by The Rev. Dr. Max Lynn
SCRIPTURE READINGS Luke 10:25-37, Amos 7:7-17
Transcribed from the sermon preached on JULY 10, 2022
Ok, so today we are going to look at the book of Amos. Amos is only 9 chapters long but has some of the most powerful prophetic lines in all of scripture. If you are a social justice person, Amos is your prophet, because for Amos, God is a God of justice. Amos is quite different from the conservative values taught by the educated to their up-and-coming sons in Proverbs we studied a few weeks ago. Amos is not middle of the road.
According to Bob Coote in his Book Amos Among the Prophets, there are three contributors from three different times that complete the book as we have it. He calls them Amos A, B and C.
Amos A is the original prophet who delivered his words orally. After just two generations of the United twelve tribes, there was a split into two kingdoms. King Jeroboam split from Jerusalem and took the Northern portion, known as Israel, establishing Samaria as the political stronghold city and Bethel as a spiritual and agricultural center. The Southern Kingdom was called Judah and its capital was Jerusalem.
Israel, the Northern Kingdom was destroyed by Assyria in the 8th Century BCE, specifically in 722, and 28,000 of the ruling elite were exiled. Amos predicted this would happen. Amos A is a regular guy, a shepherd, a dresser of sycamore trees who gets a calling from God to speak against the injustice of the ruling elite of Samaria. Because of this injustice, God would destroy them. He doesn’t offer any hope or way out. He just tells them what they have done and the inevitable consequences of it.
Now Amos B writes about a 100 years later during or near the reign of King Josiah in Judah, the remaining Southern Kingdom. After the fall of Samaria, the Assyrians exiled the old elite and imported new ones. They established or reestablished the temple and religious festivals in Bethel and helped Assyria implement its policy in the region. When Assyria collapsed 100 years later, there was a window of opportunity for Josiah who came to power in Jerusalem. Josiah used the vacuum of power in Assyria to try and solidify power over the whole area of Judah and Israel, like David and Solomon had done, and centralize that power in Jerusalem. So, Josiah wanted to destroy the temple at Bethel and institute reforms for a more just society. So, they used the prophet Amos and his proclamation of judgement on the Northern Kingdom as a warning for people to change their ways and join him.
So, in the additions made by Amos B reform is possible and expected. With Amos A God has already decided. In Amos B, the people are to decide. They have a chance; they have a choice. Amos A only addresses the specific judgement of the specific audience who are the ruling elite of Samaria. Amos B has a more general audience, the ruling elite of both North and South, and the peasants too.
Ch 5 [12] is Amos A
For I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins — you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and turn aside the needy in the gate.
Now we switch to Amos B
[13] Therefore he who is prudent will keep silent in such a time; for it is an evil time. [14] Seek good, and not evil, that you may live; and so the LORD, the God of hosts, will be with you, as you have said. [15] Hate evil, and love good, and establish justice in the gate; it may be that the LORD, the God of hosts, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.
In Ch 5:4 thus says the Lord to the house of Israel, seek me and live; but do not seek Bethel… v. 6 seek the Lord and live.
One of the issues causing trouble in the Northern Kingdom of Israel at the time of the original prophet is that the ruling elite begin to dispossess the poor of their land and change from subsistence agriculture of wheat and barley to large landowners producing luxury export goods like grapes and oil. Through taxes and rent, high interest and judges answering to the rich, peasant farmers were always on the verge of starvation. If they had a bad year, they would have to barrow to survive. When they couldn’t repay their loans, they would first lose animals and then children and finally the land. So, a small landowner unable to pay his debt may have to give away his daughter as collateral. That daughter as you might imagine might be misused, and by more than one man. Once they still can’t pay, they lose their land and become laborers who are worked to death. So, Amos in chapter 2 cries out:
6] Thus says the LORD: “For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment; because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes — [7] they that trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and turn aside the way of the afflicted; a man and his father go in to the same maiden, so that my holy name is profaned; [8] they lay themselves down beside every altar upon garments taken in pledge; and in the house of their God they drink the wine of those who have been fined.
Now in chapter 7, today’s passage, Amos says that what they have done to others will be done to them. The elite have carved up property lines and divided them among themselves. Now God was going to take their property and boot them out of the land.
Then the Lord said, “See, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass them by; 9the high places of Isaac shall be made desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste, and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword.”
You say, ‘Do not prophesy against Israel, and do not preach against the house of Isaac.” 17Therefore thus says the Lord: ‘Your wife shall become a prostitute in the city, and your sons and your daughters shall fall by the sword, and your land shall be parceled out by line; you yourself shall die in an unclean land, and Israel shall surely go into exile away from its land.’”
Amos A is the kind of prophet that bursts forth is anger to pronounce injustice. It only speaks a blatant truth and is not concerned with being politically expedient or shaping words to influence policy. So, for instance when President Kennedy was assassinated, Malcom X said that “His assassination was the result of the climate of hate. I think this was a prime example of the Devil’s chickens coming home to roost.” When asked if the country had made progress, Malcom said, “We haven’t made any progress. If you stab a man with a nine-inch knife and pull it out six inches, that is not progress…They haven’t even begun to admit the knife is there.”
When we first heard the proclamation Black Lives Matter, that was a spontaneous reaction to a specific horrible injustice of the death of Trevon Martin that represented so much historical injustice. This was not a statement devised as a political strategy with policy plans by some committee, it was a cry from the streets. That is Amos A. It is only later that the slogan become the name of a group with a political agenda and policy. That is the Amos B part.
The famous Priest Bartolome de las Casas reports on the sermon of Antonio de Montecinos for Advent, Dec 21, 1511, on the Island of Hispaniola, now Dominican Republic. Montecinos gave a strict order that everybody had to attend, including the Governor Diego Columbus, son of Christopher. He proclaimed, “I am the voice of Christ crying in the wilderness of this island…this voice declares to you that you are in mortal sin and live and die in it, because of the cruelty and tyranny they practice among these innocent peoples.” “I have seen Christ crucified, not once but 10,000 times. Montecinos asked those in attendance:
“Tell me by what right of justice do you hold these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged such detestable wars against these people who dwelt quietly and peacefully on their own lands? Wars in which you have destroyed such an infinite number of them by homicides and slaughters never heard of before. Why do you keep them so oppressed and exhausted, without giving them enough to eat or curing them of the sicknesses they incur from the excessive labor you give them, and they die, or rather you kill them, in order to extract and acquire gold every day?”
Kimberly Latrice Jomes noted that people criticized the riots asking, “What did you gain from riot and looting. She asks why did they do it? There is a social contract, but society hasn’t held up their side of the bargain. You broke your contract when you killed us in the streets and didn’t give a F… You broke the contract when for 400 years we played your game and built your wealth. You broke the contract. So, F… your target. As far as I am concerned, they could burn it to the ground, and it still wouldn’t be erased.”
Chris Hedges is the Most Amos A type prophet I know of today. While he is a non-violent Christian minister, has no soft edges. As far as he is concerned, it is too late. We are done for. God is pronouncing judgement. In The Age of Social Murder. March 21.2021 Scheer Post Hedges writes:
The two million deaths that have resulted from the ruling elites mishandling of the global pandemic will be dwarfed by what is to follow. The global catastrophe that awaits us, already baked into the ecosystem from the failure to curb the use of fossil fuels and animal agriculture, presage new, deadlier pandemics, mass migrations of billions of desperate people, plummeting crop yields, mass starvation and systems collapse.
He goes onto make his point in specific detail covering the already too far gone to stop disaster of climate change; the fact that the ruling elite know the science but don’t care. The fact that the poor will be the ones to suffer, the probability of greater pandemics, the unstoppable exorbitant spending and addiction to military spending and war, the distraction of the working class by spurring social antagonisms, conspiracy, and fascist Christian nationalism, the ongoing dependency on oil, the collective participation of the managers of the system by the uncritical middle class. In short, like Amos A, Hedges is a cynical and angry realist who only pronounces judgment – because we have done this, he says, angry as this is, what is going to happen to us.
Now when we look at these prophets like Amos and see that they understand themselves to be preaching for a lost cause, when things look so dark that it looks like there is no hope, then why preach? If Christ knows he is going to be crucified while the elite in Jerusalem and the Roman Empire will continue on, why does he continue to go to Jerusalem?
Albert Camus writes that “one of the only coherent philosophical positions is revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his obscurity. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.”
Chris Hedges continues: “Rebellion is its own justification. It erodes, however imperceptibly, the structures of oppression. It sustains the embers of empathy and compassion, as well as justice. These embers are not insignificant. They keep alive the capacity to be human. They keep alive the possibility, however dim, that the forces that are orchestrating our social murder can be stopped. Rebellion must be embraced, finally, not only for what it will achieve, but for what it will allow us to become. In that becoming we find hope.”
From the point of view of Amos, there is hope in the insistence that despite all the evidence, God is a God of justice, and nothing can change that. As we live into this faith, this revolt, whether we live or whether we die, we are the insistence there is a God, and there is hope.
Now Christ has his angry moments. Woe to you scribes and pharisees, and he overturns the table of the money changers. But Christ isn’t just an angry voice for justice, but has a positive, mystical hope in the joy and power of love. Love is its own victory and wherever it exists, it has already won.