If the sins of the Northern Kingdom resemble our own, perhaps the metaphor that God sets before the people will help us today, as well? I don’t usually do an object lesson in a sermon, but I figure that if God can do one in Amos, then I might as well give it a try. [Hold up basket of fruit.]
So: “What do you see?”
… Yes, a basket of fruit, a basket of summer fruit! I love fresh summer fruit, don’t you? Here at St. Ambrose, we know all about summer fruit from our orchard. I can still picture that table out in the parking lot last year, filled to overflowing with peaches, apples, and plums. The prophet Amos knew all about fruit, too, since he was a tender of fig trees. Yes, sweet figs are the ancient summer fruit that Amos probably would have seen in God’s basket.
There’s one problem with a 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.
You won’t notice without reading the notes in your bibles, but “summer fruit” in Hebrew is a clever pun on the word “ending.” When God shows Amos a basket of summer fruit, he’s also showing him a “basket of endings.” Holding the cup of rotting raspberries in my fridge, I can easily imagine a rotten basket of endings— endings that run and stink, endings that we can’t swallow, endings that creep up on us through death, through sin, through time. Fear, violence, sickness, greed, destruction … they are all the bearers of endings. They all seem to spread through the fragile skin of our lives like mold through summer fruit, touching us all, condemning us all.
Yes, we human beings are all much too well-acquainted with the basket of endings. What we crave instead 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. Actually, my pleas remind me 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 an intricate silver filigree bowl filled with wooden fruit. My mother placed it on the dining room 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 the smooth wooden pieces when no one was looking. I would pick them up one after the other, slowly and carefully, weighing each one in my hands. I would turn it in admiration, and then fit it back in its silver bowl, like a puzzle piece. Each fruit had such a smooth, cool heaviness in my hand. Solidly satisfying. Unyielding. Permanent. Just the way I want my world 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 desire for us 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 found 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. Elsewhere in scripture, there’s no mention of it rotting. Summer fruit in other texts stands only for the enjoyment of plenty and prosperity in the moment.[2]
It made me wonder why God shows Amos a basket of this fragrant, life-filled fruit in the midst of a world gone-awry, in the midst of the desolation of endings. Perhaps God puts this alluring basket out not only 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. Remember Good Friday: As Jesus breathes his last, the sun goes down and the sky darkens in broad daylight. The earth quakes and is tossed about like the waters of the Nile. Holy Saturday, just like this gloomy 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.
Could the basket of summer fruit become 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. Close your eyes and imagine God picking a fruit gently from the salvation-bearing arms of Christ. Picture God placing it in your parched mouth. 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?
My massage therapist told me last week how people these days are all just so empty inside. We’ve been so emptied by the trauma of the last few years that all of the pain and grief in our world just bounce around inside of our chests, wounding us with each blow. She suggested that we need something to fill us, something to cushion the blows. Like the people in Amos’ day, we are in desperate need of nourishment from God’s hand. When was the last time that any of us spent any time with God that could be likened to eating summer fruit? Full of love, full of sunshine, full of health? I know that I feel more like Martha in my prayers—dutiful, asking for help to get things done. I seem to ask Jesus for a quick vitamin pill more often than I ask for the sweetness 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, a psalm that’s 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 a path 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] Dan Clendenin, “Amos: Will Not the Land Tremble?” Journey With Jesus, July 10, 2022. Found at https://www.journeywithjesus.net/lectionary-essays/current-essay?id=3416
[2] 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.
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