Thirsty for God

Amos 8:4-13
Luke 16: 1-13

After the last prophet in the OT, Malachi came and prophesied to the people, Israel went without a prophet for four hundred years. Four centuries of silence from God. But what was even worse than his silence is when Jesus Christ came to the earth and showed them the truth, the way, the light – they rejected Him. They rejected him because they had no recollection of what it means to be in the truth.

During the time of Amos, Israel had broken covenant with God so many times that they barely kept Sabbath and holy days. Again and again they turned to pagan gods and pagan ways and ignored their true God. That is why they were punished. That is why God removed Himself from their temple and from their hearts. As part of the punishment, there were no messengers of God to prophesy to them. Not even anyone like Amos or Ezekiel to chastise them and urge them to repent. For four hundred years Israel was left without guidance, they were sheep without a shepherd.

I don’t know if anyone has ever seen sheep that aren’t being guided but let me just tell you this, sheep are not the brightest of animals. They will walk, one by one, off of a cliff. They will wander aimlessly until they are caught in something they cannot get out of and then the rest will follow them to their doom. Now imagine these people, these sheep wandering around the world for four hundred years doing whatever they wanted. Is it any wonder they did not recognize the Messiah? Is it any great surprise that they laid traps to trick Jesus and that they fell upon him as wolves in sheep’s clothing and killed him?

If we were to travel back in time to the ancient days where the Israelite’s lived in the land of milk and honey and where they also desecrated all that was given to them, we would find them often referring to a specific time in the future. They called it, “the Lord’s Day” and they were referring to the end of times when God comes down and we are reunited with Him. Many of the people thought that this would be a time of great joy, tremendous feasting and celebrating for their people. However, many prophets were actually prophesying that the “Lord’s Day” would not be like any had thought because of the actions of the people. Where they thought feasting would occur, instead a great Famine would be enacted - where shouts of joy and celebration are turned to cries of sadness and the wailing of the damned.

Here, we read in Amos another sign that the Lord’s Day is a day not of happiness and reunion but of Judgment and that the People of Israel will not fair overly well. There were too few people observing the laws, the customs and rituals that God had put forth. There were too few people loving the Lord, listening to His commandments and obeying.  Does this not sound familiar? Where have we heard this before?

When John the Baptist was preaching about the Messiah, he found many people that did not listen to the ways of the Lord. He found Scribes and Pharisees corrupting the meaning of the Laws and using them for their own gain. He found that this was a land of the damned and the lost. Jesus Christ was born into a land that had very few with any true faith. The people had forgotten what it meant to be loyal, to be true to their God.

Once again, I ask, where does this sound familiar? In this world we inhabit, where are the true believers? Where are those that follow the rituals, the laws and the ways of Jesus as he set forth two thousand years ago? When I read the paper, when I watch the news I do not see healings, blessings and love. I see hate crimes, robberies, murders and abuse. Just this week while watching the news I heard about a man who accidentally shot his best friend as they argued over a gun and instead of telling someone about it, he cut his FRIEND up with a chainsaw and tried to hide his body throughout a couple counties.  

What kind of world are we living in? What has happened to our faith? I have a friend who is fond of quoting a particular verse from St. Francis Assisi. It says, “Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words.” The first time I heard that it took me a moment to get it and then I realized what it was saying. Our actions should be all the preaching we should have to do. The backup should be the words.

Instead, I find in this fallen world of ours we use words that have very little meaning. We throw them around to those among us as shields and weapons. We use them and we think very little about what we say. I once knew a person that every time I spoke to her, before she would respond she paused as if gathering her thoughts. When I asked her why she always took a moment before she spoke she told me something very interesting. She said, “I take a moment to speak so I do not have a lifetime of regret.”

Back in ancient times, there was a simple sheep farmer named Amos who heard God calling to Him. He saw what Israel and Judea were doing and when God showed him what was to happen, he paid attention. God gave Amos many signs of the coming troubles. God did not just give one vision, one word to Amos but many. Why does God do that? Why does God make sure to hammer home the point with multiple visions, multiple prophesies and multiple prophets? God is giving us a chance to wake up. To open our eyes, our hearts and our minds to what He is trying to tell us.

It scares me, really. The Israelites were living in a time of belief. They believed in God, matter of fact they believed so much in God that they even believed in pagan gods. So here are a group of people that have a temple, have many miracles, have proof that God is there with them and still they turn away from Him. Still, they turn to false gods. And today, in a world of disbelief, in a place where it isn’t ‘cool’ to be faithful I have to wonder how we are ever going to hear what God is saying to us. How are we going to see the signs, to hear those words?

We have book after book in the Old Testament and the New Testament proving that God loves us so much that God continues to talk, Jesus continues to reach out to us despite the many things we do. Who is paying attention anymore? Is there anyone that actively seeks the Lord? Sometimes I think that the 21^st Century is not a blessing, but a curse. Perhaps it is a punishment for us for having grown lax in our beliefs like what happened to the Israelites. The worst of all famines is when we can no longer hear the word of God, when we have no contact with Him.

So very long ago, God removed himself from Jerusalem because of the actions of His people. Today, I think God is removed from us not because God walked away but because we pushed Jesus away. We kept turning a deaf ear to the Holy Spirit until we could no longer distinguish God's quiet voice from everyone else’s. We cannot hear Jesus because all we hear is what we want, what we need and what we think we should be doing.

The passage we read today in Amos signaled that God had come to the end of his tether. There were no more days of mercy for the Israelites. God would remove His presence from them and would no longer protect them. The only reprieve God gave was to say that one day the Messiah would come and make it well with God. The Messiah came just as God promised. Jesus died for our sins, taking our place. And now, so many years later I can see that God is removed from this world once more. But this time I know it is not because Jesus wants to be, but because we have made it this way.

Amos 8:13 says, “In that day the lovely young women and strong young men will faint because of thirst.” I don’t know about you but when I look around and see what is going on in this world, I thirst. I am dying for some relief - just a brief respite from the pain, the anguish and sadness that drapes this world like a cloak. I think it is time for us to once again embrace God, to ask the Lord to come to us, to remove from us the pain and despair and instead replace it with His love and saving Grace. We need Jesus. We need to follow the Holy Spirit. We need to take what we know and share it with this broken world, to once again be the vessel that God’s light shines from.  

Amen.