Homily for Monday, 2 July 2018– Ferial

Monday of the 13th Week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Amos 2:6-10, 13-16; Psalm 50:15bc-17, 18-19, 20-21, 22-23; Matthew 8, 18-22

This homily was given at St. Kateri Tekakwitha Parish, St. Margaret Mary Church, Rochester, NY, USA.

How many of us are at least somewhat unsettled by the harshness of the prophet Amos in today’s first reading and of our Psalm? I do not particularly like to be reminded of my failings, even sometimes when I should be, much less criticized so intensely and at such length as Amos or the Psalmist criticize the people of Israel in the readings we hear today.

It does not seem to matter, at least to my ears, that Amos and our Psalm berate the people of Israel with a poetic style of writing. Can poetry not be just as harsh, and indeed more so, than other literary styles, since poetry is often designed to intensify a message in the way other ways of conveying a message cannot do, to make a point?

And what is the point Amos and our Psalm made to the people of Israel of their time, and to us today, with the intensity that only poetry can achieve? Amos and the Psalmist attack not only the sins of a few individuals, but the deep-seated, longstanding and, for many people of their time and society, subconscious evil of a whole nation; a whole society. For Amos and the other Old Testament prophets and often in the Psalms, the greatest social sin was not to care for the most vulnerable people of a society or a nation; the people summed up by the frequent Biblical motif of “the orphan, the widow, and the foreigner.”

Amos, like other Old Testament prophets, speaking in God’s voice, reminds his people that they were once as vulnerable and in need as the people they are ignoring or oppressing: “It was I who brought you up from the land of Egypt… to occupy the land of the Amorites.” And if the people of Israel did not treat the most vulnerable among themselves with greater justice, they would meet the same end as the Amorites whose land God had given them: Exile and destruction.

Social injustice, to be clear, though, is not a sin for its own sake. No, social injustice, especially toward the most in need and vulnerable, is so great a sin because it is a way of forgetting God. Social injustice puts us at risk of idolatry; of making gods of our wealth, security, might, and comfort in place of the one true God. I invite us to keep this in mind as we hear Amos and our Psalm today: “Remember this, you who never think of God.”

We are gathered here and now to worship God, so I do not think that our Psalm response is directed at us per se. We “think of God”; the evidence is here, among and around us. And yet I think today’s readings, in all their startling harshness, are a call to examine our individual but also social conscience: Who are the most vulnerable and in need in our society today? In what ways have I (or we) forgotten these “least” of our brothers and sisters, “the orphan, widow, and foreigner” of our time, if not oppressed them directly or indirectly through unjust social or political policies and support for those policies or laws? How well does our worship reflect our witness to God, how we “think of God,” by our acts of justice and mercy beyond the walls of this church?