Amos 8:1-12

I have never ended a sermon bent over with my hands on my knees, until last Sunday.  I was symbolically trying to catch my breath after Nice and Dallas and St. Paul and Baton Rouge.  I didn’t even realize at the time–the shooting happened at 7 am Sunday morning when I was preparing for a morning at church–that Baton Rouge was the site of more police being shot.  These are just coming too fast.

Oh Amos, give me some comforting words from God!  Help guide us to a safer world! But Amos had no words of comfort nor of hope.  How can I end a sermon without them?  Instead Amos could only muster doom and gloom.  While we cling to the hope that passive prayer will work this time, vigils and silence, it is becoming painfully clear that active prayer is required, the kind of prayer that acknowledges the injustices we like to forget, the poor we so often ignore; the kind of prayer that calls us to change our ways and address our past and confront our anger and our fear.

That’s what Amos was doing last Sunday.  He was showing us what injustices do–they wreck havoc and cause all kinds of violence and pain.  We are living it now, Amos tells us.  No, I say, it is too hard to change!  There must be another way.  But he wouldn’t take it back,  and I found myself on my knees, trying to catch my breath.