Reflections on Amos 5:18-24

In Dallas, Texas, at a small bus transfer station downtown, there is a large plaque against one wall, behind a tiny grove of short trees, with Amos 5:21-24 engraved on it. However, the author of the quotation is given there as Martin Luther King, Jr. Though that very quotation is engraved on his tomb at his center in Atlanta, he in fact did not make up the oracle; he was merely quoting what the prophet Amos had said some 2750 years before Dr. King was born. Though, it must be said, he tried during his too short life to embody that quotation every day.

I remain amazed just how current those famous words continue to be. I am sad to say that one could stroll into any one of ten thousand Christian congregations this coming Sunday and feel the sharp sting of Amos’ ancient words. I would like to explore the words once again, the better to sense their power, and to remind myself why they have always haunted me some 50 years after I first read them. Perhaps you might need a reminder, too.

In scathing satire, Amos begins another tirade against Israelite evil by asking sarcastically, “Why do you want the day of YHWH” (Amos 5:18)? Many a church service I have attended and led begin, “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it!” That line is surely a biblical one, but it stands in stark contrast to Amos’s warning that to ask for YHWH’s day is to call forth darkness and gloom. This is so because YHWH has witnessed the evil of Israel, and has come dangerously close to rejecting the chosen ones once and for all. To ask for the Lord’s day is to request darkness; it is just as if one were fleeing a lion and was attacked by a bear, as if one rushed into her house in terror, fleeing from an enemy, and resting her hand on a wall, was bitten by a snake (Amos 5:19)! YHWH’s day has “no brightness in it.”

Why is that so? Because what YHWH has long demanded of the chosen people has simply not occurred. They have rejected the cause of the poor and needy, have denied the existence of poverty among them, while making poverty all too possible by their greed and malice, have “sold the righteous for silver and the poor for a pair of sandals.”

But their reaction to these terrible realities is fabulous worship! Ah, can these Israelites worship! Just listen to Amos describe the activities he witnesses in the great shrine of Bethel. They love pilgrimage feasts, where they set out for sacred spots and sacrifice up a storm (Amos 5:21a). YHWH “hates” and “rejects” such traditional worshipping acts. Also, their solemn gatherings for praise (Amos 5:21b) YHWH “finds no joy in,” although they find joy aplenty in them, serving coffee by the gallon and doughnuts by the score. “Whole burnt offerings” of the finest spotless beasts and rich “grain offerings” of the harvest’s first fruits (Amos 5:22ab) will no longer be accepted by YHWH. Fine Sunday clothes and large monetary gifts will no longer suffice. And that goes for the so-called peace offerings of your fat creatures, too; YHWH will not even look at those. Fancy communion paraphernalia, of gold or silver, chalices of exquisite creation, high crosses of inlaid fine mahogany, copes and miters of intricate stitching, are anathema to God.

Your songs/hymns are noise! Your well-tuned choirs and four-part anthems, not to mention your fifty-rank organs with magnificent flutes and reeds and pedals and swells, God will no longer hear (Amos 5:23). Fight no more about the kind of music you choose to worship God; God cares not a fig for any of it!

God wants only one thing, well, two things actually, though one surely follows from the other. “Let justice roll down like waters (think of waterfalls), and righteousness like an undammed stream” (Amos 5:24). At its base the word “justice” refers to God’s unfailing desire to create an egalitarian community in which all classes of people maintain and are assured of their basic human rights to equal access to the goods and services of society. “Righteousness,” though possessing many meanings in the Hebrew Bible, most directly means God’s saving action toward the people of Israel and most especially the helpless individual—the poor, the oppressed, the widow, the orphan, and the expectation that those who follow God will act in the same fashion. If those two attributes are not found in a people who claim adherence to the will and way of God, then all the sacrifices, all the hymns, all the anthems, all the vestments, all the God language, whether inclusive or exclusive, will avail the people not at all.

It is little wonder that sermons and studies of Amos are few and far between in our churches; his words are hard ones and they sting like an enraged hornet. Yet, do we not still need them? Do they not still attempt to remind us of how easy it is to play at religion rather than practice it? As always, when I get in this preachy mode, I am first and foremost preaching to me. But I invite you to listen if you are of a mind to do so. More Amos, please! He can be an antidote to a feeble faith, a tonic for a rigid or repulsive religion, a cure for a church life gone vapid.

(Images from Wikimedia Commons)