Notice God’s Beloved Children – Amos 6:1, 4-7

A text – Amos 6:1, 4-7

6 ¹Woe to those who are at ease in Zion and for those who feel secure on Mount Samaria,
the notables of the first of the nations, to whom the house of Israel resorts!

⁴ Woe to those who lie on beds of ivory and lounge on their couches and eat lambs from the flock and calves from the stall,
⁵ who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp and like David improvise on instruments of music,
⁶ who drink wine from bowls and anoint themselves with the finest oils but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph!
⁷ Therefore they shall now be the first to go into exile, and the revelry of the loungers shall pass away.

A reflection:

Over the years I have done Dwelling in the Word and traditional Bible Study with hundreds (maybe thousands?) of people. And a great many of them, when we talk of the two testaments of scripture, say they like studying the New Testament better because there we see a God of love, not a God of wrath. But the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are the same God. And God’s wrath or anger can be seen in both testaments because of God’s love! God loves all people and the creation, and yet people seem to keep hurting those God loves. One of my teachers used to say he loved both his sons very much, but he still got angry at them when they injured someone – especially if they injured one another! We can’t expect a loving parent not to be outraged when his child has been harmed.  Jesus continually takes the side of the harmed child in parables and in his healing ministry and calls out those who could have made life better but did not.

In this passage, the prophet Amos is calling out both the Northern and Southern kingdom rulers by naming Jerusalem and Samaria. He is saying that those idle leaders who live in luxury and are not at all troubled by the fate of their much poorer citizens have chosen to miss their opportunity to do God’s justice and help God’s beloved children. Amos does not say these idle satisfied rulers shouldn’t enjoy a good meal and a Sabbath day off. Amos is saying in this passage and others that much of Israel and Judea were practicing a hollow once-a-week religion that doesn’t have feet on the ground and doesn’t put its money where its mouth is, doesn’t “grieve over the ruin of Joseph (the whole kingdom of God’s people).”

Might Amos’s words also convict us? Does our faith make us go out and do something, go out and at least notice something? Are we ever in the company of a friend who we know needs help but we fail to offer it, or even a kind word that could be received as support? How are we really seeing people in need who our gifts could benefit? Amos here, like Jesus in the “Lazarus and the rich man” parable, makes the case that we have only so much time to notice things and offer to help. How this very week might we do that with money or time or love?

A prayer:

Lord God, Thank you for loving us. Thank you for giving us the words of Amos to ponder for our own day. Help us to see what we might be missing and take the opportunity to help those who need to feel God’s love for them this week. Amen.