Amos 5:6-7, 10-15
Proper 23 (28) - Year B
Seeking G*D ultimately includes establishing justice that goes beyond what is fair. This kind of justice will not allow any excuse for making the situation of those with less, worse.
We cannot simply take this renewal of justice on simply on the basis of laws attempting to ensure justice. Laws are always a step behind injustice and trying to keep a second incident from happening. Laws are helpless against innovative wrong and so protests and rebuke are no more effective than silence.
The part that is left out, verses 8 & 9, give us a better perspective from which to seek good and not evil.
Here it in language of The Message:
[8] Do you realize where you are? You're in a cosmos
star-flung with constellations by God,
A world God wakes up each morning
and puts to bed each night.
God dips water from the ocean
and gives the land a drink.
God, God-revealed, does all this.
[9] And God can destroy it as easily as make it,
God can turn this vast wonder into total waste.
Can you equate justice with the cosmos? with participating in the refreshment of people and creation? with saying, "No," to those for whom there is an acceptable level of waste?
Let's raise our vision beyond tit-for-tat laws holding the worst at bay but still institutionalizing poverty and all its attendant woes. Let's go beyond our usual responses and speak the grand vision of our being in a cosmos star-flung - and smile and live its truth.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2003/october2003.html
Amos 5:6-7, 10-15 or Job 23:1-9, 16-17
Psalm 22:1-15 or Psalm 90:12-17
Hebrews 4:12-16
Mark 10:17-31
Job: "Today my complaint is bitter."
Everyman: "What must I do to inherit eternal life."
Both cases call for boldness - a boldness to complain about impoverishment and a boldness to give all our resources to the poor.
While this boldness is spoken of in terms of its result in mercy and grace, the clearer reality is that it is only mercy and grace that allow boldness to flourish and be enacted. To have it be otherwise, in any fashion, would be to give into entitled rights of goodness or rewards for righteous works.
Where we are left is exercising our right to choose, right up to the end, our response to the exigencies of life.
- - -
how hard it is to enter
a realm of experience
requiring only nakedness
our bodies and riches
become our definition
we cannot put down
without them we are nothing
we are definitely last
with no first in sight
our windup clockwork
does not go into any good night
gently or easily
we complain and grasp
and gasp to the end
shoving grace aside
until all that is left
is unrequited forsakenness
and we sputter out
may our difficult days
and persistent riches
recede before a wise heart