Sermon for 15 October 2000, Matins, St Mary Magdalen, Sheet, published on www.trikeshed.com

Bible reading: Amos 5:6-7, 10-15

This is a verse from our reading from the book of the prophet Amos. And I would like to take Amos as our theme this morning, Amos as a prophet, rather than just this particular reading. I hope that we’ll be able to understand him and the other Old Testament prophets just a little bit more and take a look at what they mean to us today.

So, a bit of background to Amos. We are in the eighth century BC. Over 700 years before our Lord walked on this earth. That would take us back from now to the 13^th century – another age. We are in Bethel, in the northern of the two kingdoms of the Holy Land, the kingdom of Israel. By the way, that is now in the West Bank, a place where peace seems to be slipping from everybody’s grasp. And in the eighth century BC, we’re also living on borrowed time. Syria to our North has already been defeated by the new menacing power of the Assyrians. And the same thing is going to happen to us. But in these last years as so often happens, we are experiencing deepening decadence and moral corruption. The rich have never been richer but the gap between the rich and the poor has never been greater. And the rich seem to be blind to both threats – the external military menace and the internal moral one. Some parallels with our own time, certainly.

And it was to these rich people that Amos directs his message. He was a fairly poor man but one who had travelled. He was a shepherd and a dresser of sycomore trees – that’s sycomore with two Os, fig trees. He came from the southern kingdom of Judah but was called to be a prophet in Israel. Which is where we meet him. And like many of his colleagues, Amos has some powerful images. If you want to see them, the pictures of the locusts, the fire, a plumb-line showing the truth, can be found in chapter 7. Wonderful living visual aids.

Now it’s quite common to write the prophets off as doom-mongers, maybe to laugh at their antics and the way they acted out their message, as their hearers did, and then to go and look for the positive messages of hope hidden among their writings. Now the messages of hope are there, but they are meaningless without considering what the prophets had to say as a whole. And make no mistake about it, by and large, Amos was a prophet of doom. Now as Christians we think of God as our friend, hallelujah! and we tend to think we have a monopoly on that idea. But that’s also how the priests and people of Amos’s time see God. He is in our midst, yes, but the mistake we then make is to think of him as being on our side, to get possessive. And this is where the message of Amos and the other prophets first shocks and surprises us. God is a roaring lion – powerful message, fine – but (here’s the shock) that lion’s prey is us. We have gone astray and we need to be hunted down. Why? basically because we have neglected social justice.

Now if we ever think that our faith is somehow a refuge from politics we also need to read Amos. His message is not a personal one about prayer and doing good and walking with God. It is about justice. It is political and it is shocking. He tells us not to bother with our pilgrimages and services of worship. The Lord has rejected them and he has rejected us. We have sunk into such decadence, the only answer is a catastrophe. Amos is not looking into some kind of crystal ball as he prophesies doom; he is pointing out what is inevitable. The coming disaster is the drastic remedy that is needed to restore our relationship with God. What a powerful and difficult message.

Let’s try to understand this a bit more. We have become so corrupt that our outward show of worship has become a joke. Amos does make a joke of it – he parodies a call to worship: go to Bethel and sin; go to Gilgal and sin yet more. We’re so stuck in our hypocrisy that we don’t even see the huge gulf between true worship and false lip-service. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We’re stampeding like horses on a disastrous course, or like Disney’s lemmings. What power is capable of stopping us and turning us around? The impending catastrophe, the invasion by Assyria, is the only thing that is drastic enough to wake up so stubborn a people. If you sleep too deeply and obliviously, what you need is a very loud alarm clock!

Now Amos didn’t have the power to stop the Assyrians. He wasn’t able to do a deal with the people "re-establish justice and we’ll see if we can call off the attackers". And yet – and yet – there is something, there is a glimmer of what we might call hope, and what one writer (Wilhelm Vischer) calls the "Divine Perhaps". Hate evil, love good, maintain justice in the courts. Perhaps the Lord God Almighty will have mercy on the remnant of Joseph. There is this amazing possibility that the Lord will "repent". Now this is like a little peephole into the glorious freedom that we have been given. This idea that God will somehow listen, that he will somehow take account of our actions, that he might perhaps give us a say in our destiny.

We know that the terrible destruction of Samaria did come. There was destruction and exile. But there was also the remnant and there was mercy. And there we might have had to leave it. But just think forward to our second reading. Jesus’ message is just as hard hitting as that of any Amos. The injustices of the world are still as great. His images are just as strong and memorable "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God". His diagnosis is just as grave. The drastic solution is just as necessary. But, thank God for something which Amos did not and could not do. That glimmer of hope which Amos offered becomes a blinding flash because the vehicle of God’s terrible drastic solution this time is standing in front of us. It is Jesus himself. In the end, no Assyrian armies can shock us enough into changing our hearts. In the end, God realises that only he can do it. He does it in a shocking way – by dying on the cross. But in the end, that is the only way in which the injustice of this world can be overturned. The Divine Perhaps becomes the Divine Certainty, the certainty of the death and resurrection of Jesus, giving us the possibility to turn round, to hate evil, to love good, to establish justice, in our time.

Closing prayer:

Heavenly Father, we consider soberly what Amos reminds us, that you cannot tolerate injustice. We ask you to forgive our own lack of justice and we thank you that the drastic solution to our failure is Jesus, in whose name we stand here today. Amen.

© Mike Knee, 2000

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