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The Third Sunday Of Advent (Gaudete)
Stir up thy power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let thy bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be honor and glory, world without end. Amen.
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Scripture citation(s): Amos 9:11-15
A Sermon by
Fr. Austin
on
Amos 9:11-15
✛
The Plowman Shall Overtake the Reaper
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Some six years ago I said in this pulpit that Amos is not a person you would invite to your dinner party. He was ferocious and relentless in his message that you and your nation were terrible sinners and that God was not pleased and, indeed, God was coming with inescapable judgment. Get ready, look out!—that was the message of Amos, the prophet who, shall we say, gave prophets their bad name. Until the very end of his book. And then Amos makes a turn-about, and says that God will, in the last day, build up your city from its ruins. He says the mountains will just drip with wine—what an image! He does not tell you in a bland way that it will be a time of peace, but rather he describes concretely why humans long for peace: the people who plant the vineyards will also get to drink their wine. It won’t be that you plant, but then there’s a war or a drought or an enemy conquers you before you can enjoy your work. You will make gardens and also eat the fruit that comes from your gardens. You will get to live your whole life in the land.
These final five verses of the book of the prophet Amos are such a sweet contrast to his eight-plus chapters of doom and gloom, that just hearing them is a blessed relief; sweet, I say—like dessert at the end of a long, necessary, and grueling dietary regime. You’ve eaten your spinach and taken your medicine for eight chapters and for nine, and now comes this! Mountains dripping with wine! The security of getting to eat the fruit of your own garden!
Yet in the midst of it the prophet tells you something strange, something you cannot picture. One verse, two images: the plowman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes shall overtake the one who sows the seed. These are images of the future overtaking the present, indeed, of the future sneaking around you and coming up on you from behind. For the reaper comes after the plowman, just as harvest comes after planting seeds. But here Amos says, speaking to you of that sweet future day of the Lord, Amos says the reaper shall overtake, be in front of, the plowman, and that wine will be made (by that treader of grapes) even before you’re done sowing the seeds for the vines.
That image, which is strictly unimaginable (you can’t have harvest before planting), is theological genius. It is the best image I know of, in the whole Bible, for what it means for God to come to you. That is to say, when God comes, it is not just the replacement of sorrow with joy, it’s not just that dire straits are followed by abundance, or wretched sinfulness followed by personal righteousness; when God comes the future wraps all around you and is no longer just or merely or only ahead of you.
***
What does it mean for our future to be suddenly upon us and all around us?
All of us, from the 95-year-old matriarch to the 9-year-old choirboy, can understand the future suddenly being upon us. We are going our way, doing our daily things, eating, studying, planning, working, and wham! something happens to us and all that comes abruptly to a halt. You’re playing soccer in Central Park, and snap!—you can’t walk any more. You’re writing an email to your financial advisor and the pain hits, and you can hardly breathe. Within a single day—perhaps within a single minute—everything that was normal for you has become impossible. One bright day you go to school, and it turns out to be your last. Your future has come smashing into your present.
We all understand that because we’ve heard Jesus speak about the man who thought about nothing but how much stuff he could store in his barn. He was consumed with his plans for a new barn, much bigger, that could store even more stuff, when suddenly the future came into his present. “Fool,” said the future: “tonight your soul will be required of you, and all your stuff, whose will it be?” [Luke 12:13-21]
We understand, but there is another way the future comes to us: not as judgment, not smelling of death, but as gift, smelling oh so sweet. You go to visit some friends, bottle of wine tucked under your arm, and the dinner is warm and comfortable, and along the way all of you come to be talking of the significant things in your life, some of them quite hard, sometimes including sin, sometimes including death—your sorrows, the things you have repented of—but there is also a timelessness to it, a blessing, a prayer that’s not really in words. You feel that God has been with each of you in various ways through all your life, and that God will be with you whatever comes in the future, but more so, you feel that all that past and all that future is around you right now. The grapes have not yet been sown, yet you are already drinking their good wine.
I don’t want that picture to be unrealistic. For it’s not a romantic, superficial escape from hard reality. On the contrary, it is an extraordinary thing that is had by ordinary people in ordinary circumstances. The future can surround the present any time, any day. If one human being offers a little grace to another, there it is. A moment of careful listening, or giving a bit of mercy, even just a cup of cool water—anytime we give each other space to be who we are, we draw nearer to the real depth of our being, and find we are not alone. I think that is what people are talking about, when they speak of “being present” to one another, just enjoying what we are, right now, here, as we are. When we are “present” to one another, it is God’s future that has wrapped around us.
This is the sweet description from Amos of the day of the Lord: the harvester shall overtake the sower. Which is, to speak most plainly: Jesus comes from the future and surrounds us, and we share the delicious bread and wine that we have not yet finished planting. That’s heaven. That’s communion. That’s real human life. And that’s what’s coming with the Day of the Lord—and we don’t have to wait for it.
