The Journey with Jesus: Notes to Myself

Amos
The Farmer Theologian Meets the Wealthy Elite

Week of Monday, June 24, 2002

About fifteen years ago a group of Christian students that had just graduated from Stanford decided to live together for the summer. They committed themselves to live together in community and accountability, in prayer and in encouragement. The centerpiece of their communal experiment, though, was their decision to read the book of Amos. No one could have known at that time just how powerfully God would speak to them, but out of that group emerged what today is known as Bayshore Christian Ministry (bayshore.org) in East Palo Alto, a ministry among and to underprivileged children in a city where only half of the kids finish high school. God had spoken, these young college graduates listened and obeyed, and as a result the lives of hundreds if not thousands of kids have been changed by the Gospel. All this because of Amos.

Amos was a blue collar rather than a blue blooded prophet. He explicitly tells us that he was neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, that is, in the professional sense of that term. No, he was a shepherd, a farmer, and a tender of fig trees. He was also a small town boy who grew up in Tekoa, about twelve miles southeast of Jerusalem and five miles south of Bethlehem. We can imagine that to the cultured elite of his day Amos was a redneck of sorts who probably spoke with an accent. Furthermore, he was an unwelcome outsider. Born in the southern kingdom of Judah, he had the unenviable task of speaking God's prophetic word to the northern kingdom of Israel. Of course, they wanted nothing of it and did their best to run him out of town: “Get out, you seer! Go back to the land of Judah. Earn your bread there and do your prophesying there.” (7:13–15).

The prophet Amos reminds me that sometimes God calls unlikely people to important kingdom tasks. From a human perspective, no one was more unfitted for the task to which Amos was called. He was a small town farmer, a foreigner sent to speak very harsh truths to people of political and religious power who did not want to listen. No doubt the agrarian Amos felt uncomfortable among the cultured and intellectual elites of Israel, but he carried out his task with unflinching bravery and faithfulness.

The New Testament strikes a similar theme in several places. We know that, for the most part, the twelve apostles were untutored people (so much so that some more liberal, critical scholars doubt that they could have written some of the New Testament documents). Luke the physician provides us with a tantalizing insight. Local power brokers threw Peter and John into jail for disturbing the public, but there was one thing that they could not deny, the inverse relationship between their humble backgrounds and their powerful presence: “When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13). These simple, peasant people, of course, were later charged with causing trouble “all over the world” (Acts 17:6).

Paul was an intellectual, but to the Corinthian people he came across as timid, physically unattractive and a poor public speaker (2 Corinthians 10:1, 10). No matter, for in appealing to the Corinthians Paul assures them, “Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before him” (1 Cor. 1:26–29; cf. 3:18–23).

There are corollaries to this basic axiom of Amos. No matter how unprepared or unworthy we might feel, God can use us. Diane Komp, a pediatric oncologist from Yale, recalls how God challenged her in her younger years for not looking any further or higher than what she could see; perhaps God had more for her? Further, we might ask ourselves about the prejudices we carry that prevent us from hearing from God's servants whom we might be tempted to dismiss for entirely worldly reasons—perhaps they came from the wrong school, the wrong side of the tracks, and so on, especially when it comes to listening to a message that we really do not want to hear.

The real message of Amos, though, should come with a warning label. He might have been a farmer, but Amos delivers some of the most poetically powerful and provocative verse in all of Scripture, the essence of which is that God cares about the poor and the rich better listen to that.

Amos spoke to all of northern Israel, but he had a specific audience in view too. He had a word from Yahweh to the wealthy, those people whom he describes as having both summer and winter vacation homes, lush vineyards and stone mansions. They enjoy ivoried beds, succulent lamb meals, expensive lotions, and elaborate music (3:15, 5:11, 6:4–6). These upper crust people sell the needy, trample the poor, deny justice to the oppressed, and crush the vulnerable. These cruel and uncaring people are religiously righteous, too, at least outwardly. But somehow their religion had become so internalized that the personal had become private, focusing on their own personal peace and affluence with no sense of the larger world of the disenfranchised (neatly summarized and symbolized in the prophets by their repeated references to “the poor, the widow, the alien and the orphan,” that is, people who live on the margins of society with little power or influence to control their lives).

Amos's message hits these people like a blast furnace. In some of the most famous words of his prophecy, Yahweh thunders,

I hate, I despise your religious feasts;
       I cannot stand your assemblies.
Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
       I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,
       I will have no regard for them.
Away with the noise of your songs!
       I will not listen to the music of your harps.
But let justice roll on like a river,
       Righteousness like a never-failing stream (5:21–24).¹

When Paul was first converted none of the apostles would go near him they were so afraid of him. Eventually, he made his way to Jerusalem and gained their approval. How so? “All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do” (Galatians 2:10). The ultimate New Testament parallel to Amos, of course, is Matthew's vision of the final judgment, when we will be judged for how we did or did not care for the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and the prisoner (Matthew 25:31–46).

I drink my fair share of lattes, but every time I pony up my $3 I recall that half of the world—half!—lives off of $2 a day or less. This is not about guilt manipulation, it is about “faith expressing itself in love” (Galatians 5:6). Bob Pierce, the founder of World Vision, put it this way: “Let my heart be broken with the things that break the heart of God.”