May the words of my mouth and the meditation of each heart be acceptable in your sight,
O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. + (adapted from Psalm 19:14)
Good morning.
Today’s Collect:
O Lord, mercifully receive the prayers of your people who call upon you,
and grant that they may know and understand what things they ought to do,
and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you
and the Holy Spirit,
one God,
now and forever.
Amen.
That we may know and understand the things we ought to do…
That we may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them…
That is the whole sermon right there, isn’t it?
I mean, that’s what Amos did in our old testament reading today.
God told him to prophesy to Israel. To tell them that King Jeroboam will die by the sword,
and Israel must go into exile.
It is also how today’s Psalm began:
“Let me hear what God the Lord will speak…” (Psalm 85:8)
Easy, right?
We will all go home after the service today.
Pray. Meditate.
Talk to God in the way that we each talk to God.
And when Spirit gives you, me, us a nudge, a message, a directive…
We will have the “grace and power faithfully to accomplish” it.
We have then lived out today’s Scripture.
Check it off the list.
Wait for God’s next message.
I don’t know about you, but I have never found it to be that easy.
For one, I don’t always get a clear message.
God has never come to me in a dream and said, “Tammy, go say this to this person” like he did to Amos.
And secondly, on the occasions that I have understood a nudge or message, it is often followed by that old familiar voice of lack.
The voice that says, “Me? I can’t do that. I’m just a country kid from Illinois.”
But even as I utter these protests, we know there are fallacies in these human arguments, don’t we?
Do you know that there are over 100 verses in the Bible, that nudge, speak or command us to love our neighbor?
Old testament. New testament. All 4 Gospels.
Love God with all your being.
Love your neighbor as yourself.
There is no commandment greater than these.
So even when we think we don’t know what to do…we know what to do.
We love!
We see a situation; we ask, “What would love do here?”
Now you may say, But Tammy, I don’t have any money to help people.
I don’t have the authority or credentials to create change. I am only one person.
Amos didn’t have any earthly authority or title either, and Amaziah was quick to let him know…
O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, earn your bread there, and prophesy there.
But Amos spoke his truth. He told Amaziah that he was indeed no prophet, no prophet’s son.
He was a herdsman and a “dresser of sycamore trees,” and the Lord took him from the flock anyway and said to him, “’Go prophesy to my people.’”
Y’all they said the same thing about Jesus…
Isn’t he just a carpenter?
Can anything good come out of Nazareth?
As for being only one person,
Saint Pauli Murray believed and said and acted on the principle that
1 person + 1 typewriter = a movement.
And today you don’t even have to buy a typewriter or paper or ribbon or a stamp to mail the letter, because we have all of that with us every day in our cell phones.
Sisters & brothers, if we have come to church any at all, we have heard these stories.
We know them with our heads.
I pray that we begin to allow today’s scriptures to settle deeply into our hearts, into the depths of our being.
Look again at Ephesians.
We are “blessed in Christ.”
Chosen by the Divine.
Adopted as God’s own children.
God’s glorious grace is freely bestowed upon us.
The riches of God’s grace is lavished upon us.
We are marked with the seal of the Holy Spirit!
We may “just” be a herdsman and dresser of sycamore trees, or a country kid from Illinois,
a rancher, a teacher, a mother, a business person, a young child in elementary school, middle school or high school.
Yet, we are still God’s very own!
When that love is settled deeply into the core of our being,
we will know what it is that we are to do.
“We [will] love… because [God] first loved us”! (1John 4:19)
We will live in the holy optimism of Psalm 85. (v. 10-12)
Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.
Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,
and righteousness will look down from the sky.
the Lord will give what is good,
and our land will yield its increase.
I went to General Convention last month.
I went in no official capacity. Just a visitor so that I could see the big umbrella of The Episcopal Church in action.
If you ever get the chance to go, I highly encourage you to do so.
It was an amazing love fest with all variety of peoples from all over the world!
One day I sat in on the House of Deputies.
The Diocese of South Dakota had put forth a proposal to add a prayer to Lesser Feast and Fasts on a set day in the church calendar.
During the discussion portion, Deputy Deanna Stands stepped up to the microphone.
She is an older, soft-spoken Indigenous woman with gray hair.
The prayer “commemorates the Native children who attended, and in many cases died, at residential Indigenous boarding schools throughout the United States from the late 1800s until the 1970s.” …a time so recent that I would have been in junior high and high school.
Deanna Stands stated that recently, with the discovery of graves and bodies of some of these Indigenous children, each tribe was encouraged to create a memorial.
Deanna said her tribe had no money for a memorial.
So they wrote a prayer.
I’d like to read that prayer to you now. You can find it later yourself on web page for the Episcopal Diocese of South Dakota.
A Prayer to Remember the Innocents
Dear Lord, Almighty God, We
pray for all indigenous children
who were in residential and
boarding schools in Canada and
the United States. Some
died there; we ask that you
give assurance to their
descendants that their souls
are with you and their
ancestors. Some survived
there; we ask that you give
your healing grace to all who
endured hardship while there
and are still struggling with
those memories. Lastly, we ask
you to help us guard our
children against harm in this
world. All this we ask in the
name of your Son, Jesus
Christ, who lives and reigns
with you and the Holy Spirit,
now and forever. Amen.
The motion passed almost unanimously, and if passed again at the next General Convention in 2027, it will become part of Lesser Feasts and Fasts.
They had no money.
Yet, I suggest that they created perhaps the longest lasting memorial of all.
Children of God, my prayer for us today…
Individually and as a congregation…
May we know and understand the things we ought to do.
May we have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them.
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