Amos: a root text for social justice

Part 5: I loathe, I spurn your festivals

Hypocrisy, tokenism, and rejected worship

In addition to the angry God of retribution that may be expected
by those reading this text, we get to see in one passage a rarity in
the Bible -- the sarcastic God.

Come to Bethel and transgress
To Gilgal, and transgress even more:
Present your sacrifices the next morning
And your tithes on the third day;
And burn a thank offering of leavened bread;
And proclaim freewill offerings loudly.
For you love that sort of thing, O Israelites. 
                      -- declares my Lord God.

God immediately follows this with a list of disasters that he has
sent already or is going to visit on the people, so it's clear that 
all of this sacrificing and tithing and offering counts for nothing with 
God.  In addition, Bethel was a royal sanctuary with an altar, so the 
forms of conventional worship are condemned as well.

Third-day tithes would be presented more often then most people really
did, so they would be an ostentatious gesture.  Similarly, proclaiming
freewill offerings loudly makes it clear that the motive for them
is to get public credit.  The desire to be publicly seen as a
do-gooder, while privately either tolerating or participating in
injustice, is a special form of hypocrisy that Amos saw fit to
condemn over and above the injustice itself.  Nor would the
charitable offerings of goods or money to the church, or even directly
to the poor, count for anything without justice.

Amos strongly indites the practise of symbolic gestures 
as recompense for injustice.  Worse, he suggests that God can't
be served in the comfortable ways that we like as long as
justice is not done.  Let's see the same text that we started
with:


I loathe, I spurn your festivals
I am not appeased by your solemn assemblies.
If you offer Me burnt offerings--or your meal offerings--
I will not accept them;
I will pay no heed
To your gifts of fatlings.
Spare Me the sound of your hymns,
And let Me not hear the music of your lutes.
But let justice well up like water,
Righteousness like an unfailing stream.


No one really knows exactly what the Hebrew verb in the second-to-last
line means -- its other known use is to "roll up", as in what
you do when rolling up a scroll.  So that line is more often
translated as "Let justice roll down like water".  I prefer the
translation above, because it makes it clear that justice must
come up from the people, not down from God.  It also suggests that
justice must rise up from the people, not be handed down as a gift
from the rich and powerful.  In any case, this passage brings us back 
to the current day, with the use of "Let justice roll down" in the 
U.S. Civil Rights movement.  

In my opinion, the quote above is one of the most radical passages
in an already radical document.  Amos was one of the first to suggest
that social injustice was something to be concerned about.  As far as
I know, there is no other text surviving from any other part
of the ancient world that is really concerned with broad, social as 
opposed to private or sectarian justice.  Over and above that,
the paragraph above specifically rejects every kind of symbolic
public worship that the Israelites used: no festivals, assemblies,
offerings, sacrifices, singing, or music are going to make up for the
lack of justice.  Other religious movements have rejected such things
in the name of deeper service to God; Amos rejects them in the name
of emphasizing fairer treatment of other people.

That paragraph above is, by far, the most popular quote from Amos
for use in UU ceremonies.  I've heard it in a sermon, at an ordination,
as a reading.  Something about it seems to appeal to at least a certain
subset of UUs.  Why is that?  Is it a desire to bring the ideals
of Amos back before a congregation usually most concerned with General
Assembly, sunday sermons, charitable giving, music and ceremonies?  
Or is it, I sometimes fear, the symbolic gesture to top all symbolic 
gestures: the occasional reading of a text to motivate a fleeting 
feeling, which is to make up for the fact that not much is really 
expected to be done?

We've gone through the text of Amos.  The next and last section will 
be a conclusion that summarizes my ideas about Amos and the text's 
applicability to current UU practise.  I'll probably wait some time 
before writing this last section, since I'll try to get feedback
from a few people first.  If anyone has been reading this and would like
to post their own ideas at this point, please do.