A sermon on Amos 8: 1-12 & Luke 10:38-42 by Nathan Nettleton

My formative Christian years, in my late teens and twenties, were spent in what were often known as the radical discipleship churches, or the social justice churches. As a result, it became a basic tenet of my faith that God’s major agenda was bringing about justice. God was fundamentally committed to the concept of justice, and was thus angered by the existence of injustice and oppression in the world. Passages like the one we heard just now from the prophet Amos were therefore among my favourites. With its graphic descriptions of corruption and exploitation, and its vivid pictures of God’s fierce anger, it seemed to be a classic statement of this justice focussed theology and the accompanying activist spirituality. And this passage was especially relevant because it was not just about slavery or some other primitive form of abuse that we like to think are no longer an issue in our neighbourhoods. This one is about the systemic injustice of our economic system and the ways that advertising, trade and credit further impoverish the poor and line the pockets of the rich. Without any significant change to the practices described, you can switch the terminology for expressions we are more familiar with, and it comes out like this:

Listen to me, you who wipe your feet on those in need;
you who destroy the poor for your own gain.
You resent religious holidays
because they interrupt your wheeling and dealing;
you demand twenty-four hour, seven-day trading
so that you can rip people off without ceasing.
Your advertising is all deceit and delusion;
you rig the odds and the interest rates.
You lure the poor into crippling debt
until you own them — body and soul —
and then charge them again for owing you money.

Amos’ description could have been inspired by a walk down Chapel Street. No wonder they say there’s nothing new under the sun! And as any of us who came from the radical discipleship churches can tell you, the Bible is full of passages like this. Biblical passages dealing with the ethics of wealth and poverty outnumber those on sexual morality by a ratio of about a hundred to one. It is impossible to read the Bible with an open mind and not conclude that political, economic and personal injustice offend and anger God, and that God wants to rid the world of all such injustices. All this I still believe without question.

But in recent years in my Bible reading and my prayer, I’ve been noticing something else about God, something else that is present in the writings of the prophets, and even within this passage and others like it. And it is something that is revolutionising the way I think about God and the way I understand what is going on in these passages. And the shock for me is that it leaves me having to say that I don’t think justice is God’s biggest concern after all. It sounds like heresy, I know, but bear with me and let’s see, because I don’t think I’m arguing against Amos and the other prophets. I think there is something else they are saying, implicitly in some places and more explicitly in others; something that I, for one, hadn’t been noticing or paying enough attention to.

There is something in the white hot anger, in the impassioned fury of God’s language here that seems to belong to another agenda altogether. There is a sense of loss of control, loss of reason; a sense of wild hot-headed rage that screams and threatens and sometimes does things that are crazy and irrational and almost suicidal. It is not the sort of disposition I associate with the great champions of the quest for justice: the Nelson Mandelas or the Lowitja O’Donahues or the Martin Luther Kings. They nearly always seem to manage to be so admirably dignified and measured and consistent.

Perhaps there are clues here for us in the threats of severing communication. Early in the passage God says, “That’s it. The end. It’s all over between me and these people.” And towards the end of the passage, God thunders out the threat to “send a famine on the land, not a famine of food and water, but a famine of hearing the Word of the Lord.” This is a truly awful prospect when thought about theologically. God’s words are crucial to our life. It is with a Word that God speaks the universe into existence. It is not by bread alone that we live, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Jesus himself is introduced to us in John’s gospel as the Word made flesh dwelling among us, the very image of the invisible God. Theologically speaking, a famine of hearing God’s word would be living death. But I don’t think we are supposed to hear this as something to be theologically analysed. What it really sounds like, and what I think we are perhaps supposed to hear and respond to it as, is the screaming rage of a betrayed lover. “I’ll never speak to you again!”

This half crazed irrational fiery passionate language is the language of the bedroom, the language of lovers, the language of those whose burning desire and fearful vulnerability are never fully satisfied, frequently disappointed, and sometimes betrayed. This is the language of one who has chosen a beloved people, and who is so desperately and achingly in love with this people that whenever they fail to respond to that love, or fail to return it, or outright spurn it and trample over it, there is an explosion of fury, a fury full of anguish and passion and pain. And the thing we most need to know out of that, and I don’t mean know in our heads but know deep in our guts, is the extent of God’s embarrassingly enthusiastic aching love for us. And until we know that we are loved, cherished, desired, hungered for by God, then little that we will be able to say about God will rise above the bland and insipid. We will no more have come close to God than I could become intimate with my wife by reading a printout of her DNA coding.

Until we come close enough to be burned by that love, we will perhaps be stuck like Martha in our gospel reading, trying to do and say the right things, trying to be responsible and nice and dependable, trying to respond the way our society schools us to respond with all the necessary social graces, but in the end, missing the point. Jesus is not wanting to have the sort of relationship with us that one has with a good waiter or even a good dinner party host. Jesus wants to sit close and to know and be known by us. Dinner can wait. The dishes can wait. But hungry love can’t wait. It must must reach out and find a response, or be spurned, or be politely but pitifully declined because dinner is nearly ready to be served and there are so any things to be done.

Until we know that love and allow ourselves to be known by that love, deep in our bones, I don’t think we can begin to know what justice means to God or how and why it matters to God. The classic starting place for a theology of the God who takes a stand against injustice is the exodus story. God hears the cries of the people in slavery and comes to rescue them. But is it really the case that God is primarily motivated by an ideological opposition to slavery? I don’t doubt for a moment that God is ideologically opposed to slavery, but is that really what motivates and energises God’s actions? If the person you love and desire more than anyone else in the world was kidnapped, drugged, locked up in a brothel, and forced into slavery, what would be motivating you to search high and low to rescue your beloved? Would it be your ideological opposition to slavery? Would it be your fundamental commitment to the principles of justice? Of course not! It would be your love. Your aching, yearning, desperate love that cannot bear to be separated and goes crazy at the thought of your beloved being abused and mistreated. God does not come to rescue some unknown slaves the way you or I might write letters to campaign for the release of some unknown detained asylum seekers. God knows the names, knows the faces, and desperately wants them safely home and healed and free to engage in unrestrained intimate communion again. That’s what justice means to God — it is simply what falls into place when love is given its full measure. True love does no injustice, because it couldn’t bear to.

But when love is spurned, the grief and frenzied anger can sound as dangerous and violent as any oppressor. Do you notice how often God is not just seeking liberty for the oppressed, but exploding with wounded rage against the oppressors as well? On this side of the equation we are not dealing with the God whose lover has been stolen and forced into the brothel, but with the God whose lover has gone shopping in the brothel. We are encountering the white hot fury of love betrayed yet burning still. And, as is usually the case with angry lovers, what this love most truly wants is not revenge or destruction or the bitter end and never see you again, despite all that is said in the heat of the moment, but reconciliation and forgiveness and a rekindling of love in all its purity and passionate beauty. Yes, God always takes the side of the downtrodden, but God longs too for the redemption of the callous and cruel.

In a few minutes, each of you will be invited to come to this Table, and the invitation comes from one whose love for you is reckless and exuberant and dangerous. Some of you will come as wounded ones who have been ripped off and trampled in this world, and who have been liberated by Christ and know yourselves beloved and healed in his arms. Some of you will come with wounds still raw, not yet sure that you’re ready to trust again, but tentatively holding out your hands to the one who holds out his wounded hands to you, the one who yearns for nothing more than to commune with you intimately in the fullness of life healed and love replenished. Some of you will come as redeemed betrayers, who once abused God’s trust, debased the love you were shown, and dealt callously with the weak and defenceless, but you now come having tasted the depths of mercy and been refined in the fire of love. Some of you will come still entangled in the web of betrayal, and not knowing what it would mean to be freed and pardoned and embraced in a love that is beyond anything you could imagine. And most of you will come as a mixture of several or all of those things. But come. Come because you are loved. Come because you are adored and wanted and called and desired. Come because the bread of justice has been baked in the fire of love for you, and because the wine of new life has been squeezed from the grapes of passionate desire for you. Come because here is love: impassioned, dangerous, healing, refining, justice-making, spine-tingling love. Love that will stop at nothing to find deep true communion with you.