When The Fruit Is Spoiled
Sermons on the First Readings
When we speak of Amos today, we know that he was one of Israel's great prophets. Yet at the time when Amos spoke, he took pains to remind us that he was just an ordinary migrant worker. What he spoke were the words God had shown him.
God spoke to him through a series of visions that came to Amos when he was in worship. As he participated in these common rituals of worship, which he and others had seen hundreds of times, this time the ritual had a clarity that it had never had before. It is the fourth vision that I want to focus on.
