Amos and Advent

Daily Lectionary for the day:  Amos 5:1-13

“For I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins— you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate. Therefore the prudent will keep silent in such a time; for it is an evil time.” -Amos 5:12-13

Today’s daily lectionary reading from is the sort of thing we’d rather skip over.  God is angry.  Amos is angry.  You do not get many good vibes off of the reading.  Why do we read this?  What is uplifting about this?

I asked those questions.  I do less often now.  I’ve discovered that it makes a difference whether you read your Bible in a warm study or library or living room, or if you read it sitting downtown on a cold day, as someone who appears homeless pushes a shopping cart by you.  Setting matters; God’s word means different things in different spaces and moves your heart in different ways when you find yourself among those whom Amos writes about. 

Amos and Advent are meant to disturb us.  There are reasons we are ‘waiting’ (a watchword of Advent), and they are reasons that can be obscured by the warm sentimentality of Christmas.  Advent is a season where time bends on itself and orients us in the past, present, and future.  Advent is the season in which we are reminded that, as we wait for Christmas, we also wait for nothing less than the complete inversion and conversion of the world as we know it.  Amos is still worthwhile to read because the world is not how God would want it.  We do not have to look far to see those who trample the poor (Amos 5:11) and the needy pushed aside (5:12).  If we would see “justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream (5:24),” perhaps we should be a bit imprudent, and have something to say about what we see around us (5:13).  Because, while we wait, there is work to do.