SPEAKER_02: Because he is so direct and because of his passion for the downtribe and his passion for social injustice.
SPEAKER_02: I found that I find myself moving through the condemnation and focusing on the point of that, the social injustice.
SPEAKER_02: So I would kind of brush through there's a rhythm to his condemnation, and so I would just ride that rope that rhythm as fast as I could to get to what was why he was so like why God was.
SPEAKER_03: And he was so eloquent.
SPEAKER_03: So he's educated.
SPEAKER_03: He was supposedly his father died young, but a mother raised him.
SPEAKER_03: Where did that education come from?
SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: It's a great question.
SPEAKER_01: He's a shepherd and a dresser of poor figs, right?
SPEAKER_01: So how how does he have the luxury of education?
SPEAKER_01: It's enigmatic.
SPEAKER_05: What do we know about the about Amos historically?
SPEAKER_01: Well, so so on our timeline, and remember, Amos is actually a southerner.
SPEAKER_01: So he belongs to Judah, which makes him going up in the north and saying, you guys are gonna have the hurt locker opened up on you, would be very doubly offensive, right?
SPEAKER_01: So he has to be riding ahead of 722.
SPEAKER_01: That's when the north gets wiped out.
SPEAKER_01: That's mostly what we know.
SPEAKER_05: Do we know do the biblical historians believe that it is written by a specific individual?
SPEAKER_05: Or do they think that it's a combination of people, and they just Amos just happens to be a name that is picked to No, I think you find a variety on that.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, certainly there's I've never heard the opinion that Amos represents like a bunch of chapters that have been stitched together.
SPEAKER_01: Although it is very likely with everything we have, whether it was written by one person or a few, certainly there's editing that happens afterward, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_05: But does it feel like is it a continuum?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it feels coherent.
SPEAKER_01: It feels coherent.
SPEAKER_01: I mean when you read it, doesn't it feel coherent as well?
SPEAKER_01: You know, again, we can, it's so old we can never go back.
SPEAKER_01: But the interesting thing is if you look lexically, there's not like chapter one has totally different vocabulary from chapter five.
SPEAKER_01: This is sort of the key, right?
SPEAKER_01: Style and and lexicon, they it's coherent.
SPEAKER_01: Not so in Isaiah, there's three different styles in Isaiah, and people will tell you there's three Isaiahs under one name, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_09: I found when they were talking about 8th century, I was like, when did this happen?
SPEAKER_09: I am ignorant.
SPEAKER_09: I'm looking at your timeline, which is negative of until 64.
SPEAKER_09: So how do you know if they're talking about A C or BC?
SPEAKER_01: Oh, this is definitely BCE.
SPEAKER_01: So the 8th century BCE would be the 700s.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: And 720.
SPEAKER_01: But I was like, what's pretty much until we flip over and start doing New Testament, we're gonna be always presume we're we're BCE.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, well.
SPEAKER_09: They were so primitive.
SPEAKER_01: It's a strange thing, actually, to think about primitivity, actually.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, because we don't know how they made the pyramids still.
SPEAKER_09: That was magic.
SPEAKER_01: Aliens, perhaps.
SPEAKER_01: My father-in-law believes that actually.
SPEAKER_01: But those are without the iron tools.
SPEAKER_01: Or or an engine, I mean, necessity is the mother of invention, right?
SPEAKER_01: And I that probably is right.
SPEAKER_09: Giants in those days.
SPEAKER_09: Giants.
SPEAKER_01: Could be that.
SPEAKER_09: Giants robbed the earth.
SPEAKER_01: Could be.
SPEAKER_09: A lot of stuff happened.
SPEAKER_01: They didn't have iron tools.
SPEAKER_01: That's the interesting thing, right?
SPEAKER_01: So think about the level of precision it takes to make something out of wood when you don't have screws or glue.
SPEAKER_01: As a woodworker, it's amazing to think about that.
SPEAKER_01: I can build a lot of stuff with glue.
SPEAKER_01: I don't even need screws.
SPEAKER_01: If I've got glue, I mean they don't have glue.
SPEAKER_01: And they don't even have iron saws.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you just gotta think about that.
SPEAKER_01: A plumb line is a bubble level, you know, before that got invented.
SPEAKER_01: You can do a whole lot with it.
SPEAKER_01: You can do a whole lot with strings.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's that's it.
SPEAKER_01: It's the strings and gravity.
SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, go over and look at Rocket Park, at the space shuttle we made with a slide rule.
SPEAKER_01: It looks like a high schooler made it in Woodshop.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's it's I would never get into that thing.
SPEAKER_01: Have you seen it?
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I know it's incredible and it looks so primitive.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it looks like it could blow up at any second, and and they did, they blew up all the time.
SPEAKER_01: So anyway, well, people made that with a slide rule.
SPEAKER_09: And when you say plumb line, I'm thinking of something that's correct.
SPEAKER_01: It's a string with a weight.
SPEAKER_09: Alright, so how did they do horizontal lines?
SPEAKER_01: Strings?
SPEAKER_01: No, I they didn't have bubbles back then.
SPEAKER_01: No, they didn't.
SPEAKER_09: I in fact it makes it.
SPEAKER_01: Because they wouldn't have had glass or plastic, it would have been invisible.
SPEAKER_01: Well, that's fair.
SPEAKER_01: I will tell you what's interesting.
SPEAKER_01: The Hezekiah's tunnel they referenced in the video is one and a half kilometers and it snakes.
SPEAKER_01: And it has a 1% grade the entire way.
SPEAKER_09: Well, there's a way to do it.
SPEAKER_01: Well, I'll tell you how how they dug that shaft, interesting enough.
SPEAKER_01: You can read it in James Mitchiner's book, The Source.
SPEAKER_01: Two teams started on two sides, underground, with bronze tools, and met in the middle and were off by like two inches.
SPEAKER_01: And essentially what they did was they they dug a big hole and they put a tree down in the hole that they'd sided outside and they followed the tree.
SPEAKER_01: I know that sounds crazy, but this happened in 800 BC, this tunnel at Megiddo, two teams, three kilometers long, two different sides, met in the middle, off by two inches.
SPEAKER_01: So necessity is the mother of invention, and it's funny.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not convinced who's more primitive.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that was when you had to have rote learning, and you had to be, you had to be exceptionally uh gifted to do what they did.
SPEAKER_01: We don't have to be because we have things that do it for us.
SPEAKER_01: I don't know if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_02: And poetry was highly thinking.
SPEAKER_05: I honestly don't believe that we're any brighter in terms of our intellectual capabilities than they were using our technology.
SPEAKER_01: Because we have the weight of history behind us.
SPEAKER_05: I have a kid.
SPEAKER_05: I have a question.
SPEAKER_05: Um, so in 722 the Assyrians came in and they basically destroyed Israel and Judea?
SPEAKER_01: Well, because they took they took all of Israel and they surrounded Jerusalem, but they didn't take it.
SPEAKER_05: So Jerusalem never actually fell.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and and remember, Hezekiah's tunnel is what allowed it to stay.
SPEAKER_05: So who so the last the last king of Israel was Hiah?
SPEAKER_01: No, the last king of Israel is Zedekiah, the one who gets his eyes gouged down after watching his sons killed in front of him, and then he's taken into exile in Babylon.
SPEAKER_01: But that doesn't happen until 586.
SPEAKER_05: And the last Judea?
SPEAKER_01: Um I forget.
SPEAKER_01: No, no, that's Judea.
SPEAKER_01: Judea is Zedekiah.
SPEAKER_01: The last king of Israel is um that's the one I can't remember his name.
SPEAKER_01: Amaziah, maybe?
SPEAKER_01: Oh, here you got it.
SPEAKER_01: The last king is Pekahiah, yeah, Pekahiah.
SPEAKER_01: And and so he would have been killed by the Assyrians.
SPEAKER_01: Well, they're the they're the first empire, like we think of the word empire.
SPEAKER_01: Egypt has been around a long time.
SPEAKER_01: And Egypt sort of swallowed up Africa, but it didn't really come into the Levant very much.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, Egypt was not a swallowing empire like these Mesopotamian ones were.
SPEAKER_01: So, so you know, there's an old Babylon, you've heard of the Code of Hammurabi.
SPEAKER_01: That's that's the old Babylon.
SPEAKER_01: It's not really an empire.
SPEAKER_01: When we start thinking empires, the Assyrian Empire is really the Neo-Assyrian Empire, like there's different dates for these things.
SPEAKER_01: These are the names like Tiglath, Pelezer, Sargon the Great, Sennacherib.
SPEAKER_01: These are the people who brutally and ruthlessly swallow other cultures whole and redistribute them.
SPEAKER_01: And they're followed by the Neo-Babylonians, that's like Nebuchadrezzar.
SPEAKER_01: They're followed by the Persian Empire like Cyrus, and Egypt's back breaks during the Neo-Assyrian Empire.
SPEAKER_01: They're no longer like a world power.
SPEAKER_01: They used to be important and now they're just not.
SPEAKER_05: So Amos is what day was Amos?
SPEAKER_01: So we're thinking 750, just ballpark.
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
SPEAKER_01: 30 years ahead of the end.
SPEAKER_05: So he basically predicted.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, he he told folks this is what's going to happen if you don't turn around.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, and I think a good way to think about this when we think about prediction.
SPEAKER_01: I predict that if you go 20 miles over the speed limit, you will lose your license.
SPEAKER_01: You might not do it today, but I predict if you do it every time on your road, eventually, the consequences are gonna catch up with you.
SPEAKER_01: I think that's what he's saying.
SPEAKER_01: And part of it is, I think the way he ties that in theologically is you know, Israel and Judah have always been a buffer state.
SPEAKER_01: They've never, contrary to what I learned in Sunday school about how Solomon was the richest man on the planet, he was not.
SPEAKER_01: Never.
SPEAKER_01: He married Pharaoh's daughter and brought her to Israel, and he had to build a special room for her because his palace was like a pig sty for her.
SPEAKER_01: This is important to know.
SPEAKER_01: So we think, oh, Solomon sat around in gold and all that.
SPEAKER_01: He he I mean Israel and Judah were like Haiti, honestly, between America and Mexico under Spain.
SPEAKER_01: So so they had some times when the balance of power was weak that they could expand, that they can contract a little bit, but they were never anything like a ser like um Nineveh or Babylon or Cairo.
SPEAKER_01: Never.
SPEAKER_01: And hopefully that's that's helpful to think through relative importance here.
SPEAKER_01: So when you're a buffer state, and I think the prophets are saying, listen, the reason you're existing is a balance of power.
SPEAKER_01: So it's an advantage to have an independent state as a buffer, but but B, uh you actually can't take care of yourself, so you owe your existence to God.
SPEAKER_01: And God is not going to continue to go out of the way to preserve you from realpolitik when you're acting just like those other countries, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_01: So over and over again we hear the reason you can't wear clothes made out of two fabric, the reason you can't eat pork, the reason uh you can't uh have sexual relationships with your sister is because that's what the Egyptians do.
SPEAKER_01: You can't be like them.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, literally, that's this description.
SPEAKER_01: You can't be like them.
SPEAKER_01: And if you're gonna act like them, then I am going to allow natural consequences of your relative weakness to happen to you and you'll be gone.
SPEAKER_01: If that makes sense.
SPEAKER_01: You don't deserve to exist.
SPEAKER_01: You're too weak.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, to give you an idea, when the Assyrians come to Jerusalem, one of the taunts, we read it last week, is I'll give you a thousand horses.
SPEAKER_01: Let's see if you can ride one of them.
SPEAKER_01: The people in in in this sounds crazy, right?
SPEAKER_01: But horses, people only figured out you could ride a horse in about 800 BCE.
SPEAKER_01: Horses used to pull chariots.
SPEAKER_01: And the reason for this, uh, I heard this in a lecture, is that an ox breathes through its mouth, and if you put a bit in an ox's mouth, it'll suffocate because it can't it can't breathe independently.
SPEAKER_01: A horse doesn't breathe through its mouth, it breathes only through its nose.
SPEAKER_01: And that's why you can put a bit in a horse's mouth.
SPEAKER_01: Well, people didn't know that.
SPEAKER_01: So they had horses acting like oxen, harnessed and pulling chariots.
SPEAKER_01: And you might think, like, oh, Ben Hur, chariots are fast.
SPEAKER_01: Uh chariots were made out of wood and they didn't have iron.
SPEAKER_01: So chariots actually broke a bunch.
SPEAKER_01: Like they were chariots were like um like Yugos, right?
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you go nowhere in a Yugo, and you go nowhere in a chariot.
SPEAKER_01: And and you know, when you read the story about the Reed Sea and the Egyptians get stuck in the Reed Sea, well, they'd ridden their chariots too long.
SPEAKER_01: They naturally just broke, right?
SPEAKER_01: A chariot really was just an archery platform way back when.
SPEAKER_01: It allowed an archer to move around, but not with any huge speed.
SPEAKER_01: You you you'd break the axle.
SPEAKER_01: It's all wood.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, again, think through this.
SPEAKER_01: There's no roads.
SPEAKER_01: So racing like they're doing winters, right?
SPEAKER_01: They did in Rome, which is 2,000 years later, when they'd figured out how to make like iron axles.
SPEAKER_01: But you know, again, when you're going bumpity bump, bump bump, you know, through hills and dales with wood wheels and no glue.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, we we this is this thing, we anachronistically think about history.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: We think like, ah, chariot races and Egyptians have chariots, but it's totally different.
SPEAKER_01: Totally different.
SPEAKER_01: So the Assyrians come and they say, Y'all don't even know how to ride these horses.
SPEAKER_01: We do.
SPEAKER_01: What's important to know is the other nations had were into the early Iron Age, and the Hebrew people were like in the Middle Bronze Age.
SPEAKER_01: So just to contrast this, iron is very abundant everywhere on the planet.
SPEAKER_01: Bronze isn't.
SPEAKER_01: So Bronze Age weapons meant the king and the prince had a bronze dagger.
SPEAKER_01: The king and the prince.
SPEAKER_01: Everybody else had a club with a nail sticking out of it.
SPEAKER_01: Or they had stone-headed arrows.
SPEAKER_01: Now the other nations had figured out how to have metal-tipped arrows.
SPEAKER_01: You see, easier to mass produce.
SPEAKER_01: An arrow is an arrow at the end of the day, but time and production, right?
SPEAKER_01: And then in the early iron age, hey, other people have clubs with weak iron nails, or they've got weak iron swords.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, just you just gotta think through this military technology.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, these were backward people.
SPEAKER_01: This would have been like meeting the Blitzkrieg on horseback.
SPEAKER_01: Which happened.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: That's the state of the Hebrew people.
SPEAKER_05: So the Assyrians took all of Israel.
SPEAKER_05: All of Israel.
SPEAKER_05: But they didn't take, was it just Jerusalem or was there an area around Jerusalem?
SPEAKER_01: So what happened is they Judah, you know, think of it as a small county.
SPEAKER_01: And the the county seat is Jerusalem, which was four city blocks, not big.
SPEAKER_01: All the people see Assyria coming and they cram into Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_01: The only reason they don't die is there's a freshwater tunnel that the Assyrians didn't find, or they would have poisoned it and everybody would have died.
SPEAKER_01: That's how you fought sieges.
SPEAKER_01: You tried to run them out of food, then they start eating each other, or they get desperate and they try to fight to get out.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, they didn't have sappers and dynamite and all that stuff, right?
SPEAKER_01: So everybody's crammed up in here.
SPEAKER_01: Well, well, the Assyrians leave, which means you can go back out into your fields, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_01: So you just have to survive until the army leaves, and then you can go back and grow food.
SPEAKER_01: And that's kind of how that worked out.
SPEAKER_05: So Artemis never took Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_01: The Assyrians did not take Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_01: No, they and what we what what happens, right, is um two things it looks like.
SPEAKER_01: Hezekiah pays them tribute.
SPEAKER_01: All they really wanted was money anyway.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, if I can get all your money without having to kill you, that's advantageous to me because I don't lose troops.
SPEAKER_01: But they were saying, no way, we won't pay.
SPEAKER_01: So they paid, maybe they didn't pay enough.
SPEAKER_01: We don't know, but there appears to be backfighting in Assyria, so the army's got to go back there because there's there's going to be there's essentially a coup happening in Assyria and a change in power, and you've got to get the army back there.
SPEAKER_01: If that makes sense.
SPEAKER_05: Was the second temple still up?
SPEAKER_01: No, no, this is the first temple.
SPEAKER_05: I'm not meant the first temple.
SPEAKER_01: First temple's still there until 586.
SPEAKER_01: Now, um, we see pictures of the Assyrians, you can find them like stele carved in, and they're all very stylized like the Egyptians.
SPEAKER_01: You know, none of the pharaohs looked like that.
SPEAKER_01: None of them did.
SPEAKER_01: That's like an icon of kingly identity.
SPEAKER_01: Well, the Assyrian kings are always, they always have like the braided beard, and they're always like stepping on somebody's head with like weapons.
SPEAKER_01: And um, this is an important thing to know.
SPEAKER_01: You know, Napoleon stayed behind the lines as the general and told people where to go.
SPEAKER_01: And that's not the ancient way of fighting.
SPEAKER_01: The ancient way of fighting is that the king leads the army onto the the king is the champion, like the best fighter.
SPEAKER_01: And for good reason.
SPEAKER_01: That's all they do.
SPEAKER_01: But you have the luxury of training, you know.
SPEAKER_01: So Achilles, you know, led the army, he wasn't in the middle of it.
SPEAKER_01: And the same with these Assyrian kings, I mean, they were they were deadeyes with the bow.
SPEAKER_01: And they were huge, strong, agile fighters.
SPEAKER_01: That was what they did.
SPEAKER_01: And they're stylized like that.
SPEAKER_01: So again, you'll see them riding chariots over people.
SPEAKER_01: As Amos says, you you know, pe you'll be led away with fish hooks.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you don't need handcuffs when someone puts a hook through your nose.
SPEAKER_01: You're you're going to follow the rope.
SPEAKER_01: Don't think about a small fish hook.
SPEAKER_01: When someone puts a big old hook through your nose, these aren't kind folk.
SPEAKER_01: They're they're interested in completely dominating nations, and they did.
SPEAKER_09: Did they have any uh economy that in inside themselves or did in the country?
SPEAKER_01: They had to to support their military.
SPEAKER_01: You know, so so their the principal industries were initially growing grain.
SPEAKER_01: Sounds like they they grow their own food to support their army, and then the way they expand, right, is they take all of your stuff, and then the more they swallow, the more they get.
SPEAKER_01: And and then they do need people to continue to grow in the grain to supply the military, right?
SPEAKER_01: Without supply lines, you don't do well.
SPEAKER_01: Um, but the way they do that is again, they they intersperse populations so that there's no common language or religion, which is what allows for rebellion.
SPEAKER_01: Brutal, brutal people.
SPEAKER_01: Uh you'll again, I heard I told you about 50.
SPEAKER_01: Fish hooks.
SPEAKER_01: Um, you'll also hear things like babies being dashed.
SPEAKER_01: I just to make sure we're clear, that's where you take a baby and throw it on a rock.
SPEAKER_09: Um to kill it.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, when you go into another country.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: So Amos is a is this is a shepherd or a farmer?
SPEAKER_01: He identifies himself as a shepherd.
SPEAKER_05: And he is a fairly well-educated shepherd from Judea, and he goes to Israel to speak against them.
SPEAKER_05: What about Judea?
SPEAKER_05: Weren't they just bad?
SPEAKER_01: Well, he does speak a word against Judah.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: And and this is the interesting part rhetorically, and this is where maybe we can dive directly into the text with that background behind us.
SPEAKER_01: I do want to say there's a monument of Martin Luther King Jr.
SPEAKER_01: in Atlanta, and there's this quote on there, let justice roll down like waters.
SPEAKER_01: Well, he didn't say it, he said that, but it wasn't his idea.
SPEAKER_01: That comes right out of Amos.
SPEAKER_01: So King was quoting Amos.
SPEAKER_01: A lot of folk don't realize that.
SPEAKER_01: Um I just had to say that.
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
SPEAKER_01: Um, because I recognized it.
SPEAKER_01: It's pretty, it's pretty famous.
SPEAKER_01: Um so a couple of things.
SPEAKER_01: Rhetorically, the book begins with this interesting thing.
SPEAKER_01: For three sins will God will overthrow you, but you've done four, right?
SPEAKER_01: So so look, uh you you you're over the line.
SPEAKER_01: And he does that with all the surrounding countries.
SPEAKER_01: And this book is great, it draws that out, right?
SPEAKER_01: So you get to hear the surrounding countries in case you're interested.
SPEAKER_01: There's Syria, still there today, capital is Damascus, right?
SPEAKER_01: There's Gaza, that's the Bank of the Philistines.
SPEAKER_01: Um, helpful to know the Philistines are basically Minoan Greeks, right?
SPEAKER_01: So they they're they're not an indigenous people of the Levant, they're Greeks who have been pushed out of their own place.
SPEAKER_01: They've got Iron Age weapons, and the Philistines are a major problem for the Hebrews because they're technologically superior.
SPEAKER_01: They live in, what do you know, Gaza.
SPEAKER_01: And and look, listen to what they did bad.
SPEAKER_01: They exiled, they exiled entire communities.
SPEAKER_01: Boy, if you think they're bad, that's what Assyria did.
SPEAKER_01: Tyre, those are the Phoenicians, right?
SPEAKER_01: Tyre, um they delivered people to Edom, and that's really bad.
SPEAKER_01: The Phoenicians are the ones who invented the color purple or discovered it, right?
SPEAKER_01: One other interesting thing about the Phoenicians.
SPEAKER_01: The gods of the Phoenicians are the gods of Canaan, like El and Baal and Asherah, and uh Hiram of Tyre, he's the king of Tyre, builds a temple to Baal in Tyre.
SPEAKER_01: When Solomon builds the temple in Jerusalem, it's a carbon copy of the temple to Baal in Tyre.
SPEAKER_01: It's important to name this because uh Amos is gonna say, listen, you're worshiping idols at Bethel and Dan, you've got bulls there.
SPEAKER_01: The bulls are a symbol for Baal, but I don't know if you realize the Hebrew temple also has bulls.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, it's got this ginormous bronze sea, which is a basin, on the back of twelve bulls.
SPEAKER_01: So bulls are okay in Jerusalem, but they're not okay in Bethel and Dan, and here's why the prophets from Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_01: I guarantee you that the prophets in Bethel and Dan said the same thing about the bulls in Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_01: Those are idols, but ours, on the other hand, are just mine.
SPEAKER_01: Um, the Edomites attack their brothers.
SPEAKER_01: And what's really interesting is we're getting closer and closer because the Edomites are the descendants of not Jacob, but his twin brother Esau.
SPEAKER_01: So the Edomites are relatives of the Hebrews.
SPEAKER_01: They're in the same family tree, but they act different.
SPEAKER_01: Then we get to the Ammonites and the Moabites.
SPEAKER_01: Those are Lot's children.
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, Lot, in Hebrew it's Lot, uh Lot flees Sodom and Gomorrah.
SPEAKER_01: His daughters get pregnant by him.
SPEAKER_01: They probably think they're the last people on earth.
SPEAKER_01: They're trying to preserve the human race.
SPEAKER_01: So these are essentially like the children of incest in Israel's family tree.
SPEAKER_01: So again, these are relatives of theirs, and so it's getting closer and closer to home.
SPEAKER_01: You may not realize this, but he's always getting closer and tighter, not just geographically, but ethnically as well.
SPEAKER_01: The problem of the Ammonites is they ripped open pregnant women.
SPEAKER_01: This happened all the time in ancient Near Eastern warfare.
SPEAKER_01: It's like dashing babies.
SPEAKER_01: It is it's dreadful.
SPEAKER_01: The Moabites burned the king's bones, which is essentially when you burn somebody's bones up, their afterlife is over.
SPEAKER_01: So it's it's and even if it's a king, you're supposed to show respect for kings and not do this.
SPEAKER_01: Okay?
SPEAKER_01: Then we get to Judah.
SPEAKER_01: The problem with Judah is they rejected the law of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: So Amos is saying of his own people that they have rejected the Torah that Moses gave them.
SPEAKER_01: Very general.
SPEAKER_01: Alright?
SPEAKER_01: And then he comes home rhetorically.
SPEAKER_01: He's sort of come around and around and around, and maybe they were really excited to hear, hey, for three sins I'll punish Judah, and they've done four.
SPEAKER_01: And now for seven, Israel.
SPEAKER_01: So he saved the best for last.
SPEAKER_01: He's sort of surprised, you're the worst ones.
SPEAKER_01: And then you know, it's interesting, he doesn't name seven things.
SPEAKER_01: And when he talks about for three and for four, he never names three and four things.
SPEAKER_01: He only at most ever names one thing.
SPEAKER_01: The ones we get is father and son go into the same woman.
SPEAKER_01: That's a violation of the Torah.
SPEAKER_01: Um, you drink unjust wine.
SPEAKER_01: More on that in a second.
SPEAKER_01: And you make the Nazarites drink wine and you tell prophets not to prophesy.
SPEAKER_01: So father and son going into the same woman, that's essentially, it's probably prostitution in the sense of you go to a temple, right?
SPEAKER_01: So don't think red light district, or don't think this is a son with his father's wife.
SPEAKER_01: Think this is worshiping other gods, and father and son are doing that, so it's a it's a double insult to the Torah.
SPEAKER_01: Um, Nazarites.
SPEAKER_01: Nazarites are people who take a vow to God.
SPEAKER_01: Paul actually is a Nazarite.
SPEAKER_01: We'll get there.
SPEAKER_01: During the time they make a vow to God, they cannot drink wine, touch anything dead, or cut their hair.
SPEAKER_01: They can't drink any wine.
SPEAKER_01: That was standard fare.
SPEAKER_01: So this is like a nutrient-poor diet.
SPEAKER_01: You can't touch anything dead, means you can't eat meat or be a butcher.
SPEAKER_01: And then you can't cut your hair, is another interesting thing, because we're not really sure that people did cut their hair, but it was an external sign.
SPEAKER_01: Now, when your vow is over, and Paul does this in the New Testament, you shave your head.
SPEAKER_01: We'll see it when we read the book of Acts.
SPEAKER_07: It's for a period of time.
SPEAKER_01: It's for a period of time.
SPEAKER_01: There are in the Bible three people who are Nazarites their whole life, or they're supposed to be.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, they're born as Nazarites.
SPEAKER_01: Do you know who they are?
SPEAKER_07: Samson.
SPEAKER_01: Samson.
SPEAKER_01: Samson is actually the first one, and he breaks every single one of those, right?
SPEAKER_01: And when he breaks the last one by cutting his hair, he loses everything, right?
SPEAKER_01: But he was drinking wine, he touches the dead lion.
SPEAKER_01: You know, this is bad.
SPEAKER_01: Um, John the Baptist, right, who does not break the vows, and Samuel, actually, the prophet Samuel.
SPEAKER_01: So he's a vegetarian his whole life.
SPEAKER_01: That's important to hear.
SPEAKER_01: Essentially, the thing is, these people have made vows to God, and you are breaking their vows.
SPEAKER_01: It would be like taking a monk and making them watch pornography or something like that.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, just trying to think through an equivalent symbol, right?
SPEAKER_05: Nazarite, is that is that a place?
SPEAKER_05: Are they from a place?
SPEAKER_05: Or is it the term Nazarite?
SPEAKER_01: So it's interesting you mentioned that.
SPEAKER_01: So um uh Nazar in Hebrew means guardian, and so these are essentially guardians of true faith.
SPEAKER_01: They make a vow and they're they're you know, they hedge against it.
SPEAKER_01: Curiously enough, there's a village called Nazareth.
SPEAKER_01: And um Matthew raises this prophecy and applies it to Jesus, he'll be called a Nazarite.
SPEAKER_01: It means doesn't cut his hair and he drink wine and touch it, then but Matthew reinterprets it to say, no, they'll come from Nazareth.
SPEAKER_01: Matthew does something really interesting with prophecy, he's he's very flexible with it, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_01: And we'll talk about that later because it's it's throughout the New Testament.
SPEAKER_01: I grew up hearing all these prophecies are about Jesus, and actually it's really important to hear.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus is the resonance of the prophets without being a one-to-one correlation.
SPEAKER_01: They're not talking about Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: I'm convinced.
SPEAKER_01: They didn't have Jesus in mind, but Jesus fulfills what they were originally talking about.
SPEAKER_01: Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
SPEAKER_09: That I read, which is pretty, but they had Indians in World War II who went to the war because they had certain powers of, I don't know what it was, to know where the enemy was or whatever.
SPEAKER_09: And they could do it until the military made them cut their hair, and then they lost that there.
SPEAKER_04: It's very interesting you say that my uncle in India.
SPEAKER_04: In India.
SPEAKER_04: And the um the techniques uh they would use techniques during India, and they would go into and they would take their clothes off, and they would go into Japanese camps during the nighttime, and they would feel around, and if somebody had clothes on, they would kill them.
SPEAKER_04: Or if they killed somebody without clothes, they knew there was one that the other idioms.
SPEAKER_04: And he was there.
SPEAKER_01: Hair magic is an interesting thing though.
SPEAKER_01: It is helpful to know though, like the pictures of John the Baptist, if you've ever seen the icons, his hair is crazy.
SPEAKER_01: Like in the the Greek icon tradition, you know it's John the Baptist because nobody's got crazy hair like he does.
SPEAKER_01: But what we often don't quite get is I think the better image is of Hagrid from Harry Potter.
SPEAKER_01: So you gotta think, according to the Jewish law, there's five places on your face you can never cut the hair.
SPEAKER_01: Which is why you see the little Jewish boys have the payote and they curl them, right?
SPEAKER_01: And then Jewish men, my brother is one of those people, he has to shave because he's in the military, so that's allowed.
SPEAKER_01: But if you weren't in the military, he should have a beard.
SPEAKER_01: And it depends how orthodox you are, whether or not you can ever trim that thing.
SPEAKER_01: So, what you should imagine is people with big old beards.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, if you're ever wondering why Joseph's brothers don't recognize him in the Joseph story, it's because they haven't seen him without a beard until he was 12 last time they saw him without a beard.
SPEAKER_01: Egyptians shave their faces with razors and Hebrews don't.
SPEAKER_01: So they see their brother all grown up and he doesn't have his beard and they don't recognize him.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe that's more than you want to know.
SPEAKER_01: Sorry.
SPEAKER_09: I'm just wondering what the razors were like.
SPEAKER_08: What kind of razor?
SPEAKER_01: Obsidian.
unknown: Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_01: Obsidian.
SPEAKER_01: Flint knives.
SPEAKER_01: That's what they circumcise children with, too.
SPEAKER_01: Um drinking unjust wine.
SPEAKER_01: We got to read a story about that in uh last week, Naboth's Vineyard.
SPEAKER_01: Naboth has a vineyard, and and and Americans were a little bit different about this because we have things like eminent domain and fair prices, but in the Hebrew mindset, your identity essentially is this land that's been in your gener your helm for generations.
SPEAKER_01: So you can't lose your land or you lose your whole soul as a family.
SPEAKER_01: And it's this is especially true of wine, because as you probably all know, you can grow tomato in the summer, but if you're really going to make wine, the older the better, right?
SPEAKER_01: The king wants to buy Naboth's vineyard so he can grow bell peppers.
SPEAKER_01: But it's a vineyard, it's been in the family for generations.
SPEAKER_01: He's been growing the Zinfandel grape or whatever it is, right?
SPEAKER_01: It would be like going to Bordeaux and plowing it over so that you can grow beets.
SPEAKER_01: It it shows that the king does not understand anything about identity or about agriculture.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, again, particularly the value of Bordeaux vines is inestimable, right?
SPEAKER_01: Because they're a thousand years old.
SPEAKER_01: So this is part of the deal.
SPEAKER_01: When you hear that they're drinking unjust wine, don't just think, oh, they're going around grabbing up people's grapes.
SPEAKER_01: This is it, this image to taking people's property, taking people's family soul, and just consuming it.
SPEAKER_01: I don't know if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_01: This that happened a little bit with the collective, I mean collectivization is not quite right, but the capitalistic collectivization of farming in the United States that happened largely because of the Dust Bowl, right?
SPEAKER_01: But you went from more than half the population being farmers to fewer than five percent.
SPEAKER_01: And so you can read The Grapes of Wrath.
SPEAKER_01: Interesting title, The Grapes of Wrath, when we're talking about unjust wine.
SPEAKER_01: It's a loaded, it's a loaded bit there, right?
SPEAKER_01: Where people lost their entire identity and their plot and their homestead and their generationality.
SPEAKER_01: And that happened here.
SPEAKER_05: Mike, I mean I don't know how you interpret it exactly, but I mean that's what's happening in Israel right now.
SPEAKER_05: When the Israelis come in, they take a plot of land that's got all the trees on it that belong to a Palestinian family for years and years and years.
SPEAKER_01: Because all the trees can be 2,000 years old as well.
SPEAKER_05: But I I mean the question is who's got the right to have it?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: I know.
SPEAKER_01: Well, whoever has the guns is what we've decided.
SPEAKER_01: That's true.
SPEAKER_01: The other indictment we hear is that Israel's big problem is that they sell the needy for the price of a pair of sandals into slavery.
SPEAKER_01: And this is an interesting thing to think about.
SPEAKER_01: Human life is really cheap.
SPEAKER_01: You can do a whole lot when human life is really cheap.
SPEAKER_01: You can build pyramids, you can build um, you can build really famous canals, whether the Panama or the Suez, right?
SPEAKER_01: Because life is cheap.
SPEAKER_01: You can pay children to work in a sweatshop for a dollar an hour.
SPEAKER_01: I didn't think a lot has actually changed.
SPEAKER_01: We just are less aware of how cheap human life is in other places of the world.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it sneaks up on us.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: Um this is their big indictment.
SPEAKER_01: And the word, it's helpful to hear that um we use one of these words, righteousness, and righteousness is not a piety classification in the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: It's not about like, oh, you're righteous because you don't sin and you're sanctimonious and you know you wear hair shirts.
SPEAKER_01: Righteous really means just, equitable.
SPEAKER_01: Not just in the sense when somebody takes your stuff, you get even.
SPEAKER_01: That's called retributive justice.
SPEAKER_01: Uh righteousness is when you think about everybody has equal access to justice and power, and when an infraction happens, you don't look to get even, you look to move forward.
SPEAKER_01: So it's not about uh punishing people who steal a loaf of bread because they're starving.
SPEAKER_01: It's about creating systems where people can't eat.
SPEAKER_09: So they knew about righteousness before they be out of the world.
SPEAKER_01: We've always known what righteousness is, we've just never chose to live into it.
SPEAKER_09: Our system.
SPEAKER_09: They know.
SPEAKER_09: You would say, that's not fair.
SPEAKER_09: You gave him two, not me.
SPEAKER_09: They know what righteousness is.
SPEAKER_01: You know, and interestingly enough, they they don't, and this is an interesting thing.
SPEAKER_01: I've yes and no, right?
SPEAKER_01: Because um my son would always say, give me what you gave her, even at the age of 15.
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, But you want some crayons?
SPEAKER_01: You want to go to um, I don't know, Legoland?
SPEAKER_01: You'd rather do that than go whitewater rafting?
SPEAKER_01: They could be similar dollar amounts, but sometimes we get fixated on, I want what they get.
SPEAKER_01: And there's this other interesting thing, right?
SPEAKER_01: Having had two children, I do not love them the same.
SPEAKER_01: I absolutely love them, but it's expressed and feels very different.
SPEAKER_01: And not only am I not capable of doing it the same for them because they're different, I think it would be inequitable if I did.
SPEAKER_01: Because they're different.
SPEAKER_01: So I don't think there's a sameness to love because it's so relational.
SPEAKER_01: I don't know if that makes sense what I'm saying.
SPEAKER_01: It's important to have equity, but what really is equity, I think we always have to kind of try to figure out.
SPEAKER_01: Very fair.
SPEAKER_01: And they can't know how much you love them either, or how much they love you, and it can be often surprising.
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
SPEAKER_01: Or less enjoyment, you get less enjoyment from it.
SPEAKER_01: You know, I mean that's the interesting thing.
SPEAKER_02: I think it worked very hard to love a friend who is emotionally deserved.
SPEAKER_02: And he may impossible at times it felt like continue to work at loving.
SPEAKER_01: Which is what love is anyway, right?
SPEAKER_01: It's what we do, it's not how we feel.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, that was Amos 1 and 2.
SPEAKER_01: If I'm boring you to tears, you're gonna stop me, right?
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
SPEAKER_07: No.
SPEAKER_01: Um houses of ivory, uh, there apparently were ivory panels that were kind of laid like subway tiles, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_01: We know ivory is not going to build a home.
SPEAKER_01: That's crazy.
SPEAKER_01: But you're you're you're you're thinking about extravagant decorations, um complete uh luxury here.
SPEAKER_08: Well, they didn't lie on the ivory.
SPEAKER_08: I was curious for him to think about it.
SPEAKER_01: Think about cutting cutting ivory into strips and carving into it and then mounting the strips on a wall, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Um when he talks about the altars at Bethel being de-horned, um, it's helpful to know that every altar in the ancient world had horns on it.
SPEAKER_01: We don't know why.
SPEAKER_01: But they all have horns, and that's the strength of the altar.
SPEAKER_01: So if you were going to claim sanctuary, you grabbed the horns of the altar.
SPEAKER_01: If you weren't grabbing those, you could get killed.
SPEAKER_01: Sanctuary didn't work unless you had the power of the altar.
SPEAKER_01: That's the thing.
SPEAKER_01: When you cut that off, when he says the horns are going to get cut off, that means there's no power in those places and there will be nothing there, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_01: It's sacrilege to dehorn an altar.
SPEAKER_01: Well, I guess it depends anyway.
SPEAKER_01: In the evangelical world I grew up in, that's exactly the God we believed in.
SPEAKER_09: They believed in horns?
SPEAKER_01: But God's gonna come get you.
SPEAKER_09: That's what I'm saying.
SPEAKER_01: Oh well.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I guess the the discreet symbolism has changed, but I think the spirit remains.
SPEAKER_01: It's about placating an angry deity, essentially, or in a different one.
SPEAKER_01: Notice that Amos says this really interesting thing.
SPEAKER_01: Look, I've been good to you, you didn't come back to me, I beat you up, you didn't come back to me, so I'm gonna come meet you.
SPEAKER_01: Get ready.
SPEAKER_01: This is an interesting image.
SPEAKER_01: God says, gird up your loins, I'm coming to meet you.
SPEAKER_01: Since you wouldn't come to me, I'll come to you.
SPEAKER_01: But you're probably not gonna like what you did.
SPEAKER_01: And this is where we get the first time this word, the day of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: So the day of the Lord, in popular understanding, was when God made everything right for God's people.
SPEAKER_01: This is sort of like the rapture.
SPEAKER_01: And Amos says, You're looking forward to the day of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: No, no, no.
SPEAKER_01: The day of the Lord is when God opens up a can of whoop ass on you.
SPEAKER_01: Essentially that I had a professor who spoke at I Amic Pantameter.
SPEAKER_01: He'd gone to school in Scotland.
SPEAKER_01: He really did.
SPEAKER_01: Like he spoke rhythmically, it was beautiful, and that was his direct quote.
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, I almost dropped my pencil because he said that.
SPEAKER_01: But that's quite right.
SPEAKER_01: And so it's interesting to think one-to-one application.
SPEAKER_01: There's this group of evangelical Christians that's like, yay, the world's gonna end and God's gonna reward us.
SPEAKER_01: And to those people, Amos would say, you're not gonna like what you're gonna get.
SPEAKER_01: Be really careful about what you're expecting because God's going to come and meet you.
SPEAKER_01: Um I'm not quite sure it's true.
SPEAKER_01: I want you to know, but but notice what he's, I think, giving is a counter image to the one a popular expectation.
SPEAKER_01: You think God is very pleased with you, I'm telling you God isn't, because you're ignoring justice.
SPEAKER_01: I would say that's true for many evangelical Christians, I know, sorry.
SPEAKER_01: I don't know that Episcopalians are any different.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, people are people, but you know, um, we use different rhetoric anyway.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we get we get the plum line, we get that Amaziah, he's a paid prophet, right?
SPEAKER_01: That's his job.
SPEAKER_01: He says the land can't bear Amos's words.
SPEAKER_01: And that's important to hear because right now we tolerate all kinds of stupid speech.
SPEAKER_01: Sticks and stones will break my bones, words will never hurt me, we think the best kind of humor is sarcasm, but in the ancient world, words created reality.
SPEAKER_01: So if you said Assyria is coming to swallow this up, particularly with God's name behind it, it wasn't like, well, we'll see if that's true.
SPEAKER_01: It's almost like you're pushing the missile launch button when you say that.
SPEAKER_01: You're creating this reality.
SPEAKER_01: So Amaziah says, Listen, the land can't bear your speech.
SPEAKER_01: You need to be quiet because what you're saying, you could be creating this reality that you shouldn't be creating.
SPEAKER_01: He calls Amos a seer.
SPEAKER_01: Not a prophet, but a seer.
SPEAKER_01: And Amos says, Well, in fact, your wife will be a prostitute, and your sons will be slain, and you will be exiled in an unclean land.
SPEAKER_01: And we could think, well, that's really petty of him.
SPEAKER_01: That's what happened to everybody.
SPEAKER_01: When the Assyrians came, women were made prostitutes, young ones were killed, and adult men were exiled throughout the empire.
SPEAKER_01: I think what he's saying is, you won't escape the consequences either.
SPEAKER_01: You'll be like everybody else.
SPEAKER_01: One other just kind of go by here if it's okay.
SPEAKER_01: Um there's there's two things we don't always see in in Hebrew.
SPEAKER_01: Um, Hebrew poetry, especially in the Psalms, likes to use two devices that are kind of, we're blind to.
SPEAKER_01: The first is called parallelism, which is where a verse repeats itself.
SPEAKER_01: And if you notice when we read the Psalms on Sunday morning, there's like an asterisk that divides a verse in half.
SPEAKER_01: Most often, you read the first part to the asterisk, and then the next part is a repetition of that theme in different words.
SPEAKER_01: So it's called parallelism.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
SPEAKER_01: Both go together.
SPEAKER_01: They're actually telling you the same thing in different words, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_01: The other one that we definitely never see unless you read your footnotes is the use of a pun.
SPEAKER_01: And the most classic one comes from Isaiah.
SPEAKER_01: Isaiah says, God was looking for justice, mishpat, and only found iniquity, mitzpah.
SPEAKER_01: Mishpat mitzpah.
SPEAKER_01: They're really close, but they're very different.
SPEAKER_01: It's a pun that you can't see unless you look at Hebrew itself.
SPEAKER_01: And even then, it's not like funny, it's just there in the language.
SPEAKER_01: And Amos uses a pun when he says this bit about the summer fruit.
SPEAKER_01: It's a basket of summer fruits, and um, you'll even have a note, I believe, in your Bible, mine has one, chaots.
SPEAKER_01: So the word for fruit is kaets, and the end, ketz, has come upon Israel.
SPEAKER_01: Kates and ketz.
SPEAKER_01: So look, it's alike, everybody likes we're the fruit of the Lord, you're the end, is sort of the deal.
SPEAKER_01: Again, it's it's challenging their own image, like you're overripe and rotten, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_01: I want to throw out one interesting idea.
SPEAKER_01: A lot of the times um it depends on the righteousness of the king, what happens to the nation, right?
SPEAKER_01: And and I want you to think through that um I'm not even sure that's accurate, because probably the most pious president we've had in a long time was Jimmy Carter, who was absolutely ineffective as a president.
SPEAKER_01: And I'm not, I mean, things are always what they are, right?
SPEAKER_01: But Jimmy Carter's piety did not solve the gas crisis or release the Iranian hostages.
SPEAKER_01: Did not.
SPEAKER_01: So it's an interesting thing to think.
SPEAKER_01: Do pious leaders make pious people?
SPEAKER_01: Because I I think we get the idea that they do.
SPEAKER_04: In verse 78, God swears against the arrogance of Jacob.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so this is an important distinguisher.
SPEAKER_01: He's speaking to the nation of Israel.
SPEAKER_01: The nation of Israel called themselves Jacob.
SPEAKER_01: The people in Judah called them Israel.
SPEAKER_01: So you actually sort of can figure out who's talking to whom by which word is used.
SPEAKER_04: Can we do that again?
SPEAKER_04: Israel call themselves Jacob?
SPEAKER_01: That's it.
SPEAKER_05: Can I ask a question going back?
SPEAKER_05: Was it Jacob that God said you are now going to be called Israel?
SPEAKER_05: Yes.
SPEAKER_05: That's why you have this linkage.
SPEAKER_01: And it's a weirdness because Israel means like thief.
SPEAKER_01: No, Jacob means thief.
SPEAKER_01: Israel means tries to steal from God.
SPEAKER_01: Struggles against God is not really quite right.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, wrestles against God with the sins to try to take away.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, Jacob really means heel grabber, which is like mattress salesman or used car salesman or telemarketer.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's sort of like it's an idiom for that.
SPEAKER_01: The only prophet we have from Israel is Hosea.
SPEAKER_01: So Hosea's a northerner riding to northerners, he's the only one riding in the northern style.
SPEAKER_01: Amos is from Judah.
SPEAKER_01: He's a southerner writing about northerners or to them, but in southern style, because he's a southerner.
SPEAKER_01: The only voice of the North that gets represented is Hosea.
SPEAKER_01: And we'll be reading that next week and we'll be to see if you perceive it to be different.
SPEAKER_01: Linguistically, it is.
SPEAKER_01: It's got different vocabulary and different syntax.
SPEAKER_01: It'd be sort of like a New Englander versus a deep southerner, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_01: We've come to the juicy parts now.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes religious people give food baskets to the poor, but create social structures that oppress them.
SPEAKER_01: What are some economic devices that steal from the poor?
SPEAKER_01: Healthcare seems to be a tough one.
SPEAKER_05: Payday loans.
SPEAKER_05: One of the thoughts that I had was uh these grocery deserts in poor neighborhoods were they forced to go to uh like uh gas stations or gas station to to buy food.
SPEAKER_05: Check cashing.
SPEAKER_01: Check cash.
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna tell you, I think inheritance is one.
SPEAKER_01: If I can tell you a story in California, if your property is worth$20,000 or more dollars, which means if you own anything in California, if you die with a will, it goes to probate court, and the average probate court cost is$35,000.
SPEAKER_01: That's the average cost.
SPEAKER_05: If you have a will?
SPEAKER_01: If you have a will.
SPEAKER_01: If you have a trust, it can pass directly to your descendants and stays on probate.
SPEAKER_01: How do you get a trust?
SPEAKER_01: You spend$1,500 with an attorney.
SPEAKER_01: Can poor people do that?
SPEAKER_01: Do poor people even know to do that?
SPEAKER_01: To even have a will.
SPEAKER_01: Inheritance tax is one thing when you own five million dollars, and it's another when you own fifty thousand dollars.
SPEAKER_01: It's an interesting thing to think about, right?
SPEAKER_01: We want to be fair to everybody so we tax everybody equally.
SPEAKER_01: 40%.
SPEAKER_01: Is it fair?
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I these are the kinds of things I think that are really, really interesting to think about.
SPEAKER_01: Human life is really cheap.
SPEAKER_01: Well, my dad's a Vietnam veteran, and it wasn't just the VA, it was everybody else in the country when he came back.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, how did that happen?
SPEAKER_09: Somebody walked their minds or something.
SPEAKER_01: Well, I will tell you, it's an interesting thing about the military.
SPEAKER_01: The DOD recently did a study that said people have more PTSD than ever.
SPEAKER_01: And where they concluded actually is that not just coming out, people have more PTSD going in than they've ever had before.
SPEAKER_01: And those people always have it when they come out, in addition to other folks, because when you're poor, your options are the military.
SPEAKER_01: It's an interesting thing, right?
SPEAKER_05: I don't know who said this, I've said it before.
SPEAKER_05: Um, but at least during the American Civil War, it used to be said that war uh the Civil War is a rich man's war but a poor man's fight.
SPEAKER_01: Isn't that almost always the case?
SPEAKER_01: Human life is really cheap.
SPEAKER_01: In war.
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01: And there's this interesting thing too where, and maybe it's because we feel like we can't affect the difference, but essentially we go along with it.
SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, it's an interesting thing, right?
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I wonder what would happen if enough people said we refuse to accept hate speech from the American president in a meaningful way.
SPEAKER_01: What we do is we complain about it, and maybe it's because we don't know what to do.
SPEAKER_01: Could be.
SPEAKER_01: But in some ways, we haven't done anything about it.
SPEAKER_01: Now, I didn't mean the guy's a bad guy, and by the way, I would say this on both candidates when they were running, it was really dismal because I looked at the way they spoke to one another, and I absolutely would have punished my daughter for talking like that about anybody.
SPEAKER_01: But these people wanted to be, again, I'm talking about both sides.
SPEAKER_01: We've accepted hate speech from our political leaders.
SPEAKER_02: And when we don't speak up against whatever the injustice is, they get to keep doing it.
SPEAKER_02: They get to keep doing it.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, they get to do it with our endorsement.
unknown: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Because why should they change anything when they don't have to?
SPEAKER_03: The press is the people that is bad, and that's the people that are supposed to be remote in our way.
SPEAKER_01: And we consume it.
SPEAKER_03: And we consume it, and we agree with it.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's like I watch box, I watch CNN, but this is supposed to be our book.
unknown: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: And it's laden, it's laden with degradation.
SPEAKER_01: Again, on every side.
SPEAKER_03: On every every part of society nearly of doing that.
SPEAKER_01: It's it's humor.
SPEAKER_01: It's become our number one source of entertainment.
SPEAKER_01: Sarcasm and mockery, sardanism, and we consume it.
SPEAKER_01: And what does it do to I I think it steals from poor people.
SPEAKER_01: I just I want to say that.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: At the same time, almost everything I do in my life is in one of those circles.
SPEAKER_01: The clothes I wear, the fuel efficient car that I drive relies on people in Africa mining a particular kind of metal at slave wage labor.
SPEAKER_01: I don't know the solution to it.
SPEAKER_09: What kind of car do you drive?
SPEAKER_01: A Toyota Prius.
SPEAKER_01: It's very fuel efficient.
SPEAKER_09: How does that relate to African slave labor?
SPEAKER_01: Oh, they we pay people like a dollar a day to go down in a mine and get the battery.
SPEAKER_05: The batteries?
SPEAKER_01: The material from the batteries only available in Africa.
SPEAKER_01: It works great.
SPEAKER_09: I drive a diesel.
SPEAKER_09: Diesels involves less of it.
SPEAKER_09: It's less um refined fuel.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, gas itself is a nightmare.
SPEAKER_01: You know, it just it's a nightmare.
SPEAKER_09: Well, how many miles of gallon do you fit?
SPEAKER_01: 50.
unknown: 50?
SPEAKER_09: I do too on the freeway.
SPEAKER_01: I get the same on the freeway as I get on the regular road.
SPEAKER_02: Can we drill down a little bit from our outrage of the powers that be and how they talk and how they treat people?
SPEAKER_02: Drill down from systems to one-on-one relationships.
SPEAKER_01: I think we have to do both.
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
SPEAKER_01: And at the end of the day, we accept it.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: Unless we're willing to get out of our comfort zone.
SPEAKER_01: It's a lot of discomfort.
SPEAKER_02: It's a lot of discomfort.
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to say something really unpopular now, and I only have five minutes, and I shouldn't do this.
SPEAKER_01: And I want you to take a deep breath before I say it.
SPEAKER_01: Poor people are really hard to help.
SPEAKER_01: Chronically poor people are really hard to help.
SPEAKER_01: And I think it's because it does something to you to be chronically poor.
SPEAKER_01: I've been situationally of less means, but I was educated.
SPEAKER_01: And I was told you can do stuff, you know.
SPEAKER_01: And I knew when I went to claim my my uh wrongful termination insurance that I deserved it.
SPEAKER_01: And I should get it.
SPEAKER_01: And I knew when my son's Medicaid was turned off that I was good to demand it got turned back on, and I had not been beaten down by the Medicaid office over and over and over again.
SPEAKER_01: And what do you know?
SPEAKER_01: I got what I wanted.
SPEAKER_01: Even recently, I had somebody at a school who was getting a full tuition scholarship.
SPEAKER_01: The public school was a nightmare and would have been so terrible for their kid, but they weren't sure they wanted to drive the kid to school anymore.
SPEAKER_01: Now they don't have a job to distract them.
SPEAKER_01: They have some money that allows them to have gas in a car, but they just weren't sure they wanted to drive every day.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: The extra 15 minutes.
SPEAKER_01: And it was nerf-wracking for me to try to keep this child in the only place that was going to be good for them because 20 minutes was inconvenient.
SPEAKER_01: Um I'm not saying anything bad.
SPEAKER_01: I'm saying this I think is part of our frustration.
SPEAKER_01: USA gives money to a bunch of countries, and a lot of times it gets horribly misappropriated because the people in positions, well, they buy whatever they want with it.
SPEAKER_01: And having meaningful long-term relationships is very frustrating, honestly, for us, because we want quick results and we want outcomes.
SPEAKER_01: And I don't think poverty is like just a single injection.
SPEAKER_01: I think it's like a chronic illness of the soul.
SPEAKER_01: And so I'm not speaking against poor people, I'm saying it's so hard to affect the meaningful long-term relational change that we want.
SPEAKER_01: And I I want to say I see a lot of volunteers get burned out because we're wanting to do something quickly and effectively, and we don't know why people don't take the things we give and use them like we would use them.
SPEAKER_02: I'm wondering if we could change our definition of help instead of thinking that we have to change the poverty mentality.
SPEAKER_02: And the mentality is what you're talking about, part of what you're talking about.
SPEAKER_02: If we could look in terms of relating one-on-one in a meaningful way, that provides dignity and courage to an individual to keep trying.
SPEAKER_02: And I understand how hard it is.
SPEAKER_02: It's scary to work with people we don't relate to.
SPEAKER_07: Yes.
SPEAKER_02: But if we could work on overcoming that fear, every I work with the homies.
SPEAKER_07: Yes.
SPEAKER_02: And they're at the bottom of the poverty list.
SPEAKER_02: They're below the poverty list.
SPEAKER_02: And when I started working with them, I was afraid.
SPEAKER_02: I literally would stand on the wall.
SPEAKER_02: The first time I went, I stood with my back to the wall because I was afraid.
SPEAKER_02: And I went home and I said, I'm not doing that anymore.
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
SPEAKER_02: But the next week I went back and I still stood on a wall, but I was more into I tried to focus on individuals and listen.
SPEAKER_02: The next week I stood between the wall and the table.
SPEAKER_02: The tables.
SPEAKER_02: And then the next week I moved to the tables and stood at the tables.
SPEAKER_02: Then a few more weeks I could sit at the tables with them.
SPEAKER_02: So I systematically exposed myself to something I was afraid of.
SPEAKER_02: Now I know them by name.
SPEAKER_02: They know me, I know their history, I know their pathology, I know their mental illness.
SPEAKER_02: And so it's the one on one now when I work with them.
SPEAKER_02: That gives them dignity because I hear them, I listen to them, I give them time.
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
SPEAKER_02: And it's it is so rewarding.
SPEAKER_02: And I think it's worth every bit of effort and fear I had.
SPEAKER_01: I think part of it is our mentality change.
SPEAKER_01: I I had a really good speaker who told me that there's this big difference between us giving aid and us accompanying people.
SPEAKER_07: Yes.
SPEAKER_01: So in his definition, accompaniment was and I said, I'll walk with you until you tell me to quit.
SPEAKER_01: Aid is I'll walk with you till I'm done.
SPEAKER_01: And he was a physician in Haiti, and Haiti didn't have a CT scan or a CAT scan or an MRI because they were too poor.
SPEAKER_01: So he worked this up with Harvard.
SPEAKER_01: This was his project to get lab to get that kind of done long distance with Miami and ship back.
SPEAKER_01: And he sort of has this interesting mentality, which is we don't live in three worlds, we live in one world, right?
SPEAKER_01: And people are as deserving in one world of medical care as they are in the rest of the world.
SPEAKER_01: And he found that in Haiti, doctors would diagnose people and give them the medications they need, but then people wouldn't take them, or they couldn't get to the clinic to come back.
SPEAKER_01: So he said, okay, instead of poo-pooing these people, how about we get nurses to bring them their medications or to bring them to clinics?
SPEAKER_01: And it it's actually made really substantive change, but it's a lot of work.
SPEAKER_01: And it's frustrating because we might need less investment ourselves.
SPEAKER_02: And it's discouraging.
SPEAKER_02: It's discouraging.
SPEAKER_02: It doesn't happen quickly.
SPEAKER_02: Sometimes it doesn't happen at all.
SPEAKER_01: And I and I wonder if that's part of the question: when does our worship become empty ritual rather than obedience to God?
SPEAKER_01: Um if if I weren't paid to do this job, I wouldn't come back every day.
SPEAKER_01: And in some ways, maybe that's the difference between work and pleasure or vocation, and that word obedience starts to become interesting, right?
SPEAKER_01: Do I show up when I don't feel like it?
SPEAKER_01: You know, we talked about the big world problems, and this guy, Paul Farmer, says, you know, because you know something's a problem doesn't mean you have to solve it, as if I could.
SPEAKER_01: But it is important to say that's a problem and it needs to be solved.
SPEAKER_01: And is there any connections I can help make to solve that problem?
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's a different way to think about obedience and love and accompaniment and oh, look, there's a lot of kind of starving people, I can't fix that.
SPEAKER_01: Well, you can't, but it's a problem.
SPEAKER_01: And perhaps we can be part of the solution.
SPEAKER_07: Perhaps.
SPEAKER_01: There's so many areas, how do you pick one?
SPEAKER_01: And I think that the the there's a difference between picking one and picking none.
SPEAKER_01: And maybe that's the critical part, is that we we do follow our heart at least once.
SPEAKER_05: This may not be something we can even talk about at this point.
SPEAKER_05: But if you look at, you know, we read Deuteronomy or parts of Deuteronomy, and then basically, you know, sort of towards the end of the message is you know, I've given you a covenant follower.
SPEAKER_05: Joe basically says, you guys aren't following the covenant.
SPEAKER_05: Something's gonna happen.
SPEAKER_05: Um this is the really the Old Testament, this is what the the the um Hebrews or the Jews today um are living their life by, especially the Orthodox, right?
SPEAKER_05: Well, they try to.
SPEAKER_01: That's a different discussion, I think.
SPEAKER_05: Okay, well, the point I'm trying to make is this are there other religions that have something similar where where they have they have you might call them prophets that have said the same thing about like the Muslims.
SPEAKER_05: Is there a Iman who said, you're not following whatever, my that covenant, and I'm going to you're going to suffer for it.
SPEAKER_01: Repentance seems to be a universal theme, as does love your neighbor as you love yourself.
SPEAKER_01: Those those phrases seem to exist in every world religion, quite honestly.
SPEAKER_09: Muslims?
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
SPEAKER_09: Absolutely.
SPEAKER_09: They seem to be media people.
SPEAKER_01: Well, we Yeah, I I think that's the story, the the exciting stories that make the media, that's what we hear.
SPEAKER_01: We hear them because the media is supposed to be exciting.
SPEAKER_01: Um not in the Quran.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I guess it depends.
SPEAKER_01: The truth is, you can be hateful and read the Bible and use it to hate people.
SPEAKER_01: Or you can be open and say, how can life be heightened?
SPEAKER_01: How can I live more deeply and joyfully?
SPEAKER_01: So I would tell you that I think I have more in common with um reformed Jews and with um I this is gonna sound strange when I say this, but open-minded Muslims than I have with evangelical Christians.
SPEAKER_01: And I think it's because there's a mentality, and the question is, what do we do with these words?
SPEAKER_01: Do we use them to back who we are, or do we hear a call to change and to grow?
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's actually the whole point of the prophets.
SPEAKER_01: Do we say, yeah, that's right, God is gonna get you, or okay.
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna give this another try.
SPEAKER_01: Um I have to call it for today because the symphony's here.
SPEAKER_01: Uh the symphony's here in uh in the sanctuary.
SPEAKER_01: Please.