Amos 8.1-12 A famine of hearing God’s words

This is what the Lord GOD showed me: a basket of summer fruit. Anyone filled with dread and foreboding right now? Behold! A Basket of summer fruit! How about now? No? Hmm… that’s probably normal. Most people are not prophets of God. Most people aren’t expected to see what no one else sees.

I know this will come as a big surprise to none of you but I just have to say that I love Old Testament Prophets. They are my favorite literature. The colorfulness and profoundness of how they tell people their world is about to collapse. Behold! A basket of Summer Fruit! And how they interpret and see these signs of prosperity and abundance as a portent, an ill omen of what is to come.

No one ever listened to the prophets of old. They lived in a time where Israel was in its heyday. Happily enslaved to the material world. And then this lunatic comes along “Behold a basket of Summer Fruit!”

Only God says “Amos, what do you see?”

“I see a basket of summer fruit.”

“No! It is not fruit!”

“But it’s a basket of fruit… there’s strawberries, and peaches, and mangoes, and I think that’s a kumquat.”

“It is not fruit! It is the end for my people Israel; I will spare them no longer.”

“Looks like there’s a plum too.”

“The dead bodies shall be many, cast out in every place.”

“Looks like fruit.”

“Be silent!”

Prophets live hard lives. Imagine if a basket of fruit symbolizes the end of life as you know it. When all will mourn and famine is to come. Can’t do it? If you can’t that’s okay because if you noticed, we missed it.

The basket of summer fruit is an abundant harvest. A time of prosperity and goodness but it is also… a last supper. Gone are the days where the word of God was heard by nearly every citizen. Gone are the days where a city could support a church on every corner and all the pews were filled. Gone are the days where people would stand outside the doors just to hear the Word of God preached.

A famine has come, not of bread or thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. People wander aimlessly from sea to sea and north to east, running too and fro, seeking the word of the Lord but they cannot find it despite that it is available on every street corner, every bookshelf, and in nearly every language on the planet, they cannot find it.

All they see is… a basket of summer fruit. And, if all you see if a basket of fruit, why would you ever think you were going to go hungry?

Ever lose a loved one to an accident? Something sudden and tragic? You sit at home thinking to yourself what a wonderful visit you had and then the phone rings… and your heart inexplicably drops… but I was just with them… but they were just smiling… and laughing… and carrying on like they didn’t have a care in the world… there was a basket of summer fruit.

The prophets carry a curse to know that that basket of fruit marks the calm before a storm, a beautiful portent of death and destruction, the end is nigh. The sun is about to go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight. A song of joy about to become a song of lament. A day when a famine for the words of the Lord will occur.

If only our ancestors had been paying attention and not seen their prosperity as something that would never end. Not lived with the belief that each generation would have it better than the last. A sea of “if only’s” so vast generations upon generations will drown in it. Like the rains in the days of Noah, only one saw the clear sky as a basket of summer fruit and built a boat in the desert.

Hear this, you who trample on the needy, and bring ruin to the poor of the land saying, “When will the new moon be over so that we may sell again, and the Sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah smaller and the shekel heavier and practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals and selling the sweepings of wheat.”

Hear this you who trample on the needy and bring ruin to the poor of the land using those less fortunate to make your fortune thinking those you help owe you anything. You who are prosperous and have enough who think you have nothing to give. You who focus on living but fail to live. You who listen but do not hear. You who are enslaved to the material world not the word of God.

You who think the word of God is a basket of summer fruit instead of a portent of what is to come. Prophets have the ability to see when that which the people think of as good, is not. They distinguish between the fruits of God and the fruits of men. They warn you of what is to come if you continue along your current path. They see that which you do not wish to see and speak that which you do not wish to hear.

Many years ago, I left a job because I was given an offer I could not refuse. Triple the pay I was making and full benefits. In the pit of my stomach, I had this feeling it wasn’t a good idea, but I was tired of struggling to make ends meet. I was tired of the long hours and working nights and weekends. This opportunity looked like a dream come true. 9-5 Monday through Friday with enough earning potential to leave my one-bedroom apartment on Main Street in downtown Clarksburg. I would have to drive to Morgantown every day for a while, but it would be worth it, right?

Wrong.

I hated that job, and it didn’t care much for me either. I could not do anything right. Everything I touched went wrong. As a Chemist, this was a problem. I could not get the qualification and validation samples for a test sample run to titrate correctly for anything. Before you can run samples on a mass spectrometer, you have to run a set of samples with known concentrations first. These samples provide a means of judging the accuracy of the machine and are used to validate the sample preparation. If those samples do not form an accurate curve to provide a standard of measurement, the run is considered invalid. It’s VERY important. Something I used to be able to prepare at the previous job while listening to music and having a conversation with someone in the room without error, I could no longer do even with complete focus.

I also was not getting along with my colleagues. I went from a place that worked as a team to a place where it was every man for themselves. I was reported for having anger issues one day when I slammed a printer drawer too hard after removing a paper jam and loading it with paper. Everything I did was wrong. The job was destroying my emotional and physical health. After my probationary period, we parted ways and I was left unemployed, devastated at failing at something, a completely new concept for me, and had no idea what I was going to do with my life or how I was going to survive.

I’ve asked you before if you had ever made a promise to God in despair. This was my moment. “God, if you get me out of this situation, I will go to church every Sunday!” And… here I am. This isn’t my call story, this is my promise story. Never make a promise to God you don’t intend to keep because God will find a way to make you keep it and it probably won’t be what you were expecting.

That feeling I had in the pit of my stomach that that job was too good to be true is something I have learned to listen to. That portent of doom, that omen of misfortune, I have learned to stop ignoring. The prophets of old saw doom coming in what God’s people saw as prosperity. They recognized that the ways of the world were not the path of God, and they tried to warn the people. They saw that the basket of summer fruit was about to go rotten, but the people? They did not listen. They wanted that which seemed to good to be true to be true even though they probably knew it was not.

Looking back, the life I lived in that apartment? Not so bad. I had a roof over my head, food to eat, clothes to wear, and a job with incredible colleagues. I made enough to live on, but I wanted more. If I had fulfilled that promise to God by going to church every Sunday without having to have actually made the promise, it’s hard to say where my life would have gone. Perhaps I would have managed to continue living without ever knowing what it was like to fail on that large of a scale. I might not have known what it was like to be fired from a job. While these lessons are of great value, faith doesn’t have to doubt.

The Israelites would wander from sea to sea and from north to east; they would run to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord, but not find it. It’s hard to find something you already have. When we search for something, we often use the adage, It’s always in the last place you look. Why would you continue searching for something you have already found? Maybe we should ask the Israelites.

It wasn’t that God had stopped speaking to them. God was giving them a message they didn’t want to hear.