Fish in a sea of Justice - Amos 1:1-2, 5:14-15, 21-24

The sun is shining through the artistically colored windows. The worship team is at its prime. The people are all dressed in their Sunday best, poised and ready for worship. They are standing tall, faces up lifted toward the sky as the music is about to begin. There is a quiet reverence in the sanctuary. It seems as if nobody is shuffling, nobody is restless, and everyone is focused on the song they are all about to sing. Even the dust gently drifting in the luminously colored beams of light filling the sanctuary seems Holy. The voices raise, the chorus begins, but God can not hear the words of the song because of the chaotic din. The man on the third row is wondering if he can nonchalantly slip his cell phone out of his pocket. He is positive that the service started a few minutes late, will that mean it will run a little late, will he be able to make it downtown in time if the service is 5-10 minutes over. Why did he sit on the third row? He can’t sneak out toward the end, everyone will see him. He stands looking up at the screen singing the words. His face looks focused; by all appearances he is engrossed in worship. There a woman toward the back on the right. She is smartly dressed; her hair is neatly pulled back. She is the picture of modesty and propriety, but as she sings she begins to wonder if she can get away with cutting Amelia’s pay, she just can not afford to pay that woman as much as she is getting paid. Perhaps, she can tell Amelia that the work she did this last time around was just not up to par. Sure she knows that Amelia works herself to the bone and really does a fine job, but sometimes you just have to pay someone a little bit less. She can tell Amelia that the seams were just not right that she was just not as happy and then simply give her 20% less than the agreed upon price for the garment. It will be OK, Amelia will find a way to make up for it somehow, I bet she over charges some of her customers anyway.

As the song proceeds the din grows louder and louder. God looks down on the people, hands over ears waiting, waiting for the noise to stop, waiting for the din to die down, but the service seems to go on. And on the raucous get louder and louder and finally something has to be done. It is at this point that Amos (the tree farmer and sheep herder) shakes his head once again wondering why God can’t give him something pleasant to say to these people, he steps out of his anonymous place in the pew into the aisle and raises his voice above the melodious strains of pious worship and says, “This is what the Lord God has said to me, ‘I hate, I despise. . .’”

God cannot hear the worship. The worship is pointless, the worship is useless, the worship is not worship, when over laid with the din of un-worshipful attitudes which fill the sanctuary. God wants to mourn, God wants to wail, this is an outrage this is deplorable. God will turn their empty songs in to wailing, their hollow praise into mourning. If they want the festive worship over so they can get on with business, God will put a stop to the festivities.

God is a little more than fed up with the people of Israel at this point. When it comes time for the festive observances which God had set up for them; they are not grateful for the break from the routine, they are not joyful in the celebration of how God had provided for them once again; they are not enraptured and engrossed in worship of their God who lovingly and faithful takes care of them in season and out of season. Instead they can’t wait to get back to business.

They can’t wait to get back to their shops and to their markets they cannot wait to get back to work. Not because they need the money and every moment they are spending away from their labors is resulting in not being able to earn the money they need to survive, but because they want to get back to business practices which are just a little on the “shady side” to say the least. They are selling their harvests with bushel baskets which are too small. They are doing business with falsely weighted scales which are in their favor.

Not only are they dishonest in their practices but they are cheating the poor and robbing the needy of their due. God had set up a system by which no one in Israel would go hungry and in their practices they are sweeping up every last grain so they can sell it with their dishonest weights and their small bushel baskets, but they were forbidden by God to sell the sweepings. They were not allowed to go back through the field and harvest what they missed. They were not allowed to take a broom to the threshing floor and pick up every last grain. They were to leave this to those who had fallen on hard times. They were to leave the leftovers for the poor and they needy, so they could come and pick up the scraps which were over looked. But they were not doing this; they were picking every last head of grain and picking up every last wheat berry so that they could turn the most profit, while the most vulnerable in their nation starved to death on their doorsteps, searching for the food which was rightfully theirs by law. They are not respecting each other and in doing so they are not respecting God.

In chapter two is says they are selling the righteous for silver and the needy for sandals. In the ancient near east slavery was a product of extreme economic hardships. These people are being sold in to slavery not because they cannot pay off a great amount of debt, but over small amounts, a single silver piece or the cost of half a pair of sandals, not the cost of both, but just one. They are heartless and greedy and are not doing their best to raise the status of those around them. But instead they are taking advantage of their situation and being cruel in the process. In their practices they are crushing the heads of the poor and pushing the afflicted, those whose physical ailments are lifelong hardships, the blind and the lame; they are pushing these people aside, so they can simply walk past. They have no lack of imagination when it comes to ways in which they can use the misfortunes of others to help better themselves and their situation in life.

The people are doing all the right things in the sanctuary. They are worshiping God in all the right ways, with all the right actions and all the right words, with nary a word about any of those false gods. They know better than that, they know the first commandment. They are gathering for worship, they are participating in a proper Sabbath, they are honoring all the designated festivals, attending all the allotted assemblies with just the right amount of dignity and solemnity which each occasion requires. They burn their burnt offerings, they give gracious amounts of grain offerings, they find the prettiest lambs, the strongest bulls and the goatiest goats and offer each one at the right times. But it is not what is going inside the sanctuary that God is upset about. It is precisely all the things they are doing when they are NOT in the temple that has God all riled up at this point in time.

The thing is, God does not ask for much. God simply asks for them love good and to seek it in all things and to establish justice at the gates. God wants them to love good, to seek what is good. Not just good for me but good for all, good for those around me, good for my family, good for my friend, good for my neighbor, as well as good for the stranger and even for my enemy. Seek good, do good. Seek always in all things to do what is right.

God is saying that good and right practice should be the general rule of life. The people buying and selling things should be fair in the ways in which they do so. The people giving loans should not take advantage of the needy and the poor. Those who are doing evil and unrighteousness as a part of their common business practices should cease. Evil is never best business practice. Unrighteousness is not just a by product of how things get done in the world. God's call on our lives in this passage is simple, don't do evil, instead seek to do good. Do not cheat the poor. Do not take advantage of the down trodden. Do not do further harm to those who are already struggling in their day to day lives.

The first step is to not do these things, to not participate in the evil and unrighteousness that is all around. But if you are already not actively participating in actively harming those around you, your work is not done. You are responsible for yourself and your actions. You are to love good and hate evil; to despise unrighteousness and seek good in all you do, but your responsibility does not stop there. Once you, yourself are doing and seeking good in how you act, then the next step is to open your eyes look around, and see where injustice still occurs, see where and how people are being misused and abused and work to put an end to it wherever it takes place. It is not good enough to simply behave properly ourselves, we are also expected to establish justice. To work to assure that the world in which everyone lives is defined by fair and just practices. We are to work to end the mistreatment and misuse of human beings in our society and the world. We are called to love good and hate evil, but we are also called to work to bring righteousness and goodness to all parts of our world. We are not to not simply stand by and allow the people in the world around us to be mistreated. WE are called to speak up, to work in whatever way we can with our actions and with our votes, to establish justice in all corners of our society.

At the end of the passage God tells us that we are to, “let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like and ever-flowing stream.” I make special note of this because this is a rich and amazing metaphor. The words for water and ever-flowing stream are words that indicate water in abundance; water that is always there, always flowing, always moving.

Water was not abundant in the ancient near east. In the spring water would run in streams but for most the year the stream beds were dry. God calls for righteousness to be an ever-flowing stream; a stream that does not ever run dry. This is a picture of water that stays, that does not come and go with the seasons, but water that is always there, cool and life giving at all times.

God does not want us to seek justice that trickles through the land like a tiny water driblet, or righteousness that is like the dew fresh and clean in the morning but gone by the afternoon. God wants justice to be a lake we can swim in and righteousness to be a waterfall we can stand under. There is enough for all, more than enough for all. It is flowing down and over flowing the river beds and flooding the lives of everyone around. This is extravagant justice, exorbitant righteousness. It is enough for everyone to drink and be filled. Enough for us all to jump in and swim around, so much justice that is it unseemly, so much righteousness that it quite frankly wasteful.

The world as God wish it is an luxuriously apportioned mansion of the insanely rich. If justice were gold, the whole thing would be guilt. If righteousness were marble, not only would all the floors be made of it but the walls and the ceilings as well. Some might say that is too much or too far, but God says when it comes to righteousness and justice there is never too much, there is no such thing as going over board.

It is easy to think that the second of these two things God is calling for is the lesser of the two. Surely being responsible for my own actions and my own deeds is the primary call in this passage. Although we begin with ourselves, our actions, our attitudes, the ways in which we act and interact on a daily basis; although it begins with loving and seeking good in all we do, and in every part of our own lives, it does not end there. The second part is just as important if not more so than the first. Not only are we to assure our own actions are good and righteous, that we ourselves are not taking advantage of others, but we are to make sure that we do not allow, or stand by while others in the world around us are continually mistreated by others, by the systems, by the common practices that are just apart of “how our world works.” We are to work to stop that being the way things work, to end the injustices in our society and our world. To break down those systems and repair the broken parts of our society. We are to break down the damns that hold it back and let it flow, let justice go rushing into the the lives of everyone in our society. And let us be the ones who work every day of our lives to break that damn and to allow it to flood our world, so that it is literally the water in which we live. Let us all be fish swimming in a sea of justice and righteousness. Let it be the waters in which we live and the very air which we ALL breath and let us not stop, let us not rest until it is so.