Attention Getter

Amos 4:6-13

There is a kind of chronic neurosis that long-time Christians often display: we look for the reason in everything. What I mean by that is that we look for the "cause" behind every difficult or inexplicable thing that happens to us or to people close to us. The danger of that attitude is best exemplified biblically by the incorrect but firmly held convictions of Job's friends that Job must have done something to merit the disaster his life had become. It's good to read Job so that we know that there may not be answers to why calamity comes upon us, but we need to read Amos 4 to remember that sometimes we need to ask the question.

The prophet Amos, whose oracles regarding the injustice and evil in the community have inspired prophets centuries and continents removed from his context, speaks for a God who sometimes tries to get human beings' attention. Hunger, drought, blight, pestilence, scarcity, war, devastation - all kinds of calamity in succession emerged to make the people stop and ask the question: Am I/are we living right? The God whom Amos quotes sounds almost perplexed, certainly frustrated at the hardness of the hearts and the dullness of the ears of people who should be able to recognize the signs of God's displeasure. "But you would not turn," God says almost incredulously.

As I read the text from Amos, my first inclination is to recoil from the image of a God who would withhold rain and send war. My own sense of justice is troubled by the certainty that in any national tragedy many innocents suffer, and I am disinclined to see God as the source. At the same time, something about this text speaks urgently to the individual and the community that has parted company with right and righteousness. We are not always innocent. And when we are wrong, what, if anything, can shock us enough to arrest our attention so that we can hear God say, "Repent"? When God snatches us like a brand out of the fire of our own or others' making, it's not always harmful to ask whether there's something God is trying to tell us.

Is God trying to tell you something? Is today's challenge God's way of getting your attention? Or not.