A basket of summer fruit is beautiful and nutritious. But it also rots – much like communities based on exploitation and abuse.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking that I’m very grateful to the Reverend Linda Petrucelli, who will be leading worship at Church of the Holy Cross this coming Sunday. I myself will be at the General Synod of the United Church of Christ in Kansas City, Missouri. This is the regular national gathering of the UCC. I’ll be doing some work with the UCC Media Justice Ministry. I’ll also be learning and worshipping. I’ll be spending time with old friends and treasured colleagues. This is, in many ways, the family reunion of the United Church of Christ.
Please hold in prayer myself and those others who are going to be traveling back and forth to Kansas City.
I look forward to being back in the pulpit again on July 20th, so therefore I’m thinking somewhat ahead, and I’m thinking about the eighth chapter of the prophet Amos (Amos 8:1-12). Amos was not a cheerful person, but the beginning of chapter eight started rather pleasantly. God showed Amos a basket of summer fruit.
Things went badly from there.
Because God announced a lot of displeasure with things that were happening in the nation. “You who trample on the needy,” said God: beware. People were being sold. people were being cheated. And it was primarily being done by the wealthy and the powerful.
Why start with a basket of summer fruit? Because prosperity looks like a basket of summer fruit: tempting, delicious, satisfying. The problem with a prosperity that is built upon exploitation, that is built upon the wealthy and the powerful adding to their wealth and power at the expense of the other members of society, is that it is hollow, that it fades. If you leave a basket of summer fruit out for very long, it will rot. It will rot to the very core.
This was Amos’s warning 2700 and more years ago. It should be a warning to us to make sure that our summer fruit is the results of a planting that nourishes the soil from which it grows, and not something simply torn from the trees, exploiting everything: soil, roots, plants, leaf. Or in human terms: worker, family, community.
Let us take warning from the basket of summer fruit, and make sure our society does not earn the same condemnation of God.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
