This Week

This is what the Lord GOD showed me--a basket of summer fruit. He said, "Amos, what do you see?" And I said, "A basket of summer fruit."

Then the LORD said to me, "The end has come upon my people Israel; I will never again pass them by. The songs of the temple shall become wailings in that day," says the Lord GOD; "the dead bodies shall be many, cast out in every place. Be silent!" Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land, saying, "When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat." The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds. Shall not the land tremble on this account, and everyone mourn who lives in it, and all of it rise like the Nile, and be tossed about and sink again, like the Nile of Egypt? On that day, says the Lord GOD, I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth in broad daylight. I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth on all loins, and baldness on every head; I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and the end of it like a bitter day. The time is surely coming, says the Lord GOD, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the LORD, but they shall not find it.----Amos 8:1-12

Now...the charge of oppression of the poor is made once again. From beginning to middle to the end of the Amos book, the prophet’s accusation is the same: You have trampled, oppressed, and crushed the poor and the needy. At issue here is the classic and convenient dichotomy between faith and life, between religion and everyday business. The businessmen Amos addressed have divided their lives into watertight compartments, one marked religion, the other business. They are scrupulous in closing down for the holy days. No doubt they are to be found among those thronging to the sanctuaries on the sabbath! During the rest of the week their religion is not involved, though, and the customers who enter their places of business are doubly cheated, when they buy and when they sell...So the relatively wealthy merchants get richer and the poor get poorer, until they are crushed and trampled to death. The result of these practices will finally be to "solve" the poverty problem by the extermination of the poor. ----James Limburg, Interpretation: Hosea-Micha

Faith clearly tells us that where the poor person is,
there Jesus Christ himself is;
where God,
there is justice.

----Philip Guaman Poma de Ayala

We are called to proclaim the truth...And let us believe: It is not true that
this world and its people are doomed to die and to be lost.
This is true: I have come that they may have life in all its abundance.
It is not true that we must accept inhumanity and discrimination, hunger and
poverty, death and destruction.
This is true: the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life, the poor are
hearing the good news.
It is not true that violence and hatred should have the last word, and that
war and destruction have come to stay forever.
This is true: death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor
crying nor pain anymore.
It is not true that we are simply victims of the powers of evil who seek to
rule the world.
This is true: the Lord whom we seek will suddenly come to the temple; and the
Lord is like a refiner’s fire.
It is not true that our dreams of liberation, of human dignity, are not meant
for this earth and for this history.
This is true: it is already time for us to wake form sleep. For the night is
far gone, the day is at hand.

----Adapted from an address by Allan Boesak, South Africa, by the World Council of Churches, 1983