Amos 5:18-24
Psalm 50:5-15
Matthew 18:12-14
It is sometimes said that throughout the Bible God comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. When we begin to get complacent and take our good standing with God for granted, along come some dire warnings of divine judgment and wrath to shake us up and prod us to examine and amend our lives. But lest these warnings drive us to desperation, along come some comforting passages to reassure us of God’s love and will to save.
Today’s readings are a case in point. The Old Testament lesson from the prophet Amos and the verses from Psalm 50 sound urgent notes of warning and condemnation. But then the Gospel reading from Saint Matthew reassures us of God’s will to save by means of the imagery of the shepherd who goes in search of the one lost sheep in the wilderness.
As Anglo-Catholics, however, we need to pay special heed to the warnings in today’s Old Testament reading and psalm. The prophet Amos – one of my favorite prophets, by the way – relates the Lord’s condemnation of the people’s worship and sacrifices. His language is scathing:
I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings, I will not accept them, and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen.
Amos prophesied in the eighth century BC in the northern Kingdom of Israel, by the way, so the worship he was condemning was that at the royal shrine at Bethel rather than at the Temple in Jerusalem. But while later generations might have said that no sacrifices outside Jerusalem were legitimate, that is not Amos’s reason for condemning them. Rather, the judgment is that the people are resting content with observing the outward forms of worship without living lives marked by holiness and righteousness.
Much of the Book of Amos is taken up with descriptions and vigorous denunciations of an unjust society in which the rich grow rich at the expense of the poor, and pervert the course of justice by bribing judges and royal officials. Against the background of such corruption and oppression, the worship of God becomes a travesty—even though the people participate in it enthusiastically and joyfully. But they do so to their own damnation. And so, Amos sounds the prophetic cry: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
The emphasis in Psalm 50 is slightly different. Writing in the name of God putting his case against the people, the psalmist proclaims: “I do not reprove you because of your sacrifices; your burnt offerings are continually before me. I will accept no bull from your house, nor he-goat from your folds. For every beast of the forest is mine; the cattle on a thousand hills … If I were hungry I would not tell you; for the world and all that is in it is mine. Do I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?”
What is lacking is the inward disposition to match the outward offering. And so the psalmist declares: “Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and pay your vows to the Most High; and call upon me in the day of trouble, and I will deliver you and you shall glorify me.”
In other words, the psalmist is saying that the outward forms of worship are without value unless they reflect and reinforce the relationship between God and his people that they are meant to express. Both Amos and the psalmist warn us that we cannot get away with trying to use worship as a means of buying God off. Worship must arise from and in turn form the community’s character as a people set apart for God. It is a means of, but cannot be a substitute for, living into that relationship.
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