One of the things I loved about living in South Jersey, where I served my first church, was the fresh peaches. I love peaches even more than I love sweet corn. So as soon as they started appearing, I started buying. And every time I went into the local farmer’s market (Puglia’s) I would just wander around gazing on glorious piles of produce - from plums to peppers, apricots and melons, tomatoes and cherries. It made me regret I gave up painting. No wonder so many artists paint still lives. Isn’t it amazing how beautiful they all are? God didn’t have to make them beautiful, you know, they could have been just as tasty and nourishing if they were all sort of a drab khaki color. The beauty is just an extra bonus.
So it was really hard to make the mental switch from thinking of piles of sweet, succulent peaches to Amos’ basket of summer fruit - because his vision is not one of plen-ty. Amos’ vision does not forecast sticky fingers and full stomachs. Amos’ vision signals disaster.
It works better in Hebrew, becausse it’s a pun between "qayets," which means the “summer fruits,” and "qets," meaning “end.” So instead of seeing a basket full of fruit, Amos sees a basket full of “the end.” Like the plumb line from Amos 7, it’s a way of saying that the time is up for the Israelites. A lot of commentators want to make this a basket full of overripe fruit, and use it as a metaphor for the rottenness of their society, but I don’t agree. That meaning isn’t in the text, it’s just an attempt to make up for the fact that the pun doesn’t work in English. I think that what God is showing Amos is that the time of the harvest of the peo-ple is at hand. Scripture is full of agricultural metaphors for people. Probably the most applicable passage is a parable that Jesus told:
"The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field; but while men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the householder came and said to him, 'Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then has it weeds?' He said to them, 'An enemy has done this.' The servants said to him, 'Then do you want us to go and gather them?' But he said, 'No; lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, 'Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.'' ... the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the close of the age, and the reapers are angels." [Mt 13:24-39]
So, you see, people themselves are referred to as being a harvestable crop.
But there’s another agricultural metaphor that’s even more applicable. Again, it’s Jesus’ words. This time from
Luke "For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit; 44 for each tree is known by its own fruit.” [Lk 6:43-44]
Or, as Paul puts it in Galatians, “Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for whatever you sow, that you will also reap.” Or Job 4:8 ...those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same. Or Proverbs 22:8 He who sows injustice will reap calamity... Or Hosea 8:7 For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. Let us see, shall we, what the Israelites have sowed, and what kind of fruit they are bearing.
Hear this, you who trample upon the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land, saying, "When will the new moon be over, so that we may sell grain? And the Sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat.” [Amos 8:4-6]
Amos accuses them of two things: They are accused of defrauding the poor through fraudulent business practices, and they are accused of - not neglecting the Sabbath, exactly, but of disliking it. Of rushing through their religious observances with their minds on other things. This is not just a matter of being distracted, mind you, as all of us are at one time or another. No. They are so unaware of what worship is about that they imagine that going through the motions is enough. Do you suppose they really think that God is satisfied with their superficial obedience? I know a lot of people even now who think that going to church on Sunday is enough to get you in God’s good graces, as if singing a few hymns and sitting through a sermon and dropping a check into the of-fering plate makes up for ignoring him for the rest of the week.
D’you know, Christian churches in third world countries don’t look at the clock when they worship. It’s the highlight of their week. They can go on for hours. Why don’t we? I know, I know. It’s because we’re so busy. We have kids, we have sports, we have relatives, we have yard work and we have hobbies. But what do we have to do - really - that’s so much more important than worshiping God? I’m thankful that I can be reasonably sure that devising new ways to defraud people is NOT what most of you are thinking about during the service. As a matter of fact, I’m intensely gratified by the close attention that people pay to my sermons. But still ... do we come to the Sabbath with joy, greeting her as the orthodox Jews do, as a bride prepares for her groom? Or do we keep glancing at our watches, wondering if I’ll be done on time?
Well. Back to the text. Amos spends a lot of time preaching about economic injustice. In earlier chapters he rails at the rich women he calls “the cows of Bashan,” and points accusing fingers at the rich who lounge around in luxury, eating and drinking and enjoying themselves with idle pastimes, completely oblivious to the dreadful state of the country, from the misery of the poor to its moral decay. In this chapter he gets specific about how the poor got that way. He uses the grain trade as an example of the kinds of fraud that were being practiced. The easiest trick was to tamper with the system of weights and measures. The ephah is a unit of measure, about a bushel, and the shekel was a measure of weight, almost 1-1/2 oz. If the merchants make the ephah a little smaller, people will get less than what they pay for; if they make the shekel a little heavier, then the poor farmers will get less for their produce. But that’s not all they did. They also added chaff, dirt, and other useless fillers to the bottom of a sack of grain. And then when the poor were completely destitute, they would buy them as slaves for a pittance, no doubt boasting of their charity all the while.
What’s the parallel for us?
Does this mean, as some would argue, that the recent welfare reforms put us in the same boat with Amos’ commodity traders? Or is it a blanket indictment of capital-ism, as others have held? What does the fact that our country is seeing a growing gap between the rich and the poor mean, in the light of Amos’ charges?
I think that the issue of poverty in this country is a serious one, and that we will be held accountable for the well-being of the poorest among us. But the issue of economic justice, the root causes of poverty and the obligations of the state vs. the obligations of individuals, is too big a topic to be dealt with here. I will only point out two things. First, under no circumstances whatsoever is it acceptable in God’s eyes to cheat someone out of their due, whether it is by underpaying them or overcharging them, no matter what local business practice is. And second, although God does not begrudge us the enjoyment of our prosperity, as long as it is achieved honestly, he expects us to care about those less well off than we are, and to actively seek out ways we can help.
The things that the Israelites did to merit God’s anger are important, and we can learn from them. But I don’t think they’re what we need to spend most of our time on. Of far more importance to us is what comes next.
What comes next is what Amos - and indeed most of the prophets - calls “the day of the Lord.” Remember - the people he is talking to are self-satisfied. They are certain that God is pleased with them because - look - aren’t they prosperous? Aren’t they powerful? Don’t they go to church? So when the Lord comes, he will of course be pleased with them and reward them and everything will be just wonderful. Don’t they deserve everything they have?
How many of you have heard a commercial from one of the utility companies which talks about how Paradise is something we build right here on earth? It ends by saying Paradise is just like what you have now only better. I don’t know whether to call and complain or just sit and cry. What appalling ignorance. What an impoverished view of God. What a cheapening of grace.
At any rate, in chapter 5 Amos warns the people not to be so sanguine about their prospects. God is not pleased.
“Alas for you who desire the day of the Lord... Why do you want the day of the Lord? It is darkness, not light. ... I hate, I despise your festivals. And I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them.... Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.” [Amos 5:18-24]
And now in this chapter Amos describes what the day of the Lord will be like. First of all, he tells them, the land will tremble. It will be tossed around, up and down, the way the River Nile in Egypt rises and falls. Since the Mediterranean has no tides, the annual flooding of the Nile was probably the best example most of them had of an overwhelming force of nature. As it happens, there was an earthquake two years after Amos preached. Archeological excavations at Hazor in Northern Israel confirm what Amos says at the beginning of the book. And then in v. 9 YHWH GOD goes on to say "And on that day, I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth in broad daylight.” Again, there was a solar eclipse in 763 BC. In the Old Testament, God often seems to use what we call “natural phenomena” to get his point across. Do we really think he’s stopped doing that? I don’t.
Now, I’m not saying that El Nino is God’s judgment on us. It might be. But I have had no direct word. What I would like to point out, though, is that God is in charge of nature. If nothing else, what these extraordinary weather patterns should do is remind us of who is boss, and give us a renewed sense of our dependence upon him. But that doesn’t seem to be happening - at least not on the national level. Did anyone catch Al Gore explaining that El Nino comes from global warming and how we now have the technology to control it? All we have to do is control greenhouse gases. What arrogance! What shortsightedness! What would it take, do you suppose, for these powerful, self-satisfied people to repent?
What else will happen when the Day of the Lord arrives?
" I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth upon all loins, and baldness on every head; I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and the end of it like a bitter day." [v.10]
Do you see a pattern here? Everything that they valued, everything that they invested in, spent time and money on, everything they sought meaning in, is being turned upside down, or inside out. Their feasts, where they gorged on steak and lobster and drank Perrier and vintage burgundy from Waterford crystal while the poor starved - they are turned into mourning. Their Armani and Versace, their gold chains and designer jeans will all be turned in for sackcloth and ashes. The temple and the worship that they thought guaranteed their future will be destroyed. Everything that they relied upon is being shown to be hollow. And their mourning will be completely without hope.
The only thing that could save them is the one thing that they do not have. The only thing that could give them a sense of direction, a way through or a way out, is the word of God. But it has completely vanished from the land.
"Behold, the days are coming," says YHWH GOD, "when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of YHWH. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, to seek the word of YHWH, but they shall not find it." [v. 11-12]
They drove God’s prophets out from among them, and refused to listen, because he said things they didn’t want to hear. They set up their own gods, who didn’t care what they did, as long as they made regular offerings.
I remember listening to The Capitol Gang on CNN back in the day; they were talking about the flap over a defense of the Biblical position on homosexuality by a couple of very public figures. One of the commentators referred to conservative Christians as “a fringe group.” All agreed that they didn’t want to be on the record as opposing the Bible; Margaret Carlson particularly made that point. But they all agreed that taking it seriously, especially bringing it into political discourse, just wasn’t appropriate. Al Hunt even misquoted Scripture in support of his arguments against it. Even Bob Livingstone, the Republican Senator who was the guest, couldn’t manage any more than a lukewarm defense of the New Testament as providing a reliable basis for social stability.
We may, as a nation, be in trouble with God because of the condition of the poor in this country. In fact we probably are, but probably not because we haven’t fed them, but because we have starved them of the tools and incentives to build independent and productive lives. We are probably in trouble with God because of the shallow and casual nature of our worship, the loss of the sense of sin, the attitude of entitlement that we bring even into our prayer life. We may be seeing previews of God’s his wrath in the fires and the floods and the tornadoes brought by El Nino. The jury’s still out on that.
But I do not believe that there can be any doubt that we are seeing a famine of the word of God. The banishment of the Ten Commandments from the walls of public buildings is just the latest in over two generations of the systematic silencing of Scripture. What used to be a common vocabulary has now become not only missing from public discourse - except for the most superficial request for God to continue to favor us - but actually unwelcome. And yet the word of God is the only thing that can save us. Only the word of God can give hope and direction to the islands of despair in our inner cities. Only obedience to the word of God can reverse the moral decay that is rotting our communities. Only knowledge of the word of God can give us the strength to stand against the pressures of a corrupt culture. Only reliance on the word of God can give us the hope to endure its fall.
As a nation, we are already experiencing a famine. We need to start thinking like survivalists (another fringe group) laying in non-perishable supplies for the long haul, having enough to share, encouraging others to join us. We need to start storing up the Word in preparation for the Day.
What are you sowing? What will your harvest be, on the Day of the Lord?
