Perhaps because it’s an election year, but after reading this gospel I found myself remembering the presidential race twelve years ago, and one of the indelible images from the failed campaign of Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. As part of his image-building effort, his handlers at one point convinced him to be photographed standing up in an army tank as it zipped around in exercises. Now Governor Dukakis was not a tall man, and he was wearing a little round helmet, with his arms glued to his sides, and he wound up looking not like a president, not like a tank commander, but like the old cartoon character Atom Ant. Along with many other strategic errors, this funny picture of the little man in the tank was among the things that brought on his rather spectacular defeat.
Appearances do count. We want the people we listen to to have the qualifications we think they need and to look like they have them, too. Now believe me, I’m not here today to try to get a grass-roots movement going to give Dukakis another chance — we’ve all got enough trouble without that. But — if there’s one lesson from the readings today, about Amos taken from manual labor on the farm to speak the truth about God, about the apostles sent out with grubby clothing, little training and no qualifications, it’s a lesson that we still have a hard time with: God chooses people to do his work who are not the convincing choice, and does it consistently and stubbornly. God chooses the youngest brother, the runtiest sibling, the abandoned baby, the tribe of wandering Jews, the itinerant preacher, to be the people who communicate what God is and wants.
Why does God do this? We could attribute it, if we want to, to God’s sense of humor, of which there are plenty of examples in every parish. But it must be something else. God isn’t simply choosing people who don’t look the part. And he doesn’t choose these people just because they are the unexpected choice. God chooses people to speak for him who have nothing at stake in the way things are.
Amos was living in a time when there was a professional caste of prophets, the authorized interpreters of God’s word and God’s intentions. It may seem strange to us to have built a bureaucracy around something so mysterious, that we might assume should be open-ended, dependent on God — but we all know how human it is to do just that. Suddenly, a group of people, these professional prophets, have something at stake in preserving their authority, rather than God’s — and only someone with nothing to lose, like Amos, could remind everyone involved that God’s real desires can be obscured when our own agendas, and not God’s, take over.
The apostles, too, aren’t rabbis, aren’t priests or from priestly families, what’s really notable about them is how little they have in the way or position or possessions, in the way of anything to protect, in the way of an axe to grind. Jesus tells them in today’s gospel to keep it that way, to have few resources, to take nothing with them, to stay nowhere very long, so that they would never find that in one place, perhaps a place that received them enthusiastically, they would never be tempted to feel it was more important to be successful apostles than to be real ones.
What does this mean for us? Two things, at least. First, these readings remind us, as so many stories in the gospel do, that people with something at stake in the way things are are living dangerously. That matters to a parish like us, because all of us have a lot at stake in the way things are. We are relatively wealthy and intelligent and probably mostly quite successful, all wonderful things. Yet somehow it is people like us who have the greatest temptation to mistake our own priorities for God’s and to suddenly find that we support the system that preserves whatever rewards us at the expense of the much simpler system by which God measures our worth. More than most people, we are the kind of people who need to listen.
And that, of course, is the second lesson today: listening, and who we listen to. It may seem like God is asking us to do the impossible. But in fact, God may just be asking us to do the improbable.
God does not ask us to listen to every nut who comes along, every street-corner preacher or rebel with a cause. But we can take a lesson from St. Benedict, whose rule for his monastic communities insisted that when the community deliberates about something, it’s the opinion of the youngest and the newest member that is often the one to be heard most carefully. They, after all, are the ones who have least at stake in the way things have always been. Or we can take a lesson from Pope John XXIII, who had to work so relentlessly during the Second Vatican Council to make sure that it was not only the people with political power and position in the church who were deciding the church’s future. God wants us to respect the people who are in charge, who know things, who preserve the old truths. But new truth is always coming, from people who are on fire with it. Our job is to put aside our own agendas, and know them when we see them.