[A sermon delivered to the Oxford Unitarians congregation on Sunday, 11th of July 2021]
(Readings: Amos 7:7-15, Mark 6:14-29)
Both our readings today relate to prophets who faced consequences of being prophets. In our sermon today I would like to concentrate on Amos, from who’s book our first reading is from. Amos is one of the twelve minor prophets of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible. In Jewish Bibles the books of the twelve prophets are presented as one combined book, yet they are presented as individual smaller books in Christian bibles. It might be because of this that they tend to be glossed over by many in the Christian tradition – “well I can just skip these small books” one might think as they read the bible. Yet, while these books might be small, they are not insignificant. As Dr. Hywel Clifford said to me during one of his seminars at Ripon College Cuddesdon, “there are major truths in the minor prophets.”
So, what are the major truths in the Book of Amos and our first reading today? To answer this, we need to know a little context. Amos lived in the southern Kingdom of Judah not far away from its border with the northern Kingdom of Israel. These two Kingdoms had divided after having been ruled as one kingdom by Solomon. The southern Kingdom of Judah kept control of the city of Jerusalem and its important temple. This meant that Jeroboam, King of the break-away northern kingdom of Israel, had a problem. He could allow his people to make pilgrimage to Jerusalem to worship but this would give a lot of power and influence to the kingdom he had just broken away from. So, in consultation with his advisers, he forges not one, but two golden calves and says “’You have gone up to Jerusalem long enough. Here are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.’” (1 Kings 12:28). By so doing he was, of course, harking back to what Aron did during the story of Exodus story before Moses came down from Mount Siani with the commandments.
This did not please God when Aron tried it and it did not please God when Jeroboam tried it again! Yet, about 150 years after the split, things seemed to be going well for Israel. Jeroboam II was now King and he was a successful military leader who brought lots of wealth to himself and his kingdom which he had expanded.It is here that Amos arrives on the scene. In the first part of the Book of Amos we read that God is clearly displeased by the actions of all the nations in the region and Amos shares with us God’s condemnations of Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, Moab, and even Judah, but, the longest condemnation of all is reserved for Israel. Or, I should say, more specifically, the rulers of Israel.
Other prophets around the time of Amos mostly condemn Israel for falling fowl of God’s prohibition of idolatry, but Amos does something slightly different, he mainly reports that God is angry with the rulers of Israel for being hypocritical in their worship. At one point, Amos quotes God as saying to the rulers of Israel, sternly yet very poetically,
I hate, I despise your festivals,
Amos 5:21-24
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;
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
I will not look upon.
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 ever-flowing stream.
What the real problem is, for Amos, with the rulers of Israel is that they put on a big public display of their piety and worship whilst they remain unjust and unrighteous, even if their worship was directed properly to God that would not be enough, they had to promote justice and be in right relationship with their fellow humans to win back God’s favour – they had to end their hypocrisy.
So, what exactly were Jeroboam II and the rulers of Israel doing that was so wrong? Again, the Amos provides the answer, he decrees that God has condemned Israel, “because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals – they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted out of the way.” (Amos 2:6-9) More specifically what was happening was that the wealthy of Israel were ignoring the plight of the poor by allowing them to be sold into debt slavery and then denying them legal representation.
It is because of this that Amos predicts that Israel will be conquered by a powerful nation and its wealthy and powerful will be taken away into exile. Forty years later this happened and the Armies of Assyria did pretty much exactly what Amos described.
Now, Amos did not write any of this down – the text that makes up the Book of Amos was compiled later – instead, he preached it to the people of Israel. Indeed, in our reading today we heard that Amos had preached in the temple of Bethal – right where one of the golden calves was kept for worship by the rulers of Israel. Here we see him get into an altercation with a priest of this golden calf cult. We heard how the priest hears Amos predicting that the king will die by the sword and that the people will be forced into exile. The priest reports this to the king and then attempts to deal with the problem himself by getting Amos to clear of back to where he came from.
Amos’s response to this is rather puzzling. He insists he is not a prophet nor even the son of a prophet but a modest shepherd and grower of sycamore figs. Incidentally, he also goes on to respond by making a somewhat unkind prediction about what will happen to this particular priest’s wife – a prediction that does not led itself to being read in a service! But why insist he is not a prophet when he clearly fills all the functions of one. Firstly, and most obviously, I think he is trying to emphasise that these are the words of the Lord and not his own, he is just the modest messenger. Secondly, I think he is purposely describing himself as a common working man so that he is standing with the oppressed in Israel as one of their own and not as some fancy figure separate from them.
More speculatively, there could also be a bit of a “don’t shoot the messenger” dynamic at play here. This priest has just informed against Amos to the king and prophets who displease those in power… well… while it is a key function of prophets to speak truth to power, such moves are rarely good for the earthly longevity of the prophet in question. This is all too apparent in our second reading that featured the story of the execution of John the Baptist after he dared to tell of the King for marrying the wife of his brother.
But I said I would focus on Amos and I meant that. I think there is a lot we can learn from Amos today. Firstly, no matter how good our worship is, it matters little if we are not actively working for righteousness and justice in society. For our hymns to sound pleasing to the Divine we have to be working for a better world as we sing them. Secondly, societies that oppress their poor and marginalised are doomed. This is a very important lesson for today. Readers of the recently published 2021 edition of The Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report would be surprised to learn that during the pandemic year of 2020, global wealth per adult rose by 6% to another record high of almost $80,000. If you think that sounds incredibly unrelatable to your personal circumstances, you would be right. What has caused that increase is that 5.2 million people became millionaires last year, a 25% increase – the largest since 2003, and it was a great year for billionaires who saw their wealth rise collectively by $1.2 trillion – which, with only one exception, was the single greatest yearly rise in the wealth of the 1% this century. Of course, global wealth inequality rose this year, so that that richest 1% now own 45% of all household assets. In contrast, at the end of 2020, the bottom 50% of adults have less than 1% of global wealth to share between them.
There is a third important lesson to learn from Amos. A religion that defends the interests of those in power is just as doomed as they are. The fall of the Kingdom of Israel that Amos predicted swept the idolatrous religion that the priest Amaziah practised away as surely as it ended the rule of those in power who he answered to. If we are to prosper in the long run, we have to answer to the calling to prophecy – no matter what its price.
Amen
