URC Daily Devotion 8th January

It’s hard to read these passages without picturing the places that carry these names as they are now. We’ve all seen Damascus broken by violence and Gaza ‘punished’ with fire. We know that with broken gates and walls of fire come death for human beings; for soldiers and civilians, adults and children. And it’s hard to hear such anger, whether it comes from God or from another human.

I could tell you that Amos plays a little trick on Judah and Israel in chapter two. He gets his readers cheering at the thought of God punishing the other nations, but then tells them that God has their own injustice in sight too. I could tell you that by the end of the book the tone is different and God is not just condemning, but also relenting and even promising restoration. But perhaps it is better if, for today, we try to stay in a place where we listen to God’s anger, really listen and allow it is to rock us and challenge us. Maybe there are days when we need a kind of righteous anger to be stirred in us; anger at the kind of exploitation, slavery and truly appalling violence that God names here, according to Amos, in these places and peoples. When we stop being so angry at these kinds of things we can sink into complacency. We may know that retributive violence is not the answer, but neither is any kind of meek tolerance and forgetting. On some days, and so let it be this day, we need to be reminded just how terrible injustice can be. But then, we need to wait, and see, what God will do, even in us, once anger can be tempered by reason.