "Now let me tell you about  the sins of the Southern 
Jews," he said. These Southern Jews were  the people with whom the Jews of the 
North were the most  competitive and with whom they had the deepest rivalry. The  
relationship between Judah in the South and Israel in the North  was like 
that of New Zealand and Australia today. Signs in shops  in New Zealand announce 
that "New Zealanders have two favorite  teams, the All Blacks (the name of New 
Zealand's national team)  and anyone who is playing Australia." So to hear 
their Jewish  rivals in the south be condemned was music to the ears of the  
Northern Jews. The crowd pressed closer to this strange messenger  and its size 
continued to increase dramatically. Those Southern  Jews, Amos said, "despised 
the Torah; they did not keep God's  commandments. Their lies caused them to 
err constantly," but God's  justice is sure, he promised, and so Jerusalem will 
be "devoured  by the fire of God." The crowd was ecstatic with enthusiasm,  
clapping and cheering. No one budged as this crowd-pleasing  evangelist reached 
his climax. Now with every ear straining to  hear, this herdsman arrived at 
the conclusion for which he had  journeyed from Tekoa to the King's chapel in 
Bethel. His message  was ready and so Amos turned to his climax.  
"Now," he said, "let me tell you about the worst people in  the world." The 
crowd could hardly wait to hear who that would be.  They were not prepared, 
however, for what was to come. "You Jews  of the Northern Kingdom," he said, " 
are the ultimate culprits in  God's world. You are the ones who worship 
ostentatiously in the  sacred shrines, but even as you worship, you sell the righteous 
 for silver and the poor for a pair of shoes. You trample the poor  in the 
dust of the earth. You violate one another sexually. You  worship at every altar 
in garments stolen from the labor of the  poor. You profane holy places with 
heavy drinking of wine  purchased with fines levied against the meek. You 
corrupt holy  people, encouraging them to violate their sacred vows. You even  
silence the prophets." The crowd was suddenly silent and the  smiles disappeared 
from their faces. Then Amos spoke of the  punishment that God would send. 
"This judgment is inevitable," he  screamed. It was a devastating message. The 
stunned crowd took a  while to recover from shock, so Amos continued to drive 
home his  key insights. "Worship isolated from life is of no value. Worship  is 
nothing but justice being offered to God, and justice is  nothing but worship 
being lived out. If worship and justice are  ever separated, idolatry is the 
inevitable result." It was a  stirring message, but suddenly it was not a 
popular one.  
When the members of the crowd recovered sufficiently to  respond, they sent 
for a priest from the Shrine at Bethel named  Amaziah and asked him to come to 
their defense, for they said,  "Amos has conspired against you and the land 
and we are not able  to bear his words." Amaziah was the voice of the 
established  religion. He would brook no more of this interference with worship  at the 
King's Shrine and so to Amos he said: "O, Seer, go home,  flee away to your 
land in Judah. Prophesy there if you must, but  you are never again to come 
again to Bethel for this is the king's  sanctuary. This is the temple of our 
nation. Your words are not  welcome here."  
Amos responded to Amaziah, "I am no prophet, nor even a  prophet's son. I am 
a herdsman, a dresser of sycamore trees, yet  the Lord took me from my flocks 
and called me to prophesy to the  people of Israel." Once again, he repeated 
his charges. "The songs  of your holy places will become nothing but wailing to 
the Lord.  You cannot worship while you trample the poor. You cannot wring  
money from the poor to line your pockets with greed. God will turn  your sacred 
feasts into mourning and your pious songs into  lamentations." The preaching 
of Amos was now more than the people  were willing to tolerate and so Amos was 
physically driven from  the shrine. Rejected and defeated he returned to his 
humble life  in Tekoa. In this newly imposed exile he wrote out his prophetic  
message, and that message became known as the words of Amos the  Prophet. In 
time people heard transcendent truth in his words and  finally these words 
were added to the sacred text of the Jewish  people and were thus read in worship 
settings in the temples,  synagogues and holy places. That was when people 
began to  recognize that in the words of Amos, they were beginning to hear  the 
"Word of the Lord." That is=2 0how the words of Amos came to  echo through the 
centuries. In that process, God was inevitably  redefined as justice. Worship 
and justice could never again be  separated in true Judaism and worship came 
to be viewed, as Amos  had suggested, as human justice offered to God while 
justice was  seen as divine worship being acted out. In this context justice  
became another name for God.  
It was through the work of the prophets primarily that God  was redefined in 
Jewish history. Love became the name for God  through the writings of Hosea. 
Justice became the name for God  through the writings of Amos. The prophets 
really do matter, not  because they were the predictors of the future as so many 
of us  were once taught, but because they were able to see more deeply  into 
the meaning of God. The prophets more than anyone else made  it possible some 
eight hundred years later for people to see and  to hear the presence of God in 
the life of a crucified one named  Jesus of Nazareth. The life of Jesus 
pointed to a divine nature  marked by the dimension of love that Hosea had added to 
the  meaning of God and the dimension of justice that Amos had added to  the 
meaning of God. That resulted in a new understanding of  consciousness in 
which divinity and humanity seemed to flow  together as one.  
The biblical story was never static, nor is the human  understanding of God. 
It is idolatry and an act of faithlessness  that is being expressed when any 
one thinks that all truth has  finally been reveale d and that someone or some 
institution  actually possesses it. 
– John Shelby  Spong









 
____________________________________
Question and Answer 
With  John Shelby Spong   
William from Newmarket, Ontario, writes: 
If the  roots of the Christ story are indeed in Egyptian mythology  
(according to Tom Harpur's book The Pagan Christ) or the  continuation of Jewish Epic 
History (according to your _Jesus for the Non-Religious_ 
(http://johnshelbyspong.com/store/Jesus_for_the_Non_Religious.aspx) )  then who were the writers of 
the gospels? How did they acquire the  expertise to make such a complex 
adaptation and what drove them,  in spite of the risk of persecution, to adapt these 
myths to the  person of Jesus of Nazareth, either as if this person was an  
historical figure, or if he never existed?< /TD>   
Dear William,
The writers of the gospels were Jewish people who represented  the second or 
third Christian generation. They wrote in Greek, not  Aramaic, which was the 
language Jesus and his disciples spoke. The  gospels — at least the first 
three: Mark, Matthew and Luke — are  the products of the Synagogue, which had 
shaped the Jesus story  dramatically over the 40-70 year period that transpired 
between  the crucifixion and the gospel writing tradition.  
I disagree with Tom Harpur's thesis, for I do not think  Egyptian mythology 
can shape the Jesus story in as short a period  of time as existed. I note that 
Paul writes in Galatians, a book  that is usually dated in the early 50's, 
that he had conversed  with Peter and other "pillars" of the Christian movement 
within  four to nine years of his conversion, which scholars date one to  six 
years after the crucifixion. Mythology needs more time than  that to develop.  
People need to embrace the fact that the Jesus story was kept  alive, 
recalled and celebrated in the Synagogue, for that is where  the followers of Jesus 
worshiped every Sabbath. The Synagogue and  the Christian Church did not 
separate until 88 C.E.  
I am quite sure Jesus of Nazareth was a person of history20in  whom and 
through whom Jewish people believed that they had  experienced the presence of the 
holy God. It was in that  experience that Christianity was born. The earliest 
articulation  of that faith came from Paul who wrote, "God was in Christ,  
reconciling the world to God."  
How we tell the world of the meaning of that experience is  still what 
Christianity is all about.
– John Shelby Spong






 
____________________________________

Send your questions to _support at johnshelbyspong.com_ 
(mailto:support at johnshelbyspong.com)   



_Print this Article_ (http://secure.agoramedia.com/spong/34631.asp)   
 
Not a member? _Subscribe now!_ 
(http://clk.atdmt.com/AGM/go/ups0120000005agm/direct/01/)   







     (http://www.everydayhealth.com/)   
Thanks for joining our mailing  list, _elliestock at aol.com_ 
(mailto:elliestock at aol.com) ,  for A New Christianity For A New World on  11/09/2008 
_REMOVE me from this list _ 
(http://secure.agoramedia.com/manage_subscriptions.asp?email=elliestock@aol.com&nlid=71&hsheml=moc^loa~kcotseille) | _Add me to 
this list_ (http://secure.agoramedia.com/manage_subscriptions.a%20%20sp)  | 
_Manage my e-mail settings _ 
(http://secure.agoramedia.com/manage_subscriptions.asp?email=elliestock@aol.com) |  _Contact  Customer Service_ 
(mailto:support at agoramedia.us)  
Copyright  2008 Waterfront Media, Inc. All rights reserved.
4  Marshall Street, North Adams, MA 01247
Subject  to our _terms of service_ 
(http://www.everydayhealth.com/pop_tos.htm)  and _privacy policy_ (http://www.everydayhealth.com/pop_privacy.htm)   

 



 
____________________________________
Listen to 350+ music, sports, & news radio stations – including songs for  
the holidays – FREE while you browse. _Start Listening Now_ 
(http://toolbar.aol.com/aolradio/download.html?ncid=emlweusdown00000013) !  


_______________________________________________
Dialogue  mailing  list
Dialogue at wedgeblade.net
http://wedgeblade.net/mailman/listinfo/dialogue_wedgeblade.net


**************One site keeps you connected to all your email: AOL Mail, 
Gmail, and Yahoo Mail. Try it now. 
(http://www.aol.com/?optin=new-dp&icid=aolcom40vanity&ncid=emlcntaolcom00000025)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20081218/31f5fc14/attachment-0001.html>


More information about the Dialogue mailing list