Are we listening?

Messages are all around us. Some are audible, others are inaudible. Furthermore, some we tune in to, others we tune out!

Amos, the prophet-shepherd who lived in a wilderness area south of Jerusalem where the winters are cool and wet and the summers warm, clear and dry, was impelled to share an important message with his neighbours – especially those to the north in Israel – even though he would probably have anticipated a cool response.

Writing in the May 12, 1980, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel*, Lynn Howard gives us a vivid picture of the bustling marketplaces Amos would have encountered:

To sell his wool and fruit and to purchase what he needed for living in the wilderness, Amos probably journeyed to many marketplaces: Jerusalem, Beersheba, Gilgal, or even more distant Samaria. Marketplaces (open areas just inside the gates of a town) were the town's center of activity. A crowd of all kinds of people— farmers, weavers, fishermen, and their families—milled about at the market. There was buying and selling of fruits, vegetables, textiles, and pottery. In addition, civil court cases were tried, and the tax collector received customs money. Merchants bringing bales of silk, spices, and jewels from far away, as well as more ordinary merchandise, journeyed the caravan routes to reach town before the gates closed at night.

Someone must have been paying attention when Amos proclaimed his message around 760BC, because it’s been preserved. Here’s one instruction he announced:

             Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live: and so the LORD, the God of hosts, shall be with you, as ye have spoken. Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate: ... (Amos 5:14, 15 (to :))

Down the centuries, others have repeated these sentiments. For example:

o   Depart from evil, and do good … (Psalms 34:14)

o   … eschew evil, and do good …  (I Peter 3:11)

o   Thou hast loved righteousness, and hated iniquity; therefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows. (Hebrews 1:9)

Questions are also useful for capturing audience attention. Here are three posed by our prophet friend (chapter 3):

                o   Can two walk together, except they be agreed?

o   Will a lion roar in the forest, when he hath no prey?

o   Shall a trumpet be blown in the city, and the people not be afraid?

Even though the book of Amos has been a challenging read, I am so glad to have spent the past month getting to know it a little better.

Julie Swannell

*Christian Science Sentinel - May 12, 1980: “Amos, the shepherd-prophet”

Gardens and pests

 AMOS – Minor Prophet

A bible scholar visited Brisbane some years ago. One of the questions he asked was, “When did the last prophet live?” Remembering the Glossary definition* in Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy, I replied, “All of us here.” I got something right in those classes!

*The definition reads, “Prophet. A spiritual seer; disappearance of material sense before the conscious facts of spiritual Truth” (p. 593:4).

I don’t find Amos a riveting study, though I did find a summary of the book online at https://www.biblestudytools.com/amos/. I found it very good.

Today I read up to Amos 4:9 in the King James Version. This verse reads, 

“I have smitten you with blasting and mildew: when your gardens and your vineyards and your fig trees and your olive trees increased, the palmerworm devoured them: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the Lord.”

This reminded me of a Christian Science lecture given at our church by George Millar** (an Australian who introduced Geoffrey Barratt** to Christian Science). George had talked with a practitioner about the pests in his garden; perhaps it was aphids. The practitioner recommended that he read Mrs. Eddy’s Unity of Good, commenting that he was the biggest pest in his garden.

Eddy writes Un. 52:16:

What say you of evil?

God is not the so-called ego of evil; for evil, as a supposition, is the father of itself , — of the material world, the flesh, and the devil. From this falsehood arise the self-destroying elements of this world, its unkind forces, its tempests, lightnings, earthquakes, poisons, rabid beasts, fatal reptiles, and mortals [my emphasis]. 

Joyce Voysey

**Read an interview with George Millar published in The Christian Science Journal of June 2010. The interview begins:

Gardens hold a special place for Christian Science practitioner and teacher George Millar. Not just the one at his current Twickenham home on the river Thames, but one that stretches way back to his childhood in Australia.

When George was a boy, his older sister woke up, unable to get out of bed. She was paralyzed. The polio epidemic was widespread in Melbourne, and all schools were closed. A doctor came to the house and diagnosed her with the disease, saying he would return shortly to make arrangements for hospital. In a family where Christian Science had gone back three generations, "Mum told me to go into the garden and pray," George recalls. "I was very afraid. But since we'd just had a lesson in Sunday School on the importance of obedience, that's what I did."

George doesn't remember exactly how he prayed. "Maybe it was the Lord's Prayer, or 'the scientific statement of being' from Science and Health, or simply 'God, help my sister!' " But he does remember that on that dreary grey day as he sat in the garden, he suddenly looked around to see that it was full of light —majestic in its beauty. "We didn't have much of a garden at all," he adds, "since my father was the gardener and he was away at war." In that moment he was no longer afraid, and knew his sister was healed. He raced into the house to tell his mother, just as his sister came skipping out of her room, completely well...

Pay attention to the plumb line

Brick layers use a plumb line to ensure their work is aligned vertically.

To what are our actions aligned? What are our ideals? Do we  measure up? 

If we are not measuring up, then where is our plumbline and what are our expectations?

The prophet Amos (see chapter 7) had a vision of a plumb line. Who would have known? 😊 Here are the verses which describe the vision (The Living Bible):

“The Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, checking it with a plumb line to see if it was straight. 8 And the Lord said to me, “Amos, what do you see?”

I answered, “A plumb line.”

And he replied, “I will test my people with a plumb line.”

In the Oct. 7, 1944, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel, there is an article called “God’s own plan”. Here Martha E. Newall relates the plumbline to “unerring divine Principle”.*

To students of Christian Science endeavoring to see God's plan for the freedom of the world, Amos' vision of God standing on a wall "with a plumbline in his hand," which was to be set in the midst of Israel, signifies unerring divine Principle, which demands perfection in all our ways. And is not this perfection the plumb line by which we need to measure all our planning?

This reminds me of a passage in the Christian Science textbook:

Man's moral mercury, rising or falling, registers his healing ability and fitness to teach.
(Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy, p. 449:11–13)

Amos had a clear picture of a plumb line. This inspired his actions. We too have clear and inspired messages come to us. We just need to pay attention.

Julie Swannell

*Newall also mentions “mass mesmerism” which would suggest that our prayers are insignificant in the face of world problems.

Fairness, accountability and restoration

The demand for fairness (impartiality, equity, justice) wells up in us from an early age. I was surprised to find this in the book of Amos.

I can't say that I can quote any passage from the prophet Amos off the top of my head, but from the little I have recently read about him, I knew that his message to the northern kingdom of Israel some hundreds of years before Jesus' emergence on the human scene, would still be important today.

So, what a lovely surprise to find the prophet-shepherd quoted in today’s edition of The Christian Science Monitor!  Here is the piece, titled “Yusef Salaam and the ‘ultimate justice’” from contributor Ken Makin:

If Yusef Salaam had lost faith in the justice system, let alone electoral politics, it would have been understandable. As a teenager in 1990, he was convicted of a crime he didn’t commit and spent nearly seven years in jail. 

And yet, Mr. Salaam, one of the five men exonerated of raping and savagely beating a Central Park jogger in 1989, grew more determined. Last week, he won a seat on the New York City Council representing Harlem. A few months before he announced his candidacy, Mr. Salaam stood at a ceremonial gate that was unveiled to honor the Exonerated Five’s resilience and independence.

“We are here because we persevere,” Mr. Salaam said at the time.

There are times when a gate works as a dam – a prison. Gatekeeping is the activity of limiting access and controlling resources. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke allegorically many years ago about how we might break open the floodgates: “Now is the time for justice to roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Dr. King’s reference to the book of Amos wasn’t just aspirational. It was a call to accountability. Even as Mr. Salaam walks in the way of Harlem activists such as Malcolm X and iconic politicians such as Adam Clayton Powell, there are still injustices that profoundly affect Black people. As we highlight the individual stories of the exonerated, we should be mindful that there is a collective of people who seek independence from poverty and homelessness.

The potential that comes from that social uplift is limitless, as Mr. Salaam said when asked about the arc of his life on PBS. “It strikes me as the ultimate justice,” he said. “In faith and in faith communities, they always talk about when God restores, you get back 100 times what was taken.”

Reading this has spurred me to begin the work of actually reading the book of Amos, instead of reading about the book! (Someone has said that the best text we need to understand the Bible is the Bible itself! Haha.) By the time I got to chapter five, I was getting the gist of the prophet’s message. Under the rule of the misguided Jeroboam, things were much too comfortable in the newly separate kingdom of Israel. The wealth and ease of many had created a malaise of complacency, pretention and indolence. Further, they completely ignored God.

Amos’ poetic imagery (5:24) rings out in its call for justice and fairness:

…let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.

The Message (by Eugene Peterson) phrases God’s message via Amos thus:

               I want justice—oceans of it. I want fairness—rivers of it.

Mary Baker Eddy speaks of justice as “the eternal attribute of Truth”.  

The signs of these times portend a long and strong determination of mankind to cleave to the world, the flesh, and evil, causing great obscuration of Spirit. When we remember that God is just, and admit the total depravity of mortals, alias mortal mind, — and that this Adam legacy must first be seen, and then must be subdued and recompensed by justice, the eternal attribute of Truth, — the outlook demands labor, and the laborers seem few. To-day we behold but the first faint view of a more spiritual Christianity, that embraces a deeper and broader philosophy and a more rational and divine healing. The time approaches when divine Life, Truth, and Love will be found alone the remedy for sin, sickness, and death; when God, man's saving Principle, and Christ, the spiritual idea of God, will be revealed.
(Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, Mary Baker Eddy, p. 2:6)

And  so, today it is to Truth, God, that we turn as our “remedy for sin, sickness, and death”.

    For I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds, saith the Lord... (Jeremiah 30: 17)

Julie Swannell