20250720 The Importance of Listening
Based on: Amos 8:1-12 and
Luke 10:38-42
Hymns: 399 Take My Life and
Let it Be, 451 Be Thou My Vision, 593 Here I Am Lord
Amos 8:1-12
1 This is what the Lord God
showed me: a basket of summer fruit.
2 He said, “Amos, what do you
see?” I said, “A basket of summer fruit.” Then the Lord said to me, “The end
has come upon my people Israel; I will
never again forgive them.
3 On that day, the people
will wail the temple songs,” says the Lord God; “there will be many corpses,
thrown about everywhere. Silence.”
4 Hear this, you who trample
on the needy and destroy the poor of the land,
5 saying, “When will the new
moon be over so that we may sell grain, and the Sabbath so that we may offer
wheat for sale, make the ephah smaller, enlarge the shekel, and deceive with
false balances,
6 in order to buy the needy
for silver and the helpless for sandals, and sell garbage as grain?”
7 The Lord has sworn by the
pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget what they have done.
8 Will not the land tremble
on this account, and all who live in it mourn, as it rises and overflows like
the Nile, and then falls again, like the River of Egypt?
9 On that day, says the Lord
God, I will make the sun go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in broad
daylight.
10 I will turn your feasts
into sad affairs and all your singing into a funeral song; I will make people
wear mourning clothes and shave their heads; I will make it like the loss of an
only child, and the end of it
like a bitter day.
12 They will wander from sea to sea, and from north to
east; they will roam all around, seeking the Lord’s word, but they won’t find
it.
Luke 10:38-42
38 While Jesus and his
disciples were traveling, Jesus entered a village where a woman named Martha
welcomed him as a guest. 39 She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s
feet and listened to his message. 40 By contrast, Martha was preoccupied with
getting everything ready for their meal. So Martha came to him and said, “Lord,
don’t you care that my sister has left me to prepare the table all by myself?
Tell her to help me.”
Good morning and Happy Sunday
to you each. My name is Darci Strutt, and I am a Lay Servant from the Hudson
United Methodist Church. It is my honor to be invited into your pulpit this
morning.
Please pray with me.
Heavenly Father, we invite
your Holy Spirit to move within this place. May it enliven how the words are spoken
and how they are heard. We praise you for your love and patience with us. In Jesus name we pray. Amen
I am weaving the scriptures
from Amos and Luke together this morning. Both strike me as having a similar
theme in the importance of listening.
I’ll look at Luke’s passage first and then dive more deeply into the
words of Amos. To wrap things up I’ll attempt to look at what these scriptures
could mean for us today.
The Luke passage is a hard
one to deal with for me because often people paint Martha as wrong and Mary as
right, but the two sisters are both doing what we would call “right” things.
Hospitality was important. Listening to Jesus was important.
Martha is the one who
welcomed Jesus as a guest in the house. She was the elder sister and took on
the responsibility for providing hospitality. From other scriptures we learn
that Jesus had a close relationship with Martha, Mary, and their brother
Lazarus, but even if they had been strangers she would have felt compelled to
provide hospitality.
The Jewish faith had a strong
belief in the importance of hospitality ever since Abraham hosted two strangers
that turned out to be angels in disguise. The tradition remained an integral
part of the Christian community as well.
Peter 4:8-10
8 Above all, show sincere
love to each other, because love brings about the forgiveness of many sins. 9
Open your homes to each other without complaining. 10 And serve each other
according to the gift each person has received, as good managers of God’s diverse
gifts.
Hebrews 13:1-2
1 Keep loving each other like
family. 2 Don’t neglect to open up your homes to guests, because by doing this
some have been hosts to angels without knowing it.
Martha wasn’t doing anything
incorrectly by taking the role of “host” seriously. I most often think of Jesus
as roaming around with just 12 other guys. Just a couple verses before this one
was the sending out and returning of the 70. Could they still have been together? Was
Martha dealing with a party of nearly 100 people? Goodness I would have been anxious too!
Complaining about her sister
not helping doesn’t seem like a conversation one would have with a guest
though. In that she may have been inappropriate. She didn’t communicate that
serving Jesus was an honor but instead a burden. She was so stressed that she
forgot her motive for serving.
It feels wrong to have her
say that it was a sign Jesus didn’t care as well as making Mary’s choice his responsibility. Did she already ask Mary to come into the
kitchen, and she refused? I’m assuming
it would have been odd to have a woman listening to a teacher period so Martha
may have also been attempting to have Jesus put Mary into her place.
Jesus words are gentle yet to
the point.
Luke 10:41-42 The Lord
answered, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things. One
thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the better part. It won’t be taken away
from her.
Listening to Jesus words
while he visited was more important than Martha realized, and being a female
did not keep her away from the ability to listen in to his teaching.
Jesus discusses the need to put
away worry just a bit farther down in Luke.
Luke 12:22-31
22 Then Jesus said to his
disciples, “Therefore, I say to you, don’t worry about your life, what you will
eat, or about your body, what you will wear. 23 There is more to life than food
and more to the body than clothing. 24 Consider the ravens: they neither plant
nor harvest, they have no silo or barn, yet God feeds them. You are worth so
much more than birds! 25 Who among you by worrying can add a single moment to
your life?[d] 26 If you can’t do such a small thing, why worry about the rest?
27 Notice how the lilies grow. They don’t wear themselves out with work, and
they don’t spin cloth. But I say to you that even Solomon in all his splendor
wasn’t dressed like one of these. 28 If God dresses grass in the field so
beautifully, even though it’s alive today and tomorrow it’s thrown into the
furnace, how much more will God do for you, you people of weak faith! 29 Don’t
chase after what you will eat and what you will drink. Stop worrying. 30 All
the nations of the world long for these things. Your Father knows that you need
them. 31 Instead, desire his kingdom and these things will be given to you as
well.
Martha may have inspired teaching
on worry!
I fear we can fall into the
same trap that Martha did. We can believe we are doing the most important thing
only to find out we missed the mark. Both activities were “right” activities,
but one was more right in the moment.
It reminds me of the story of
the woman pouring oil on Jesus’ feet in Matthew chapter 26. Judas complains
that the oil could have been sold, and the money given to the poor. Care of the
poor is a very good thing. Yet, there was something more “right” to do in that
moment.
Matthew 26:10-13
10 But Jesus knew what they
were thinking. He said, “Why do you make trouble for the woman? She’s done a
good thing for me. 11 You always have the poor with you, but you won’t always
have me. 12 By pouring this perfume over my body she’s prepared me to be
buried. 13 I tell you the truth that wherever in the whole world this good news
is announced, what she’s done will also be told in memory of her.”
We don’t know what Jesus was
teaching about that day while Martha was frustrated in the kitchen, but those
of us who follow Jesus as Lord know that every lesson he taught was important.
His time on earth was limited and he was advising us to take the time to focus
on him while he was there.
Let’s take a step back into
the Old Testament. The verses from Amos come with a punch.
Amos 8:4-7
4 Hear this, you who trample
on the needy and destroy the poor of the land,
5 saying, “When will the new
moon be over so that we may sell grain, and the Sabbath so that we may offer
wheat for sale, make the ephah smaller, enlarge the shekel, and deceive with
false balances,
6 in order to buy the needy
for silver and the helpless for sandals, and sell garbage as grain?”
7 The Lord has sworn by the
pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget what they have done.
The people Amos was chastising
were not heathens. They were religious people. They did the appearance of
following the law by honoring the Sabbath, but they missed the point of the law.
A day off was a gift from God. A recommendation to spend time away from the
material world. Instead of using the time to connect to God and family they
counted the minutes until it was over so they could make more money. Sabbath
had become an inconvenience not a gift.
The law attempted to instruct
on how to take care of the poor. Leviticus 23:22 is an example.
Leviticus 23:22 When you
harvest your land’s produce, you must not harvest all the way to the edge of
your field; and don’t gather every remaining bit of your harvest. Leave these
items for the poor and the immigrant; I am the Lord your God.
They were keeping the letter
of the law but ignoring its intent. That is another way of not listening.
I can feel Amos’ frustration.
During one part of my working life, I was responsible for writing information
security policies. No matter how detailed I would write it the employees would
seek to find a way around the policy to not get in trouble. I found that the
more detailed I wrote the easier it seemed to get around. To use an analogy, if
I said to not jump off the roof, especially the east side, an employee would
say they didn’t jump off the east side they jumped off the northeast side and
that wasn’t expressly forbidden. Sometimes it felt like people were being dumb,
but in most cases, they were attempting to do their job in the easiest way
possible. Security often got in the way. Of course, security was an important
part of everyone’s job. To attempt to
skirt it was to put their desires to make work easy instead of caring for the greater
needs of the company they were working for.
I wanted to reduce the whole policy to “Behave!” and then we could fight
out the details.
Jesus did the same thing when
someone asked what law was the most important. By his time, they had developed
hundreds of laws giving more detail, which as I said before gave more
loopholes.
Jesus’ response is in Matthew
chapter 22
37 He replied, “You must love
the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, and with all your
mind. 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like
it: You must love your neighbor as you love yourself. 40 All the Law and the
Prophets depend on these two commands.”
That was the point behind all
the rules. Love!
Amos gave some harsh consequences
for their lack of listening.
Amos 8:11-12
11 The days are surely
coming, says the Lord God, when I will send hunger and thirst on the land; neither a hunger for bread, nor a thirst
for water, but of hearing the Lord ’s words.
12 They will wander from sea
to sea, and from north to east; they will roam all around, seeking the Lord’s
word, but they won’t find it.
If people refuse to listen,
then why bother talking. Yikes!
What can we learn from these
teachings? The Word of God is alive and meaningful for us today.
Reading Amos, we could point
to the wealthiest 1% and say, “shame on you”. The gap between the wealthy and
the poor is continuing to increase. They find loopholes in our complex tax laws
that allow them to not contribute without getting into trouble. Of course, the
point of the tax laws was to care for each other and for the needs of running a
country. If people appreciate clean water and roads in good repair and all the
many services taxes provide, they should help pay for them.
Yet I do not believe passing
the blame to someone else is what the scripture is calling us to think about.
If we look closely at our own
behavior can we see places in our lives where we are following the letter of
the law but not its intent? Are we quick to point out the faults in each other
and fail to honor the highest commandment which is to love one another? The
world feels full of hatred and injustice. We are called to be God’s hands and
feet in this world. God is just and loving. How are we doing?
Then, as we look at the Luke
passage, there is the question of doing the right thing in the moment. The
experience Matha had is important for us as well. We may be quick to volunteer
to do important work for the church. We may give our money toward worthy fund-raising
efforts. We feel good when we serve and know the work is important. But how
much time have we spent listening to Jesus words via Bible study and small
group discussion? Do we spent listening for the Holy Spirit during our prayer time
or simply list off our concerns and walk away after “Amen”. Do we even have a
time set aside to connect to God?
Remember I believe Martha was
doing a “right” thing. She was busy because hospitality was very important. Yet
it wasn’t the best “right” thing to be doing in the moment.
Serving others is important.
But serve from a place of connection to God’s love. Know that love yourself and
let it flow through you to those you serve. Know the intent behind what you do.
Serve with gladness not in frustration.
As we sing “here I am Lord”
remember the words, “I have heard you calling in the night”. God is still
speaking.
These are our action items.
If we want to do God’s will on earth as it is in heaven like we pray in the
Lord’s Prayer, then we need to listen and learn.
Amen
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