Prophetic Grief

This sermon is based on the prophet Amos and invites us to both grieve and roar at the condition of our country

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Transcript

Sermons from 

Mission Hills UCC

San Diego, California

Rev. Dr. David Bahr

david.bahr@missionhillsucc.org

September 14, 2025

“Prophetic Grief”

Amos 8: 4-7 – Common English Bible

Hear this, you who trample on the needy and destroy
         the poor of the land, 5 saying,
     “When will the new moon
         be over so that we may sell grain,
         and the Sabbath
         so that we may offer wheat for sale,
         make the ephah smaller, enlarge the shekel,
         and deceive with false balances,
 6         in order to buy the needy for silver
         and the helpless for sandals,
         and sell garbage as grain?”

7     The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob:
         Surely I will never forget what they have done.

Amos was a farmer in Tekoa – an area in Judah that looked a lot like western Kansas.  He tried to raise sheep on dry hills covered with thin grass, he tried to keep his scrappy fig trees alive with scarce rain.  He lived among people who worked hard without a lot to show for it – but they also didn’t ask for much more than a fair shake.  

Tekoa was on a trade route.  Amos was used to seeing caravans of traders pass by from time to time – a few here, a few there.  But lately, there were more of them and their carts were loaded higher each time.  He listened to their stories of growing prosperity up north in Israel.

One night he was laying out under the stars when he heard the roar of a lion.  He jumped up to protect his sheep from the predator and noticed they were all still fast asleep.  Amos realized he hadn’t heard an actual lion and figured out it was a message from God to go north and see Israel for himself.  And when he did, it was like stepping into another universe.  He saw houses gleaming with ivory, markets overflowing with goods, he heard the sounds of music and the noise of bargaining.  He witnessed servants serving wine in bowls – there was so much of it.  He marveled at their prosperity.

But when he looked more closely, he noticed such details as a woman clutching her child while a merchant waved a small ledger, shouting numbers at her.  He soon called over a guard who pulled the child from her arms.  Her cries cut through the marketplace – except that no one heard her.  At another stall he saw the merchant snatching the sandals off a man’s feet and sign some papers. The man had just been sold, his life traded like merchandise.

Amos felt sick to his stomach.  All this wealth and all this suffering.  He thought, this is cruelty dressed up as prosperity.  And suddenly, that lion’s roar he heard in the middle of the night came straight out of his mouth – “You who trample the poor, who sell the needy for the price of sandals, who grind the innocent into the dirt – the Lord has sworn.  You will not get away with it.”  

That got their attention. Word of Amos’s roar spread like wildfire. The merchants were furious. “He’s ruining business! He’s scaring customers!”  Word traveled up the chain to the king himself.  Soon Amos found himself face-to-face with the high priest who looked him up and down.  With scorn dripping in his voice: “Go home, farm boy. Back to Judah where you belong. Earn your bread playing prophet down there. Don’t come here upsetting things. This is the king’s temple. This is holy ground.”

Amos straightened his back and squared his shoulders. His voice was steady, but there was fire in it:  “I’m no prophet. I’m not even the son of a prophet. But the Lord took me from the fields and said, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’ So here I am. I didn’t choose this. God chose me. And I will not be silent.”

From merchants, the priests, the king – Amos faced opposition from all sides.  Sounds a lot like Jesus.  You might wonder sometimes, can’t we skip over these prophets and just get back to Jesus?  But Jesus is a prophet himself.  That’s why knowing their stories is so important to understanding him.  It shows us what it means to be a follower of Jesus – a Christian today.  

It’s easy to forget that Jesus was about more than teaching love and kindness. His words upset a lot of people – often quite deliberately.  Today’s gospel lesson is just one of many examples – one of the most if not the most bizarre of all his parables praising a crooked manager.  It doesn’t make a lot of sense until you look at the reaction of those who heard it.  

Jesus isn’t holding up the crooked manager as a saint. He’s using a crooked story to get under the skin of a crooked audience. Religious leaders who were comfortable with a system that looked holy on the outside while crushing the poor on the inside. At the end of the parable, the Pharisees laughed him off.  They rolled their eyes at him, but he just hit harder:  “You are masters at making yourselves look good in front of others, but God knows what’s behind the appearance.”  They didn’t find that funny.  At all.

It’s important to remember that these opponents and all the others weren’t cartoon villains, but gifted, good and devout people —but, when those gifts bent toward power, or profit, or fear, they found common cause against him.  

I want to share a quick look at those groups.  The Pharisees were teachers with a deep reverence for scripture and yet, too often they used scripture as a yardstick to measure who was clean and who was unclean, asking, for example – did you wash your hands the right way? They accused Jesus of breaking purity rules and he shot back: You’ll swallow a whole camel, but strain out a gnat.  

Another group opposed to him were the scribes – the scholars who kept Israel’s story alive. They preserved the tradition, but their efforts sometimes meant guarding the boundaries of who was in and who was out was the most important. For example, when Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners, they saw only betrayal and questioned his authority. Jesus snapped back: How can you shut the door of the kingdom in people’s faces?

Another group, the Sadducees, kept the temple going year after year — offerings and festivals, made sure the people had a place to worship. But through their oversight, when Jesus famously overturned the tables of the moneychangers, it struck at their power and their profit. He charged them: You have turned my Father’s house into a den of robbers.

The Herodians, far less familiar, were political insiders who had a gift for keeping peace with Rome. But they often used that to protect their own privilege. When they tried to trap Jesus with a question about taxes, he exposed their game. Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.

The priests had the gift of helping people draw close to God through ritual and prayer. But they also made worship a heavy load. Access to God came with a bill, and the poor carried the weight. Jesus confronted them, saying: I desire mercy, not sacrifice.

Pharisees, scribes, Sadducees, Herodians, priests…  It’s tempting to treat these as villains or only ancient clashes, but they’re not. They’re mirrors.  The same temptations — to protect privilege, to profit using fear, to confuse cruelty with faithfulness — these stories don’t just belong to the past.

There’s one more group: Zealots. They had the gift of passion and courage and were willing to risk their lives to drive out Rome by any means necessary – for the sake of their people.  But they also turned to violence. Jesus warned: All who take the sword will die by the sword.  

But also remember, their violence was born of desperation under Rome’s crushing occupation – not to excuse it – a people who felt cornered with no other choice.  But our own age is different. The violence we face today is not the desperate cry of the oppressed, but the vengeance of the powerful.  Cruelty unleashed to punish and dominate easy targets. 

But we’ve also just witnessed how painfully true Jesus’ warning still is with the assassination on Wednesday.  Which, by the way, happened on the same day as a school shooting in Colorado, two weeks after children were gunned down during a Catholic mass in Minneapolis, three months after a legislator in Minnesota was gunned down in her own bed.  And those are just the ones that made headlines. In those three months alone, more than 160 mass shootings scarred this nation. That’s more than one and a half every single day.

Can we just breathe for a moment?

We know the prophets had sharp words, but did you know there was also one called the weeping prophet?  It was Jeremiah.  He wrote the Book of Lamentations.  A book of tears. That’s the other side of the prophets. Not just fire in their mouth, but tears in their eyes. 

Lamentations is a hard book to read.  It’s full of sorrow. “My eyes are spent with weeping, my stomach churns, my bile is poured out on the ground because of the destruction of my people.”  Hard to read but it certainly speaks to times like these when we have no words to fully express our complicated feelings – weighing empathy and justice against each other on a scale that cannot be made equal.

Jesus, too, wept when he entered Jerusalem. He looked at the city, beautiful but broken, and said: If only you knew the things that make for peace.

And that’s where we are too – grieving the violence that touches every corner of modern American life.  Our lament is holy because to grieve together is to resist despair and denial – it keeps our hearts alive.  And yet the prophets don’t stop at grief. That’s the gift of faith – that’s why we worship.  Faith always points us forward.  Not to a quick fix.  Not to shallow optimism. But to deepen our hope, rooted in God’s justice and mercy. Prophets remind us that despair is not the only option, and cruelty is not the way to respond.

I think of Mister Rogers. After 9/11, people asked him what to say to children in such a frightening time. He didn’t try to give them easy answers or pretend everything would be fine. Instead, he said something many of you know by heart: “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”

That was Mister Rogers’ gift – this morning’s lesson in Sunday School. He never denied the darkness, but he always pointed toward the light that ordinary people carry.   Wearing his red cardigan and sneakers, his gentle voice — he gave us permission to hold both grief and hope at the same time. 

That’s prophetic imagination. The courage to see what is broken, to say it is broken, and then imagine something new. 

Our tears are real. But the prophets did not cry instead of speaking truth. They wept, and then they thundered, like Amos who roared: You who trample the poor.  Jesus who wept and he roared: You are like whitewashed tombs — beautiful on the outside but full of death inside.

And so we must speak – again.  To a nation drowning in guns we must say:  Stop shrugging off children’s lives as collateral damage.  We reject the lie that some deaths are worth it.  Can’t we just be honest?  To claim that any child’s death is the price of freedom is morally bankrupt.  And yet even as we condemn, we still mourn, we can still have empathy for a life — every life, any life — lost to violence.  Empathy is not a sin.

Once again our call is prophetic:  the tears of Jeremiah, the roar of Amos, the weeping and fire of Jesus.  To grieve what this violence says about us, and then to let that grief propel us into prophetic imagination – until justice rolls down like the mighty waters, until mercy rises up like the early morning, and love, not fear, has the final word.