{"id":3292,"date":"2022-01-16T11:00:28","date_gmt":"2022-01-16T16:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=3292"},"modified":"2022-01-16T11:38:37","modified_gmt":"2022-01-16T16:38:37","slug":"a-famine-of-the-word","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2022\/01\/16\/a-famine-of-the-word\/","title":{"rendered":"A Famine of the Word?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Click here to hear the full service<\/a><\/p>\n

Amos 8: 7-12<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to hear just the sermon<\/a><\/p>\n

Introduction<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

One shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. (2 Kings 1:8, Matt. 4:4).\u00a0 You shall not live by bread alone.<\/p>\n

Not by bread, alone, but by the word\u2026<\/p>\n

We do not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.<\/p>\n

A long time ago, now, an Irishman wrote his first best seller. Frank McCourt\u2019s lovely bildungsroman<\/em>, his coming of age novel, Angela\u2019s Ashes, ends with the young boy escaping his past, escaping his family of origin, escaping the biology that threatens always to become full destiny, and feeding himself.\u00a0 He is so hungry that he finds trashed newspapers in which the daily fish and chips have been wrapped, and he licks the papers clean of scraps and bits and crumbs and oil, until the words on the paper fill his mouth.\u00a0 His whole book is about his deliverance, how he learned to live by reading, how he learned to love through words\u2026 how he learned to live by reading, how he learned to love through words.<\/p>\n

Not by bread alone\u2026<\/p>\n

The ancients knew this.\u00a0 An education is in part the freedom to travel beyond the confines of the 21st<\/sup> century.\u00a0 Our Holy Scripture, read Sunday by Sunday at Marsh Chapel, is a part of that liberation, that freedom, that freeing of the mind.\u00a0 The books of the prophets, from Hosea to Malachi, and from Isaiah to Daniel, are part of the spiritual road map, the religious diet for the long journey of, toward, in, by and through faith.\u00a0 Amos fiercely predicts that all manner of calamity will befall his 8th<\/sup> century BC countrymen.\u00a0 He saves the most horrific for last.\u00a0 There will come a time, he forecasts, given human wayward habits, given that so many so often are willing to live a lie (this is sin, living a lie), even A BIG LIE, when there will be\u2026no word.\u00a0 After which, as Jesus so often said, it is too late. There does come a time sometimes in time when it is too late. Famine was the great scourge of antiquity, feared as today we fear nuclear holocaust.\u00a0 Said Amos, famine is terrible, but\u2026there is something worse.\u00a0 A holocaust of the word, a famine of the word. \u00a0When there is no word, no truth, no communication, no consort, no connection.<\/p>\n

Are we living in such a time? \u00a0Today?\u00a0 Has a famine of the word befallen us?\u00a0 A fit question for the memory of Martin Luther King, is it not?<\/p>\n

A Time of Famine Today?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Has a famine of the word overtaken us?\u00a0\u00a0 A few hours spent exploring the cyber space might make you think so.\u00a0 And yet, it must be added, there are treasures too there too.<\/p>\n

Has a famine of the word overtaken us?\u00a0 The great hopes with which television writing began, in the 1950\u2019s, has given way to waste, a beautifully bedazzling wasteland.\u00a0 And yet, there are exceptions, children of Rod Serling we might say, still found in the magic box.\u00a0 You enter a new dimension, not of sight or of sound, but of mind and imagination.<\/p>\n

Has a famine of the word overtaken us?\u00a0 Look out at the internet, a sprawling universe of chat, governed by e-mail, and its second cousins.\u00a0 E-mail:\u00a0 immediate, global, indelible, irretrievable, reactive.\u00a0 One medium of choice today.\u00a0 And yet there are exceptions.\u00a0 A carefully composed, thoughtful e-letter, kind and honest, personal and self-disclosive, sent over the waves after attentive editing.\u00a0 A joyful e-note from Europe or Texas or Canada.\u00a0 Or Dublin.<\/p>\n

Has a famine of the word overtaken us?\u00a0 I found cleaning out my wallet the other day that my public library card was still there. The human being, to be human, needs space and time for being.\u00a0 Otherwise, we become human doings, not human beings.\u00a0 For this reason, God made deep winter.\u00a0 For this reason, of the making of books there is no end.<\/p>\n

Has a famine of the word overtaken us?\u00a0 Listen to our political and cultural discourse.\u00a0 Twenty years ago, nearly, we were led to war on the argument that prudence dictated immediate action.\u00a0 So, we could act preemptively–though this was not our custom, unilaterally\u2014though this was not our desire, imperially\u2014though this was not our heritage, unforeseeably–though this was not our preference.\u00a0 A Christian country could be led to prosecute a post-Christian war, in 2003.\u00a0 This, because of the fear of weapons of mass destruction.\u00a0 But\u2026where were they?\u00a0 People know about mistakes, and thus about contrition, compunction, apology, learning. But correction takes compunction. He now of blessed memory, Bishop Desmond Tutu, could teach us about truth and about reconciliation. But truth needs saying, doesn\u2019t it?\u00a0 Or are we beyond telling the truth?<\/p>\n

Has a famine of the word overtaken us?\u00a0 Someone should right a diary of our daily talk, like Victor Klemperer did in Germany from 1933\u20141945.\u00a0 What would such a diary record?\u00a0 What is the character of our daily conversation, to the extent we have time for it?\u00a0 How well do we listen?\u00a0 How carefully do we remember?\u00a0 How insightfully do we respond?\u00a0 How lovingly do we visit?\u00a0 Do we visit?<\/p>\n

Has a famine of the word, that prospect in Holy Writ, in ancient Scripture, in the dusty book of the prophet, has it come upon us? Think back one year and one week.<\/p>\n

There are some weeks when good news seems hard to come by, and (that) week (was) one such.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

Coming into (that) week already we faced challenges aplenty.\u00a0 A climate reeling out of control.\u00a0 A pandemic claiming (at that time) 350,000 lives.\u00a0 A political culture, a culture cooked politics, for politics is ever downstream from culture, putting people at daggers drawn. \u00a0A community of communities seeing, in full, for the first full time it may be, the ravages and damages of racial bias, hatred, and prejudice. \u00a0And pain, the pain of every day.\u00a0 And then, January 6, 2021. Insurrection with presidential incitement. <\/em><\/p>\n

For the rest of history, for the rest of our lives, we shall have to live with, and attempt by faith to live down, both to live with and to live down, such utter calumny, such tragic, needless, heedless yet revelatory disaster.\u00a0 It (was) an apocalyptic\u2014a revelatory\u2014moment, hundreds wrecking the capitol\u2026One said, \u2018this is like 9\/11, except we did this to ourselves\u2019.<\/em><\/p>\n

(RAH, 1\/7\/21, (slightly amended)). \u00a0More on this another week.<\/p>\n

Listening for A Prophetic Word Today<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Amos spoke 800 years before the birth of Christ.\u00a0 He mourned the bitter loss of an only son, before that phrase would trigger theological reflection, as it does for us.\u00a0 He foretold a darkness at noon before that phrase titled an account of Stalin\u2019s purge.\u00a0 He spoke of songs becoming laments before the poetry of Robert Pinsky subsequent to 9\/11. \u00a0Amos like John the Baptist comes before Jesus the Christ.\u00a0 Amos\u2019s prophecy about a famine of the word may fit most or some of our current experience.\u00a0 I wager it fits more than we care readily to admit.\u00a0 But this is not the last word.<\/p>\n

We trust our life and future to Jesus Christ (repeat).\u00a0 It is his word, finally, that carries us, and his role as Prophet that means most for us.\u00a0 In him, the voice of the prophet continues, even in a word famine, to speak to us.<\/p>\n

The other cold day I noticed the temperature.\u00a0 \u20132 degrees Fahrenheit.\u00a0 Here is a strange reality.\u00a0 There are great gulfs crossed between gas to liquid and liquid to solid.\u00a0 But those gulfs are numerically unheralded.\u00a0 They are not know by great numbers like 100 degrees or 0 degrees.\u00a0 No, they are found out on the arithmetical periphery, in forgotten minor numbers like 32 and 212.\u00a0 Celsius is so much more orderly.\u00a0 But Fahrenheit is like prophecy.\u00a0 You find the word spoken in forgotten places (repeat).\u00a0 With Amos, in a little hamlet of Tekoa.\u00a0 With Jesus, up on the lakeshore.\u00a0 With Wesley, in coal mines.\u00a0 With King, in the black church.<\/p>\n

The prophet gives voice to silent agony.\u00a0 This is what Amos did, however unsuccessfully, for his people, smitten by a word famine.<\/p>\n

The prophet gives voice to silent agony.\u00a0 Reinhold Niebuhr did so over a long life-time of restrained, earnest engagement with life. This paragraph of Niebuhr\u2019s abides in memory: \u201cNothing worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope.\u00a0 Nothing that is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith.\u00a0 Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we must be saved by love.\u201d (Sifton 349)<\/p>\n

The prophet gives voice to silent agony.\u00a0 So said Abraham Heschel, as he and Niebuhr, then older men, walked their dogs together on Riverside Drive.\u00a0 Heschel preached Niebuhr\u2019s funeral. Wouldn\u2019t you have loved to overhear their banter? Listen to Heschel\u2019s voice: \u201cThe demand in biblical religion is to be alert, and to be open to what is happening\u2026Awe enables us to sense in the small things the beginnings of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and simple.\u201d<\/p>\n

The prophet gives voice to silent agony.\u00a0 The generations deep hurt of people of color in these United States finally found fullest voice in the well tempered homiletics of Martin Luther King.\u00a0 In Christ, the divine voice has taken full throated residence in the heart of hurt.\u00a0 A voice to be heard needs loving connection with an addressable community.\u00a0 The prophet does not stand above or apart from his people.\u00a0 He abides, dwells, tabernacles among them. Among us.<\/em><\/p>\n

The prophet gives voice to silent agony.\u00a0 During WW II Paul Tillich took the NYC subway downtown once a week to speak over Radio Free Europe, to speak to his German relatives.\u00a0 Listen to Tillich\u2019s radio voice:\u00a0 Listen to his radio voice regarding the National Socialists: \u201cThey know all about tragedy, for their creed educates for tragic heroism, it educates for death, but this is all Nazism knows, whereas democracy, socialism, Christianity all have something that stands beyond tragedy, a hope for the human race.\u201d (Sifton 265).<\/p>\n

Honoring Prophetic Speech<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Up then and let us wait for the Word, waiting without idols, waiting without substitutes.\u00a0 And as we wait, let us honor the prophetic speech of Amos, of Jesus, of Wesley, and, especially today, of King.\u00a0 And let us act so in particular.<\/p>\n

Let us prize the days in winter, the gifts of winter snow days, to read, to read ourselves, to read to our grandchildren, to invest in the joy and the spiritual grace of reflection that comes from reading.\u00a0 A literate person today is not one who can read, but one who does read.<\/p>\n

Let us protect and preserve the possibility of a divine Word, heard as spoken, by listening with intense presence and presence of mind, come Sunday, and responding both in affirmation and in critique.\u00a0 People have such remarkable, and shabby reasons not to worship.\u00a0 Not you, not we.\u00a0 Listen\u2026for the word of God.<\/p>\n

Let us then speak ourselves, as we have spirit.\u00a0 At least in prayer.\u00a0 By visiting with one another (and that more than a broadcast e-mail).\u00a0 By writing down our views:\u00a0 in a journal, for a letter, as a letter to the editor.\u00a0 Numbers 11:29: \u201cWould that all God\u2019s people were prophets\u201d.<\/p>\n

Our job is not to remember and recite, but to live and speak!<\/p>\n

Our job is not just to remember that King said, \u201cThe great stumbling block is the white moderate more devoted to order than justice\u201d.<\/p>\n

Our job is to be alert to the weighty matters of justice and mercy and love\u2014of jobs and money and life.<\/p>\n

Our job is not just to remember that King said \u201cif a man hasn\u2019t discovered something that he will die for, he isn\u2019t fit to live\u201d. Our job is to find that something.<\/p>\n

Our job is not just to remember that King said \u201cI have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character\u201d. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Our job is to re-build that nation, even, in the deep shadow of January 6.<\/p>\n

Our job is not just to remember that King said \u201clet freedom ring\u201d Our job is to make it ring, in our time, in the face of the fears of this time.<\/p>\n

Our job is not just to remember that King said, \u201cI just want to do God\u2019s will\u2026we as a people will get to the promised land\u201d. Our job is to get walking.<\/p>\n

For one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.<\/p>\n

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Click here to hear the full service Amos 8: 7-12 Click here to hear just the sermon Introduction One shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. (2 Kings 1:8, Matt. 4:4).\u00a0 You shall not live by bread alone. Not by bread, alone, but by the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3292"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2679"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3292"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3292\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3295,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3292\/revisions\/3295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}