They Shall Run To and Fro, Seeking the Word of the Lord

On that day, says the Lord God,
    I will make the sun go down at noon
    and darken the earth in broad daylight.

I will turn your feasts into mourning
    and all your songs into lamentation;
I will bring sackcloth on all loins
    and baldness on every head;
I will make it like the mourning for an only son
    and the end of it like a bitter day.

The time is surely coming, says the Lord God,
    when I will send a famine on the land,
not a famine of bread or a thirst for water,
    but of hearing the words of the Lord.

They shall wander from sea to sea
    and from north to east;
they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord,
    but they shall not find it.
(Amos 8:9-12, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

Last week’s message touched upon the ways that generations of readers have seen their societies reflected in the prophecies of Scripture.

Amos had his mind fixed firmly on the kingdom of Israel, eight centuries before the birth of Jesus. A century later, Jeremiah sought to warn the people of Judah of their kingdom’s imminent downfall. After that, Isaiah spoke of the contemporary threats he perceived. And so on.

The early Quakers, however, connected the words of these three prophets (and others besides) to their own seventeenth-century world “turned upside down.” Entire movements in Christianity have been based on meticulously detailed interpretations of the Book of Revelation; the idea of a literal “mark of the beast” has entered the broader cultural discourse. And people today still scour the Bible looking for signs of what awaits us—how we might bring about the Kingdom of God, or identify the powers that could lead us to our doom.

But prophets don’t predict events so much as describe conditions.

When I read this passage from Amos, for example, I don’t dwell on what sort of environmental crisis might bring about a literal darkness at noon. I don’t noodle over the details of potential political or economic catastrophes that could “turn [our] feasts into mourning and all [our] songs into lamentation.”  I won’t say I don’t imagine such things—the way things have been going for the last decade, it’s become increasingly difficult to not imagine any number of dystopian scenarios. But many of us still have the luxury of releasing such thoughts as soon as we recognize them.

I focus on the famine. I start with the literal famine, the one Amos tells us God will not bring, and I can’t help but think of how many people enjoy an abundance—even an excess—of food while others go hungry. I think about we treat the price of basic staples like eggs or milk as a sign of the U.S. economy’s ability (or failure) to provide for all its people. I think about how phrases like “food desert” have entered our vocabulary. I think about communities like Flint, Michigan, that have gone years with contaminated water.

Then I turn to the famine Amos really wants to talk about: the famine “of hearing the words of the Lord.” I think about a people who can feel, in their hearts, that their society has gone astray. I think about those who come to these people, in their fear and confusion, and assure them that they didn’t do anything wrong, the blame lies with that other group. If the people gave them the power to deal decisively with those intruders and transgressors, they could make society great again. And some folks believe these promises.

Seeking the word of the Lord, they accept the first thing that sounds comforting.

But Christians know how to tell whether a message truly comes from God or not, as outlined in the First Letter of John: “Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.” (1 John 4:2-3). Some Friends today may find that guideline too restrictive; the earliest Quakers, however, accepted it as simple truth. Either way, perhaps we can all agree on what John says soon after: “Since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfected in us.” (4:11-12)

Any message that gives us permission to not love someone else and to treat them unjustly, then, does not come from God. Circling back to Amos, a society that looks the other way as the wealthy “make the ephah smaller and the shekel heavier” (i.e.; charge more for less) and “[sell] the sweepings of the wheat” (sell substandard goods at full price) has turned away from God. (Amos 8: 5-6) And as that society’s own iniquities drag it down, a people lost and without guidance will panic—and, perhaps, fall for the first promising line of patter that comes along.

So what can we do if we seek the word of the Lord to lead us to a more loving community? In the Religious Society of Friends, we’ve figured out that running to and fro won’t help us find God. Instead, when we aren’t doing the work of loving our neighbors, we bring ourselves to a state of expectant worship and wait for Spirit to summon us.