NOT BEING AFRAID OF THE FUTURE
Rev. Joyce Antila Phipps
Old First Church
Texts: Amos 7: 7-15; Mark 6: 14-29
In a number of recent studies, some even before the pandemic, young people expressed an uncertainty about or fear of the future. The pandemic only made many of their fears worse. Many of the so-called Millennials, as well as the cohort slightly older and even younger feel despair not only over the state of the world but their inability to control their futures.
An increasing number of them belong to the “Nones,” those people who do not believe in much of anything beyond the world they can see and touch. My older son’s friends are a good example. They have told me they question everything in their old religious framework for a variety of reasons: church is not relevant to them; the church and Christianity – two very different things – do not speak to the problems they face in the world.
The most important question to them is what the future holds for them and their children. What’s striking, of course, is that most of them have a really strong value system, one that was in truth framed by their early religious upbringing, but they don’t connect to the church as an institution today because they do not see the church as addressing the central issues in their lives, their concern about an uncertain future.
The experience of being afraid of the future does not just belong to our time. In fact, I daresay, that throughout history, most times have presented something to fear to the extent that people are afraid of the future. Look at the world of Amos, for example.
The kingdom that David and his son Solomon had so laboriously built had split into two following Solomon’s death in 922, in large part due to Solomon’s oppressive policies towards the north. The two kingdoms of Judah in the north and Israel in the south existed side by side for just about two hundred years. Amos came on the scene around 762 BCE, when Jeroboam II was king of Israel and Uzziah was king of Judah; the date is pretty fixed because of a reference to an earthquake that can be dated in 760.
A fairly wealthy herdsman and “dresser of sycamore trees,” as he calls himself, Amos was from Israel, called to speak to Judah. He was a contemporary of the first Isaiah and of Micah, and his message was similar: Woe to you who oppress the poor for God will visit judgment upon you. Needless to say, this was not a popular message.
Israel was reaching its heights under Jeroboam II by extending power into present day Syria as far as Damascus through invasion and occupation, which permitted Israelite merchants to take advantage through becoming suppliers of goods because of their connection with the king. Sound familiar? But Amos saw disaster coming.
Amos called on the wealthy to stop oppressing the poor by taking their land away from them by an eighth century equivalent of eminent domain; he reminded the king, in the words of Deuteronomy, that, “Justice and justice alone, shall be your aim, that you may have life and possess the land which the Lord your God is giving you.” The ambit of justice was not to be limited only to wealthy men, but to be extended to all who resided in the land – the widow, the orphan, the alien. And because there was no justice, God was setting up Judah for a real lesson. And it came with a vengeance when the Assyrians destroyed Israel in 722.
Mark’s Gospel presents a different take on the theme – the prophetic voice of John the Baptizer, who secured his death when he spoke out against the injustice he saw in his time – the marriage of Herod Antipas and Herodias, who had not only been the wife of his half-brother, but was also his niece through his father’s half-brother. So the issue was not only divorcing a husband and another wife (Herod divorced his first wife to marry her causing a war with his first wife’s father), but incest. No one else in the kingdom dared to criticize the marriage which had been consecrated by the high priest.
I often wonder how John must have felt having been thrown into prison where torture and executions were commonplace. We in the United States have certainly had our equivalents of this – Martin Luther King in the Birmingham jail, the hundreds of black men arrested and lynched over our history. Today, Uyghurs are held in Chinese concentration camps and pro-democracy leaders are imprisoned in Hong King, Belarus, and Russia. Has the world changed?
In many ways it has. We don’t live in a despotic tetrarchy like Galilee; we live in a democracy, one that our ancestors have fought and died to establish and maintain. We have the power as citizens to make a difference. With that power comes responsibility. If we do not speak out against the injustices of our time, where will we stand when we collectively and individually are called to judgment?
I shudder when I think about the injustices we have all around us: poverty, eminent domain that destroys the homes that people have built in the name of “economic development,” desecration of our natural resources for economic growth, an invasion of an independent country under the guise of a war against terror, the destruction of our civil liberties, and the marginalization of twelve million persons who provide us with our standard of living as “illegal.”
Thomas Jefferson wrote regarding slavery, “I tremble when I think that God is just,” for he and others like Adams and Franklin foresaw what would happen in a country where people were enslaved. As citizens of this country, we have the obligation to speak out against the moral injustices of our time, especially those perpetrated by our own government. To neglect to do so is to be even more complicit than were the Germans when the Nazis began rounding up Jews.
But we don’t live in fascist state; we live in a democracy where power derives from the consent of the governed, an essential claim in the document that established us as a new nation, conceived in liberty. This is what I say to my granddaughters, part of the Z Generation. They do have the power to direct the future. This is the way not to be afraid of the future.
Let us pray: Eternal Guardian of our lives, our souls, our conscience, embolden us to speak as you would have us speak, to condemn injustice, defend the poor, and to declare your Kingdom to all the world. In the name of him who came to open us to your future, even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.