Amos 5:18-24 Prophets
for Our Time
Today, we continue our summer
sermon series
on famous and infamous people of faith from the
Bible.
We have covered a whole cast
of characters -- OT and NT, men and women.
The man we are hearing from
today is the prophet Amos.
The idea of hearing from Amos
in a sermon actually started
with the song we just heard from the choir,
the African American spiritual We Got Shoes.
As we planned worship for the
summer,
the choir and Sylvia and Sheila let me know
that one of their favorites was this piece we just
heard.
As I looked at the lyrics,
and did some research,
what I learned was this is not just a nice song.
This is a bold protest
spiritual,
with a couple of layers of meanings disguised in the
lyrics.
The song is a cry for
justice, from the voice of a prophet --
the nameless slave who first sung it in a cotton field
somewhere in the south in the 19th century.
Despite the fact that they
were slaves,
the original singers of this song were boldly confident
about God’s ultimate justice, and so they sang
“All God’s children got shoes
- and robes, and harps and wings”
Basics like shoes were hard
to come by when you were a slave,
but in God’s future reign, there would not only be shoes,
but robes and even luxurious, angelic things.
They sang these words,
confident that in the end, God’s justice would reign.
But the song goes even
further than that with the line
“Everybody talking about
heaven ain’t going there.”
Here, the singers confronted
the hypocrisy of slave holders
who went to church on Sunday a.m.
and then went back to the physical and emotional abuse
of other human beings the rest of the week.
This is a song that proclaims
God’s justice and judgment would ultimately rule.
It’s a song about the haves
and the have nots and whose side God is really on.
When I understood what this
song was really about,
I immediately thought of the
prophet Amos.
The prophet Amos has some of
the harshest words in the Bible.
It’s all judgment on the consequences of neglecting God’s covenant.
We can date this book from
around 760 to 750 BCE,
during the time of the split kingdoms of
It was a time of great
prosperity for the kingdoms, but it was based on practices
which favored the rich over the poor,
the powerful over the powerless,
strong over the weak.
We know only a little about
this prophet Amos -
he was herdsman or shepherd, and a trimmer of sycamore
trees.
God called him as a prophet
to pronounce God’s judgment on the nations-
not just
which Amos proceeds to do in this short book.
And the judgment is always
about justice.
You see, for God, justice always has to do with how the haves treat the have nots.
This is part of a long
prophetic tradition in the Bible.
Micah, another OT prophet
puts it this way in Micah 6:8:
He has told you O mortal,
what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and
to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?”
To be in covenant with God means to have compassion
for others.
In this tradition, the
message is loud and clear:
God is never pleased with a
religion full of empty words and shallow praises.
Real religion, Amos tells us,
must disturb us enough to change our lives.
Real religion, as someone once said,
must comfort the afflicted and afflict the
comfortable.
Now Amos is not what you
might call a popular guy.
But prophets rarely are.
This little book was actually
largely ignored by the church
from the earliest centuries until the 19th and
20th century
until something called the social gospel movement
emerged.
This was a theological
movement where people started re-reading the Bible
and applying the gospel to the social problems of the day
that ranged from racism to poverty.
In fact, there is a verse we
heard today that may sound familiar to you:
“But let justice roll down
like waters, and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.”
This probably sounds familiar
not because you’ve read it in the book of Amos,
but because the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King used it in a
widely quoted speech
in the ‘60s during the civil rights movement.
But Amos lived in another
time, another era.
So did Martin Luther King,
for that matter.
Things are different
now. We don’t need prophets like people
used to, right?
Some of you know that there’s
a section in the AJC Gwinnet news each Saturday
where a question is posed to a group of Gwinnett
clergy.
Some weeks the question takes
me 30 minutes, and some weeks,
I’m thinking on it for 3
days.
But most weeks I try to
respond to the question.
Two Saturdays ago, the
question was: are there modern-day prophets?
Some of my colleagues didn’t
think so.
But others, including myself,
think there are modern-day prophets.
I guess it depends on how you
define prophet.
If you want to know how I
recognize a prophet,
it’s not by why century they live in, but by their
message.
A prophet is always serving
as a mouthpiece for God,
reminding us to work towards God’s purpose of justice for the
whole world.
One of the ministers who
answered this question
actually named a prophet right here in Gwinnet Co.
Ellen
Gerstein, of the Gwinnett Coalition for Health and Human Services.
So last week, I decided to
call up a prophet.
This prophet was concerned
about justice -
the haves and the have-nots right here in Gwinnett
Co.
What does this have to do
with us?
It’s simple.
Because God is concerned with justice, we need to be too.
Two things were required of
the people of
Love the Lord your God with
all your heart, soul, strength, and mind.
That’s the covenant part.
And love your neighbor as
your self.
That’s the compassion part. And as we Christians already know,
because Jesus taught us this,
if we want to know who our neighbors are,
they are often the ones lying on the other side of the
road.
And according to this modern
day prophet with whom I spoke last week, Ellen Gerstein, increasingly our
neighbors are lying at the side of the road right here in
Now I’m fairly new to this
area of town.
I live in the Lilburn area,
which is also in Gwinnett Co.,
so to get to church I drive through Norcross.
What I’ve noticed is that
Peachtree Corners
is this little island of prosperity in a
sea of poverty.
In fact, if you listen to
Ellen Gerstein,
a county of islands of prosperity in a
sea of poverty.
But if you listen to the
prophets of the Bible,
we don’t need to be afraid of poverty.
It’s prosperity we need to
fear.
This is nothing new.
For this sermon, Carol Owens,
one of our members,
lent me a book called “All the Men of the Bible” by
Herbert Lockyear.
It was published 50 years
ago.
In the section on Amos, the
author says this:
The greatest perils, both of nations and men, lie not
in poverty, but in prosperity.
That’s because prosperity
becomes an idol and keeps us apart from God.
Prosperity puts blinders on
us - and we can no longer can see God’s concerns.
Ellen Gerstein gave me some
statistics on poverty in
our neighbors who are lying on the side of
the road.
The statistics show a
downward trend on a number of different scales:
When we hear statistics like
these, we can respond in several different ways.
For one, we can find someone
to blame: People make bad decisions.
There are too many illegal
immigrants. It’s the government’s fault.
It’s the housing industry’s fault.
It’s their own fault. But
it’s not the children’s fault.
Or we can stay on our little
and pretend that the ocean of poverty is far away.
As I was working on this
scripture last week, I emailed one of our elders,
“Has anyone at PCCC preached
a sermon recently on poverty in this community
and what our response should be as Christians?”
This elder responded: “No, I don’t recall ever hearing a sermon
about poverty
relating to the community around us.
I think we sit in our little
comfortable box and look out the windows
and wonder what we can do to help,
then we quickly slip out, collect and donate food and
clothes,
then rush back into our little comfortable box with our
arms wrapped around ‘our things.’”
This elder went on to say,
many of us are “lukewarm at best, too consumed in keeping
what we have,
than giving it to those in need.
That could apply to keeping
our ‘things’ or to keeping the gospel to ourselves.”
Ouch. That hurts.
Which is the
way I imagine Amos and the other prophets always made people feel.
I’m not pointing fingers here, and neither was this
elder. It hurt me to hear this.
Because most of us are living on islands of
prosperity, me included.
A third choice is to listen
to the prophets among us.
Like Ellen Gerstein who wants
more than anything
to see the faith community partner with non-profit
agencies and businesses
to improve the well-being of our community.
She dreams of a homeless
shelter in Gwinnett Co. for women and children.
She wants churches to support
their cooperative ministries, like Norcross Co-op.
She’s willing to come and talk to churches
about poverty in this county and what they can do to make a
difference.
In the coming year, we are
going to be having more and more conversations
about our mission here at Peachtree Corners, because that’s
what thriving churches do.
What it really means to be
disciples of Jesus and what God wants us to do about it.
There is a mission field all
around us here in Norcross.
My hope and prayer is that we
can hear God’s call for justice
right here in our own community.
In closing I bring to you one
more prophet - but I have to admit I almost missed this one.
This was a young voice, a
small boy’s voice - he might have been 7,
one of the children who participated in the
that several of us took over to Norcross Cooperative
Ministry this summer.
Last Wednesday, after he was
all done with the fun, and it was time to go,
I walked him and several
other children through the office
back to the waiting room to find their mothers.
He walked alongside me and
said quietly with a little smile on his face:
“I like this.”
“You like what?” I
asked. He just said it again, “I like this.”
I started to ask him again,
“What do you like?” But then I
knew.
He liked making a cross
bracelet, with Leah Faulconer helping him.
He liked getting his picture
taken with a Polaroid camera, watching it develop,
and then making a frame for it.
He liked the snack -- fruit
rollups and juice boxes and apples to take home.
He liked it when Ginny Bozzone sat on a blanket reading stories to him
from a children’s bible.
He liked feeling loved.
And then I knew what he
really said.
“I like this.” He said.
But what he meant was “I like being treated like a child of God.”