Amos: "in the interest of the individual and the community"

The prophets were community builders. So was the apostle Paul.

In his letter to the church in Rome (Romans 12: 9) Paul writes "Let love be without dissimulation". (The dictionary says that dissimulation means pretence or hypocrisy.)

Amos's message to the Israelites is on the same track. They are hypocritical and they have their priorities wrong. They claim they are God's chosen people, but they've lost perspective. Their actions have been neither righteous nor just. Dissimulation, you surmise?

God has tried to get the message to them to "do what is good and run from evil... [that] then the Lord God of Heaven's Armies will be [their] helper" (Amos 5: 14 NLT). 

But obviously something is out of sync because trouble keeps re-appearing: "...you will be like a man who runs from a lion -- only to meet a bear. Escaping from the bear, he leans his hand against a wall in his house -- and he's bitten by a snake" (Amos 5: 19 NLT). 

Today we might describe it this way, when trouble seems heaped upon us: "there's a lot happening right now" or "there's been just one thing after another". 

Happily, Amos has a solution--a river. Here's what he says:  

"...I want to see a mighty flood of justice, an endless river of righteous living" (Amos 5: 21 NLT).

Bearing in mind the role of the river in Naaman's healing (II Kings 5: 1-14) and the definition of river in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy (p. 593) as a "channel of thought", it might be concluded that  Amos is suggesting a distinctly changed thought from this community.

In a stirring article titled: Biblical Community: Lessons for Today in The Christian Science Journal November 2010, Madelon Maupin describes Amos' work thus: "Amos ... embodied [the] necessity for collective self-examination, addressing spiritual lethargy and its deadening effects..." 

Madelon concludes her article: "One helps many. Many bless one. The story of community. Then we echo Mary Baker Eddy's words: "I can use the power that God gives me in no way except in the interest of the individual and the community"" (Message to The Mother Church for 1901, p. 31).

This has given me much to ponder. How does a community engage in "collective self-examination"? What is "spiritual lethargy"? Is my community fired up with spiritual energy and action? Is my community demonstrating true justice and righteousness?  What about my role: Am I stuck in self-righteousness, self-justification, and self-will? How am I contributing to the greater good of my community? Is love without dissimulation?

Julie Swannell

PS. Readers may enjoy this short video explanation of the book of Amos. 

"Close" reading captures the meaning

You may have heard the phrase "a close reading". I believe it means to find the author's method of communicating the message to the reader; to not just read the words, but to discover the underlying message. A book I recently purchased is helping me do this. It's "Giving the sense: how to read aloud with meaning" by Nedra Newkirk Lamar.

Lamar writes (p. 15): "When we speak, we naturally emphasize each new idea, and subdue the old. It's automatic." 

Here's her first example:

"Suppose you said to a newly-arrived visitor: 

    Here is a very comfortable chair. Please, sit in this chair.

Probably you would slightly stress comfortable and chair in the first sentence. Would you stress chair in the second sentence? Certainly not.

In the first sentence, chair is the new idea. In the second sentence, sit is the new idea, while chair is an old idea and does not need to be emphasized, but rather, subdued."

That example is very clear. But Lamar goes on to give us some harder-to-analyse examples. Here's one from the Bible (page 17:)

[5] And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified. [6] He is not here: for he is risen, as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay. [7] And go quickly, and tell his disciples that he is risen from the dead; (Matt. 28)

Lamar explains: "In the last verse, is that he is risen from the dead new? Isn't it all old from verse 6? Isn't the new idea disciples? So wouldn't you need a good stress on disciples, going up high enough in pitch so that you could then drop your pitch and subdue the entire phrase that he is risen from the dead?"

So, this has helped me to understand Amos. My first reading brought a sigh: so much repetition. Unintelligible. Then I tried looking for the new idea. Ah. Lightbulb. The book does indeed repeat the theme of sinning. But the new idea is who the author is identifying as having sinned, i.e. "the people of Damascus" (Amos 1: 3), "the people of Gaza" (Amos 1: 6), "the people of Tyre" (verse 9), etc. Once I saw that there is a pattern here, I could sift through all those words and find the author's purpose and strategy.

I love this enabling way of reading, especially of reading sacred texts, and I'm having fun trying this method to my reading aloud too!

Julie Swannell

Two years before the earthquake

Amos has an attention-getting method of dating his era – “...two years before the earthquake” (Amos 1: 1). I had to look into that!

My Commentary on the Bible (Dummelow) has a very detailed introduction which is worth a read to get an all-over picture of the book of Amos. Dummelow (first printing 1908) states that the earthquake cannot be dated. However, on consulting the internet we will find in International Geology Review July 2010 (Title: Amos’s Earthquake: An Extraordinary Middle East Seismic Event of 750 B.C.) that modern archaeology can date it at 750 B.C. They say the epicentre was probably north of present-day Israel in Lebanon, and that the intensity was likely 8.2.

Amos is classified as a Minor Prophet. There were twelve of these, formerly written on a single scroll: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Amos seems to be classed as the first of them.

Amos was a chap of modest means; Dummelow says his possessions consisted of a few sycamore trees and a small flock of sheep of a peculiar breed, ugly and short-footed, but valuable for the excellence of its wool. He was independent and probably had a lad to look after the sheep while he was off prophesying. He was of the lower kingdom of Judea (in the time of the divided kingdom), and he saw the bad things that were happening in Israel, the northern kingdom. He saw that luxury, impurity and intemperance were rife and the poor were treated as chattels not as men.

He got a call from God. He must do something about it. There had been warnings by drought, locusts, famine, and pestilence, but they went unheeded. Dummelow says that Amos was conscious of a direct call from heaven even as Paul was in New Testament times.

No doubt it is time that I actually read the text of Amos!

Joyce Voysey