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I happen to love bad news, good news jokes . Um, bad news, good news jokes, reposition reframe reorient. So the doctor says, I have some good news and some bad news. And

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the patient then selects his sequence. He wants the good news first and the doctor replies, well, they're naming a disease after you. Good news, Bad news, bad news, good news. Which

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comes first. Your choice. Preaching of course, reverses the order because preaching delivers the bad news first . The judgment, the accusation, the confrontation as big nor famously observed. Only the gospel can condemn

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because only the gospel can heal. So let's start with the bad news, wealth equality in America is reaching historic disproportion. The Atlantic published a study recently demonstrating that income inequality is worse now than it was

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in 1774, even factoring for slavery earlier today, Elizabeth gave to us a dazzling and thorough explanation of income and wealth inequality Cause and effect. And for those who weren't here for that luxury, here's the

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reader's digest version. The top 10 Hold more than 70% of the nation's wealth. The bottom 50% hold two. And while an historic problem, the recent trend is particularly unsettling. Since 1982, the share

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of American income held by the top 1% of the population has more than doubled. The rich are getting richer and fewer. The poor are getting poorer and more numerous. And the middle class is shrinking and

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slipping. The tea party then should be no surprise to us nor occupy Wall Street, because people across the political spectrum seem united, at least in their suspicion that someone is gaming the system. Their diagnosis

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differs mind you, but they're shouts are the same . It isn't fair. That's the bad news, wealth. The quality in America is reaching historic disproportion . So news flash this just in from huffingtonpost.

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Com, I'm waiting to see what the religious response will be, what the established churches will say in response, most likely not very much when ministers speak out against systemic sin, they risk losing financial support

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. Congregants who benefit most from the economic status quo may leave and seek safer ground. That's a prediction worth reflecting on church member dropped by last year. He's a good man and he's a very good man

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. He's a decent man. He announced his departure from the congregation and his wife's. You see, he read somewhere that the Pc USA was recommending divestment from several companies doing business with Israel. Yes.

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What he owns it all of it. I promise you that the nondenominational church, where they are now members will not mention money except to label it as God's blessing and to ask for more of it as

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for our congregations in our denomination, for our churches problem, it's not necessarily a reluctance to speak on matters of economic injustice. Our problem is that when we do speak, our speech is often shrill and

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smug and naively accusatory and more critically, our middle class denomination seems fascinated with a splinter in our neighbors , capitalist. I while blind to the log in our own. Speaking of speaking Amos spoke two people

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content with summer fruit. Amos brought a message people were hurting, he said while some grew fat. Others grew gaunt while some grew rich, others grew weak and what was worse, God's people grew complicit

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and amidst the injustice of it all, despite the unfairness, God's people didn't speak. They did not act truthfully. They participated. In fact, they benefited with deceit and false balances. They gained the

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system, they couldn't wait for the sabbath to conclude so they could get back to business. And are you struck by how contemporary words? Three millennia old can remain. Remember that bark quote about needing to

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have a newspaper in one hand and a bible in the other. Don't you wish? Sometimes you have longer arms Amos nails, it Amos describes our world , our context, us and it almost seems sophomoric

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to offer an observation as obvious as this. But nonetheless, here it is. The market dynamics of global capitalism engulf us all. We are, all of us. Children of Wall Street. We benefit

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our pension fund depends on the market. Our congregations are funded by disciples who pledge based on their portfolios , earnings on investments. Keep this institution vibrant. The congregation I serve could not do half what it

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does without its legacy gifts The same economic devices which have shown 8% of the workplace to the door and put millions of homeowners underwater. Those same economic devices pay our salaries and secure our futures and that my

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friends is a simple truth. Problem is it's not so simple. It's very complex, practically and morally . Let me pause. Are you uncomfortable? Yeah , Yeah. I am. The complexity of global

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capitalism and our interconnectedness with it can leave us stunned , stammering, confused, slack jawed. You know ? Years ago, somebody convinced me. In fact , I was living in Austin at the time,

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someone convinced me that burger king was contributing to deforestation in south America. The argument was that ranchers there were clearing rainforests so that burger king's cows could grow fat for slaughter. So I stopped buying whoppers,

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aren't I? Righteous as simple a solution as that was. What are we to do now in the world, gone famously flat where chinese workers make inexpensive products that we actually need and for pittance A nation

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where 40% of American college graduates move back in with their parents. I'm 18 months away by the way . Mhm. A nation or the best solution for insolvent banks thought too big to fail is apparently to

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open the people's treasury to the very financiers who created this mess, who then make those banks even bigger . Someone sent me an email last week and said this, I said give a man a gun and

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he'll rob a bank, give a man a bank and he can rob the world. Amos nails it , gaming the system, false weights and measures complicity amid such skullduggery, Amos says, hush, shut

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up. Now listen. And then into a conscience as only silence can prepare one. God spoke a harsh word into that silence. God threatened more silence . God promised a famine but not of bread and

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water. God warned of a famine of hearing the words of the Lord as if God said, Well , since you won't listen to my words, I won't offer them anymore. It's a sacred silent treatment

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. No words, no relationship. Could anything be worse? I mean, we're people of the word . Students gather at this seminary to learn and to interpret, and then finally to proclaim the word and

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amidst the injustice and the unfairness and the overwhelming complexity of it all. Can you imagine anything worse than the impoverished silence of speaking to global capitalism? Without the words of the Lord? It was no idle

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threat, frustrated with the complicity of God's people amidst economic unfairness, God surely must have been sorely tempted simply to shut up, give them what they want , do what you damn well, please. Our

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mother used to threaten so generally we did. And yet here's the good news you were waiting, weren't you? Finally the good news in the end, just to isn't who God is. God is a

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word God kept speaking. God whispered words of hope and meaning to profits and people alike, speaking, always calling passionately, pleading patiently. And then when and then when God's whisper, it opened the world's

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ears. Then God's word shouted into flesh, and God's word dwelt amongst us, teaching the curious and touching the untouchable, feeding the hungry and challenging the complicit. Just look at that widow, said the

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living word, jesus, look at her. She lives on a fixed income, and there she is . She's sharing it all. And, as you know, this passage makes its customary annual appearance during

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stewardship season, and appears ever faithfully as a text to inspire proportionate giving to fund the institution. But what's a real shame is what remains on the preacher's exige ethical cutting floor. Why don't more of us

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, preachers? Observed jesus is obvious frustration with an economic system that forced the widow into poverty in the first place, living in a declining empire and following jesus in a society baring its teeth and clenching its

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fists and practicing ministry with people provided for, but also enmeshed within an uneven economic system. What really do we have to offer the words of the Lord God is still nudging us to speech, and we

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mustn't allow the cynical suspicions of huffingtonpost. Com to become reality. But speaking, the critical word of judgment is really the only the first step towards being truly and fully prophetic. Because prophecy isn't only a

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raspy throated harangue, punctuated with wagging fingers. Like all of God's speech, prophecy is intended to deepen our conscience and to prepare our hearts for good news and new initiative. Prophecy is its proclamation and proclamation

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is never content with decrying injustice, proclamation carries forward . It opens up, opens faithful hearts and minds to new possibilities. As Elizabeth reminded us today, prophecy provokes our imaginations prophecy is dream analysis, it's

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our analysis of God's dreams. It isn't enough for us simply to point our fingers at the injustice of wealth and income gaps. And since we can't extract ourselves from the economic metrics which produce them, we

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are called to make those metrics more humane and more fair and more just so, really now, what can the church do? Another Church can invest its holdings in a socially constable way. And that means

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, of course, that the church must always and forever refused to benefit from industries and businesses which run counter to God's hope for human community and well being . And the church can also engage and support its

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members who are themselves involved in the business world. You know, we often decry sunday only christians, but I am sometimes impressed that business people come to our sanctuaries on sunday at all, we often fail

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our parishioners in the business world. We can be deaf and dumb to the challenges and the opportunities that they face monday through saturday really now, what if the Church were faithfully to affirm and nurture its business

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people, encouraging to keep their lives and their companies and balance harmonizing profit with purpose. You know, there really are remarkable examples of companies concerned with equitable pay and care for workers and interest in the environment

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and the production and goods and services which truly do enrich human life. I will confess to you as a social justice liberal. I am a late arrival on this topic, but I have arrived. There

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are deeply good and decent people in the for profit world. The Church can also encourage the rise of a new common sense capitalism, interestingly, Micro lending in the developing world did not come from the church

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. And yet we can still participate. Have your mission committees considered giving to micro lenders? Did you know the self development for people already is and quite successfully in the Dominican republic? Most significantly, I

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think congregations can model and also, especially as preachers , generosity and sacrifice. And that will require careful , intentional and passionate preaching of stewardship. But we must move beyond the hackneyed and institutional impulse to equate

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stewardship with the church's budget, the discipline to practice of generosity. It's just so much better than it's so much deeper and richer in life giving to become generous. We can preach and paint a picture of

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life as an open hand, trusting God's provision, far removed from the tight fisted anxiety of the culture conditions, and for us preachers and those called to be preachers, well, we must stand up and

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we must speak up, stewardship is not about funding the institution, stewardship is a joyous and passionate lifestyle , focused on reflecting the radical generosity of God. And yes, the church can indeed speak bravely and

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clearly to the calamitous consequences lurking beneath wealth, inequality for the deprived of lost opportunities for independence and dignity and self reliance and for the privileged. Well, the loss of our very spirits, jesus commented time

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and again on what happens when disciples place greed and accumulation and hoarding above commitment to God. A foolish man finds his bursting Barnes useless the night his soul is required of him and the rich young ruler discovers

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it is not yet ready to follow, jesus, not that is until he goes and sells and gives and camels. It turns out do not thread needles easily, but with God. Mhm. Anything as

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possible to discover that our wealth, our wealth. Did you hear that? Our wealth, it's actually God's wealth intended for life giving relationship in the human community. To discover that for us, wealthy people

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can be holy redemptive. So preachers must buck up and speak out on the wealth gap, both bad news, but also good news and hopeful ways that give our parishioners, faithful people away to respond beyond

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guilt and fear and anything less. It's professional malpractice , you know, I'm fascinated that Amos begins with an image of bounty, a basket of summer fruit . I chose my tie nicely tonight, by the

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way, begins a lovely image. It's that resonated with your wonderful voice basket of summer fruit. It is foil of course the good news before the bad news is Amos sequence to them, for there are

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great lessons learned in contrasting feast with famine lessons both in rhetoric and also in reality, you know. Doug and I grew up in a small church in a small town in agricultural town here in texas.

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In late summer the communal nature of that baptismal community went on annual display the as crops were harvested from gardens and fields, fresh produce was shared cherries and cucumbers and tomatoes and squash and corn. There were

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people in that small presbyterian church. However, who remembered another time when there was little to share when there was a literal famine? The Dust Bowl of the 1930s. I have seen an antique photo of

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a crow's nest made with wire because the crow could find no straw that's famine. So I watched with great interest ken burns documentary about those years when dirt flew and cattle starved and Children coughed up sand.

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If famine has any advantage, perhaps it is that it's survivors. Learn something about community and generosity and hope. Always useful lessons when the rains come again , at least if you remember them. And so

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when his films, Burns returned several times to a woman named Caroline Henderson, a young college graduate in 1914 in and of itself quite an accomplishment at the time. This woman went alone to the Oklahoma Panhandle

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and Homestead at a small wheat farm. She employed a worker, a hired hand. A year later they married, they farmed that land together for decades living quite literally off of the land. They raised

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a daughter who went off to college and then to med school and finally to phoenix In their 80s in the 1960s and poor health. Finally, their daughter convinced them to join her in Arizona. And the

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next spring they returned to the visit the home place in three days there he died, and then only months later, she followed him through what she called the Western Gate Caroline had steadfastly refused to sell her

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farm to an agricultural corporation. She called them far away. Bureaucrats with no relationship to the land, and she left her land to a trust on the singular condition that it never be plowed again. Caroline

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Henderson wrote these words to prepare the ground as well as we may to sow our seeds to cultivate and care for. That is our part. And yet how difficult it is for some of us to learn

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for the results. We must leave to the great unseen forces of nature. Whether the crop, be corn or character may God give to us the character to proclaim the words of the Lord, that the