‘A view from the pew’

I have commiserated with parishioners who never get the chance to mount the pulpit and hold forth the way I am required to at Mass. I ask them what they would say if, somehow, they were allowed to address a congregation for something other than a charity appeal, worthy as this is. I realize I am a couple steps removed from their life situations, celibate, childless, financially secure if not rich. In one of my parish assignments I would gather every Monday night with about 10 parishioners so we could work on my homily for the next weekend. It worked well. The following, while edited and expanded, is a sermon suggested to me by one such person whose judgment I respect. She called it “a view from the pew.”

The Bible is timeless and speaks across the centuries to all generations, including ours. Recently in our church readings we heard about Amos being reprimanded by a religious leader and told to leave his area of Israel, the northern kingdom, and prophesy in Judah, the southern one. These two halves of God’s chosen people often warred with each other, so divided and hostile were they with each other. You could almost hear a chorus of “sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down, you’re rockin’ the boat.” Amos is the oldest of the author prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures. He lived in the eighth century B.C. His message was that people should repent, quit being flippant with their religion and take the care and concern for the poor in earnest — less fixation on trivia and more action from believers on the things of true importance: caring for the poor, feeding the hungry, and concern for the sick and lonely.

Times were prosperous, everything was going very well, and as often happens, religion had become the performance of a few rituals in a halfhearted manner, and Amos was against that lackadaisical behavior. Naturally the religious leaders, who were doing quite well, wanted to maintain the status quo, and the message of Amos was inconvenient and troublesome.

Amos was middle class. His message did not benefit him (he wasn’t poor, hungry or lonely) but neither was he rich, so his message did not disrupt him financially. However God chose him for this unpopular task, and he reluctantly obeyed God’s calling.

Hmmm — religious leaders who are doing very well maintaining the status quo — not focused on the message of love and concern for those in need? Sound familiar?

But regardless of the religious leaders, the Bible also speaks to those of us in the pews. Amos is telling us to quit being flippant, to understand that our religion is meant to be deep and caring — not in a ritual duty once a week, but the meaningful obligation of love for one another — to help those who are marginalized and in need. Are we sending Amos on his way? The next time you are speeding past your homebound neighbor’s house on your way to an errand, what song are you singing to Amos? “Sit down, you’re rockin’ the boat?”

My co-author objects to hollow religion, as did Amos. This is the mindless performance of certain sacred functions or prayers or actions in ritual fashion. Because they are repetitious, they start to lose their heart and degenerate into mere routine without thought, as though God were somehow pleased by merely external formalism, an outward shell with no interior. Amos and many others have complained about this counterfeit version of formal religion. We criticize the Pharisees and Sadducees, the people in the Gospels with whom Jesus had the most trouble. They seemed unaware about their knock-off excuse of devotion. Jesus had little trouble with sinners who admitted they sinned: prostitutes, collaborator tax-collectors, the ”rabble who know not the Law,” as the high priest Caiaphas scornfully called them.

Religion with an interior is the kind that corresponds to the words and gestures and observances of the exterior. It shows it knows God’s desire that we attend to our brothers and sisters. St. John notes the incongruousness of people saying they love God but hate their neighbor. He called them liars. It was probably the first protest song of the 60s. Barry McGuire sang “Hate your next door neighbor but don’t forget to say grace.” Should God bless the food of such a household?

What responsibility does each of us have to purify our own version of religion?