I love my church. I have been going here for almost five years, and it keeps getting more and more encouraging to be part of this community. For the past several weeks, we have been looking at the minor prophets; we do one per week. Last week was my favorite; we covered Amos, and you can listen to the wonderful sermon here (just look for the sermon dated 07-07-01 (YY-MM-DD date formats make so much more sense than our conventional MM-DD-YY)).
Until a few summers ago, when I spent six weeks learning and growing by serving in the inner-city Chicago neighborhood of Lawndale with InterVarsity’s Chicago Urban Program (CUP), I had never even looked at the book of Amos. Well, I may have looked briefly at Amos 5:24, and a couple of the verses which surround it, but only because of Dr. Martin Luther King’s beautiful “I have a dream” speech when he quotes it passionately. Might I add though, with added hindsight, that his quote and his message is further strengthened by the context surrounding Amos 5:24, rather unlike many more recent Biblical allusions made by figures of public interest, which often find the meaning in the Bible to be directly in opposition to the meaning with which they use it.
While I was participating in CUP, we spent a great deal of time really digging into the book of Amos. It was pretty intense. Actually, the entire six weeks was really intense. “Really intense” is probably the biggest understatement I could make. My experience in Chicago was quite possibly the most intense experience of my life: seeing many of the injustices in American society first hand, realizing the heart God had put in me to fight injustice from before I can remember, the passing of a wonderful man of God who happened to be my Grandad, seeing my family in rural and small city Texas as being more like to the inner-city than to the suburbs where I have lived most of my life, and all the other amazing experiences I had in that short six weeks. But Amos really stuck out, especially as I struggled to find my place while in college, preparing to go out into the world to fight injustice like I have been called.
I think it was only a couple of weeks after I got back from Chicago, and the culture shock had not yet worn off. I was walking to the front doors of my church, which sits on a hill, in the desert, overlooking the city from one of the most wealthy suburban areas in Tucson. In my head, I was thinking, “Is this where I belong? Should I be at a church in midtown or South Tucson, where maybe there is more going on to fight injustice, rather than at this suburban, mostly white church?” I grabbed a bulletin, found the place where my friends were sitting, and took a seat. When I opened the bulletin, it was like I had been hit over the head with a sledgehammer. This was the Sunday Jed, our associate pastor, officially became our associate pastor, and right there in the bulletin, where the sermon title and scripture it relates to usually are, it said “Amos.” Not only was the sermon on Amos, but we sang what has become one of my favorite worship songs, Where Justice Rolls Down (a song based on Amos 5:24), twice. To top that, we also had a representative from the Covenant Church (our denominational family) who spoke briefly about the work that was happening to plant ethnic and multi-ethnic churches in California, Arizona, and Hawaii, and about the new Hispanic church starting in Phoenix, and about the plans to start an Hispanic church here in Tucson (Iglesia Camino de Vida is now a reality).
Have you ever wept? If you don’t know, or aren’t sure, you haven’t. Weeping is the kind of experience that you can’t understand until you have experienced it yourself. That church service, despite the curious looks from my friends sitting on either side of me, I wept. This is the only time, in my entire life, that I can remember weeping. I wept because I knew that God wanted me to be exactly where I was, because I saw Him moving strongly in my church, and because the joy of the hope of God’s Kingdom is an overwhelming joy.
That was nearly three years ago, and in that time I have seen my church continue to grow into a church with a heart for justice. And while I have been at school, assaulted with the temptation to compromise, to say, “that was a nice little idea, but reality is different,” my church community has been very instrumental in reminding me that true reality is God’s Kingdom, and anything short of that is a facade, as empty and hopeless as using a pocketknife to try and cut down a thousand-year-old Sequoia. If God has called me to fight injustice and to be intimately involved in community development, I have to follow that call, no matter the cost.
Perhaps this has given you a better idea of part of why I love the book of Amos. If you really want to understand why I love Amos so much, you should read it, study it, and take what Amos tells Israel to heart.
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