Amos 8:1-12
I was raised with felt-board Jesus and all of the traditional Bible stories, from Noah and the Ark to Paul and the earthquake, served up each week by Mr. Bridger in Sunday School. Everyone, adults and kids, went to Sunday School at 9:30 am at my childhood church, then everyone not in the nursery gathered for what we now call inter-generational worship, but that we just called worship back then, at 11:00am.
I learned how to participate in worship as a child.
And for the record, if anyone had a sense of humor in that church, I was too young to notice. They seemed like nice enough people in that context, but I am so much happier in a denomination that knows how to laugh.
Despite this background, and decades of interest in religion, Christian and otherwise, I arrived at Divinity School twenty years ago this year with little real understanding of the historic context that gave birth to our faith tradition. What makes that even crazier is that I come from a history-loving family. My childhood home was filled with those Time-Life books you got in monthly installments, and family vacations were one battlefield or historic site after another.
To be fair, the Biblical Age is at a much greater distance than the period covered in the 26 volumes of Time-Life’s “Old West” series. That chronological distance leaves a lot of room for uncertainty, and the events take place over centuries, not decades. The sources are a mess, re-arranged and redacted to reflect later situations, for history is and always has been told through the lens of now.
Still, there are some broad socioeconomic and geopolitical patterns we can identify in the Ancient Near East, and one of those is that the region where most of the events unfold, roughly today’s Israel and Palestine, was a terrible place to establish an independent kingdom, which may explain why it was so short-lived.
The land itself was marginal, semi-arid. The real problem was the great river valleys to the northeast and southwest. You see, ancient Jewish culture was based primarily on small-holds, family farm plots that produced enough food to sustain the family, with just enough surplus to trade for other essential goods.
Those first Jewish tribes were radically democratic, and continued to have active movements of resistance even when they were ruled by monarchs and foreign powers. Democracy fosters innovation at the cost of efficiency.
To the southwest of Canaan was Egypt, with the great Nile River Valley, controlled by autocrats who enslaved and exploited.
To the northeast was the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley, which gave rise to both the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires.
Both river systems produced a surplus of food, and surplus food is important.
Surplus food allows for an economy of exchange, which in turn allows for specialization, for physicists and physicians.
But most important of all, you must have a large surplus of food to field an army and pursue wars of aggression outside of your own territory. And this was precisely the context for the classic age of the prophets, the waning years of the Northern Kingdom and the final years and captivity of the Southern Kingdom, as Egypt to the southwest, and the Neo-Assyrian Empire and the Babylonian Empire to the northeast all waged war across the region, leaving the two Jewish kingdoms between a rock and a hard place.
Amos is among the earliest of these classic “text” prophets, a contemporary with the original Isaiah and Hosea. Prior prophets, like Samuel, Nathan, and Elijah, appear as characters in the narrative, but do not have stand-alone books.
Despite this shift in the form of the prophetic tradition, Amos denies being a professional prophet, and there really was such a thing at the time, including prophets who told kings whatever it was they wanted to hear. Amos even goes so far as to identify himself as a shepherd and an arborist, but he is no rustic. In fact, he is quite literate.
Amos lays the foundation for what would become the prophetic literature we know today. While we can see redactions and additions from later ages, we have no reason to question the historic heart of his message, which includes in its original text layer five oracles against neighboring states. The last of these is against Israel, the Northern Kingdom. The passage we read this morning focuses specifically on economic justice in Israel.
The biographical information in the text identifies Amos as a Judahite, not an Israelite, which explains why the rich and powerful had him expelled from that Bethel, much as legal residents of the United States are being disappeared and expelled from our country for naming the crimes against humanity being committed now the modern state of Israel. But Amos is not after war crimes. Genocide is very biblical. Amos is after economic crimes.
Specifically, he denounces those who are religious for the new moon and the Sabbath, but cheat customers as soon as business hours resume, using false weights and adding the chaff to the grain in an ancient version of shrink-flation.
Many of today’s Christians pretend there is a dividing line between their faith and their livelihood, talk about love of neighbor on Sunday, but deny healthcare to their neighbor on Monday, vote to cut PEPFAR and Medicaid. They are fooling themselves. They are sinners. Economic justice is a consistent theme in the Jewish Testament, including in the Torah, as well as in the life and teachings of Jesus and the texts of the Christian tradition. Economic justice is one way we love our neighbor.
Of course, if you’ve sat in those pews more than a couple of times, watched online or read any of my sermons, you know that I care about economic justice, as does our denomination, the United Church of Christ.
Recently, I’ve been given opportunities to address Elmira’s housing crisis, a symptom of our economic injustice. I wear both of my hats in that context, the economic justice hat of a progressive faith leader, and the practical numbers hat of an elected official who has to figure out how to provide essential services as our tax base collapses.
Confusingly, one of the practices I denounce across all settings is rent-seeking, which is an economic term that has nothing to do with housing, land-lording, and tenancy.
To economists, rent-seeking is extracting value without producing value.
It is the vile practice at the heart of private equity, hedge funds, crypto-speculation, every Ponzi scheme ever created, and quite frankly, end-stage Neo-Liberal Capitalism, which is essentially a rent-seeking Ponzi scheme.
It is speculation and derivatives and the bull in the market, speculators who buy on credit hoping prices will go up, bull appropriately named.
I don’t have a problem with people doing well if that is what their hard work and talent earns them, though I absolutely believe in hard work. Paul talks about the importance of everyone working. The Christian monastic tradition understood labor as a spiritual practice.
In a healthy society, those who can work do work and produce a surplus of good, tangible and intangible good, widgets and waffles and webpages so that we have enough of everything to take care of those who cannot work.
In the biblical context this was primarily widows and orphans, though in the ministry of Jesus we see quite a few unable to work due to disability as well.
As science and safety have extended our lifespans, more and more of us age out of work due to disability, or have simply done our share of working in exchange for money, and switch to working for causes and people we care about.
Ultimately, the only ethical use of our surplus, the only loving use of our surplus, is for the common good, for care of the vulnerable and the creation of art and the management of wild places. The consolidation of wealth is a threat, not only to our democracy, not only to our faith, but to the Creation itself.
The Rev. Canon Frederick Donaldson, supporter of women’s suffrage and Christian socialist, famously listed wealth without work among his seven social sins, aka profit without production, aka rent-seeking, aka every scam going in today’s finance capitalism.
For far too long, Christians have pretended that being a Christian is an interior thing, about belief, and showy displays of religiosity, the revival and the altar call. We’ve distorted the prophetic texts, pretending they were about proper worship. They never were. They are geopolitical. They are socio-economic.
May we, called to follow in the tradition of Jesus, honor him and the prophetic tradition of which he was a part, mindful of our engagement with an unjust, cruel, and exploitative economic system, knowing that today, it matters how you conduct business, just as it did when a prophet named Amos crossed the southern border and challenged the elite of Israel. Amen.