A series of Evensong talks on ther minor prophets: AMOS

Dear Amos, elder brother
WOW!
A travelling preacher came to Tekoa yesterday, with news from Israel, from the King’s sanctuary. He was invited to your cousin Miriam’s wedding feast, and in the evening he gave a recitation.  He has all the Psalms of David by heart, of course, and gave us the suitable sections of the Song of Songs; later on as the wine flowed he recited some of the recent prophecies. Imagine our surprise and joy when he said they were yours – “the prophet Amos”, he called you, and said that your words delighted the King. Imagine how we clamoured to hear more! So he recited them two or three times, and some of the younger boys were straining to catch your phrases and learn them by heart. They started marching around the compound, shouting your words: “I will send a fire upon the wall of Tyre, and it shall devour her strongholds.  I will kindle a fire in the wall of Rabbah, with a tempest in the day of the whirlwind.”
Brother, I remember the days when there was so much commotion and shouting in our home. You were so sure that the LORD had called you to be a prophet, and Father and our uncles were calling you a good-for-nothing dreamer, an enthusiast, not knowing your place. No shepherd is called to serve in the King’s city as a prophet of the LORD, they said: you must learn to walk humbly and fear your God.  When you left they said you were a madman, and we should think of you as already lost to us. And mother wept, hiding her face in her scarf and beating her breasts.
But now – all that is forgotten, the name of their famous son, the prophet Amos, speaker of the words of the LORD, favoured by the King of Israel, your name is on their lips with boasting and celebration.
Truly, big brother, I almost believed them when they said you were mad. But now it seems to me that you have taught us a great lesson: God honours even the humblest and meanest, if their heart is pure.  Was not King David himself a shepherd as a boy? And God will have vengeance on the foreigner, on all who fail to honour him because they are not among His chosen ones. Even a shepherd can become a prophet and preach the Word of the Lord to his people, but foreigners will be utterly ruined and destroyed. Brother, if you carry on you may become the greatest of the prophets. May the Spirit of the LORD go with you.
Your loving sister,
Anna.

Amos
What in the LORD’s name are you doing?  For pity’s sake, brother, leave off your madness. You are bringing shame on all your family and your neighbourhood.  For the course of two full years the Word of the LORD has flowed from you with power; the whole nation of Israel has clapped its hands and blessed your name as you spoke the truth, the word of judgment against the enemies of God and of the King, His anointed. But now – has an evil spirit seized you, brother, that you should turn to denouncing God’s own people?
Amos, think: remember the promises that the LORD GOD made to our people, that if we kept his Holy Covenant he would bless us and make us prosper. And truly, we do prosper. The trade routes are busy, the land is secure; here in Judah King Uzziah has renewed our spirits, and in Israel where you are King Jeroboam’s military might is feared throughout the region. Never since the time of King Solomon have the twelve tribes been so richly blessed. And the people do honour God: they make all the necessary sacrifices and keep the festivals. Their hands are pure, and they make offerings to the LORD, they keep all the required feasts with diligence and more – with extravagant gifts. Like David himself, they offer music and song to the LORD. The law is clear: God blesses the people, for they keep the covenant.
You are not the first to see that God wants more than outward observance. He wants the people to love and honour him with their practice of justice and not just with festival and sacrifices. But you go too far: you would turn God into an unreasonable tyrant, demanding a purity of behaviour that the people are not capable of. The poor are always with us; those who can achieve it naturally love luxury and leisure. Brother, we are selfish creatures. Our God is a kindly Father: he knows our weaknesses, and will forgive all so long as we honour His commandments. 
You should know that your intemperate words are being taken up by the worst kind of people. The drunkards and wastrels of the town have adopted you as their spokesman. They call the decent wives of Tekoa “cows of Bashan”, and repeat your threat that they will be dragged through the breaches of the wall with fishhooks.  They have even said this to your own mother.
Amos, come to your senses.
Anna

My dear brother, my Amos
I write this in the hope that it will find you. Since you were expelled from Israel and commanded not to prophesy there again, I have had no word of you for so many years; but recently there has been a rumour that you are returned to our homeland and have been seen in the old pastures where once you tended the family’s flocks.  It is said that you are writing down the prophecies that you made so long ago, and that some of the young men are studying them and accounting them as wisdom.
I regret the angry words I sent you so long ago. Will you forgive me? It seems to me now that all along you had a wisdom beyond our understanding. When you began by telling us what we wanted to hear, you were catching us like fish in a net.  You saw our foolish belief that God shares our pettiness, that he will treat our enemies as we would treat them, and you reflected it back to us as in a mirror.  And then you deliberately enraged us: you overturned all our beliefs, calling our piety a sham, declaring that we were the enemies God would punish, the objects of his angry curse. How long it was before I came to understand you. I think your meaning is to make us strange to ourselves; to make us see how close to idolatry we come when we think we have the truth of God and that we please him. I think you intended to make us complacent so that you could shock us out of complacency, just as a surgeon will hold a wounded patient tenderly to make him relax and trust him, before he inflicts the pain that will cure.
In all your prophecies you have proclaimed the greatest insights of our faith: that God will defeat evil, destroying forever all that is wicked and cruel, and that God desires for us to live in a society where all are valued and share in prosperity, where none are treated as worthless.  These are the great truths, the deep wisdom which you announced faithfully and fearlessly, the message of a truly great prophet. But as you delivered your message you let us hear how our folly would twist it for our own ends, turning the message of God’s righteousness into hatred of our own enemies, and into bitter accusations of one another.
It is true that God will defeat his enemies – but not in the way we imagine. It is true that our religion falls far short of God’s desire for justice – but it is man, not God, who drags the corpses of his enemies with fishhooks. You have called us to seek God beyond religion, beyond tradition, beyond our own loyalties and prejudices – to seek God himself, for himself alone and not for our own prosperity and protection. You have reminded us that God measures our love for him by our love and compassion on His children.  You put the truth of God’s righteousness and justice into human language, into words we could understand, but those words themselves were shaped by our sinful minds, and twisted the truth into bitterness and condemnation. Just as our sheep carry their lambs hidden within themselves before they come to birth, so your prophecies carry some new word hidden within themselves, which must one day come to birth. You leave us looking for that future birth, for the prophet who may speak of God’s righteousness in a new language, the language of love, Amos: love, forgiveness, compassion, mercy, pity, love. Your prophecy is not finished until one comes who will speak of love.