Proper 11, Year C
Amos 8:1-12Psalm 52
Colossians 1:15-28
Luke 10:38-42
Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom,
you know our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking: Have
compassion on our weakness, and mercifully give us those things which
for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask;
through the worthiness of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and
reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen
I
have something to show you today! I don’t usually do an object lesson, but if
God can do one in today’s first reading from Amos, then I might as well give it
a try. [Hold up basket of fruit.]
You all take Amos’ role here: “What do you see?”
… Yes, a basket of fruit, a basket of summer
fruit, straight from yesterday’s farmers’ market! I love fresh summer fruit,
don’t you? In May, we see baskets of strawberries, bursting with bright red flavor;
in June, there are juicy blueberries and blackberries; now we have velvety peaches;
and soon we will get tender figs, the ancient summer fruit that Amos probably
would have seen in God’s basket.
There
is one problem with this delicious abundance of fruit, though. Unlike apples
and oranges, which can last awhile, summer fruit starts to go bad much too
quickly, doesn’t it? The pieces at the top of the basket might still look plump
and shiny, but down at the bottom, hidden in the dark, an icky gray fuzz will
start sprouting and silently spreading. Quickly, the disgusting mold will move up
and down, in and out, from one piece of fruit to another until the whole basket
is spoiled and runny with slime.
You
won’t notice without reading the notes in your bibles, but “summer fruit” in
Hebrew is a clever pun on the word “ending.” At once, God shows Amos both a
basket of summer fruit, and a “basket of endings.” Holding the cup of rotting
raspberries in my fridge, I can easily imagine a rotten basket of
endings—slimy, moldy endings, endings that run and stink, endings that we
cannot stomach, endings that creep up on us through death, through sin, through
time. Just hold Amos’ words up to the recent news headlines: a joyful summer
fireworks celebration and an evening of dancing that terrorism suddenly turns to mass slaughter; a
peaceful demonstration that hatred turns to violent death; loving lives brought
to an unjust end by fear and racism; once-happy families cast out into a harsh
and unwelcome world by war. Fear, violence, hatred, misunderstanding,
destruction … they all seem to spread through the fragile skin of our lives
like mold through summer fruit, touching us all, condemning us all.
We
are all much too well-acquainted with the basket of endings: the ending of joy,
the ending of meaning, the ending of words, the ending of relationship, the ending
where only the deserted quiet of the trash heap leaves us in defeated silence. What
we want is permanence. What we want is to know that the good fruit will last. My
tendency these days is to demand reassurance from God that the rot will stop
spreading. My prayers are pleas for fruit that doesn’t go bad, life that doesn’t
end, a world that is guaranteed to stay sane and safe.
I
was reminded of my mother’s fruit bowl. When I was a child, we might have had
an old apple or orange rolling around in the back of the fridge, but we mainly
ate our fruit canned—DelMonte-style. The only basket of fruit in my house was
my mother’s pride and joy: an intricate silver filigree bowl filled with wooden
fruit, placed on the table for all to admire year round. Each piece was painted
to look like real fruit. When I was
little, I loved to sneak over and play with it when no one was looking. I would pick the pieces up one after the
other, slowly and carefully, weighing each one in my hands, turning it in
admiration, and then fitting it back in its silver bowl, like a puzzle piece. Each
fruit had such a smooth, cool heaviness in my hand. Solidly satisfying.
Unyielding. Just the way I want my world to be, the way I want my God to be.
But God doesn’t show Amos a bowl of wooden
fruit, does he? Left with only my mother’s wooden fruit, we would starve, both
in our bodies and in our souls. God’s true presence is far from comforting
imitation. It’s not there just for show. True life, God-given life, is not a
bowl of changeless certainties. As I pondered today’s text, I made an interesting
discovery. “Summer fruit” might be a pun on “endings,” but “summer fruit” is
only used elsewhere in the Hebrew scriptures in a positive, celebratory way.
Summer fruit is the food of kings, of banquets. It is fresh and pregnant with
life-giving juice. In scripture, there’s no mention of its rotting. Summer
fruit in other texts stands only for the enjoyment of plenty and prosperity in
the moment.[1]
It
made me wonder why God shows Amos a basket of this fragrant, life-filled fruit
in the midst of the desolation of endings. Perhaps God puts this alluring
basket out not just for judgment, as it might seem at first, but also to offer
us life in the midst of death. After
all, God sends God’s Son into this decaying world, where he becomes a part of all
of its messy endings. God’s Son dies in the biggest ending of all, an ending
similar to the one that God describes to Amos. Jesus breathes his last, and the
sun goes down and the sky darkens in broad daylight, and the earth quakes and
is tossed about like the waters of the Nile. Holy Saturday, like this section
of our text, ends in utter silence. And yet in Jesus’ Cross and Resurrection,
this Ending of all endings is also a beginning, the beginning of our salvation.
Perhaps
this basket of summer fruit is a gift from God, a gift to remind us that ours
is a God who makes beginnings out of endings. When the world gets us down, perhaps
we can imagine God carefully choosing for us a ripe fruit from a tree at the
corner of heaven and earth, picking it gently from the salvation-bearing arms
of Christ, and placing it in our parched mouths? Can you taste its live
sweetness, like joy? Can you smell its deep fragrance, like incense? Can you
feel it drip down your throat with all of the life-giving force of that first
sip of orange juice after surgery? Can you feel it strengthening you to face
the endings we must live in this world, strengthening you to turn and offer
this same sweet gift to others?
I wouldn’t be surprised if Jesus isn’t holding out a basket
of fat, ripe summer figs to Mary as she sits silently at his feet in our Gospel
lesson—offering her a concrete taste of life, and joy, and meaning in the face
of the ending and upheaval that is to come for her with his death. Perhaps that
One Thing that she chooses is to take the gift of a delicious fig from his open
hand.
When
was the last time that any of us spent any time with God that could be likened
to eating summer fruit? Joyful, full of sunshine, full of health? I know that I
feel more like Martha in my prayers—dutiful, asking for things to do. I seem to
ask Jesus for a quick vitamin pill or a stiff wooden peach more often than for the
squishiness of a ripe fig. I wonder what fruit Jesus might want to offer each
of us today? Is God perhaps offering us the chance to pray forth our despair with
a psalm, one that is gritty like a fig? Or to immerse ourselves in a moment of
music, luscious like a peach? Maybe it’s time spent with a book as juicy as a
watermelon or with a poem as small and full of flavor as a berry? Maybe it’s
spending time on a walk on sand as grainy as raspberry seeds? In the face of
all of the endings that frighten us, all of the pictures of violence and
injustice that haunt us, all of the silences that overwhelm us … choose to take
a moment this week to sit in the sun at the feet of Jesus, and take a piece of summer
fruit from his hand.
[1]See
2 Sam 16:1-2; Micah 7:1;
Isaiah 28:4. See also Yvonne Sherwood, “Of Fruit and Corpses and Wordplay
Visions: Picturing Amos 8:1-3” in the Journal
for the Study of the Old Testament 92 (2001) 5-27.
