Delivered at United Church worship at VST on Tuesday November 8, 2011.

Our reading brings us in to the world of a kingdom in disarray. After some heady days, a period of unbridled economic growth and expansion, things are now on the decline. The economy is in recession, wages are stagnant, unemployment is high and Israel is surrounded by enemies on all sides. All the while Israel’s elite—the royalty, the merchants, scribes, stockbrokers and speculators seem to be doing just fine.

Amos arrives on the scene out of nowhere. He’s a bit confrontational, pronouncing God’s judgment and crying out for justice. A court priest tells him to shut up and go home, to keep his prophecies to himself. Amos replies “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycomore trees.” He’s uncredentialed and unlearned in the jargon of the royal court and the marketplace—just a simple farmer with some livestock and one hell of an axe to grind. He’s not even from there—he travels from somewhere in the hillbilly heartland to deliver something that God needs to be said to those in charge. God’s got things to say and Amos has been listening.

Worship at the temple goes on business as usual while the kingdom falls apart around them. But there they go, with their smells and bells and their great festival celebrations and their extravagant offerings of fatted calves for God’s hopeful favour. They pray and sing with joy for the DAY OF THE LORD, when God will finally come and clear the house of all of Israel’s enemies forever and bring a reign of everlasting peace—especially now with the Assyrian empire at the gate, ready to pounce.

But Amos isn’t having any of it. You think God’s judgment is going to be nice? You think God is on your side? God’s going to clean up all right, but you’re going to be cleaned up alongside your enemies. It’s like running away from a lion and running right into a bear! There’s no silver lining on this cloud—just a lightning bolt aimed right at all of your faces! All of your rituals are nothing less than empty pieties. They are in the form of doxologies and thanksgivings without the content, gestures severed from their source, YHWH, the God of justice who brought them out of Egypt and who is the source and sustainer of all things.

Amos delivers an oracle, an act of prophetic speech from the perspective of and in the voice of God. I am sick of your public displays of piety, he says. Even though you’re throwing around your wealth, your food, your fattest animals on my account, I refuse to have any part of it. I can’t even bear to look at it. So stop singing to me because it’s all meaningless because there’s no justice in all the land. Then he drops one of Martin Luther King’s most used bible verses: Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream!

This all sounds kind of familiar. A loud voice emerges from the margins at the doorsteps of power, seeking to give voice to the powerless against the ever-deepening divide between the supposed stewards of power and wealth and the other 99%. The powers-that-be criticize him as an irritant, as an unrealistic zealot camping outside the capitol and emerging in ragged clothes to deliver his prophetic judgments. There isn’t much here by way of policy or demands—you don’t get much more general than Amos’s verbal shotgun blasts. All Amos knows is that the whole system is rotten to the core and it touches every part of life in Israel. He calls for nothing less than a righteousness that rolls down into the heart of the city so fast and so hard that it will wipe out the old ways of greed, violence and callous indifference. God’s judgment is at hand.

But, just when we catch ourselves smugly admiring Amos’ criticism of those greedy, self-serving plutocrats, we see that his accusative finger is not pointed at the empire, but at his own people. We find that Amos, like most if not all the prophets, is talking to Israel, God’s own people. The people who have a unique, covenantal relationship with God and who are to be a holy priesthood, a gift of righteousness not just to themselves, but to the whole world. This is an internal critique. The Assyrians, if you remember, are standing at the gate. The world’s foremost power and economic engine is about to move in and obliterate the Northern Kingdom of Israel entirely. But Amos doesn’t travel east to the imperial capital; he travels inland to address the people of God; just like Jesus, who rather than showing up at the governor’s mansion shows up to clear the temple, the beating heart of his own people. The DAY OF THE LORD is as much a day of judgment for Israel as it is for the nations.

He’s not just flinging God’s justice around at injustice in general. He’s calling God’s people back to faithfulness, which is measured not just by their offerings in worship, but by the offering of their very bodies as vehicles for worship. How can you worship this God and sing your songs in the temple and ignore the demands of the Torah outside its walls? Amos picks up on a common prophetic thread—that the true sacrifice is manifest in the entirety of one’s life. And worship doesn’t matter much if the holiness of the people doesn’t accompany it, if Israel’s corporate body doesn’t shine forth with grace. 

What the folks in the tent city downtown have right is that the problems of the world aren’t just this policy or that social issue. Just like Amos they know all things are deeply intertwined and our contemporary problems are but symptoms, manifestations of a much deeper disorder. Christians have usually named such a deep disorder “sin.” The deeply fractured nature of the world that the empire runs on and gets its spiritual power from doesn’t leave any place, or any people untouched. It’s not just from wicked institutions or nation-states, but infects everything from the highest points of power right down to the human heart. You think the ones with the money and the guns are the only ones in need of judgment? Amos asks. You look a lot like they do and God may not be able to tell the difference between you when the DAY OF THE LORD comes. You think when the flood-gates open and the waters of justice and righteousness flow down, you aren’t going to get wet?

I don’t know about you, but I can’t help but feel accused every time I walk away after hearing Amos. I’m not one of the bankers or the generals or the court theologians, but I walk away feeling Amos’ address anyway. And maybe that’s just the way the Spirit works. Maybe the Spirit is speaking to the church. Maybe the Spirit is speaking to the church of its own worldliness, of its own inability to discern how like the world it is in its fears, its hates and its long-term brutality. For Amos, the starting point of critique is in and among the people who confess the God of the Exodus, who are the bearers of freedom and mercy wrought from the grip of Pharaoh in an incredible act of faith. Similarly, for church the starting point is in the healing wholeness brought among us by Jesus Christ, the One who came to bring healing and wholeness to the whole world. It is in this coming that the church has now come to understand its vocation. And it is in its coming to the world out of its own sense of being loved and forgiven, that the church begins to even fathom what Amos means. The stream is one of transformation flowing down like water and submerging us into the life of God. Because if the church in its own life can’t pull this whole thing off, how can the world?

And for this, thanks be to God.