On these days when our members have been on their Civil Rights journey, I want to call your attention to a quotation that our travelers saw on a memorial in Montgomery, Alabama; it was one of Dr. King’s favorites: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream…” It is a biblical quotation, originally from the Prophet Amos (5:24), whose story we will hear this morning.
The Prophet Amos wasn’t born the “Prophet” Amos. He was a regular guy; one of the most relatable people in the Bible. He didn’t have a degree in religion; Amos was a lot more like the people sitting out there than many of us who speak up here.
In the beginning, Amos was a shepherd, a herdsman. A hard worker, he wasn’t rich, but neither was he penniless. In his writing there’s a clear sense that he wasn’t taking care of someone else’s sheep—he had his own flocks and herds…as well as his own orchard of sycamore trees. Amos would have had daily responsibilities each morning and throughout the day, caring for his farm, interrupted by days when he traveled throughout the region taking his various good to trade in the marketplaces. He shows a keen awareness of what’s going on with neighboring tribes and peoples as he visits their villages. Amos was a businessman.
You’ve heard me talk about hard times in the ancient world of the Bible, destruction of cities and temples and times spent in exile; but Amos did not live in one of those times. The kingdom was largely stable. There were periodic battles and treaties with neighboring peoples, but the kingdom was mostly in a season of expansion, not contraction. People were building and hiring; the markets were strong. And people were religious too, and observant about it. In a way that maybe mirrors our country in the 1950s, much of social life and a lot of cultural expectation was built around religion and its practices and ceremonies and festivals, and it was expected that one would show up for such things, participate, bring contributions, etc.
So for the most part, in Amos’ world, things are going along fine. And yet as he travels around, he’s noticing things, some things that don’t seem quite right to him. A lot of middle class merchants and landowners were getting wealthier, but the wealth was due to a practice of selling debtors into slavery; and slaves were the ones building the new cities and towns. Folks knew about these practices, but the courts were fixed in favor of the wealthy, so no one on the bottom end could get any justice. Religion was popular, as I said, but as Amos noticed, religion wasn’t just flourishing…it was decadent. The festivals and the ceremonies were hugely elaborate and expensive, but there was little attention given to the Word of God, or what it had to say about justice for the poor. Many of the priests had become part of the system and were rarely seen critiquing it; prayer was mostly about personal piety but wasn’t changing any hearts or minds.
Every day Amos witnessed these things that made him vaguely uncomfortable…until one day He had an undeniable experience of hearing the voice of God saying to him, Amos…are you noticing this? Do you see that things are not heading the right way? What are you going to do about it? …And that’s how the herdsman, the regular guy, becomes a prophet. Our Scripture lesson from chapter 6 is just one of many examples how he spoke out against the opulence and hypocrisy. “Alas for those who are at ease in Zion, who lie on beds of ivory, who anoint themselves with the finest oils…the revelry of the loungers shall pass away.” (6:1-7, selected verses)
Now Amos, as I’ve said is a good businessman, he has a sense about people; so when he starts to speak up about the injustices he sees, he’s got a plan—he talks about the other people first. He speaks about all of the foreign and distant peoples and the injustices and hypocrisies he sees in them. You can imagine him, were he living in our own time, leveling criticisms against the people and situations that were easy targets: have you seen the human rights violations in China and the brutality of the Russian military? Have you seen the homelessness crisis in San Francisco and the opioid abuses in Appalachia? Have you seen the opulent spending of those evangelical megachurches and the smoke and mirrors financing of the Vatican? Amos speaks the truth and he sees the nodding heads.
You might have a sense of where this is going. Amos is going to try really hard to set the stage by talking about what everyone else is doing, but eventually he brings it home; he starts talking about the abuses of power and justice and religion he sees among his own people, and his own conviction that things need to change… He warns that his own people’s empty faith and luxurious living at the expense of others will lead to their downfall. And that’s when people start to get mad…but that’s also when Amos really becomes a prophet.
As I thought about Amos’ story, and the times in which he lived, those times in Israel that were reasonably comfortable….religion was thriving, but problems waited under the surface… …as I thought about those times, I kept thinking about our own country’s history, particularly in the 1950s. In our own country’s history, there are several periods of ebb and flow in church participation, and the most recent great revival was the 1950s. These good and stable postwar times were characterized by flight to suburbs and the massive construction boom that went with it, the growth of the consumer product industry, and the boom of civic organizations of all types: PTOs, Rotary Club, YMCA… And post WW2, tons of people go back to church, looking for a return to stability and community following the upheaval of the war. Not all of this was bad, but religiously it had a shadow side; some of the booming religious attendance in the 50s had less to do with religious fervor, and more to do with looking good and appearing moral. Being an Elder in your church, for instance was a good way to get promoted at work. And meanwhile, simmering beneath all of that were hypocrisies that would lead people to leave church in droves in the following generation as the Civil Rights Movement laid bare some of the ways comfortable churches had forgotten about justice. You can hear the Prophet Amos speaking to communities like these: “I hate your festivals…your burnt offerings I will not accept them…but let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” (5:21,24)
At the same time, there were a lot of good things about religious growth in the 1950s, and there were prophets, and when you think about that time, you have to talk about Billy Graham. Some folks imagine or remember that he was only concerned about saving souls or finding a personal relationship with Jesus, but in fact, for Billy Graham, those things were found through an honest assessment of problems: the things Amos cared about—the brokenness of the world and the need for Christ’s peace to heal it. Last week I told you about the great New Testament scholar Elaine Pagels, who discovered Christian faith through Graham’s preaching in 1958: listen to how she described the first time she heard him preach:
“Then the moment came, and a fiery preacher began to speak, quietly at first, warning that what he’d say would sound foolish and irrational to university professors—the authorities of the world I lived in—and it did. He began quoting the [prophets], “Ah, sinful nation!” Then, increasing his intensity, he scolded America…for driving its most brilliant sons to invent ever more horrific nuclear weapons… …Graham raised his voice to denounce Christians who used scripture to justify slavery and defend racism while ignoring the poor and our own spiritual poverty…I was riveted. [I had never heard anyone indict [my people’s failings, as he did now]. After thundering against America’s own moral bankruptcy, he paused dramatically and turned, his voice hushed, to speak of our need for God’s love, promising everything, including eternal life: all we had to do was go forward and ‘accept Jesus into your heart.’” (Pagels, Why Religion, 2)
Billy Graham’s preaching was about that acceptance of Jesus into one’s heart—and the way it would change one’s heart. His was one of the voices that brought people back to church by the masses in the 20th century…and his message was grounded in an honest assessment of the ways people need to change…so that they could be freed of the burdens of sin. So that they could see God clearly through a life unencumbered by the distractions of the world and the evils of injustice.
When we lay the words of a prophet like Amos before a 2025 congregation, all of you hear these words a bit differently. What we hear most clearly depends on your point of view and what you care most about—and that’s to be expected. So some of you are listening for an indictment of our current administration (or you hear an indictment of the last one); others of you are hearing commentary about US policy in the Middle East or in Europe; still others are hearing a commentary on the current state of the church in our country, and its need for spiritual revival—you hear me saying that all of those social problems are only solved through truly seeking, knowing, and following Christ. I suspect that not just one of those point of view, but all of them hold truth.
Additionally, following as we’ve read Amos today, I would invite you to consider this: Amos’ strategy was to speak first of the evils of others before making the real point of bringing it home: Where is your life not lining up with the purposes of God? What in your life needs to change in order for you to more truly follow Jesus Christ? Notice that I am not asking what is wrong with everyone else, or who else needs to change, but what needs to change in you.
Amos conducted a prophetic ministry by being honest about the sins of the world, but not just the sins of others. He worked his way closer and closer to home before finally asking his listeners to think about their own homes and lives and the ways in which they needed to reconnect with God and with one another.
In that same spirit, my challenge to all of you, and I give it also to myself is this: can you honestly ask yourself: how has my life become a passive or maybe active acceptance of things that need to change: violent actions and words, daily economic injustices that provide our own comfort on the backs of the poor and the vulnerable, religious observance that is more about looking good than being swept up in the Gospel of Christ. Can we ask ourselves, “Am I truly looking at my own need for change and beginning there? Or am I more interested in complaining about the sins of others—politicians, or your neighbor, or your brother in law? Those criticisms may be true and important, even prophetic, but what if they must begin with a hard look at ourselves? This was the message of Amos.
I titled this sermon “May God Shed Grace on Thee” changing the line of the old song just enough so that it might grab your attention once more and help you to gratefully ask, “How has God shed grace on me? And with what therefore shall I do?” We’ll America the Beautiful in worship today, because, if you listen to the words closely, yes, it’s a song about love of country, but first it’s a song about love of God, a God who calls us to be grateful for who we have been, and honest and brave about who we still need to become—and as Amos said, this work starts with ourselves.
We don’t really get anywhere in life or in faith, in love for your neighbor or closeness to God, if its always an exercise of criticizing what everyone else is doing. As we experience gratitude for our nation and its history, and as we yearn for a tomorrow when our faith and our justice will be much more complete than it is today, may we not be afraid to listen to the challenging words of Amos and to bring the message home to ourselves. How might my life speak more clearly of the justice and righteousness I am called to in Jesus Christ? Amen.