And the Lord Took Me from Following the Flock

Amaziah said to Amos, “O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, earn your bread there, and prophesy there, but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom.”

Then Amos answered Amaziah, “I am no prophet nor a prophet’s son, but I am a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees, and the Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’ 

“Now therefore hear the word of the Lord.
You say, ‘Do not prophesy against Israel,
    and do not preach against the house of Isaac.’ 

Therefore thus says the Lord:
Your wife shall become a prostitute in the city,
    and your sons and your daughters shall fall by the sword,
    and your land shall be parceled out by line;
you yourself shall die in an unclean land,
    and Israel shall surely go into exile away from its land.”

(Amos 7:12-17, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

Prophets, the twentieth-century rabbi Abraham J. Heschel tells us, strive “to reconcile man and God.” 

That should make us wonder what had driven them apart. “Perhaps,” Heschel mused, “it is due to man’s false sense of sovereignty, to his abuse of freedom, to his aggressive, sprawling pride, resenting God’s involvement in history.”

Nearly three millennia ago, the people of Israel lived in such a state of mind—at least, so Amos, an ordinary shepherd and farmer from the southern part of the kingdom, believed. Amos spoke of God’s disappointment in a society whose members “have rejected the instruction of the LORD and have not kept his statutes… led astray by the same lies after which their ancestors walked.” Walking away from their covenant with God, these people “trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth and push the afflicted out of the way.” (Amos 2:4,7)

God had had enough of such evil. “I will punish Israel for its transgressions,” God said through Amos. “I will punish the altars of Bethel… I will tear down the winter house as well as the summer house, and the houses of ivory shall perish, and the great house shall come to an end.” (3:14-15)

That went over about as well as you might expect, and Amaziah, a priest in the temple at Bethel, encouraged Amos to get out of town while he could—and, if he valued his life, to stop criticizing the rulers of Israel. Amos, as we see above, refused, because he answered to a higher authority. He didn’t volunteer for any of this; God upended his ordinary life and ordered him to speak out. Furthermore, Israel faced a far greater existential threat from God than Amos did from Israel.

Let’s reiterate: This discussion does not concern modern Israel.

Amos speaks of the Israel of his time. The generations that followed him have interpreted his warning (and the words of other prophets) to describe the fate of any society that has strayed from the path of righteousness. As the government of the United States makes plans to strip people of their citizenship and deport them to other countries, for example, some readers might recall Amos’s chastisement of a nation that “delivered entire communities over to Edom and did not remember the covenant of kinship.” (1:9)

Early Quakers such as George Fox, however, saw their world of seventeenth-century England reflected in the prophecies of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. They also saw themselves called to warn their neighbors of the consequences of living outside the covenant with God, just as Amos and the other prophets had been called so many centuries before them. (James Nayler even heard the summons while working as a farmer, like Amos himself.)

Speaking up placed Friends at substantial risk, as it had Amos. The English authorities put Fox in prison for his public ministry on numerous occasions. But their persecution could not break his connection with Spirit. During one such period of confinement in 1664, he would record in his journal, he beheld a vision of “the angel of the Lord with a glittering drawn sword stretched southward, as though the court had been all on fire.” 

“Not long after,” he continued, “the wars broke out with Holland, the sickness broke forth, and afterwards the fire of London; so the Lord’s sword was drawn indeed.” (The second Anglo-Dutch War began in the spring of 1665, right around the time the Great Plague began decimating the population of London; the Great Fire of London occurred the following year.) 

Has God drawn a sword against today’s mighty nations?

Will a time come when God spares us no longer? When our high places are made desolate and our sanctuaries laid waste? (Amos 7:8-9) For people who don’t believe in God, of course, these questions hold no significance. They may even come across as preposterous bible thumping. At the other end of the spectrum, some but not all Christians might tell us that Jesus made such questions irrelevant by sacrificing himself upon the cross. And even people who don’t believe that may not wish to dwell on the possibility that humanity has tried God’s patience to its limits.

Ultimately, I have little interest in connecting the literal content of biblical prophecy to our modern condition. I do believe, however, that the prophets have much to tell us about the ways in which we can lose sight of our obligation to love God (however we see God) and love our neighbors as ourselves. And the prophets can also prompt us to reconcile ourselves to those obligations before we bring about the conditions of our own ruin—as individuals or as entire nations.