AMOS 8:1-14
WOW! How seldom has an assigned Scripture been so poignantly relevant to our current history! Especially one that is over 2700 years old. Read Amos 8:4-6 to grasp this truth.
I’m preparing this message on “Black Friday”, whose promoters advanced the start of Christmas sales to the very earliest legal limit after Thanksgiving Day.
Amos spoke of the impatience the wealthy merchants had with Sabbath laws and religious observances that kept them from trampling on ordinary folks in order to fill their own pockets. He condemned them for their deceitful and fraudulent marketing practices which cheated the poor –“…make the ephah (measurer) small and the shekel (cost) great”.
Regardless of your or my opinion of the current wave of protest by our fellow citizens in “tent cities” against what some have called “an epidemic of corporate greed and economic injustice”, can we not see the parallel to the conditions in Amos’ day? Amos prophesied against economic injustice which had widened the gap between the rich and the poor, in hopes of bringing about change. He saw so clearly that greed and oppression are wrong in God’s sight. He knew that God loves all people, and desires a society in which caring, honesty, and fair dealing on every level produces healthy and harmonious living conditions.
We read Amos today against the backdrop of deepening poverty and suffering, the shrinkage of the middle class, the rapid increase of millionaires, the unemployment and foreclosure crises, and the astonishing failure of the “super committee”, and can’t help wondering if God isn’t speaking to Americans today. Who are the prophets in the U.S.A. today? Something to ponder this Advent season. What is God saying to you and to me as we thoughtfully make our way to Christmas this year?
(Richard Hennigar)
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