"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 5:21-24)
Here's an important (and likely provocative) reminder from the prophet Amos for us: God doesn't need religion.
In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, God is actively opposed to religion when it is used as a cover for crookedness, greed, and justice.
For someone like me, who as a pastor is by all accounts a professional religious person, all of this is a difficult truth to take in. It also runs counter to our conventional thinking, right? Religion--whether in the form of rituals, religious services, festival liturgies, sacrifices and offerings, big tent revivals, or national days of prayer--seems like the sort of thing God should unequivocally like. You would think that God would always be in favor of extra church services, prayer vigils, and praise song, right? Isn't all of that stuff meant for God in the first place?
Well, yes and no. We may tell ourselves that our hymns, litanies, and ceremonies are acts of worship meant to honor God... but the prophet Amos reminds us (as many of us heard this past Sunday) that God isn't interested in any of it if those things are a distraction for us to avoid the harder lifelong work of treating others rightly, doing business fairly, and putting our own interests above the needs of others. When any of those things happen, or any other form of injustice occurs, and religion is used in the attempt to buy God off with offerings or appease God with displays of devotion, God won't even listen to a note of it. God, after all, doesn't need religion--God isn't powered by our prayers, fueled by our faith, or persuaded by our public performance of piety.
Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan once put it this way: "In the Hebrew Bible, God says, 'I reject your worship because of your lack of justice.' God never says, 'I reject your justice because of your lack of worship'." In other words, God is not obligated to our accept our hymns, listen to our anthems, receive our offerings, or watch our prayer rallies and Sunday services. And if we have allowed any of those things to become a smokescreen so that we can ignore the ways we treat other people, God will actively reject all of our rigorous religiosity. Worst of all, Amos seems to say, if we tell ourselves that our displays of performed piety necessarily mean that God endorses whatever other crooked things we are doing, the prophet makes it very clear that God wants nothing to do with such devotional theatrics.
Of course, it's even harder for us to admit that this isn't just a problem of ancient Israel, but a continuing problem for followers of Jesus even millennia later. During the pre-Civil War era in the United States, plenty of preachers led their congregations in praise of God and held revivals for folks to come to Jesus while endorsing slavery and the horrendous notion that someone could own another human being and treat them like chattel. During the 1930s in Germany, plenty of pastors presided over worship services naming Jesus Lord and then giving allegiance to the Fuhrer. In the Jim Crow decades, plenty of churchgoers sang loud anthems to the Lord and then showed up at lynchings, promoted segregation, or kept out their neighbors and fellow Christians whose skin was darker than their own, all convinced that they had God on their side because they were so devout in their praise and prayer. And even in the present moment, it is terrifyingly easy to convince ourselves we have God's support because we are saying all the right "religious" words, while looking the other way as people are stepped on and taken advantage of, as neighbors go hungry, or as wars claim the lives of innocents. And as Amos insists, God won't have it. It wasn't just in ancient Bible times: Amos reminds us that even today God reserves the right to say a loud "No" to our attempts to co-opt divine support for our self-serving agendas and crooked ways.
Ultimately, the prophet reminds us, we cannot sever our worship of God from the character of God--and when we try to do that, we end up treating God like our mascot rather than our Master. In Amos' day, the conventional wisdom said, "You'll know who has God on their side because they'll be the ones putting on the best religious show," and the prophet said instead, "You'll know who is on God's side because they'll be the ones doing justice and practicing decency toward their neighbors." When we forget that, we end up thinking that God needs or wants more big faith-themed rallies, displays of religion in the public square, or national days of prayer--when God has made it very clear that God doesn't need any of those things, especially if those things come at the expense of actually treating others rightly or rationalizing our greed.
So today, here's the question: can we be honest enough with ourselves to look truthfully at where we might be letting our own agendas co-opt our religious devotion? Can we allow the voices of prophets to point out to us where we have been using performed piety to cover over our crooked ways? Will we dare to listen when Amos and his 21st-century heirs call us out for being indifferent to the needs of the most vulnerable and the abuse of power? And most of all, will we be will open to changing our ways, reorienting our hearts and actions toward God's commitment to justice, and letting God redirect our lives as a result? Or will we insist on just singing another verse of the same old song, thinking it impresses the Almighty?
Today, in other words, will we take it seriously that God doesn't need religion, but that God wants us to do justice all around?
Lord God, keep raising up the voices who will tell us the truths about ourselves we need to hear, and open our ears to hear what they say.
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