The Rev. Frank Logue
King of Peace Episcopal Church
Kingsland, Georgia
September 23, 2001

Shall Not the Land Tremble?
Amos 8:4-12 

Once upon a time a great nation was founded by people seeking to worship God in the way of their own choosing. These God-fearing people dreamt of a land of peace and prosperity. They hoped that God would bless the new land and all who settled in it. Of course, there were other peoples already living in that good land. People who needed to be displaced to make room for the new great nation. However, that need not concern us now. Our story is of a great nation founded by people who wanted their children and grandchildren to grow up in a country that unashamedly taught religious morality. 

For a very long time the nation prospered and did become great, greater perhaps than the dreams of those first settlers. The land produced abundantly and the nation grew rich off the fat of the land. God smiled on the country and blessed the people who lived there. In fact, the country was so blessed by God that the people came to see the nation as God’s gift to the world. Somehow God’s eternal purposes were carried out by the country in a way they had never been carried out before. The nation might well be as close as any political system could come to fulfilling the ideals of the kingdom of God, which were justice and mercy for all.  

Patriotism and religion were all stirred together for this great nation. It was viewed as unpatriotic not to be religious and irreligious not to be patriotic. After all, look how God had blessed the nation. How could the two not go together? 

Over time, the initial religious purposes of founders of the great nation came to be overshadowed by other concerns. Old patterns of living were broken down. The family farms fell into new patterns of ownership. The cities flourished and grew. The rich became richer and they liked it. The poor became poorer, but for the most part, the people tried not to notice. If they worked harder, they wouldn’t be poor anyway. Look how God was rewarding the hard work and ingenuity of the rich.  

The great nation passed an important junction, a crossroads, or maybe just a fork in the road. It is hard to say exactly, because no one was paying any attention at all at the time. The country had become disconnected from its strong religious and moral roots. Economic status came to matter in places where it never mattered before, such as in the court system. The distinctive social culture of the once great nation had eroded away until day to day life was nothing like it had been a couple of generations earlier. Many of the people of the once religious nation took part in few if any worship services. God became one obligation among many. The great religious festivals of the year were largely observed, but beyond those two or three days a year, many people in the prosperity-driven culture found little time for the God of their forefathers. 

In some ways, the society was going two directions at once. Prosperity gave the country outward signs of vigorous health. But that economic growth would have a price tag, a larger price tag than anyone appreciated at the time. Underneath the surface of this vigorous economy, the once great nation was in social, moral, and religious decay.  

Just when the nation reached what everyone would agree was its peak of prosperity, some voices on the edge of the crowd cried out that the nation must turn back to God. Some had the audacity to say that the great nation could be destroyed by an enemy not yet on the horizon. Few, if any, people listened. Look at all the prosperity. The great nation would never fall, could never fall. Anyway, God would not let that happen. God would protect the nation. Hardly anyone noticed the irony that the once religious nation claimed God’s eternal protection long after having turned its back on God. 

OK. You get the idea. The land that once seemed like God’s gift to the world disconnected itself from God and then, irony of ironies, still relied on God to save her. 

The nation I have been discussing is the Northern Kingdom of Israel from its founding until the eighth century B.C. when the prophets Hosea and Amos took to the streets to call the great nation back to its godly roots. At that time, Jeroboam II was king and had been king for three decades. Jeroboam reigned for a total of 40 years and by many outward accounts had a very successful time as the monarch of the ten northern tribes of Israel. Yet, the Bible uses some of its harshest language for this king who reigned during a time of prosperity.  

Our Old Testament reading from Amos this morning tells of how the people were trampling the needy and bringing ruin to the poor of the land. Throughout the prophecies of Amos and Hosea, we hear of a prosperous land that no longer extended God’s justice to all who lived within her borders.  

God spoke through Amos saying, “How you hate honest judges! How you despise people who tell the truth! You trample the poor and steal what little they have through taxes and unfair rent” (Amos 5:10-11a New Living Translation). 

The public worship of God continued while the private dishonesty and greed accelerated. For that reason, God spoke through Amos saying, “I despise your festivals, and take no delight in your solemn assemblies…. But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:21,24 NRSV). 

Amos was a simple herdsman who was called by God to travel from his little town of Tekoa, south of Bethlehem, to the great luxury of the northern kingdom. Once there, Amos scathingly attacked the immorality and carefree pursuit of luxury, which he said exemplified life Northern Israel. He also offered a stinging rebuke to the rich for maximizing their profit at the expense of the poor. To say the least, he was not a popular prophet. The prosperous people did not want to here his words. 

Nevertheless, the prophet called to the people again and again to “Come back to God and live! (Amos 6:6 NLT). The prophet said that only if the whole nation repented and turned to God once again could they be saved. However, Amos never preached revolution, as he seemed to think that it had gone too far. The excesses were too great and the once great nation was destined to fall.  

The words of the prophet fell on deaf ears. The people felt that their nation would always endure. Look at how God had blessed them. How could they not continue to prosper? But Amos had spoken the truth. By the end of the eighth century, the ten tribes that made up the Northern Kingdom of Israel fell in battle to the Assyrian Empire. The Assyrians carted off the peoples who survived the battles to other lands never to return. We now remember the once great nation as the ten lost tribes of Israel. But the ten tribes were not carelessly misplaced. The lost tribes had first prospered, then considered themselves invincible and were proved tragically wrong.  

Scripture warns us that a great nation cannot build its wealth at the expense of the poor. Dwindling profit are margins expanded through lay offs. Products are made profitable by outsourcing the labor to parts of the world where laborers endure sweatshop like conditions. These are just two of the ways in which our market economy is built on the backs of the needy.  

Our culture is sometimes referred to as a consumer culture. Not a bad descriptor as we are a nation of consumers, something I am reminded of every time I attempt to venture into the Wal-Mart Super center, particularly on a Saturday. But consumer culture is really an indictment. To consume something is to use it up. Moreover, as one locked into our consumer culture as anyone else, it pains me to see the ways in which our market-driven economy consumes. First, we consume the lives of the third world workers who increasingly are the ones to create the goods we consume. Then the market economy avoids consuming us consumers entirely, for that would be self-defeating. Instead, the desire of the consumer culture is to enslave us each to working off an endless mountain of debt.  

America uses vastly more of the world’s resources than is our share. It takes more to feed, clothe, and shelter us than ever. But of course none of us, me included, is satisfied with necessities. Entertainment and luxuries are the norm and we use up more resources than we have coming to us if simple justice were used as the measuring line. For all our advances, we have not come so far from the conditions of Jeroboam II’s Northern Kingdom of Israel. 

If that is true, then Amos words relate to our current situation as well. Amos told of the unjust ways of the Northern Kingdom and then he cried out, “Shall not the land tremble?” How can we continue with a culture that consumes others while enslaving ourselves and expect it all to last. Shall not the land tremble? Perhaps it did last week when we all discovered that America was not as invulnerable as we had hoped. 

The answer for our times is the unheeded answer Amos held out in his own day, “Come back to God and live!” I am so pleased to see the many signs proclaiming God Bless America. But often I fear that the signs written in all capitals really refer to god with a little “G” and America with a capital “A.” Something like, “God of our own devising, bless the America of our choosing,” when the one true God has already said that there are no blessings for unjust nations. God said, if you want to be blessed as a nation, then let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. 

So what next? Where do we go from here? Jesus words in this morning’s Gospel reading are helpful. Jesus says that whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much” (Luke 16:10 NRSV). None of us has the ability to single handedly change the way our nation and our world works. However, we can be faithful in small things.  

I intend to try once more to take the path less traveled. My indebtedness for our nice new great big pick up truck notwithstanding, I want to try to cut back on my own consumptive habits. But that’s just part of the picture. For like the Northern Kingdom of Israel that was experiencing not just economic injustice, but also moral and religious decay, America too is suffering for having cut ourselves off from godly foundations.  

I want to look to ways that we can strengthen the religious education of our own community. If we do not infuse our children with a love of God and teach them religious morals, we cannot expect our nation to change. The public schools cannot do it, so we need an alternative. We have talked of making private religious-based education available through a King of Peace created school. Perhaps it is time to explore what separates that vision from reality. What other ways can we help our one little corner of the nation reflect the justice and mercy God wants for all people? I don’t have all the answers. Together we might be able to find some new and inventive ways to reach out to our own community.  

A day of reckoning is coming for our nation and we dare not stand by and do nothing as the decay under the prosperity continues to spread. We can not change the whole world. We can not change the whole nation. But we can “Come back to God and live” as individuals and as a community of faith. Then we can look for ways to share that blessing with our community.  

Amen.