Advent, Monday December 3: Amos 2.6-16

Note: Advent blogs will be based on the daily lectionary from Year 2 of the Book of Common Prayer. Those in the Corpus Christi area are also invited to attend daily Advent worship at 3:30 PM Monday through Thursday from December 3 through 13. Services will be held in the West Prayer Chapel at the South Texas School of Christian Studies and will be led by SCS faculty and students.

God’s Message: “Because of the three great sins of Israel - make that four - I’m not putting up with them any longer. They buy and sell upstanding people. People for them are only things - ways of making money. They’d sell a poor man for a pair of shoes. They’d sell their own grandmother! They grind the penniless into the dirt, shove the luckless into the ditch. Everyone and his brother sleeps with the ’sacred whore’ - a sacrilege against my Holy Name. Stuff they’ve extorted from the poor is piled up at the shrine of their god, While they sit around drinking wine they’ve conned from their victims. - Amos 6.6-8, The Message

If Amos seems like an odd choice for a series of Advent readings, consider that nobody in ancient Israel thought much of him either. This hairy old rabble-rouser stumped his way up from Judah to the northern kingdom knocking sheep manure off his boots with every step. He was an eighth century Wendell Berry, a poet-prophet-farmer with guts enough to speak boldly and brains enough to speak eloquently against religion that had become a state-sponsored chaplaincy for the military-industrial complex.

Of course, nobody needs Amos’ message less than America at Christmas.

“They sell the righteous for money, and the needy for a pair of sandals.”
Well, okay, maybe we do buy Nikes cranked out by kids in Asian sweat-shops.

“And a man and his father resort to the same girl.”
Or at least the girls on the same websites and 900-numbers.

“On garments taken as pledges they stretch out beside every altar.”
We call them subprime loans.

“And in the house of their God they drink the wine of those who have been fined.”
Ah, yes - the tithe as the ultimate money-laundering scheme.

God goes on to gripe that he began a promising youth ministry: “I raised up some of your sons to be prophets and some of your young men to be Nazirites.” This met with initial approval - keep the teenagers off drugs and stop ‘em gettin’ pregnant! - but once the parents realized their kids took faith seriously they told ‘em to grow up and shut up. Religion is all very well but we have to live in the real world.

The Lord ends by likening himself to Santa’s sleigh, loaded down to the axles not with presents, but with the iniquity of a materialistic religion. Then he warns that the whole thing’s going to the landfill.

Advent is a time when we prepare to remember Christ’s first coming and look toward his second, but neither concept packs much punch if we think we’re doing fine without him. Perhaps we need to stop and think about where - and who - we really are in order to learn to yearn for where - and who - we need to be.

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