As I have shared in the past, I was once part of the on-stage child audience on the Jim and Tammy show. I was a youth counselor when the Billy Graham Crusade came to town. I graduated from high school just down the road from Pat Robertson’s global headquarters. When I talk about the heresy of fundamentalism, I know.
The good news is that I’m not buying Jim Bakker’s doomsday prepper supplies, though between plague, war, and white men with guns, I’m starting to wonder if its not a good idea. I’m not an Islamophobic ethno-nationalist like the Rev. Graham’s son, Franklin, the con-man and liar. And unlike Robertson and others of his ilk, I do not believe that God sends hurricanes to punish the United States for marriage equality.
But let’s start with today’s reading. The prophetic ministry of Amos took place during the couple of centuries when there were two Hebrew kingdoms. In the south, the Kingdom of Judah was centered around Jerusalem and the great Temple of Solomon. In the north, the Kingdom of Israel was centered around worship at Bethel. This kingdom was sometimes called Samaria, and the residents of this region, Samaritans.
Amos feels called to deliver God’s word of justice to the people of Israel. And justice is the theme of the most famous verse from the text, “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” The thing is, Amos isn’t even from Israel. As he reports in our reading, he’s a shepherd and arborist from Judah. So not only is he aggravating as all heck, he isn’t even a local.
Many folks read today’s passage and the doom-and-gloom condemnation of the prophets generally as proof text, confirmation of their version of God the punisher. These are the folks that link homos and hurricanes, who want to believe that those who don’t follow God’s law suffer in this life.
But as we established a couple of weeks ago, it simply doesn’t work that way. Bad things happen to good people, sometimes, and bad people and bad nations do just fine, at times. I wish doing good things produced good karma, but I don’t do good things in order to get rewarded. I don’t do good things to get a golden ticket to some maybe heaven. I do good things because goodness, compassion, life, are the natural order of God’s good creation, because I am most myself when I am aligned with all that is goodness and Godness.
Still, this is an old theological maneuver. Prophets threaten bad kings and bad kingdoms with plague and war and all manner of disaster. They look back at disasters that have happened, and lacking any other good explanation, they attribute them to God, then invent a reason why God was angry.
The real world just doesn’t work that way, but for just a moment, let’s step into that crazy alternative moral reality. Let’s assume that conduct and consequences always follow on one another. Let’s take, for example, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the cities destroyed in ancient times. One fundamentalist after another has said this is the result of God’s displeasure with homosexuals. The first of these cities even lends its name to the supposed crime of non-reproductive sex. Funny thing is, scripture itself says that the sin of Sodom is a sin of inhospitality.
Amos, in the book that bears his name, is not railing against Israel because the Israelites worship other gods, though we saw that narrative in the story of Elijah, Ahab, and Jezebel. Here, Amos condemns Israel because of the way the powerful of Israel, both government and religion, treat the poor.
He even gives us this delightful “Real Housewives of Samaria” moment when the rich women of Israel bellow to their husbands “Bring something to drink!”
Of course, you won’t hear many preachers of “prosperity gospel” focus on this part of the text. In their law, the law of this ancient dispensation, the rich are rich because God wants them to be rich, because they deserve to be rich, and the poor are poor because they have done something wrong, because God wants those people to be poor. If the Prosperity Gospel folks help the poor at all, it is patronizing and toxic, a mission trip to Haiti that is simply old school colonialism in a new form. For people who reject biological Darwinism, they sure do preach a lot of Social Darwinism.
Amos conveys the word of the Lord, as he experiences it. Just before that beloved passage about justice, God declares:
I hate, I reject your festivals;
I don’t enjoy your joyous assemblies.
If you bring me your entirely burned offerings and gifts of food—
I won’t be pleased;
I won’t even look at your offerings of well-fed animals.
Take away the noise of your songs;
I won’t listen to the melody of your harps.
Jesus preaches the exact same thing, denounces showy religion, makes clear that God is concerned with conduct, not ceremony, with your practice, not your pageantry. Jesus condemns those, like his opponents among the Scribes and Pharisees, who obey the letter of the Law instead of the Spirit of the Law. Even if we were still under the Hebrew Covenant, the spirit of the law is justice. It is welcoming the immigrant, paying a just wage, caring for the widows and orphans, forgiving debts. If we have to pick and choose texts to emphasize, then I choose the passage where God promises Noah not to flood the earth again. Killing a whole bunch of people with Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Harvey because God is angry about marriage equality is just bad theology whether you are a Christian or an evangelical.
The spirit of scripture is clear. And I believe there is something of the holy there. It isn’t in the minutia, the nit-picking and the rules. It is in the spirit of love and justice that runs through the entire story, through both the Hebrew Testament and the Christian Testament, like the ever-running stream Amos imagines.
If I am honest, I do not care even slightly how exactly an ancient society ordered itself, an ancient society that included slavery, that treated women like property, a pre-enlightenment culture with no technology and almost no science, that thought illness was caused by demonic possession.
I don’t care.
I have no intention of worrying about some ancient law, and I don’t think a living loving God does either. The idea that God made a bunch of rules during the Bronze Age, issued an update when Caesars ruled Rome, and has sat back ever since, manipulating football games and occasionally healing a kid who gets enough “get well” cards is laughable.
I do care very much about the spirit of that law, the spirit of the law found in Amos, in the Hebrew covenant, in the Christian covenant, in the teachings of Jesus, in the compassionate inter-being of the Buddhist, in the pillar of Islam that calls for charity, in the ancient pagan practice of hospitality, and that is the law of love, in all of those cases. That is the holy mystery I find in the Bible, this powerful force for love and justice and selflessness, the voice of the wandering rabbi, who heals and tells us “Be not afraid.”
I can believe there is God in scripture without believing scripture is God, for God is not ever contained and controlled by human words. We may have these ancient words of Amos, this “word of the Lord,” but words are at best a sketch, all that is holy and infinite and yes hinted at by humans, smart apes pointing at what is beyond. We are toddlers playing in the fields of holiness, and the best response is to run, to experience, to learn, and maybe even to giggle a little.
I can believe there is something that is the spirit of democracy and liberty in the founding of the United States without believing every word written by a bunch of misogynists, many who owned slaves. In fact, I care exactly less than zero about the intent of the so-called “Founding Fathers.” Who consented to a dictatorship of the dead, exactly? I sure didn’t vote for them.
What I want to know is what is the right thing to do that reflects democracy and liberty and God’s law of radical love and restorative justice today, today when we have vaccines and airplanes and weaponized drones and Wikipedia.
Amos was absolutely right when he challenged the rich and powerful of Israel to make their nation a better place for all people, when he railed against income inequality and the luxuries of the rich. But Amos was wrong when he declared the God would destroy Israel. The Assyrians destroyed Israel, though it was no doubt weakened by the selfish stupidity of the billionaires.
What is the right thing to do today? God may not lay waste to America because of our worship of the dead, because of our corrupt economic system, because of the racism and division, because of the idolatry and heresy and violence and guns and hatred. God doesn’t need to. We are doing a fine job of destroying our nation and our faith without divine assistance.
What is the right thing to do right now?
May God give us new prophets. May God’s Spirit fill us with just enough crazy hope to make all things new. Amen.