Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 18, 2010

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I just love the prophet Amos. That’s why I switched the usual order of our scripture readings, so I could read Amos. He’s one of the great writing Hebrew prophets of the eighth century BCE. That’s so long ago that you’d think he wouldn’t have anything to say to us, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Amos thunders against economic injustice more powerfully than anyone in the Bible before Jesus himself. Maybe even more powerfully than Jesus himself. Amos is the one who roars “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Amos 5:25 He lets the rich oppressors of the ordinary people and of the poor in his society have it like no one else. He is the prophet of justice par excellence. I just love Amos.

Today we heard one of the passages that make Amos such a favorite of mine. It’s one of Amos’ typical tirades against the rich and the way they oppress the people. Against those who, he says “trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land.” Those who engage in unfair trade practices and who see religious observations like the Sabbath as nothing but an impediment to their making more money. The passage contains a typical prophetic prediction of the consequences of this injustice, dire consequences of doom and destruction. Amos has God say that God will turn the people’s feasts into mourning and their songs into lamentations. God’s going to get you, Amos is saying, because of your wrongdoing; and it’s not going to be pretty.

All of that is pretty typical stuff for the great prophets of the eighth century BCE. We read very similar things in Micah and in Hosea. But after delivering himself of this pretty typical stuff Amos says something that really caught my attention this last week. He says that God will send a famine on the land. Now, that’s pretty typical prophetic stuff too. The prophet Elijah, for example, famously called down a famine on the land because of the people’s idolatry. But what struck me is that this famine is different. It will be, Amos says, “not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD.” People, he says, will seek everywhere for the word of the LORD, but they shall not find it. In other words, God is going to withdraw from the people. The famine that is coming is not a shortage of food and water. It is a shortage of the word, of the presence, of God.

And that got me thinking: Just what is going on here? Why is the people failing to do justice for the poor as God desires and commands going to lead God to withdraw from the people? How are we to understand that notion? And does it have any meaning for us? Amos condemns economic injustice. He condemns the wealthy cheating the people. That’s what Amos means when he talks about those who make the ephah—a measure of volume—small and the shekel—a monetary unit—great. Those who use false balances, selling the people less than they think they’re getting for their money. Those who sell inferior product, the sweepings of the wheat. Now, we have people today who do the modern equivalents of things like that, and I could go on a lot like Amos condemning the robber barons of Wall Street and of the executive suites of huge corporations for their modern day equivalents of the practices Amos here condemns. For their Ponzi schemes and their fraudulent investment devices, for their massive lobbying efforts to keep the government from prohibiting their financial sleight of hand that enriches them and wipes out the investments of the rest of us, and for so many other things besides; but I won’t—although I guess I just did, didn’t I. I think we all know about unjust economic practices in our country today. Let’s just take it as given that economic injustice is every bit as real today as it was in Amos’ day, albeit with different and more sophisticated particulars. And let’s take it as given that these unjust economic practices hurt and anger God today every bit as much today as they did in Amos’ day. That, after all, is what Amos’ prediction of dire consequences means to us. We don’t have the mechanistic view of things that the ancients had. We don’t think that God directly intervenes to cause harm to whole societies because of the injustice of the wealthy the way Amos did. So let’s take Amos’ dire predictions not literally but as an expression of the way in which injustice hurts and angers God.

I want to focus on the idea that Amos expresses that the injustice of the rich leads to the withdrawal of God from the land, to a famine of the word of God. What does that mean to us? We don’t believe, or at least I don’t believe, that God ever withdraws from us, that God is ever absent from us; so does that mean that Amos’ statement that God will cause a famine of the word of God has no meaning for us? Well no, it doesn’t mean that; but as is so often the case with bible passages, to get at what it means for us we have to get beyond a literal understanding of the words we read. We have to ask: Is there a spiritual truth that these words point to that has meaning for us? Not surprisingly, I think that in this case there is.

To get at that meaning I start by asking: Just what is it that the oppressive rich who Amos so resoundingly denounces are doing wrong? On one level it is of course the oppression of the poor that they are doing that is wrong. But why is it wrong? What about it makes it wrong? We might think that it is simply wrong in itself, but I think that there is a deeper way in which it is wrong. It is wrong because it violates the word and will of God. It is violating God’s ways that makes it wrong, and it is our knowledge that it violates God’s ways that makes us aware that it is wrong. On one level the wrong here is economic, but on a deeper level the wrong here is spiritual. It is spiritual because it has those who commit it focusing exclusively on themselves and their own advantage and not on the word of God, not on the way and will of God.

That, I think, is what Amos is getting at when he says that a consequence of the oppression of the poor by the rich in ancient Israel will lead to a famine of the word of God. Violating the word and will of God leads to spiritual famine. Focusing only on our personal wealth and power, or any other behavior that we all know violates the word and will of God, leads to spiritual famine. It leads to spiritual dryness, to spiritual drought, to spiritual hunger, a hunger that cannot be satisfied as long as we continue in the ways that we know violate God’s word and will. It isn’t that God separates Godself from us. Rather, it is that when we commit this kind of sin, the sin of ignoring the will of God, we separate ourselves from God.

I have seen that dynamic at work. As most of you know I used to work for great big, very wealthy law firms. What I’m about say wasn’t true of all of the successful lawyers in those firms, but it was true of many of them. They focused almost exclusively on their own wealth. For them, practicing law wasn’t an end in itself, and it certainly wasn’t a way to serve other people. It was a way to make money. As much money as possible. Some of them even saw the lawyer’s professional ethics code as nothing so much as an obstacle in the path of their making more money.

And that world was, to a considerable extent, a spiritual desert. People, including the firm’s own employees and for some even its clients, weren’t individuals to be respected, they were objects there to make more money for the firm. No amount of money was enough for many of the leaders in those firms, we had always to bring in more. The result was a work environment characterized by outrageous demands on the employees’ time and labor. The negative effects on both the employees and the principals of the firm were manifest. The rates of divorce, depression, and alcoholism were very high. Many of the people there, including many of us lawyers, didn’t want to be there, but there was a phenomenon we called “golden handcuffs.” The lure of the money was so strong that we couldn’t bring ourselves to leave. We weren’t happy, but oh did we love the money. It was indeed a place of spiritual famine.

That’s how it is when we ignore the word and will of God. Put another way, that’s how it is when we ignore our spiritual health in pursuit of material wealth. That’s how it is when we violate the basic principles of spiritual health, which, after all, are what the word and will of God are all about. When we treat other people only as a means to our desired end, violating what philosophers call the categorical imperative and people of faith call the Golden Rule. When we put material values ahead of our relationship with God just like the targets of Amos’ invective did so very long ago. When we put any values ahead of what we know to be God’s values.

We aren’t lawyers in big downtown law firms, but we are subject to some of the same temptations to put other things ahead of God in our lives. So let us hear Amos saying not that God will actually withdraw from us. God never does that. Rather, let us hear Amos saying that in violating the word and will of God and ignoring our spiritual health in the pursuit of worldly wealth we separate ourselves from God. We suffer spiritual famine. Amos is right about that, you know. Amen.