July 13, 2025
READINGS & MESSAGE
AMOS 7: 7-17
Someone once said there’s truth, and then there’s politics…and this is the choice offered in this reading from Amos…are the king and the people going to listen to the truth that the nation is in serious crisis or is it going to be business as usual with everything swept under the carpet?
Is Amos going to speak the truth or is he going to see reason and leave the king in peace?...and we all we know that there is a time and a place for criticism of the system but it’s not here and not now…however, Amos has an “inconvenient truth” which I’ll borrow from Al Gore’s film on climate change…it is a time of reckoning and in this case, with Israel, the inconvenient truth is that things have gone too far and the collapse will be catastrophic…the nation will disappear…
LUKE 10: 25-37
The Gospel this morning…a passage you’ve heard many times over and yet we, as society, still struggle with it…and it’s also a passage that gives grounds to all of the lawyer jokes which have been floating around for eons….it’s a simple question and answer to Jesus from the lawyer but the lawyer needs to go deeper into the situation…it’s like Karl Barth and his famous dictum on that we should read the Bible and the newspaper simultaneously and Athol Gill, a lawyer, says, “but which version of the Bible should we use and which newspaper can we trust?”…so Jesus responds with an outrageous story which we’ve coined “The Good Samaritan” story…it has to do with neighbour…who is my neighbour?...what qualifies someone as your neighbour?... well I believe that a person becomes your neighbour when they appear in your life, whether it’s on the street, at your front door, or possibly through television…wherever we make contact with another, there, our neighbours are…
TELLING THE ‘FAITHFUL’ TRUTH
One of Jesus’ sayings is, “I did not come to judge the world but to save the world. He who rejects me and does not receive my word has a Judge: the word that I have spoken will be his (or her) judge on the last day”…so Jesus is the judge who doesn’t have to be our future judge… his word is our judge already…and what he shares with us throughout the Gospels is the telling of the ‘faithful’ truth…and sometimes truth hurts!...we have to remember this…and today’s scripture reminds us that God chose us, not just for gifts but also for accountability…God has great expectations for us…let us always pray that God will give us the grace we need to rise to God’s expectations…
Recently, I had spoken to one of my colleague friends about the decline and diminishing numbers of folks coming to worship services and the efforts that are put towards, I guess, evangelism (for lack of a better word) and the answer I received was this – “Every troubled organization is full of fear…in such a situation, leaders have the responsibility to face the fear and to tell the truth…a leader must tell the truth to an organization that there is some sort of denial happening..
and, the leader tells the truth out of faith that the organization already has the needed resources to face facts.”…
In today’s first lesson are words of judgment from the prophet Amos…God has made a covenant with Israel, but Israel seems to have been unfaithful…in fact, this is the story throughout the Old Testament…I note that Amos addresses most of his prophetic ridicule against the religious leaders – priests and prophets…in other words, to be truly honest with all of you, most of the judgment is against people just like me!...and in today’s Gospel, Jesus tells a story that we know as the “Good Samaritan”…but to be honest again, the story could also be known as the story of the “bad priest” or “bad minister”…the priest, who ought to be in the business of helping people in need, passes by the man in the ditch…so…there is judgment in Jesus’ story, but it is implicit or embedded in the story…he’s telling the ‘faithful’ truth…
And one conversation one day brought out this most absurd question, “Do you think Muslims will go to hell?”…it wasn’t a very biblical question in my eyes, however, I noted that when God is in a judgmental mode, God’s most harsh condemnations are not for Muslims or anybody else outside the faith of Israel and the church…God’s most searing criticism is FOR Israel and the church!...this includes us…and especially the clergy!...now I’m paying attention!...
To be made to stand before the mirror of truth, even though it may take an eternity to face the facts about ourselves, is an aspect of God’s faith in us…though we sometimes don’t believe that we have the resources to live truthfully, God believes in us more than we believe in ourselves… and if anyone is ever able to stand before that judging–redeeming mirror and face the facts, it is only in response to something that God enacts, not as a product of our own will or intellect…if we are able to love, it is because we have first been loved…that’s out of 1 John and, we did not choose God; God in Christ chose us….and this is telling each of you the ‘faithful’ truth…
The stories which we’ve heard this morning or the scripture passages are stories for travelers on the road…they’re a scriptural GPS of ‘faithful truth’, no matter what the consequences…they route us in the only direction which God desires – the way of love and compassion for others…the story of the ‘Good Samaritan’ is more than a parable about a helpful stranger…it is about the transforming power of God at work in those who travel the dangerous roads in our world…each of us…and I’ll end with this…
A year or two ago, a twelve-year-old Palestinian boy, Ahmad Khatib, was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers during street fighting near his home in Jenin, the West Bank…the boy had been holding a plastic toy gun…he was taken to an Israeli hospital, where he died after two days…his parents made the decision to allow his organs to be harvested for transplant to Israelis…six people received his heart, lungs, and kidneys, including a two-month old infant…his mother, Abla, said,
“My son has died. Maybe he can give life to others”…
These parents made their own journey into the compassion of God and were living eternal life…they were portraying the ‘faithful’ truth of what can still hold our world together…
Amen….