Amos 5:11-12, 6:4-7
Today we’re continuing our series called Faith in the Real World: Claiming our Prophetic Voice. So far, we’ve talked about hate, and fear, and we’ve gotten a chance to hear about the incredible work that our Outreach and Justice team is doing. And today we’re continuing the conversation by looking at another issue that we see shaping our world—greed.
Now, when we hear that word “greed” I’m sure that lots of different images come up for us. Some of us automatically think about certain individuals who hold an overabundance of wealth. Maybe we think about corporations that have put profit over people’s well-being. Maybe you think about the state of our economy and the way that decisions are made, of who receives help and who suffers. Maybe you think about the classic 80s movie Wall Street and Michael Douglas’ famous speech where he says: “Greed is good.” He won an academy award for it!
There’s a lot of different places we could go with this today because greed is a pretty wide-reaching topic. And the tension I’ve sat with as I’ve prepped for today is—is this one of those things that we can name...but we can’t really change? Is this a symptom of a system that is so much 2
bigger than us as individuals and is this just the way things will be?
What I’ve kept coming back to when that question creeps in is really the whole point of this series. Because this series, while it IS a time to name what is hurting our world...it’s more than that. It’s also an opportunity to ask what God would have us do and then join God in that work, both individually AND collectively as people who are part of this thing called The Church.
So as we work our way toward what we CAN do, I want to start by understanding the problem and how greed might show up in our world, in a couple of distinct ways.
First is maybe the most obvious one: (SLIDE) economic inequality. We hear a lot about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. I saw a sign in my neighborhood that said “tax the rich, feed the poor.” This is very much the conversation of the moment.
We see this reality in our own immediate community. Last week, during the conversation with our Outreach and Justice team, we learned that depending on what zip code you live in, in our immediate area of Indianapolis, your life expectancy can differ by 14 years. We are living in a world where we see the tangible consequences of some people 3
have so much more than they will ever need and some are barely surviving.
Another way that greed shows up is (SLIDE) in our internal worldview. We see this being wrestled with all the way back in the 4th century with the development of the Seven Deadly Sins. And right there, on that short list, is the word avarice, or greed. It’s defined as “an inordinate love of possessing, or an excessive desire for wealth or material possessions.”
And when this type of internal greed takes hold of us, it can cause us to develop a scarcity mindset. We start to believe that there simply is not enough and will never be enough to go around. We think that if we don’t secure what WE need, as quickly and efficiently as we can, then someone else might end up with what we need or want and there won’t be any left for us. Scarcity isn’t limited to our interpersonal lives either...it can show up in big, systemic ways where groups are pitted against each other...it can lead to abuse of power...it can make it really difficult to see the human in our midst if we view the world as this sort of zero-sum game where we must win and others must lose.
However greed shows up, it almost always comes with consequences. And most often, the ones who feel the 4
weight of those consequences are the most vulnerable people in our midst.
And so it's not really surprising that the Bible would have a lot to say about greed, particularly through prophets like Amos. As far as they’re concerned, greed has no place with God’s people. It is completely opposite of the ways that God wants people to be in relationship with each other and to care for the world that God has entrusted them with.
And Amos is an interesting person to share this kind of message. He was a shepherd and a fig tree farmer. And while that might seem like the most minute detail of this whole story, I think it's actually one of the first glimmers of hope we get. Because the hope I see behind Amos’ fiery words is that they were coming from this ordinary, normal guy. He doesn’t have an important title. His resume is nonexistent. He isn’t a government official or someone on the inside. He is simply living in a system that he thinks is broken, and he believes that God has given him something to share that just might impact some kind of change.
Amos lived in the time of the Kings and during his life, Jeroboam the II was ruling the northern kingdom of Israel, and things were changing. There was a newfound stability in this moment, and with stability came not just survival, 5
but the chance to really prosper. But, along with that was also the chance for people to really struggle. And even though a CORE PART of the Israelite’s identity was to care for the vulnerable people in their midst, the widow, the orphan, the sick, the poor, that was starting to get lost in this new way of life.
It’s like they’ve forgotten their own story and the ways they have experienced God’s love and justice and care. It’s like they’ve forgotten that this justice work was never meant to be a tangential thing for them, but an essential part of their worship. And as they lose these things that make them THEM...they start to look less like God’s set apart people...and more like everyone else around them.
So when you hear a Scripture reading like the one we read today, and you witness Amos taking such a strong stance and talking about these terrible sins, saying things like, “woe to you who do x, y, and z” THIS is where this comes from. He’s furious with how out of alignment with God they’ve become and Amos is so angry he can barely stand it.
A couple of weeks ago, when I preached on Jonah at our Midtown campus, we explored Jonah’s anger and looked at what it means to have righteous anger. And that it’s important for us to be on the lookout for when our anger is 6
aligned with the things God cares about and what kind of action that might drive us towards. I have to say that I think Amos is a pretty good illustration of what this can look like. He’s got every reason to be angry about what he’s witnessing. He’s got generations of covenants, and commitments, and commandments to say—this is not how it should be! And he’s got a message from God to the people to back up his anger.
Seeing the way that Amos responds to his world might have some implications for how we respond to ours.
Theologian Marcus Borg wrote about his first encounter with the book of Amos and what it did to his faith. And, to put it simply, it sort of upended everything. Reading the words of this prophet, the way he responded to the injustice in his midst and the laser sharp focus on what mattered to God, it set him on a completely different course. It impacted the way he read Scripture, to the way he voted, to the way he laid out his everyday life. He said that in all of his life studying the Bible, until he read through the Old Testament prophets, he didn’t fully understand God’s character.
If you’ve ever been in a Bible study with me, or just let me talk to you long enough, you will undoubtedly hear me say how much I love the Old Testament prophets, and I think 7
what Borg says resonates with me quite a bit on WHY I love this section of Scripture so much. Because these writings, even when they are confusing or intense, can shape us in important ways. They help form the way we see things and show up and they help us see clearly what God values most. They remind us that things may be unfolding ONE way...but they don’t have to. God is always at work on behalf of what’s just...and we can be too.
And that's a call that’s for each and every one of us here. Each and every one of us can be about these things that Amos says are so important. And that's true if you have a lot, if you have a little, if you’re somewhere in between. We ALL have to be committed to telling a better story in our world than the one that greed would have us believe is inevitable. We always have a choice if we’re going to be shaped by our resources or shaped by our faith.
I witnessed a powerful example of what this can look like through a family in my church in Pasadena. And I entered into this community and that relationship in a pretty tough spiritual place. I had just come off a year working and living in under-resourced communities in Chicago. I saw, firsthand, how systemic inequalities can absolutely harm people. I watched the impact that greed can have on people who are just trying to make it and how impossible it can be to get ahead. And I left that experience pretty 8
jaded. Pretty angry—like, Amos-level angry! And I didn’t really have a lot of tools to help me channel that anger. I didn’t have a good framework to process what I had experienced. And so it became this sort of bitter taste left in my mouth and I developed this very specific understanding and assumption of what wealthy people were like. I figured that there were people who could work for justice in the world, and then there were people who were living in abundance and this was a venn diagram where the circles could never overlap.
Being in relationship with this family really challenged that viewpoint, and I would say that it really healed something in me. I met them in an Outreach and justice committee meeting of all places. And as I got to know them, it became very apparent that they were exceptionally wealthy people. AND they were also exceptionally generous people. They were the kind of generous that you would find out about from a third party source way after the fact. Like I remember once I was talking to someone from a nonprofit in downtown LA and remarking on this transportation initiative they had. And he told me, oh yeah, we have the vehicles because this family donated them. This whole ministry would not have happened if it wasn’t for them. 9
That’s ONE story...I could tell you at least a dozen more and I'm sure there are dozens beyond what I even know. But the bottom line is that knowing this family and witnessing the way that they lived and loved people and held their incredible resources with these open, eager to share hands...it reminded me of what can be possible. It taught me that there’s a different way to live. It showed me just how powerful the work of the Holy Spirit can be if we can be open to God doing that work in us.
Because I think that God gives us a pretty specific antidote to greed. And it’s for all of us, no matter who we are, no matter how much we have or don’t have. It’s this concept that gets laid out, again and again throughout the prophets. It’s a concept that I’m not sure we talk about as much in our world but that might actually make some pretty significant changes if we would.
Because as I study the prophets, as I look at what God cares about most, it seems to me that the antidote to greed...is the pursuit of righteousness.
Now, that word, righteousness, might feel overly spiritual and even a little bit ambiguous. But before we discount it, I want us to look at how Walter Bruggemann defines righteousness, particularly in the context of the prophets. 10
Particularly in the way that someone like Amos would have used it: (SLIDE)
Righteousness is used to [describe] people who live generatively in community in order to sustain or enhance the community’s well-being...showing special attentiveness to the poor and needy (Bruggemann: Reverberations of Faith p.177)
If we are focused on building a life around this kind of righteousness, then it becomes almost impossible for greed to get a hold of our lives. Because this type of living is the ANTITHESIS of greed. This is about others’ well-being. This is understanding that it’s NOT about me and my getting ahead but it’s about US and OUR ability to thrive. Committing ourselves to living a righteous life means that when we have more than we need, we look for ways to share it. It means we pay attention to the heartbreak happening in the world because we know that that’s part of what following God looks like.
Righteousness reminds us that there IS another way. It reminds us that WE can be part of creating hope. Even at the very end of Amos, we see him have this vision—that someday, God’s people could get back to the righteousness that sets them apart. That things COULD change and the world COULD be more like what God wants it to be. Even for 11
someone who is CONSUMED by his anger about the state of the world, there’s a deep and abiding belief that God will be at work.
We need to hold on to that deep and abiding belief, as the church in our world right now. I have to tell you that one of the things that worries me the most, about myself and about the Church in general, is that we might be tempted to believe that we are hopeless. We might really start to believe that we can’t make a change and we’re just stuck with what the world has given us.
When we find ourselves in that kind of place...we have to come back to people like the prophets. We have to come back to radical awareness and truth-telling that sits smushed together with the possibility of change. We have to believe that God is at work and we MUST, as the Church, be hungry for ways that we can live out God’s righteousness in our world.
This is not the time to give up and hope someone else will do God's work in the world. And if God used an ordinary farmer like Amos to make a way for change then I believe that God can absolutely use ordinary you and me to do the same.
Last week, we heard about the Streets to Home initiative that is happening in our city. Where different faith communities and civic organizations are working 12
TOGETHER, in an unprecedented way, to end chronic homelessness by increasing the amount of affordable housing available in our city.
St. Luke’s has a goal to raise 27K to support this effort. This is an immediate, concrete action step you can take to do God’s work in the world. To live into that definition of righteousness. So we’re going to put up the QR code and I just encourage you to give towards Streets to Home if you haven’t already.
(SLIDE) QR Code
And whether you donate today, or not, my hope for each of us is that we would really consider how we might live our righteousness in our lives. What it might look like for YOU, whoever you are, whatever your life looks like, to reject greed in a really intentional way. That we would all be willing to speak the truth when it’s required, to show up when it’s needed, to hold on tight to the possibility that there IS a different, better way than the world might have us believe.
Even if the action we take feels small and simple...these small and simple things bring us back to the big things that God cares about.
All of these actions help us create a world that looks more like God would hope it would be. 13
Let’s pray.