Sunday Eucharist, installation weekend of the Very Rev. Winnie Varghese, Dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, NYC

Proper 21 RCL Amos 8:4-7; Psalm 113; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13

I would like to thank and bless this congregation for calling my dear friend the Very Reverend Sibling Winnie Varghese to be your 12^th Dean. And I would like to thank the Dean of the cathedral for inviting me to preach this first Eucharist after the installation. Let us pray:

Let it be with your woman-servant
according to your word.
With these words
the word of God was formed in the woman of God.
On this day, as on that day,
let your word come forth again. Amen.

Woe unto you! Woe! Woe? That’s not exactly something we say anymore. And nearly unrecognizable to folk who have not come up dining on a steady diet of ancient Israelite prophets and prophecy. But synonyms for woe are woefully inadequate. Yet there is something about it, something about the sound of it that I asked the Very Rev. Winnie Varghese to allow me to use the unrevised standard version, just this one time.

In hip-hop, serving often as contemporary prophetic outcry, there is an equivalent, right here at home; here, in the state that birthed the explosion of hip-hop 50 years ago: Check yourself before you wreck yourself. Often abbreviated “check yourself,” the phrase is a cautionary warning with a harder edge than, “you in danger girl.” Like all good dictionaries, the Urban Dictionary provides examples of how the phrase is used in context, to facilitate our understanding:

I’m going out with a girl who is married. Fool, you better check yourself before you wreck yourself.

I done seen my girl lovin’ up on another man. You already know I’m fin’ta to burn all her shoes. Hold on big dog, you better check yourself before you wreck yourself.

That is the word of Amos, as it is styled, at the beginning of this book. His literary agent editor tells us everything we need to know about the timing, location and context of his rhymes and his lines. Context matters for, a text without a context is a pretext. The book begins by describing it as “the words of Amos,” thus identifying him as poet, prophet and publishing author. In addition to theological labor, in Amos we find a man doing the kind of agricultural labor that keeps others fed and makes yet others wealthy off of the sweat of his brow, the bend of his back and the calluses on his dirt encrusted feet in what is now the settler violence riddled West Bank, being turned into the kind of open air prison that Gaza was before its ruin, by the closure of the only independent crossing out of the territory where occupation and annexation seek to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Amos is a bi-vocational prophet living in a divided nation where political and religious differences erupted into a bloody civil war with consequences that crashed down on the heads of their children and their children’s children and their children’s children’s children for generations untold.

Amos lived in one part of the disunited states but prophesied over the whole and for that matter, the whole world. In the first chapter, Amos preaches a sermon that sweeps like a fisherwoman’s net across the world, prophesying against cities in what are now Syria and Jordan and Lebanon and Israel and Palestine. This sermon, like that sermon, crosses borders God does not recognize, speaking a word to folk living on both sides of the political divide: Check yourself before you wreck yourself.

Woe to you who are comfortable. Check yourself. Woe to you who feel secure. Check yourself. Woe to you who recline in luxury. Check yourself. Woe to you who eat well and drink better. Check yourself. Woe to you who squander your artistic gifts. Check yourself. Woe to you who are self-indulgent. Check yourself. Woe to you who have time for all of these things but are not grieved over the near annihilation of an entire people. Woe unto you! You better check yourself before you wreck yourself. For you will be the first to feel the boot of empire on your neck and and although it does not look like it now, one day the party will be over. You better check yourself before you wreck yourself.

But perhaps they thought the party would never be over, the ruling class would never be forced out of office, the shekel market would never dip that low, the Assyrians would never come their way. The elite of Judah survived the fracturing of the nation, and they survived well because the palace and temple industrial complexes fed them the tithes and taxes of the people who actually worked the land, grew the food, kept the flocks and fished the seas. They were living in comfort the likes of which they could not see the end.

And the prophet cried, “Woe!” Check yourself. Amos established, in that first outing, that his prophetic burden, concern and message were for folk beyond what was otherwise his immediate circle; it was for the “they not like us” folk every bit as much as it was for the “it’s our turn now” folk. It was for folk who were not in his ethnic nationalist group. It was for folk who had different religious and cultural practices and spoke different languages. Because none of those borders or distinctions matter to the God who spoke to and through Amos. And, as a living word infused with and animated by the Spirit of God, these words of that Amos prophesied to the ancient Israelites speak today, to the descendants of his people and they speak to we who have received them as a shared inheritance.

These words speak to those who hoard obscene amounts of wealth, heaped up in the digital treasuries of this very city, this nation and around the world. They speak to those who see in depraved, decadent and dissolute political and media darlings imitable ethical and moral standards as in the portion of the first verse excluded by the lectionary butchers. These words speak to those who party while the world burns around them, while children starve around them – in the most prosperous nation on earth – and, while other children in a nation halfway around the world are intentionally starved to death and crushed to death by engines of war built and funded by treasuries that have no coin for vaccines, science or education. They speak to those who force others onto reservations and Bantustans; they speak to those who force families into deportation and concentration camps, taking and, frequently losing, their children to punish them for being, for being in the land in which, often, they and their ancestors had been before the newcomers came with their claim, written in blood in the Name of God. These words speak to those who strip the right to bodily autonomy from women and transfolk, while simultaneously trying to erase transfolk from public spaces and from existence itself. These words cry, “Woe!” Check yourself.

But most especially, they cry, Woe to you who are not grieved over the ruin, the shattering, of Joseph. Joseph, those African Israelites born from the womb of Asenath the Egyptian. A reminder, the proclivities of the patriarchs mean there was no such thing as a “pure” Israelite. Joseph, code for Manasseh and Ephraim and thus code for northern Israel; Joseph, the ones who voted the other way when there was a choice between cruel corruption and competence. And when the would be dictator and his disciples put the choice in religious terms, the North broke away rather than be governed by such an insecure man.

But now they were in trouble. The Assyrians were on the way for larger part of the land after the split and its exploitable resources belonged to Israel, to Joseph. And the Judean elite danced on the graves of Joseph not knowing that a Babylonian boot was coming for their necks too. Woe to you who are not grieved over the ruin, the shattering, of Joseph. Check yourself before you wreck yourself. For there is a wrecking ball coming for you.

What if we are the wrecking ball? What if we have wrecked someone else’s world? What if we have stood by and watched as someone else’s Joseph was wrecked? What if we have funded and provided arms to facilitate and perpetuate the wreckage of some other Joseph’s land and home, the wreckage of some other Joseph’s child sized bodies, the wreckage of entire city blocks, the wreckage of hospitals, mosques, churches, schools, refugee camps? The prophet declares: Therefore they shall now be the first to go into exile, and the revelry of the loungers shall pass away.

But that’s not what we’re seeing today. The party goers are doing just fine. It’s the rest of us who are living in exile, a Babylon created just for us within the borders of what is now our land due to our nefarious history. But rather than watching the corrupt and the cruel whose mouths vomit vitriol and violence get what is coming to them as promised by the prophet, we are seeing our vulnerable neighbors, sometimes the poorest of the poor, who labor in the fields like Amos, being snatched up and sent into exile. A reminder that prophecy cannot be reduced so simply to prediction.

Amos doesn’t offer the possibility of repentance in our lesson and for Jesus the repentance of the rich man who would be right at home in Amos’s congregation comes too late. Jesus has a hard word to those who have not changed since the days of Amos. For the selfish and self-absorbed, Jesus offers only agonizing separation from God in the world to come. One day it will be too late to cry out. We as a nation have already seen the consequences of letting things against which we should cry out go by without comment or critique. We have seen what happens when silence communicates consent. “Never again” has been yet again and again and again. Some of us have sat in churches where the words “Gaza” and “immigrant” and “trans” have not been heard over the course of the last two years, where the prophetic voice of the church is silent, inside and outside of the church.

Still the prophet’s “Woe!” echoes across time, but joined by far too few voices. Amos is not a miracle working prophet. To follow in his steps and stand in his tradition doesn’t require super powers. It requires opening your mouth and saying “Woe!” to the the predatory exploitation and state sponsored violence against the poor, the immigrant, the unjustly prosecuted, those denied housing, health insurance and medical treatment; against the persecution of trans folk and the intentional starvation of the children of Gaza and, not letting them go unremarked and uncondemned. Open your mouth and cry “Woe!” Cry out from the wreckage. Let your voice be heard. And let those with ears hear, hear and heed. Open your mouth and say “Woe!”

And what if we are the ones who are wrecked? What if we are not the wrecking ball but, living among the wreckage? Is there a word from the God of Amos and Jesus other than wait? Wait for them to get theirs? Wait for God to show up? What are we to do in the midst of the wreckage of our lives and our world? Cry out with Amos and cry out with the psalmist who knows that with God all things are possible, including the reversal of the wreckage snowballing past Amos. The psalmist cries out:

5 Blessed are these for whom the God of Rebekah’s line is their help…
7 Bringer of justice to the oppressed,
bringer of bread to the hungry.
8 The Compassionate God sets the prisoners free,
the All-Seeing God opens the eyes of the blind,
the Just God lifts up those who are bowed down…
the Mother of All cares for the stranger,
orphan and widow she bears up,
but the way of the wicked she confounds.

Those who are crushed by ancient oppressions like poverty and, newer oppressions like transphobia, these are the blessed ones for whom the God of Rebekah’s line is their hope and help.

Waiting is hard. But I come from a waiting people who understand that sometimes the scope of God’s faithfulness is measured in centuries if not millennia. And we also understand that the cost of that waiting is a butchers bill paid by those who can very least afford it. And still we say God is faithful, during the wrecking and the crushing and, with us in the midst of the wreckage. God is faithful. We cry “Woe!” because there is a God and she is faithful. And for that we say hallelujah and amen even as we cry “Woe!”

In the Name of God: Life, Liberator and Love. Amen.