This Week's Sermon: "Amos"

“The Minor Leagues: The “Minor” Prophets of the Bible,” Week Four

True to the goody-two-shoes form of a pastor-in-the-making, I have always been a terrible liar, even as a kid. My first attempt at lying was a classic—I told my dad I had taken a bath when I had not. He felt the bar of soap. It was bone-dry. I immediately had my bath—among other consequences.

My first attempt at cheating in a game also came with my dad—I am not sure why I subjected him to all my first experiments in childhood chicanery, but in the spirit of Father’s Day, I am going to share this story as well. We were playing a Wheel of Fortune board game, in which you take a sheet that has the phrase and put it behind a screen shaped like the famous set that they play the televised game on. I had caught a glimpse of the sheet and saw that one of the words had an ‘x’ in it, so I guessed ‘x’ with my first turn. And my dad said (I’m paraphrasing slightly) “You twerp, you cheated and peeked at the sheet, nobody ever guesses ‘x’ on their first turn in Wheel of Fortune.” We stopped playing so that I could think about what I had done in timeout.

These stories of me learning honesty from my dad are not only good Father’s Day material, they are timely for the concern that the prophet Amos illustrates for us in this passage from Amos 8, of the justice inherent in dealing honestly with one another, and the injustice that comes when we cease to abide by such honesty, especially when there are strong disparities of wealth and power at play too.

This is a new sermon series to take us all the way through the summer, from Memorial Day weekend to Labor Day weekend, and truthfully, it is a series that I have wanted to give for a long time now, almost a decade, in fact. But it never quit fit into the arc of my ministry until now. Because I think that after all the work that we as a team put into resuming in-person worship services after fourteen months of online-only worship, a few months of a relatively simple series can help us catch our breath and focus on getting back into the weekly rhythm of worshiping in-person again. We have gotten off our couches and back to the gym, now we need to settle into a pace on the treadmill.

So, this sermon series was born. Each Sunday, we will hear from one of the twelve (or thirteen) minor prophets of the Tanakh (Old Testament), so-called because the books attributed to them are much shorter in length than those of the three “major” prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. As a group, I have found the minor prophets especially dear and compelling, but I acknowledge for some, maybe many, of you they may seem unfamiliar or even intimidating, and this series is meant to help chip away at that. The sermons are designed to be standalone, so that if you do some traveling this summer and miss a Sunday or three, I do not want you to feel like you have fallen behind everyone else. So I hope by the end of this series come Labor Day, we have discovered newfound affinity for these so-called minor prophets, and elevated them closer to major status in our faith.

To best facilitate everyone following along, we will read the prophets in the order they appear in the Protestant versions of the Tanakh. So, we began with Daniel, and followed him up with Hosea and Joel, and today we arrive at Amos.

Amos is a contemporary of Hosea—they prophesied under (or against, really) the same king of Israel: Jeroboam II, who reigned for roughly forty years until his death around 747 BCE. If you recall from my sermon on Hosea two weeks ago, Jeroboam II was a fairly effective ruler, but that was not because he was righteous. Far from it. Like his namesake, Jeroboam I who had been Solomon’s chief slave overseer before splitting the unified Israel into two under Solomon’s son Rehoboam, Jeroboam II was perfectly happy with golden calf worship and other forms of idolatry because they were part and parcel of his foreign policy to keep foreign empires at bay. That policy also meant welcoming foreign deities, and that is at the crux of Hosea’s career against Jeroboam II.

Amos, in contrast to Hosea, is primarily concerned with the economic impact of Jeroboam II’s faithlessness and idolatry. It is not that Amos is unconcerned with Jeroboam II’s personal connection to YHWH—on the contrary, in Amos 7, the prophet delivers a prophesy of Jeroboam II’s violent death because of his idolatrous words and deeds. But that is not Amos’s main concern.

Amos’s big objection is the impact that Jeroboam II’s greed and selfishness is having on the people’s economic fortunes, or misfortunes. And that stands to reason once we learn a bit about the prophet himself—Amos shares in his book that he is a shepherd and a landscaper, both blue-collar jobs. Shepherds in particular were disliked in ancient Israel because sheep absolutely devour grassland, and so farmers and shepherds had a sort of rivalry over the arable land available—which was not very much, truthfully. Much of Israel is the Negev desert, so arable land was a precious commodity. And in a subsistence-level agricultural nation, that meant wealth was a precious commodity.

Amos lays out his bill of particulars against how the wealthy maintain their wealth over the subsistence-level poor who make up the vast majority of the ancient Israelite population. What Amos describes is a haste to be done with the Sabbath and holiday worship of YHWH so that those with means can return to defrauding the wider population by manipulating prices and wages. The ephah was a unit of measurement, especially for grain, and the shekel was the unit of currency. So what Amos is documenting is God’s upsetedness with people who already have much dishonestly making those without even poorer.

And this is where Amos is both a time capsule and, like Joel last week, timeless. He is, on the one hand, describing specific practices taking place under a specifically idolatrous and self-centered king. But he is also describing a pattern that is timeless: of people with means using their means to take advantage of people who do not have the same resources and advantages.

We have a word for that in the English language. Injustice. When we say that our God is a God of justice, this is what we mean—God not only loves justice, God is upset by injustice. Frankly, I think—I hope—we would want to worship a God who is upset by the injustices we inflict upon each other. A God who is not upset by such sin strikes me as an apathetic God, an absentee landlord to whom we should owe no allegiance, much less the allegiance of our hearts and souls.

And so I understand why God’s upsetedness may make us fear or tremble. And maybe it should. But above all, it should reassure us, that if injustice is done to us, that God will be appropriately upset on our behalf, just as God would be upset on behalf of a neighbor we unjustly wrong. Prophets like Amos can be challenging for us in this way—as a seminarian in preaching class, I had to cut my teeth on Amos, and I remember well wrestling with him and doing, frankly, a terrible job of it—but prophets like Amos really should be reassuring to us. We should feel reassured by a God who wants us to be treated justly, and most all wants the oppressed and marginalized among us to be treated justly as well. And if we do not want a God like that, well, that should force some pretty tough questions of ourselves about why we might not want God to desire justice for all, and we need to be honest in answering those questions.

Because dishonesty is not always so blatant as your kid telling you they bathed when they still smell, or guessing ‘x’ on the first turn of a game of Wheel of Fortune, though. If only it were. That sort of stuff is easy to spot and, I hope, a relatively innocuous part of coming of age and learning right from wrong.

As adults, we do, or should know right from wrong, and yet as Amos—and all the prophets, for that matter—make abundantly clear, we do not always do right instead of wrong. And often that comes into play in the exact same scenario Amos describes: when we are the ones with power over someone else, to use our abilities or resources to harm them. When we think we can get away with inflicting harm because we have more power than the person or people we would be harming, it makes it that much easier to be tempted by evil into inflicting that harm.

Since we know we have a God who wants to see us treated justly and honestly, we should feel free, feel set free, to ask ourselves how we can treat others justly and honestly. Instead of being intimidated or even threatened by the prophets, can we feel liberated by them?

For the prophets each do what we ourselves are sometimes unwilling to do: put a mirror up to us so that we might see ourselves and our history as we are, and not necessarily as we imagine to be. But it is not to put us down, it is to inspire us to always be striving to be better, to do better.

If God wanted to give up on us, God would not send us prophets such as these. God would simply write us off, let us destroy one another into oblivion. But God swore, first to Noah, never to do that, and then renewed that vow to Abraham, and to Moses, and across the Scriptures. Including the prophets.

So as we plunge forward into tomorrow, into whatever it may bring for good or bad, comfort or pain, joy or sorrow, may we rest today in the knowledge that Amos reveals: that God does not forget evil, nor should God. Because the promise of God is that good wins out, and that sin does not have the last word.

By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson

Birmingham, Alabama

June 20, 2021