Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, 20^th of July 2025

Amos 8:1-12

Once a month Yoojin and I meet to choose the parts of the service that he will prepare and lead over the following four weeks. This includes looking at the lectionary readings, and when we saw last week’s First Reading, Amos 7:7-17, I strongly advised Yoojin not to use it. The reading describes Amos’ conflict with Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, and ends with Amos saying to Amaziah: ‘thus says the Lord: “Your wife shall become a prostitute in the city, and your sons and your daughters shall fall by the sword, and your land shall be parceled out by line; you yourself shall die in an unclean land, and Israel shall surely go into exile away from its land.”’ I thought that it would be unfair to expect a theological candidate to preach on a threat attributed to God that a priest’s wife was going to become a prostitute.

The Book of Amos is the oldest of the collection called ‘The Book of the Twelve,’ which also includes the prophecies of Hosea, Joel, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. It begins with the editor’s introduction, ‘The words of Amos, who was among the shepherds of Tekoa, which he saw concerning Israel in the days of King Uzziah of Judah and in the days of King Jeroboam son of Joash of Israel, two years before the earthquake.’ Tekoa is a rural area in the small southern kingdom of Judah, but Amos’ words deal with the larger, wealthier, and urbanised northern kingdom of Israel. Strangely, the editor describes Amos’ criticism of Israel simply as ‘the words of Amos’. That is not the usual opening of a prophetic book. The other parts of the Book of the Twelve begin with ‘the word of Yahweh that was addressed to Hosea’ and ‘the word of Yahweh that was addressed to Joel’ and so on and so forth. But these are Amos’ words, says the editor, not necessarily the Lord’s words.

(Maybe I could have let Yoojin preach on Amos last week. Maybe, although Amos began his threat with ‘thus says the Lord,’ he was only speaking for himself. I have certainly said awful things to people when I have lost my temper with them, and those have definitely been my words, and not the words of God.)

Amos himself, in his argument with Amaziah, says, ‘I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees, and the Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord said to me, “Go, prophesy to my people Israel.”’ Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, has told Amos to go home and stop preaching in the sanctuary of the king of Israel and the temple of the kingdom. Amos refuses and points out that, unlike Amaziah, he is not part of any sort of professional cult or order. The king could tell priests what they could do and say. The community of prophets might have had control over one of their own. But Amos is neither of these things. Only the Lord can control Amos’ words, and those words are not encouraging.

In today’s reading, we hear the fourth of the five visions that Amos says the Lord showed him, and we find that God likes puns. ‘This is what the Lord God showed me: a basket of summer fruit.’ The word for ‘summer fruit’ is qayis, and the Lord then tells Amos that the end, qes, is coming for Israel. There is some evidence that in the dialect of the northern kingdom the two words would be pronounced in the same way, making God’s punning even more striking. This pun is the most extreme statement in the book of Amos. The word used for ‘end’ is usually used to refer to the eschatological end, the end of time, and here it is used for the end of the people of Israel. The people of Israel were the people of God; they were living in a time of economic prosperity, and they assumed that their privilege and affluence were a sign of God’s favour. Suddenly, they are told that everything is going to be destroyed.

The rest of the vision explains why this end is coming. The problem is the separation between their religious and business practices. The Israelites are following some of the demands of the covenant made between God and God’s people. The wealthy would like to sell grain on the Sabbath, but the practice had been condemned since the earliest times, and all the influence of the affluent could not change it. So they follow the prescribed religious observance of the Sabbath and attend the festival of the new moon, but they complain about it. And although they are obeying the covenant’s worship demands, they are ignoring the equally important covenant demands of justice and care for the poor.

Amos describes two types of sins. The unethical grain dealers who complain about being unable to do business on the Sabbath are also planning to put false weights on their scales to reduce the quantity sold (make the ephah smaller), raise prices (make the shekel heavier), and sell even the husks of grain that they have swept from the floor (selling the sweepings of the wheat). In a subsistence culture, cheating the poor when they come to buy food is deadly.

Amos also condemns those who, with dishonest practices, buy the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals. Those being accused here are those who have made loans to the poor, cheating as they did so, so that the poor are unable to repay what they have borrowed and become debt-slaves. The poor are not literally bought for a pair of sandals, which would contravene the Law, but because they cannot repay the price of a pair of sandals, they are sold into slavery. For trivial debts, their lives are destroyed.

Because of these crimes and sins, Amos warns, the nation of Israel will no longer be able to live comfortably in the security of being the people of God. ‘The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.’ For the only time in the Hebrew Scriptures, God’s promise not to forget the people is a threat rather than reassurance. Those who have been proud of their descent from Jacob will experience the overthrowing of the natural order. Everything is to be turned upside down. Songs which would normally be of praise will be songs of lamentation. Daylight will become darkness, and the stable earth will tremble.

Worst of all, God will send a famine of hearing the words of the Lord. When Amaziah told Amos to leave, the priest was implying that prophets should only speak in the service of the king. A nation that believes such a thing is a nation that has rejected the word of the Lord, and so the nation will be deprived of it. God will punish God’s people by withdrawing from them. In today’s gospel reading, Mary sat at the feet of Jesus, drinking in his words, and Jesus told Martha that she had chosen the better part, the one thing needed. For Israel, the one thing that is needed will be taken away.

The God Amos speaks for is a frightening God. For the crimes of the rich, the whole nation, made up of rich and poor, is to be destroyed. Maybe Amos thinks that the situation of the poor is already so desperate that the destruction of the kingdom of Israel cannot make it worse, that being ruled by a foreign empire will be no worse for them than being ruled by their own people. Maybe he was right. We know that what Amos foresaw eventually came true. Half a century after Amos spoke, the Assyrian Empire invaded Israel, took many of its people into exile, never to return, and moved others from the Empire into the land where they intermarried with the remnant left behind. (That remnant became the Samaritans, and today their descendants include Palestinians living in the West Bank city of Nablus.) The people of Israel had believed that as God’s own people, observing the new moon and the Sabbath, celebrating the prescribed feasts and singing songs in the temple, God would protect them. No, says Amos; the Lord ‘will turn your feasts into mourning and all your songs into lamentation’.

I do not believe in a God who destroys nations for their wrongdoing. I do believe that the words of Amos are a warning to any nation that might believe it has God on its side, or in today’s terms, that it is a virtuously liberal democracy, and yet commits injustice against the most vulnerable. They are also a warning to us. At the core of Amos’ message is the reminder that our economic decisions are also religious, and that the God of Israel and of Jesus Christ is not in favour of the oppression of the poor. As I have said before, budgets are moral documents, and how we spend our money reveals what we believe.

Amos’ words are terrifying, and so is the idea that they could in any way apply to us. But as theologian William H. Willimon says, commenting on this reading: ‘One way you can tell the difference between a true and living God and a dead and fake god is that a false god will never tell you anything that will make you angry and uncomfortable!’ So, let us sit with these discomforting words from Amos, and let them affect our lives.