The Rev. Virginia W. Nagel
Ephphatha Parish of the Deaf
Episcopal Diocese of Central NY
The reading from the prophet Amos probably woke up a lot of people this morning! I suspect that many of us got the feeling that Amos was talking to us, and that is exactly right. He was and is!
We need to look a little bit at the history behind this reading. We all know that the Lord God gave his people rules to live by...the Ten Commandments and other rules; if you want to read through the books of Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy in your Bible, you will find them all. If you read those books, you will notice that there are several main points that God keeps hammering away on. One is the same as we know from the first four of the Ten Commandments: God is our God, and we are to worship only him, and live according to the rules he gave us. Why? Well. it is his world, and he has a right to make the rules for it. And he made us, and so we are supposed to obey him. What's more, he made us in his own image, and that means we have to show others in our lives what God is like.
It is like your mom or dad talking to you when you were a kid: Now, when we get to the big dinner party, I want you to behave. Remember everything we have told you. If you behave and mind your manners, people will
understand that you came from a good home and that your parents brought you up right. But if you don't behave properly, they will wonder what kind of upbringing you had, and they will think that we never taught you anything. They will wonder what kind of family you have!
The second thing that God keeps telling us is that it is important that we reserve the Sabbath to rest, and to worship him. No work. No business. Just rest, and enjoying the feeling of being so loved by God. He cares about us and wants us to have a day to rest, a day when we can smell the fresh clean air and feel our hearts full of joy at the world God made; when we can go to church and enjoy praising him and learning about him; and then we can enjoy our families and friends, play games, have fun, remembering that this is all a gift from God. Older people will remember that until about 1965, stores were closed on Sunday, there were no bank machines, and most people really did use Sunday for a Sabbath of worship and rest and enjoyment of God, his world, and his other people.
The third big point that God makes in his gift of laws is that we need to take care of people who have less, or who have less power, or more problems than we do: widowed people, old folks, orphans, children, people who don't understand how society and the laws work.
Well, God sent Amos to the people to tell them that they had gotten off the track. They were keeping God's laws, sort of, but not with their hearts. They were just going through the motions. They stopped business on the Sabbath, but they couldn't wait to get back to work and make more money. And they were not honest about their business. They weighed their thumb on the scales along with the meat, sold bad quality goods, lied about what things were made of. And they looked for helpless people and forced them to become slaves, so they could make money by selling the slaves. They could not wait for the Sabbath to be over, so they could get back to their dirty kinds of business and make more money, dishonestly, for themselves.
You can see that the people were just going through the motions of their religion. They didn't really love the Lord God. They had made idols of money and power and pleasure. They couldn't be bothered to help people who needed help. All their thoughts were on getting more money and power for themselves. Does that sound to you like our own nation and our own society?
So Amos scolded them, as God had sent him to do. God also promised some serious punishments for the nation of Israel if the people continued that kind of bad behavior...war, eclipses, earthquakes, epidemics. And if they look for a way to contact God, they will not find a way.
And what will happen then?
People will hunger and thirst for a message from the Lord. They will repent and say Sorry to God. And God says, in the next part of Amos, which we did not read today, that he will have mercy on them and take them back again, if they repent and change their ways. We are seeing some of that now; more people are looking for ways to find the peace of heart and soul that God had promised. People are turning back to the Lord....not everybody, not yet, but the polls tell us that more people are praying, learning about God, and church attendance has increased a bit. Not a lot, yet. But it is starting.
Is it starting in your life and your heart, too?
Amen.
