Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
July 20, 2025
Amos 8:1-12

The day had finally come. I had been counting it down for months. The day when I was going to make the last payment on my car. No more monthly billing, no more interest, no more watching that money come and go. What a joy. And wouldn’t you believe it – on that very day, the day of my last car payment, the car’s computer decides to crash. Because, you know, we are just driving computers. And I had heard of planned obsolescence, but this felt personal. Finally, freedom from the car payment. But that hope, that joy became my bitterness. It’s happened to you, it’s happened before.

Nearly eight hundred years before Jesus, the Lord God stands before the prophet Amos and gives Amos a vision. And God says, ”Amos, what do you see?” Amos says, “A basket of summer fruit.” You know, think the Chiquita Banana logo. This must look so good to Amos, so delicious, a promise of goodness from God. Like a great reward, like the hope of God’s goodness, God is showing Amos what is about to be. 

But, like that warning light that lit up my dashboard, the vision becomes a terror.

And the Lord God passes judgment. God says, “see this basket of summer fruit?” Well, “the end has come upon my people Israel; I will never again pass them by.” “The time is surely coming, says the Lord God, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord…they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.” This is the judgment that God is passing upon God’s people. Why the basket of summer fruit? Not because it’s a sign of hope, but because the time is ripe for God’s judgment. They had thought that all was well. They had thought that, just by being God’s people, that everything was always going to be okay. But not so.

And why is God so angry? God is angry that God’s people are ripping off the poor. That their minds are only set on making money. We read it this morning, the people are asking, “when will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale?” On the sabbath, they were supposed to be focusing on their worship of the Lord God. But instead of doing that, they can’t wait for the sabbath to be over so they can open up their businesses again.

But there’s more. The people are saying to themselves, “We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver.” The ephah was a unit of measurement. The shekel was the money. And I’ve preached about this before. How I somehow managed to put fourteen gallons of gas into my car’s twelve gallon gas tank. Let me rephrase, someone had tinkered with the pump and I got conned into paying for fourteen gallons of gas though I’m certain I could only put in twelve gallons. The ephah was small, and the shekel was great. Deceit. False balances. Buying the poor for silver. This, this is what has stoked God’s anger. 

This is what Amos is talking about. God’s wrath is kindled, God is seething at these economic injustices. And see, it’s not that the people have forgotten about the poor. No. It’s that the people know exactly who the poor are, and they are using the poor to make even more money for themselves. It’s not that God wants the people to do more charity. It’s that God wants them to fix the system. Their weights and measures are crooked; they think only of how to make more. Like today, we make things cheaply and poorly so that we have to keep buying them. And the people at the bottom of the ladder, well, they’re the ones who are most easily ripped off. And God has noticed.

And God is passing judgment. It is one of the dominant themes of holy scripture. And it’s probably the reason most of us don’t like the Old Testament. It’s full of passages like this. We want all that love and kindness. We don’t want to hear about an angry God, we want to hear about a God who cares for us. I mean, we want those lines from holy scripture that you can feel good about. People love that line from the prophet Jeremiah – “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.” Hey that’s great, sounds good on a motivational poster. But no one, no one is cross-stitching the prophet Amos onto a decorative pillow – “I will bring sackcloth on all loins, and baldness on every head.”

See, if we are the ones who are practicing deceit, if we are the ones who are using crooked balances, who are exploiting the poor for our own wealth, then of course this passage comes across as judgment. But if we are the poor, if we are the ones getting ripped off, if we are the ones who can’t get out of debt because of the cynical and vicious financial systems to which we are beholden – then this passage is a reminder that God does care. It’s about a God who recognizes inequity, it’s about a God who sees the cheats and the scoundrels who are taking us for a ride and making a mint. It’s all about the point of view.

So God is angry,  and rightfully so. And that’s not just a theme in the Old Testament. John the Baptist will say the same things. Jesus will say the same things. Saint Paul will say the same things. It’s not that rich people are inherently evil and that poor people are inherently good. It’s all about the power dynamic. And what makes God’s blood boil, is when the powerful prey upon the powerless. And so this is judgment. God will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; God will bring sackcloth on all loins, and baldness on every head. Your basket of summer fruit will rot. God will rebalance the scales. God will bring things back into order. That’ll be hard news for those who have been up, and good news for those who have been down.

So, more than anything, I ask you today to consider, and reconsider, your own point of view. Your own place in life. Which side of the scales are you on right now? What would that judgment be? A judgment of woe, or a judgment of blessing?

And I also want to say this. There are parts of holy scripture that none of us really follow. And that cuts across all ideologies. So all I ask, is that we all become more familiar with the scriptures, with the Bible. Regardless of our persuasions and sympathies. This is part of our vision for Trinity Church for the next year. Chase and I want to make sure you have every opportunity to learn more and to simply get to know the holy scriptures. And we’re going to offer a lot. We’ll have Sunday School. We’ll have a Bible Study after church on Sundays during Children’s Choir. We’ll have another one early morning on Tuesdays and then again on Tuesday afternoons for Trinity Middle School. Chase is going to start one for college students on Thursdays. That’s on top of all the other programs that are already going here. Y’all, I’m tired of the old hackneyed Episcopal Church joke that we don’t know the scriptures as well as the Baptists do. Instead, we should all consider, and reconsider, our point of view, our relationship with the Lord God, and our place in life.

As I’ve been working through those same things. Not having a car for a week, made me think about how hard it must be for people who are living on the margins in this town to get to work without a car. And how for folks on the margins, one flat tire, can cause them to miss one shift, could make them lose their job, their home, their livelihood. Sure, I have to pay more money to get my car fixed. As the basket of summer fruit was taken from Amos. But that’s not the point. The point is that the Lord God is daring to make us consider, and reconsider, what we have all taken for granted. So I ask you to consider, and reconsider, and read and grow and challenge yourself – not so that you would get that life you dreamed of, not so that you would get to eat the basket of summer fruit, but so that you would know the Lord God.