Woe to You Who Desire the Day of the Lord

Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord!
    Why do you want the day of the Lord?
It is darkness, not light,
    as if someone fled from a lion
    and was met by a bear
or went into the house and rested a hand against the wall
    and was bitten by a snake.
Is not the day of the Lord darkness, not light,
    and gloom with no brightness in it?

I hate, I despise your festivals,
    and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
    I will not accept them,
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
    I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
    I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like water
    and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
(Amos 5:18-24, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

I love the specificity of Amos’s visual metaphors in the opening verses here.

As someone who grew up on action films, my mind can easily picture someone fleeing from a lion, making their way across a dangerous patch of landscape—a raging river, say, or a steep cliff—only to encounter a bear running straight at them through the trees. The movie camera in my mind knows exactly how to frame the shot of a man on the run, catching his breath in an empty house, reaching out to lean against the wall, and feeling a snake slither across his hand. I can imagine the panic I’d feel in such moments; I suspect you can, too.

Amos offers that terror as a sharp rebuke to those who express their desire (usually quite loudly) for God to come down and sort everything out once and for all. And we know some people do think like that; we see them in our own day, openly praying for the Rapture to begin, giddily anticipating the moment when they’ll be teleported to heaven, leaving the rest of us to suffer through the apocalypse. How do you think that’ll work out for you, Amos asks—or, as the Beastie Boys would frame the question several millennia later, you think that you can front when Revelation comes?

The ones who wish for the day of the Lord never seem to consider the possibility that the darkness will swallow them up as well. Early Friends like Robert Barclay, however, recognized that men and women could give an outward performance of faith in God but remain “both inwardly estranged and alienated from his holy and righteous Life, and wholly Strangers to the pure Breathings of his Spirit.” They might go through the motions of sacrifice, yet fail to follow God’s guidance.

God has no love for such empty rituals.

Perhaps you, like me, have been following news reports of the Christian prayer services that have become a recurring feature at the Pentagon since Pete Hegseth took over the management of the United States military on Donald Trump’s behalf. You might have heard about the meeting last spring when Hegseth offered a slight reworking of the “Ezekiel 25:17” passage from Quentin Tarantino’s screenplay for Pulp Fiction as the prayer of a military search and rescue operator.

Hegseth seems convinced that he’s leading American troops in fulfillment of the Lord’s will. “The providence of our almighty God is there protecting those troops, and we’re committed to this mission,” he told an interviewer at the start of the U.S.-Israeli military attack on Iran. And, let’s face it, I say he “seems” convinced, but you don’t tattoo a Jerusalem Cross, the emblem of the medieval Crusaders, over half your chest unless you’ve fully committed to the bit.

I can readily guess what the Quakers of Barclay’s generation might have said about Hegseth and others melding the interests of church and state so blatantly, even before we get into the military aspect of this particular situation. And I know that many Friends are speaking out against this war, and against the religious justification Hegseth and others invoke for it.

Personally, I remain confident that God has no love for any of this regime’s conduct. I believe that, as the prophet Daniel told Belshazzar and his court, they have spent their lives honoring the gods of silver and gold while rejecting the very God who gave them their existence—and that, eventually, they will be weighed in the balance and found wanting. But do I look forward to that day?

Or do I worry about how I might fare when the heavenly verdicts start coming in?

I take some solace in an article I read a long time ago, I don’t remember where exactly, about a number of Catholic saints throughout history who had consistently low opinions of themselves. Whoever wrote it suggested that the very fact that those saints worried about whether they measured up in God’s eyes meant they were putting in the effort, doing their best to avoid falling into sin. They cared enough to try to get it right.

You had to watch out for people who go through life convinced they can do no wrong, though. You could only count on people like that to do what felt right to them, regardless of who their actions might hurt. (Which might explain why the Christian nationalists get all worked up about the alleged dangers of empathy…)

Anyway, I don’t desire the day of the Lord any time soon. Instead, I’ll keep doing my best, along with other Friends, to lay the groundwork for the Blessed Community here and now.