Let Justice Roll Down (23rd Sunday after Pentecost; Amos 1:1-2; 5:14-15, 21-24; November 12, 2017)

Let Justice Roll Down

23rd Sunday after Pentecost
Amos 1:1-2; 5:14-15, 21-24
November 12, 2017

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

I've been thinking a lot during the last week about the massacre that took place in Sutherland Springs, Texas. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. Once again, we have witnessed horrors. Once again, we hear the cries of the wounded and bereaved. Once again, we listen to the empty words of our leaders. “Now is not the time. Thoughts and prayers.”

I'm sick of the violent deaths in our news. I'm sick of having to remember all the places where the people that I love go where they're supposed to be safe but have nonetheless been the sites of mass shootings: movie theaters, schools, clubs, country music concerts, and now even church, just to name a few. And these, really, are just the tip of the iceberg.

The numbers from 2014 tell a story: 92 people died each day from gunshot injuries. Of those 30 per day were victims of homicide, 59 were victims of suicide. Far too many, more than we can bear, if we try to bear them, which is why we don't. We only bear a few, the more egregious examples, and only for a few days or weeks.

I was also reeling like some of you from the news accusations of abuse of power committed by Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Ben Affleck, President Bush (the elder),
Michael Oreskes of NPR, Louis C.K., and others. This behavior doesn't seem to be limited to any particular industry and certainly not to one side of the political spectrum.

On Friday Carol, Beth, Diana, and I went shopping for some party favors for Diana's seventh birthday party being held this afternoon. Fourteen girls are coming; we picked a great time to get out of town. Anyway, while three generations of Caldwell women deliberated over which favors to get, my attention wandered. Well, to be perfectly honest, I wandered right along with my attention. I found myself looking at t-shirts. There were lots of designs, most of them I understood not at all. One of them caught my eye, though. It was silhouette of Beauty and the Beast from this year's release starring Emma Watson (as Beauty) and Dan Stevens (as the Beast). I like Emma Watson. I've watched her grow from Hermione Granger, the bright and somewhat gawky first-form student at Hogwarts Wizarding Academy, through her years at Brown University, her work as a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador. She has some pretty strong feminist credentials.

But something bothered me about the t-shirt. The Belle that she portrays in Beauty and the Beast is no shrinking violet, by no means a victim. She is smart and brave and she makes her own choices. But. But at the same time the story of Beauty and the Beast can only be made to stretch so far. It's a myth that resists being subverted. Remember that, according to me, a myth is a story that we tell to explain ourselves to ourselves. Beauty and the Beast is a myth about men and women and the nature of their relationships. At bottom it asserts that men are victims of their own animal natures and can find (or recover) their humanity only through the intervention of women. For the Beast to become human he must recover the human nature only Belle can see. Only her love can see his true (and hidden) nature and bring it to the surface. She--not he--is finally responsible for his becoming human. If she succeeds he will be freed from the tyranny of his beastliness; if she fails his humanity will disappear.

So my question of the t-shirt is: Why do we imagine that men are powerless to find their own humanity? Why do we imagine that women are responsible for making a man out of a beast?

It seemed to me that I had found a clue that not only connected mass murderers and powerful sexual abusers of less powerful women (and sometimes of men). A great deal of effort and far too many words have been spent trying to understand harassers and mass shooters. We diagnose them at a distance and prescribe treatment plans, but we miss the obvious: They are men almost exclusively. They imagine themselves to be powerful expressions of masculinity, men who get what they want or strike out at those who deny them what they believe they should have, but these men are in fact examples of something that has gone terribly wrong.

Hold that thought.

Our lesson this morning came from the prophet Amos. Amos is different from the other prophets we have met this year. He has a day job. He is a shepherd and tender of fig orchards. He is neither a royal prophet nor the head of a school of prophets. Instead he finds himself overwhelmed with his sense that the life of Israel has become deeply contrary to the covenant with Yahweh. He left his work in the south of Judah and made his way north to the Kingdom of Israel and its capital Samaria. There he denounced the injustices that he saw: the steeply unequal distribution of wealth and the exploitation of the vulnerable and of the land. He especially denounced the pretense that they kept up by maintaining their high-quality worship, their praise bands, their candlelight services, and their professional-quality choirs. Instead, he demanded in God's name:

But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Let justice flood the land like a flash flood that comes rushing down a wadi, sweeping away everything in its path. Let righteous flow like a stream that is filled with water the year round.

For Amos this justice would care for the widow, the orphan, and the migrant worker. This justice would level the staggering inequalities of wealth and power that had arisen among the people of God.

We could certainly use a double dose of Amos' medicine. But I want to offer another possibility, a broader application of his vision than even he could see.

If our children and our friends and our neighbors are ever to enjoy the safety that we believe they should, they and we must be free from the fear of some man who has nursed a grudge and plans to act out his revenge. Sure we need a great more common sense about guns. But one of the roots of our problem with guns is our problem with masculinity.

It is time and past time that every person who bears the image of God be able to live in freedom from fear of a man who feels entitled to touch them without their consent. If men can be clear that we are not entitled to any special privilege or status, if we can be clear that when our feelings are hurt we not entitled to take it out in anger against our neighbors, it would be like justice rolling down. If we men can be clear that we are never, not ever, entitled to the bodies of women, if we can be clear that controlling women is not how boys become men, if we can be clear that men are responsible for their own feelings instead of blaming them on what women do or how they dress, life in our world can be sustained with a stream that flows all year.

Until then we live in a drought-stricken world, as dry as central Texas. My family lived for six months in central Texas when I was five in a place called Big Springs. When a place name in central Texas has the word “spring” in it, that’s not because there is water there. “Spring” in a central Texas name is a wish, a prayer. My mother fought a long and losing battle against dust the whole time we were there. She broke down and wept one morning when she opened her refrigerator to find a thin layer of dust coating everything.

When I say that our world has a deep thirst for life, I mean it is central Texas dry and central Texas thirsty. It is central Texas dry for lack of the justice Amos demanded. It suffers a Sutherland Springs drought that can be quenched only by the righteousness that Amos preached.

So let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

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