05 July 2024 Amos 8:4-6, 9-12

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Please read the passage before reading the commentary

Amos takes a stand in favor of social justice, against the ways the rich and powerful manipulate systems in order to take advantage of the poor.  In the days of Amos, merchants sometimes had two sets of weights, one accuracy and the other slanted to take advantage of the poor or to favor the merchant.  When a system is designed to keep the rich and powerful rich and powerful and the poor person continuously poor, Amos would denounce such a system and accuse those who support such a system of trampling upon the needy and destroying the poor of the land.

We have laws, however, that favor the rich and the legislators and work against the poor and needy.  I know someone who lost employment because of serious health reasons, who lost his drivers’ license and had his business license almost confiscated because he fell behind in child support.  Other people made shady deals against him and drove him more deeply into poverty.  When he was able to get his drivers license back, he found he had to pay a huge fee to have it reinstated.  To him, laws, which may have been enacted for good purposes, drove him more deeply into poverty.  Amos would have some scathing words for such laws and shady dealings.

Amos’s words should draw our attention to our much-flawed immigration system, to laws that favor the rich and unduly put the burden of taxation on the poorer of society and to laws which make it harder for minority groups to take part in the voting rights of the people.  To the extent that we support the flaws in our society for our own gain, to that extent we should hear the prophet’s words as applying directly to us.

What if God were to stop speaking to us, would ignore us because we tend to ignore God?  That would be a famine worse that a loss of harvest or a century-long drought.  Yet, this is what Amos threatens the people who put their selfishness before the good of others or the honor due God.