There is an Oxford University Theology professor who begins each new class year with a question: “With what is theology concerned?” The answers usually center around things like God, or Faith, or Spiritual Matters or the generic Religion. To which the professor will shake his head and reply “No, Christian theology is concerned with everything!”
The “theory of everything,” or TOE, has been a science fiction pursuit since at least the 1960's. It has even been a subject of some reflection and research from real scientists. The TOE is a holy grail of sorts that would explain, or connect, or make sense of everything in the known universe. Maybe not in intimate detail, but the TOE is supposed to unify or explain through a single model (the TOE) all the fundamental interactions of nature. It is supposed to give us the ability to predict the outcome of any experiment or process.
And if you listen carefully, you can hear a snort of derision through almost three thousand years of history back to a little fireball named Amos. “What do you think I was doing?” he mutters. “I was predicting – but we called it prophesying – the outcomes of all sorts of human processes on a regular basis! With graphic language and loads of volume!!”
And indeed he was. Take a look at our passage for this week. No, actually, take a deep breath and brace yourself – then take a look:
Amos 8:1-12 This is what the Lord GOD showed me-- a basket of summer fruit. 2 He said, "Amos, what do you see?" And I said, "A basket of summer fruit." Then the LORD said to me, "The end has come upon my people Israel; I will never again pass them by. 3 The songs of the temple shall become wailings in that day," says the Lord GOD; "the dead bodies shall be many, cast out in every place. Be silent!" 4 Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land, 5 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, 6 buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat." 7 The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds. 8 Shall not the land tremble on this account, and everyone mourn who lives in it, and all of it rise like the Nile, and be tossed about and sink again, like the Nile of Egypt? 9 On that day, says the Lord GOD, I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth in broad daylight. 10 I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth on 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. 11 The time is surely coming, says the Lord GOD, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD. 12 They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the LORD, but they shall not find it.
Good ol’ Amos. You can count on him to stir up trouble. To poke people in the eye with a sharp stick. Amos wasn’t one to beat around the bush – which is a pun because he was a dresser of sycamore trees. Whatever that is. And that’s just part of the problem with Amos, he doesn’t quite fit in. He’s a country boy sent to the city. He’s a manual laborer charged with addressing the upper class. God calls him from the farm, herding sheep and dressing sycamore trees (actually, I spent a summer de-tasseling corn, it was hard sweaty, mind-numbing work that started as the sun was rising, marching up and down the rows of corn no matter how hot the sun got and lasted until it was nearly going down. If dressing sycamore trees was anything like that no wonder he was so grumpy), and says that he was given the task of straightening out the economic morass that was Israel at the time. You can’t blame him for getting hot under the collar, I guess. He looked at the excesses of the elite and was outraged. He looked at the lot of the poorest and his heart broke.
So, what’s the deal with the fruit? Well, it’s a tricky Hebrew pun that’s hard to translate. The word for summer fruit is qayes, and the word for “end” is qays. Or maybe it’s the other ways around. Whichever. Get it? No, most of us don’t. Which means that the best way to visualize this prophetic image would be to look at a time lapse film of a bowl of fruit. There it sits, all shiny and delicious. But then through the magic of technology in the space of a few seconds it rots, right there before your eyes, it rots and shrivels and before you know it instead of a mouth-watering image of the harvest of plenty it turns your stomach and is only fit for the compost heap. Or imagine a shiny red apple that you grab from a basket and take a big bite, only to discover that under that skin, the meat of the apple had already turned, and it is mushy and mealy and you hope that darker spot is just advanced rot and not a worm you’ve bitten in half.
That’s the picture God draws for Amos and he shares so gleefully with Israel and with us. What’s really going on in the land of plenty? What’s under the surface of progress and growth? Where does justice reside in a land driven by profit, where does mercy live in a society of the bottom line?
Though there are some who might argue for it, I’m not sure that it serves us well to go line by line and compare the abuses Amos describes with our world today, our America today. Though in recent months and the past year or so we have been witness to such abuses in our news reporting on a scale that might make even Amos blush. The truth is the perpetrators of such excesses aren’t likely to be reading this bible study, so pointing fingers would be a fruitless exercise. The weight of the text as a whole can speak for itself quite well, I think. And where there are words that pinch, image that cause us to flinch, we can respond to that word on our own.
I think the message for most of us, is a little more subtle than that, however. I know, I know, subtle and Amos go together like ice cream and fish heads, but still. Take a look back at verse 5. Amos’ complaint here is that the merchants are chafing under the blue laws. He is saying that they have compartmentalized their worship life and their business life and are wanting to get the former out of the way so that they can get back to the latter. He imagines them sitting in the pew in their Sunday best, but plotting Monday’s conquests in the back of their minds.
The classic prophetic complaint is that the tendency, even of people of faith, is to put God into one small - and maybe shrinking - corner of our lives and to do our level best to keep Him there. While we go about the rest of our lives without a thought as to how our faith just might impact our business decisions, our political decisions, or our public and private behaviors. We have allowed the Constitutional blessing of separation of church and state – which was intended to keep the government out of the church, not the other way around – to become our standard operating procedure for all of live. We have given God a corner of our lives, but what God wants is all of it.
That professor was right, theology – or we might more comfortably say faith – is concerned with everything. Our whole lives belong to God, all of our decisions, all of our leanings, all of our priorities, all of our business. To continue to behave otherwise is to bring famine upon us. But not a famine of bread, but of the Word, the presence, the blessing of God. And then we would be lost.
OK, next time, I deal with the real threat from Amos: verse 10 - "I will bring baldness on every head." That’s just way too personal!
Shalom,
Derek
The “theory of everything,” or TOE, has been a science fiction pursuit since at least the 1960's. It has even been a subject of some reflection and research from real scientists. The TOE is a holy grail of sorts that would explain, or connect, or make sense of everything in the known universe. Maybe not in intimate detail, but the TOE is supposed to unify or explain through a single model (the TOE) all the fundamental interactions of nature. It is supposed to give us the ability to predict the outcome of any experiment or process.
And if you listen carefully, you can hear a snort of derision through almost three thousand years of history back to a little fireball named Amos. “What do you think I was doing?” he mutters. “I was predicting – but we called it prophesying – the outcomes of all sorts of human processes on a regular basis! With graphic language and loads of volume!!”
And indeed he was. Take a look at our passage for this week. No, actually, take a deep breath and brace yourself – then take a look:
Amos 8:1-12 This is what the Lord GOD showed me-- a basket of summer fruit. 2 He said, "Amos, what do you see?" And I said, "A basket of summer fruit." Then the LORD said to me, "The end has come upon my people Israel; I will never again pass them by. 3 The songs of the temple shall become wailings in that day," says the Lord GOD; "the dead bodies shall be many, cast out in every place. Be silent!" 4 Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land, 5 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, 6 buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat." 7 The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds. 8 Shall not the land tremble on this account, and everyone mourn who lives in it, and all of it rise like the Nile, and be tossed about and sink again, like the Nile of Egypt? 9 On that day, says the Lord GOD, I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth in broad daylight. 10 I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth on 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. 11 The time is surely coming, says the Lord GOD, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD. 12 They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the LORD, but they shall not find it.
Good ol’ Amos. You can count on him to stir up trouble. To poke people in the eye with a sharp stick. Amos wasn’t one to beat around the bush – which is a pun because he was a dresser of sycamore trees. Whatever that is. And that’s just part of the problem with Amos, he doesn’t quite fit in. He’s a country boy sent to the city. He’s a manual laborer charged with addressing the upper class. God calls him from the farm, herding sheep and dressing sycamore trees (actually, I spent a summer de-tasseling corn, it was hard sweaty, mind-numbing work that started as the sun was rising, marching up and down the rows of corn no matter how hot the sun got and lasted until it was nearly going down. If dressing sycamore trees was anything like that no wonder he was so grumpy), and says that he was given the task of straightening out the economic morass that was Israel at the time. You can’t blame him for getting hot under the collar, I guess. He looked at the excesses of the elite and was outraged. He looked at the lot of the poorest and his heart broke.
So, what’s the deal with the fruit? Well, it’s a tricky Hebrew pun that’s hard to translate. The word for summer fruit is qayes, and the word for “end” is qays. Or maybe it’s the other ways around. Whichever. Get it? No, most of us don’t. Which means that the best way to visualize this prophetic image would be to look at a time lapse film of a bowl of fruit. There it sits, all shiny and delicious. But then through the magic of technology in the space of a few seconds it rots, right there before your eyes, it rots and shrivels and before you know it instead of a mouth-watering image of the harvest of plenty it turns your stomach and is only fit for the compost heap. Or imagine a shiny red apple that you grab from a basket and take a big bite, only to discover that under that skin, the meat of the apple had already turned, and it is mushy and mealy and you hope that darker spot is just advanced rot and not a worm you’ve bitten in half.
That’s the picture God draws for Amos and he shares so gleefully with Israel and with us. What’s really going on in the land of plenty? What’s under the surface of progress and growth? Where does justice reside in a land driven by profit, where does mercy live in a society of the bottom line?
Though there are some who might argue for it, I’m not sure that it serves us well to go line by line and compare the abuses Amos describes with our world today, our America today. Though in recent months and the past year or so we have been witness to such abuses in our news reporting on a scale that might make even Amos blush. The truth is the perpetrators of such excesses aren’t likely to be reading this bible study, so pointing fingers would be a fruitless exercise. The weight of the text as a whole can speak for itself quite well, I think. And where there are words that pinch, image that cause us to flinch, we can respond to that word on our own.
I think the message for most of us, is a little more subtle than that, however. I know, I know, subtle and Amos go together like ice cream and fish heads, but still. Take a look back at verse 5. Amos’ complaint here is that the merchants are chafing under the blue laws. He is saying that they have compartmentalized their worship life and their business life and are wanting to get the former out of the way so that they can get back to the latter. He imagines them sitting in the pew in their Sunday best, but plotting Monday’s conquests in the back of their minds.
The classic prophetic complaint is that the tendency, even of people of faith, is to put God into one small - and maybe shrinking - corner of our lives and to do our level best to keep Him there. While we go about the rest of our lives without a thought as to how our faith just might impact our business decisions, our political decisions, or our public and private behaviors. We have allowed the Constitutional blessing of separation of church and state – which was intended to keep the government out of the church, not the other way around – to become our standard operating procedure for all of live. We have given God a corner of our lives, but what God wants is all of it.
That professor was right, theology – or we might more comfortably say faith – is concerned with everything. Our whole lives belong to God, all of our decisions, all of our leanings, all of our priorities, all of our business. To continue to behave otherwise is to bring famine upon us. But not a famine of bread, but of the Word, the presence, the blessing of God. And then we would be lost.
OK, next time, I deal with the real threat from Amos: verse 10 - "I will bring baldness on every head." That’s just way too personal!
Shalom,
Derek
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