Materials
The Old Testament
Minor Prophets #7
Lifestyles of the Rich and Amos
Amos 5
by R. Todd Bouldin
This morning we visit the Minor Prophets one last time. Most of us
are probably glad to be leaving them, for they make us uncomfortable.
They are too specific and concrete for those of us who would prefer
to limit our religion to some pie in the sky by and by type of theology
where all that matters is getting baptized then going to heaven in
the end. Haggai, Amos, Zephaniah, and Micah tell us that faith is
about something more than becoming God’s chosen people. It is
about more than true worship. It also involves the way you treat people,
and particularly those at the bottom of the rung.
Prayer
Amos was an unlikely messenger of justice. He was no Martin Luther
King, Jr. or Desmond Tutu. Amos was a herder of animals and a caretaker
of figs in the country of Tekoa in Judah. Not only was he an unsuspecting
prophet, God called him to preach in Northern Israel. Amos might have
been an outsider in Israel, but the North and South had a lot in common
at that time. They were stable and prosperous, conquering land and
expanding their borders. It was a time when Israel enjoyed great economic
and political power. Home sales were up and so was worship attendance.
Amid their prosperity, the Israelites were selling the poor into slavery
because of debts that they owed them and could not repay. The powerful
elites denied justice to the poor and powerless in their courts. As
Amos says, “They sell the righteous for silver . . . they .
. . trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth.”
(Amos 2:6-7) They defiled their worship by drinking fine wine with
money that they received from their excessive interest and unjust
fees that they charged the poor in God’s own house. (Amos 2:8)
They were doing so well that they had summer and winter homes that
God promised to tear down (Amos 3:15). Finally in Amos 4:1, Amos says,
“Hear this word, you cows of Bashan who are on Mount Samaria,
who oppress the poor, who crush the needy.” In our text for
today, we read of more injustices that hit a little too close to home.
Verses 10-12 of chapter 5 paint the picture of people who abuse the
poor through heavy taxes and unfair rents, and then deny them recourse
by bribing judges and jurors. The powerful maintained their lifestyles
then insulated themselves from accusations of unfairness. But they
never failed to show up for worship. It was amazing to see how people
who felt their worship was sincere could not see just how unjust their
lives and their society really were.
God’s word for them through Amos: God would not accept their
worship as long as they oppressed the poor. God said, “I
hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn
assemblies. I will not listen to the melody of your harps.”
(Amos 5:21, 23). True or dynamic or even sincere worship is not
enough for God if you make a claim to be God’s people. If you
are God’s people, you honor the creation God has made and the
people who are made in His image. In Leviticus 19 we read, “Do
not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism
to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly . . . love your neighbor
as yourself.” Jesus said that the whole law and prophets could
be summarized in loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself.
That is the beginning of justice. But when the poor are being overlooked
or extorted, the love of neighbor has disappeared and justice has
to be done. So Amos makes a great appeal to Israel for justice for
the poor. He cries out, “Let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5:24)
The systemic problem we face today is the vast disconnect between
the economics of our world and the economics of the Bible. The Biblical
witness of compassion and justice for those cast aside in this world
doesn't ring true with the modern American way of life. An obvious
and legitimate question of course is, “Who are the poor?”
For Amos, it is not just people without money. It is people without
a remedy. The poor are more than the homeless and the hungry. They
are the people on the margins of existence, people whose lives consist
of merely surviving. They hold no social capital, no political power,
no ability to know who to call when help is needed, no family or social
resource to help them when life gets hard.
In our time, there are reasons for poverty in our country, and some
of them are obviously choices made by people themselves. Other times,
life just deals a hard blow through mental illness, cycles of unemployment
of lack of education. Sometimes it is a system which favors those
with corporate largess and large campaign donations. The Christian
writer Howard Snyder once wrote that the rich get richer and the poor
get poorer, not because the rich are smarter or more virtuous than
the poor, but because society is structured to reward the rich and
punish the poor. Tax loopholes, financial opportunities that come
from knowing other wealthy and powerful individuals and the ability
to afford a competent attorney are all ways in which the poor are
disadvantaged. Often these policies are not targeted against the
poor but they result in furthering their condition. Just last
year, the Congress removed funding for low income heating assistance
for thousands of poor persons while extending tax breaks to those
at the upper levels of income. My home state of Tennessee is taking
200,000 individuals who cannot get health insurance because of preexisting
conditions off of its Medicaid rolls, many of them working full-time
jobs, while Tennessee corporations like HCA and FedEx pay little or
no property or corporate taxes. Those are systemic reasons for poverty
that go way beyond laziness.
The reasons for poverty are many and complex, including political,
economic, social and moral reasons. So determining who truly is poor
is difficult in our complex world, but my guess is that “we
know it when we see it.”
We also live in a different world than the world of this text because
we are focused on successful living, on independence and self support,
on getting ahead and staying ahead, on getting our “daily bread”
and then some – just in case. We admire those who succeed and
stereotype as lazy those who do not. But, as author Robert Farrar
Capon observes, “If the world could have been saved by successful
living, it would have been tidied up long ago. Certainly, [too many
of] the successful livers of this world have always been ready enough
to stuff life's losers into the garbage can of history” (The
Parables of Grace). The American way is to go it alone – to
do it on our own – and to be sure others do it on their own
as well.
While there certainly is value in independence, we must be very clear:
God never excuses Israel from justice or compassion for the poor
on the grounds that the poor haven’t helped themselves first.
Maybe they had, maybe they had not . . . but it never is a reason
for Israel to restrain its generosity. Furthermore, the Bible never
implicates the poor for their own condition. The prophets of Scripture
always point to the powerful, the wealthy and the systems that favor
them as the reason for poverty. It is not to say that some poverty
is not caused by laziness, but God’s people owe it to God and
Scripture to first of all ask themselves whether there are other reasons
for poverty since Scripture never blames poverty on laziness but on
injustice in courts and government policies, on selfishness and on
a lack of gratitude. If we want to be “biblical”, then
let’s start where the Bible starts on this issue: with us. That
means asking what systems that we support keep people poor and what
could I personally do to raise them up? Those are the questions of
justice and compassion.
While we do not have all the answers to poverty, nor we do know exactly
what it means to be just, there are places we can begin. You can donate
to Christian relief organizations like World Vision, or adopt a child
in the developing world through Compassion International, or work
a day in a rescue mission or soup kitchen. Refuse to shop at department
stores that do not treat their employees fairly. Speak out for the
humane treatment of those unborn, for human rights, for fair wages,
and for fair and affordable housing options for the poor. Build a
house for Habitat for Humanity. You might begin by befriending a poor
person and trying to understand the reasons for their poverty. Get
informed about the plight of the hungry, the poor and those dying
of AIDS and hunger in Africa. Call the White House and the Congress
and demand that they do something about genocide in the Sudan. I will
post some more ideas to our website this week, and I welcome your
suggestions as well.
The prophets speak of another kind of world than an independent, do
it for yourself kind of existence. It is a world infused with grace
in which all that we have is the gift of God’s grace, and not
something that we earned or deserved. That includes our salvation,
but also our livelihoods and our wealth. Therefore, God’s people
who live by this grace stumble over themselves to be generous rather
than to find reasons for restraint. The Bible also speaks to the origin
of evil, and it is not Hollywood, the gays, liberals or conservatives.
Paul says, “The love of money is the root of all evil.”
(I Timothy 6:10) Most poverty, at least in Scripture, begins with
someone’s greed.
To become a generous people does not mean that we are naïve or
indiscriminate in our stewardship, but that the Christian’s
first response to poverty should be
generosity and not hesitation. Once we can shape our hearts in
the shape of generosity, then the questions and the hesitations may
be appropriate; but they are not where people who live by grace and
in gratitude begin.
Richard Foster in his classic book The Celebration of Discipline
asserts that to live a generous life you must count all you have
as a gift from God rather than as a personal possession. As soon
as you think you own something, you start to control it. Receiving
all that you have as a gift loosens your grip on it, and with a looser
grip, your first response to poverty and need is an open hand.
A rich man once came to Jesus, and he wanted to know what else he
needed to do to be in God’s favor. Jesus told him to sell all
that he had and give it to the poor. The man was probably shocked
because in the worldview of 1st century Judaism, piety combined with
possessions was seen as the sign of God’s favor. Having a lot
meant that God liked you a lot. But Jesus turned the tables on the
whole equation and He said, “It is hard for the rich to enter
the Kingdom of God!” So the disciples asked the obvious question,
and it is our question too as rich disciples in a hungry world, “Jesus,
if a righteous pious guy is out, then what chance do we have?”
And then Jesus spoke the news that is our Gospel hope, “Humanly
speaking salvation is impossible; but not with God. All things are
possible with God.”
Perhaps even the salvation of people who possess too much.
Amen.
July 31, 2005
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