July 18, 2010 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Price of Injustice

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 15
Amos 8:1–10
Luke 6:20–26

“I will turn your feasts into mourning.”

Amos 8:10 (NRSV)

In the biblical tradition, a prophet is not a fortune-teller, but someone who sees the bigger picture that the national leadership is avoiding, someone whose loyalty—not hatred but loyalty to his or her nation leads to perceptions that may be at odds with current political wisdom; someone who believes that things can change and who, for his or her efforts, may be labeled subversive, eccentric, or deranged.

John L. Bell
Thinking Out Loud

I have been making a mental note all morning not to sign up to preach on the Sunday that is the last day of the Open Championship at St. Andrews. Actually, I was able to check in between services, and it doesn’t look like much exciting is happening.

This week, as I was watching some of the coverage, one of the journalists described the person who announces all the players as they tee off. He is a man named, I believe, Ivor Robson, and he was described as speaking in “clipped Presbyterian tones.” I wonder if that’s what you’re getting today: clipped Presbyterian tones?

All week I have been haunted by the prospect of shape-shifting creatures disturbing the status quo around us and ultimately raining down destruction on the Earth. No, I’m not talking about the Transformers, who, as you may know, are filming their third movie—creatively called Transformers 3—just up the road from us here on Michigan Avenue. They have closed off the Avenue and the bridge has been up, with all sorts of shenanigans going on. It has been a nuisance, I have to say, in a city like Chicago with the congestion that we have. My confession this morning is I did get a bit cranky on Friday evening as I was trying to get back home from Hyde Park. However, as I said, that was not the primary cause of my concern.

The shape shifters who have been haunting me this last week are the prophets in the Hebrew scriptures, the Old Testament, most particularly the prophet Amos. I thought hard about whether to engage with this passage today. We might call these verses one of the “tricky bits” in the Bible. I wasn’t sure if it was fair to foist Amos upon all you faithful who come to church on these lovely summer Sundays when we know lots of people are away doing fun things. Then I thought that the truth is that you really are the faithful, so this is a good place to begin to do some reflections on what are some complex and tricky verses in scripture.

Amos we might call the Old Testament prophet par excellence. Before we delve into Amos’s words this morning, a note of caution, of context, before we explore these prophetic and poetic sayings. In the history of Christian interpretation of the Bible, the role of the Old Testament prophets was that they were seen as foretellers, as seers, visionaries into the future, who spoke of the ultimate coming of the messiah. Therefore for Christians, the prophets were mined to find clues and hints about the coming of Jesus.

Right back to the Gospels we find the writers saying that this or that particular thing happened in order to fulfill this or that particular prophecy. Those of you who are here during Advent know that during that time we use the words of Isaiah and Micah and reflect on them as pointing forward to the fulfillment of God’s plan of the coming of Jesus. I think it’s fair to say that there has been an important and good shift in that understanding of the interpretation of the prophets, a shift during the twentieth century that has seen them not just as figures present to talk about the coming of Jesus, but rather as persons in themselves, as subversive poetry speakers who challenge the injustices that they encounter in their day.

We might say that rather than being foretellers of Jesus, the prophets prefigure Jesus, that Jesus stands in the line of these spirit-filled speakers of God’s word and God’s judgment and God’s hope. William Sloane Coffin is helpful in this. He reflects that “Jesus was certainly something more than a prophet, but surely nothing less.” Think of the three offices of Jesus as priest, prophet, and king. And in some sense, there has been a discovery, or a recovery, of a more sophisticated understanding of how and why the prophets spoke to their own time and context and how they still speak to our time.

And so to Amos the shape shifter. Why a shape shifter? In a very important part of the book of Amos, in the chapter before the one we read, there is a meeting between Amos, this prophet speaking out against the vested structures of his day, and Amaziah, the priest loyal to those structures, servant to the king whom Amos speaks against. Amos is an outsider; he is from the land of Judah, but he prophesies and preaches to the land of Israel. Amazaiah, the priest of the king, says to Amos, “Go flee; never again prophesy here.” And Amos’s reply is “I am not a prophet, nor a prophet’s son; I am a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees.” Amos, the prophet who is not a prophet. What does that mean? What’s Amos saying to us? The scholars tell us that at that time in Israel there was what we might call a professional guild of prophets whose job it was to serve the king and the government as religious professionals. Amos claims not to be a part of that but rather to have been called by God himself to speak God’s word of judgment. He is an outsider who, in the beautiful phrase of Scottish poet Edwin Muir, “speaks the truth that only a stranger sees.”

Amos sees visions, is infused with God’s word and God’s spirit and speaks that word. It is a fierce word of judgment throughout the book of Amos, supplemented by peculiar visions of a plumb line, of “a basket of summer fruit” (in our reading today), which in the original Hebrew are clever puns that are used against the people of the land. The refrain in Amos’s words to the people, to the structures of society of his day, is “You have trampled the needy, oppressed the poor, crushed the weak, and you know what? God is fed up with you.” One blogger this week, reflecting on preaching on Amos, said my title might be “God is fed up.” God’s had enough. James Newsome, an Old Testament professor, reflects that in Amos “God is a god of justice who will brook no violation of that basic principle by which both God and God’s people are to live.”

In Amos 8, the prophecy of the violation of that principle of justice is rooted in the question of economic justice. Amos 8 is an indictment of the business owners and market traders of the day who would cheat the people. There are three counts, three charges, that God levels against them through Amos, against this elite level of power in society. The first is hypocrisy: they mark the new moon and the sabbath, they mark the holy days, but during the holy days they never stop thinking about how to make more money, about when they can open to make money. There is in Amos an indictment of a false dichotomy between religious observance and how we live our lives day to day; an indictment of a religion that would be a Sunday, a sabbath religion only, that was not open to God’s call to justice in daily living.

So there’s a charge of hypocrisy and then a charge of corruption: “You make the ephah small and the shekel great.” The ephah and the shekel are the measures of weight, measurement that are used in the markets and in trading. The businessmen were cheating their customers by using false weights and measures. Hypocrisy and corruption and then third is this indictment of economic oppression of the poorest in the land: “They are buying the poor for silver, the needy for a pair of sandals.” There is almost a sense of penal servitude of those who are at the lowest levels of the economy. And the message of Amos is this: “There is a price to pay for this injustice. God calls on those who perpetrate this injustice, the powerful, to recognize it. There are inevitable reversals that will happen.” In verse nine and verse ten is the beautifully poetic “The sun will go down at noon, I will turn your feasts into mourning, your songs into lamentation, baldness on every head.” You can almost hear Jesus’ words echoing through these reversals in the “woes” of Luke’s Gospel: “Woe to you who are rich now; you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, because you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.” It almost seems that the judgment that is brought is in the very nature of the process of economic injustice, which brings with it the seeds of destruction of such a corrupt system. This is where Amos speaks not only to his time; it’s also where Amos, I believe, speaks to our times. You can think of apartheid in South Africa, which was perhaps the prime structural system of economic injustice in which the few were able to live well by the toil of the many. That system was brought down by its own inherent inconsistency. It is true, surely, of slavery in the United States and its grandchild, segregation. It’s perhaps no surprise that people like Martin Luther King Jr. looked to Amos and used Amos’s words in crying for justice to roll down like great waters. Much has been written about what we now know as the great recession, the economic downturn in 2008, which still fills our screens every night with concerns about market movements and about financial regulation. I found compelling the reflections of Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Columbia. He wrote this about the roots of how the great recession came about: “Banks and financial institutions sold mortgages with teaser rates (temporarily low rates that exploded after a few years) and mortgages with balloon payments (a short-term mortgage taking advantage of currently low interest rates that had to be refinanced in five years).” These, he says, were “particularly advantageous to the lenders, because they entailed repeated financing, and so when the teaser period ended and the rates jumped, the families who borrowed all they could would be unable to make their payments. Many were told not to worry because the price of the home would rise before rates expired.”

Amos said, “You make the ephah small and the shekel great and practice deceit.”

Stiglitz writes about how he believes “the big lesson of this crisis is that despite all the changes in the last few centuries to markets and financial regulation, our complex financial sector was still dependent on trust.” And that trust broke down because of the injustices of the system, and so the financial system froze. It’s a fascinating analysis. The book of Amos is a book with fierce judgments, but thankfully that is not the last word. It ends with hope, with a promise of God’s presence and the restoration of the kingdom. Perhaps the message of the prophet for us today, perhaps the message from Jesus for us today, is if we are able to recognize injustice and economics that trample the needy and the poorest and if we can recognize that in our time, there is hope.

A story about justice and restoration:

Abbott Anastasius had a book of very fine parchment, which was worth twenty pence. It contained both the Old and New Testaments in full. Once a certain monk came to visit him and, seeing the book, made off with it. So that day when Anastasius went to his scripture reading, he found that it had gone and knew at once that the monk had taken it, but he did not send after him, for fear that he might add the sin of perjury to that of theft.

The monk went into the city to sell the book. He wanted eighteen pence for it. The buyer said, “Give me the book so that I may find out if it is worth that much money.”

So the monk gave him the book, and with that the buyer took the book to the holy Anastasius and said, “Father, take a look at this and tell me if you think it is worth as much as eighteen pence.”

Anastasius said, “Yes, it is a fine book and at eighteen pence it is a bargain.”

So the buyer went back to the monk and said, “Here is your money. I showed the book to Father Anastasius, and he said it was worth eighteen pence.”

The monk was stunned. “Was that all he said? Did he say nothing else?”

“No, he did not say a word more than that.”

“Well,” said the monk, “I’ve changed my mind and don’t want to sell the book after all.”

He went back to Anastasius and begged him with many tears to take the book back, but Anastasius said gently, “No brother, keep it. It is my present to you.”

But the monk said, “If you do not take it back, I shall have no peace.”

After that the monk dwelt with Anastasius for the rest of his life.

Amen.