The Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

AMOS 8:1-12: In the fourth and last vision of Amos' prophecy, God shows Amos a basket of summer fruit. It is the fruit that is harvested at the end of the summer, and its presence means that the end of summer is near. It may even be a basket of fruit that has been brought to the temple as part of a sacrifice. God asks, "Amos, what do you see?" Amos replies, "A basket of summer fruit." God says, "The end has come upon my people Israel." There is an important word play in this exchange between God and Amos that can hardly be recapitulated in English. In Hebrew the word for "summer fruit" resembles the word for "end." When Amos hears "summer fruit," he thinks "end." "The end has come upon the people Israel," says God. "I shall not pass by them again. I have abandoned them. Dead bodies shall be many, cast in every place. The only worship possible for them is the worship of mourning the dead. "Be silent," God says to his prophet. "Do not ask that I should change my mind. Do not ask that you shall hear from me again."

This dire note is followed by the cry of God's herald: "Hear this." The proclamation that ensues is the most dreadful in all the Old Testament.

It begins by picturing a scene at the sanctuary at Bethel. The people, especially rich and powerful merchants, have gathered at the temple to celebrate the ceremony of the new moon. But they are anxious for the ceremony to pass, so that they can get back to the important tasks of buying and selling. They cheat in the sale of grain, by measuring it out in containers smaller than they were supposed to be. They mix chaff, "the sweepings of the wheat," with their grain. They use one set of weights for buying from the farmer and a heavier set for calculating payment due. In Tirzeh, near by, archaeologists have actually dug up two sets of weights in the shops, one for buying and one for selling (Mays 144). "I shall not forget their deeds," says the Lord. "Shall not the land tremble on this account?"

It then pictures the Lord leaving the temple by darkening the day. The people of Israel had experienced this. There was a partial eclipse in Israel on June 15, 763 BCE and a total eclipse on February 9, 784 BCE, so Amos's audience would have known the effects of the darkening of the sun at noon (Gowan:417). "On that day," says the Lord GOD, "I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth in broad daylight. I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth upon all loins, and baldness on every head; I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and the end of it like a bitter day."

But God is not done with them yet. "Behold, the days are coming," says the Lord GOD, "when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, to seek the word of the LORD, but they shall not find it." Hunger is bad, and thirst. But no one can live if the Word of the Lord is withdrawn; the spirit of the person is exhausted, the center of society is destroyed. No famine is as bad as that in which the Word of the Lord is no longer heard.

PSALM 52: This psalm concerns an unknown tyrant who is about to do evil to God's people. We do not know who it is that the psalmist has in mind, so we can fill in the blank any way we want. Do we know those who boast of mischief, who plot destruction, who work treachery, who love evil more than good and lying more than truthfulness? If we know such a one, this psalm is for us.

The psalmist assures us that God will not tolerate such mischief, treachery and evil. He will uproot that one from the land of the living. Quite in contrast, those who trust the loyalty and love of God are like a green olive tree that is planted in the temple of God. The comparison is clear. The green and growing olive tree is firmly planted in the house of God. Those who trust God at all times are firmly planted in the life of God.

The psalmist believes that his life is one of those lives that is planted in God. Therefore, he says, "I can trust the steadfast love of God forever and ever. I will thank (God) forever, because of what (God) has done. In the presence of the faithful, I will proclaim (God's) name, for it is good."

COLOSSIANS 1:15-28: If my suggestion of last week - that the Letter to the Colossians was addressed to a congregation of Torah-observant Christians in Colossae - then the two parts of this text fall into place. The first half, 1:15-20, talks of a view of Christ held by the Pauline Christians but not of the Jewish Christians, and this passage is the attempt of the Pauline group to introduce these ideas to the other group. The second half, 1:21-28, tells of the place that the Apostle Paul held in the church, his desire to take the gospel to the whole world and his willingness to suffer in behalf of that gospel.

"Christ is the visible image of the invisible God." In other words, we do not see God, but we do see Jesus Christ. As the image of God, he perfectly carries in his person all that God is. He was present with God before creation took place. By him or in him all things in heaven and earth, both visible and invisible, were created. All things were created for him. In other words, when the purpose of creation is finally revealed, that which holds creation together, its love and faith and hope, will be the love and faithfulness and hopefulness of Jesus Christ. These powerful ideas have been extremely significant in Christian faith and life, for they became incorporated in the Nicene Creed that has for centuries been one of the creeds that has been formative for Christian life generations upon generations.

"He is the head of the church." "Head" can mean "the one who is authoritative in the church," the one whose words and works are to be obeyed by all who are part of the church. "Head" can also mean "the source of the church," the one in whom the church began and from which its faith and life flows from the beginning until the end.

"He is the first-born of the dead," the one whose resurrection opened the way for the resurrection of all. The Jewish-Christians did not emphasize the resurrection of Jesus as much as they did his ascension. That latter act is not mentioned here. It is the resurrection that is given first place. He is Lord not because he ascended into heaven but because he was the first to be raised from the dead, and that gives him pre-eminence in (makes him Lord of) all things.

"In him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell." Do you want to know what God would say if God were here? Listen to what Jesus Christ says. Do you want to know what God would do if God were here? Watch what Jesus Christ does. Do you want to know the internal characteristics of God? Study the character of Jesus Christ. Do you want to know the purposes that God intends to fulfill in this cosmos? Meditate upon the purposes Jesus Christ served when he was among us. In Jesus all the fulness of God is pleased to dwell.

"Through him God reconciled himself to all things, and this reconciliation takes place through the blood of the cross." Around the cross we see arrayed against Jesus all the forces of evil that work in human life. There was denial, in Peter. There was betrayal, in Judas. There was naked power, in Pilate and his soldiers. There was pride, in the priesthood. There was greed, in the money-changers of the temple. There was indifference, on the part of the crowd. All of these fought against what God was doing in Christ. Any of these might have prevailed over him. But none did. In the face of denial and betrayal, there was the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. In the face of violence and naked power, there was the love of Jesus Christ. In the face of indifference to suffering humanity, Christ suffered everything that any human being had ever suffered. In this struggle on the cross, God reconciled human kind to himself. Reconciliation means to put together again that which is broken, with no parts left over. God through Christ did that on the cross.

It was this gospel of which Paul was the servant. God commissioned him to make this glorious mystery, first revealed to the Jews (called here "the saints"), made known to the Gentiles. Paul's service to this gospel resulted in his sufferings, which he considered to be akin to the sufferings of Christ. Paul saw purpose in this sufferings. Through his sufferings Paul believed that the age of the messiah would surely come; had not Jewish thinkers been saying this ever since the prophecies of Isaiah of Babylon? So Paul rejoiced in the cursings, the beatings, the shipwrecks, the stoning that came his way. Out of sufferings like those the messiah, who had himself suffered, God's new age was coming into being. "For this," said Paul, "I toil and struggle with all the energy that Christ inspires in me."

LUKE 10:38-42: Why does Jesus chide Martha for "being anxious and troubled about many things" and praise Mary for "doing the one thing needful"? The answer to that question alone can open the meaning of the text.

The setting for the action in the text is a familiar one. Jesus has come to a village, and Martha has received him into her house. Martha now does the expected thing. She is in charge of the house, and she prepares the meal for the guest. Mary does an unexpected thing. Instead of assisting her sister Martha in the preparations for the guest, she sits at Jesus' feet and listens to his teaching. Martha is playing the role of housewife and is doing what is expected of the woman of the house. Mary is playing the role of disciple and is doing what is expected of a disciple of the Lord's.

Jesus, on the other hand, is exploding the expectations that his culture had for women. The culture did not expect men to be entertained in a house where there were no other men present. Jesus went into the house of Martha and Mary. The culture expected women to serve men. Jesus is saying that that cultural stereotype is now passe'. The culture expected men to be disciples but not women. Jesus is saying that women can become disciples as they listen carefully to his word. In its own way this story points up the revolutionary nature of the ministry of Jesus. He alone of the people in Palestine takes women seriously as persons, and he wants them to take him seriously as messiah and lord.

Mary, says Jesus, is doing "the one thing that is needful." She is concerned above all for the kingdom of God that has come to her in the person of Jesus. She wants to love the Lord her God with all her heart and with all her soul and with all her strength and with all her mind and to be distracted by nothing less. Sitting at the feet of Jesus, as she does, is a signal of the oneness of purpose that she now has.

We meet Martha and Mary one other place in the New Testament. In John's Gospel, chapter 11, they are grieving over the death of their brother Lazarus. Jesus comes to them once again and raises Lazarus from the dead. Their house becomes the headquarters for Jesus' ministry in the Judean area, and from their house Jesus goes to Jerusalem for his last meal with the Twelve and to the cross. Before he goes into Jerusalem, Jesus has one more meal with this beloved family. As she had done before, Martha continued to serve them at table. Mary, on the other hand, took a pound of costly ointment of pure nard and anointed the feet of Jesus. In doing this, she pronounced him "The Anointed One," the messiah of the Jews, the one who will bring God's kingdom to this world. Her act at this meal indicates that she had learned well the lesson of the last meal concerning Jesus' message of the kingdom of God and of his place in it.COLOSSIANS 1:11-20: The region of Phrygia, to which this letter was sent, was a spawning ground for enthusiastic cults and new forms of religion. Heiropolis was the home of the Stoic teacher Epictetus, a slave who may have had some knowledge of Christianity. Laodicea had numerous Jews, though they compromised easily with heathenism. A number of papyri found in the area indicate that belief in magic and fear of the demonic were important parts of folk religion in the Greco-Roman world. The "power" terminology and "cult" descriptions in the letter to the Colossians suggest that this may have been the background of the "error" in Colossae.

Heroditus (5^th c. BC) tells us that Colossae was a great city of Phrygia, one of the places where King Xerxes halted his army before the invasion of Greece,480 BC. Xenophon (4^th C BC) called it "a populous city, prosperous and great." But it began to lose population and influence. By the time that Ptolemy the geographer wrote of the area, he did not even mention Colossae in his enumeration of towns, though his list includes several inconsiderable places. At the time Paul wrote his letter, Colossae was in the Roman province of Asia, controlled by a Roman pro-consul, headquartered in Ephesus. It was the least important town to which Paul addressed a letter.

The church at Colossae was founded by Epaphras, an assistant of Paul's and a native of the city. Onesimus also was from this city. Philemon may have been a member of the church here, as was Onesimus. There was trouble in the church, which was a mixture of gentile and Jewish elements. Judaism stressed circumcision, sabbaths, and festivals, Gentiles emphasized philosophy and elemental spirits. Most Christians in Colossae were Gentile. No single identification of the error at Colossae is thoroughly convincing. The heresy has been assigned to Essenism, mysticism, Greek pagan cults, gnosticism, Christian gnosticism, and other forms of syncretistic religion. The most we can say is that the error was a syncretism of Jewish, Gentile, and Christian features that diminished the all-sufficiency of Christ's salvation and his personal pre-eminence.

The letter itself was written in conjunction with Philemon, the Letter to the Philippians, and possibly the Letter to Ephesians. It was carried by Tychichus and Onesimus. Since Colossae was destroyed by an earthquake in 61 AD, it must have been written before or about that time.

The beginning of the Letter to the Colossians follows the usual pattern of Paul's letters. He describes himself as "an apostle of Jesus Christ." He adds that being an apostle was not of his own choosing but that he is an apostle "by the will of God." The letter is addressed to "the saints and Christian brothers in Christ in Colossae." This seems to be the self-designation of the group of Christians that had gathered around James, the brother of the Lord. They were a group that considered Jesus Christ to be the fulfillment of the Jewish way of life (someone has called them "Torah-observant Christians," and I think this is a good description of them). Their faith was built around the Old Testament and the synagogue, and their Bibles and their worship centered around the Hebrew language and Hebrew practices. As such, their positions on the faith were considerably different than Paul's, and some of the things said in this letter are directed to those differences. Paul concludes with his familiar formula: "Grace to you and peace." This combines both a Greek and a Jewish greeting. Greeks greeted each other with the word charis, "grace." It was both an hello and goodbye in the Greek language. Jewish people greeted each other with the word "shalom," "peace," "may the well-being of God be with you." Since the Christian church included both Jews and Greeks, this greeting has an inclusive "feel" to it. The greeting ends with the words "from God our Father." Is the omission of the usual "and our Lord Jesus Christ" done in deference to the monotheistic beliefs of these Torah-observant Jews who had a hard time believing that they had any other Lord than God himself?

The letter goes on to describe the kinds of prayers that the author is accustomed to make in behalf of the people of the Colossian church. There are prayers of thanksgiving for the faith and love and hope that is in them. There are prayers that these graces may continue to be extended into all the world. There are prayers that they may be filled with the knowledge of God's will. There are prayers for their growth in spiritual wisdom and understanding. There are prayers that they may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing him and producing fruit in good work. There are prayers that they may become strong with the strength that comes from his glorious power. These prayers in their behalf are poured out in one long breathless sentence whose glowing Greek simply cannot be reproduced in an English translation.

There is a reason that these prayers can be asked and answered. God has rescued us from the powers of darkness; in those societies in which light came only from the sun and a few flickering candles darkness was a fearsome thing, the abode of evil, and people wanted to be delivered from that darkness. The Father has transferred us, said the author, into the kingdom of his beloved Son. Through the Son the Father has redeemed us; through the forgiveness offered through Christ he has disentangled us from the sins that have strangled us. This is why, says the author, we can live joyfully and give thanks to the Father. He has enabled us to live no longer in darkness and in sin but has caused us to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light.