Amos 8:4-7 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

Hear this, you that trample on the needy,

and bring to ruin the poor of the land,

saying, “When will the new moon be over

so that we may sell grain;

and the sabbath,

so that we may offer wheat for sale?

We will make the ephah small and the shekel great,

and practice deceit with false balances,

buying the poor for silver

and the needy for a pair of sandals,

and selling the sweepings of the wheat.”

The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob:

Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.

So, a couple of Sundays ago, I presented to you a brief synopsis of my simplistic understanding of the evolution in humanity’s thinking about God.

First, I said that I believe that humanity, from the beginning, has an intuition for the Creator- a God space built into their beings.

In the beginning, people used that intuition to explain weird stuff by saying God must be in the water, the fire, the earthquake and anything else that was mysterious.

Soon, God not only caused the weird stuff, God must be the weird stuff, so there is a water God, a fire God, a sun God.

As the evolution of God continued, human beings began to use the idea of God to justify human behaviors and God became a warrior God, a God of vengeance and retribution.

The next step in the evolution of our thinking about God turned God from warrior to protector and the one who keeps order in society. God becomes the rule maker.

God orders the world into a workable system with punishments and judgements for those who break the rules.

And finally, my argument goes, the apex in the evolution in our thinking is that God is not only concerned about the rules, but about the creation as well. That concern is based in the concept of love. God loves that which God has created.

And to go one step further, God not only loves but is, by God’s very nature, love. It is The essence of God.

And for followers of Jesus, there is an understanding that God is love and that we see in Jesus what “God is love” is like.

The foundational truths of my life are that God is love and Jesus embodies and models that love.

Onto a different characteristic of God. The Bible also talks about judgement, a lot.

Granted, different judgement episodes in the scripture reflect different eras in the evolutionary process. But the idea of judgement runs throughout the scripture, from the garden to the flood to the plagues to the creators of the golden calf to the poor guys who tried to keep the ark from falling to the Baal prophets on mt Carmel to Jesus’ parable about goats and sheep to the great judgement scenes in Revelation.

And judgement is usually perceived as a negative where we get ours for all the lousy stuff we have done.

And many of us were raised in religious settings where we were taught to be afraid of God the Judge. We believed if we did something wrong, God was waiting to Judge us as bad. Some of you are still afraid of God.

But, God is love and loves casts out fear.

So, what about Judgement in a theology where God is love.

The Bible, and other religions’ scripture as well, portray God as the final judge, the one one who passes judgement on human beings.

We tend think of judgement in these contravening terms, so the idea that God is love and the idea that God is judge can create major problems for a person who thinks like I think.

Here’s my take.

God is love. It is God’s nature, God’s character, God’s persona, God’s essence.

So if God is love and God is Judge as well, that Judgement has to be based in love- unconditional, gracious, merciful love. It just can’t be any other way.

So judgement doesn’t serve to exact punishment, or retribution or even vengeance.

Rather, Judgement is intended to make things right.

“When you judge others, you do not define them, you define yourself.” Wrote the author and speaker, Earl Nightingale.

What might we learn about God by the way God judges?

What do we learn as we look at a couple of judgement scenes from the scripture? This is just a super small sampling, and there is lots of room to argue, but I think it’s telling.

Amos 8 is a passage of judgement

First the sin . . .

Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land.

We will practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals.”

What’s being judged?

Those who trample on the poor

Those who are corrupt, using their power to take advantage over the poor and needy.

“Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.”

And then the threat of judgement. . .

“On that day, says the Lord God, I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth in broad daylight. I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth on all loins, and baldness on every head.”

The point of the passage is clear. It is a call for justice for the poor, the

underdogs, and the absolute reality that God stands with the dispossessed.

Many of the judgment passages in the scripture, rather than being about the literal passing of a sentence, are about admonishing those who are mistreating the “least of these” to get their act together and start acting with integrity and justice.

Now let’s turn to Jesus’ great Judgement parable, remembering that Jesus embodies the way God is.

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory.

All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left.

Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’

Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison and helped you?’

And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.’

Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’

Then they also will answer, ‘when?’

Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Please understand that this is a parable and not an actual depiction of judgement, and please notice Jesus’ point- that he is in the struggling and the hurting and the mistreated, and when we ignore them, we are ignoring Jesus. The point of the parable is to remind us, encourage us, admonish us to care for the struggling.

Judgement is about coming to a new understanding of the way life is supposed to work.

When I hear modern evangelical leaders make ridiculous claims that this tragedy or that tragedy is God‘s judgment because of gay people, or feminism, or secularism, or allowing people to practice the religion of their choice, or whatever, I think to myself, if this tragedy is really an act of God’s judgement, scripture would indicate that it would be because of our mistreatment the poor and the downtrodden and our mistreatment of the very people that the evangelical leaders are blaming for judgement.

Frankly, I think an earthquake is an earthquake, I think a hurricane is a hurricane, more influenced by climate change than God’s judgement. A terrorist attack is a terrorist attack and behind that attack are any number of variables, but God’s judgment is not one of them. I think a mass shooting is a mass shooting because the wrong people have the wrong kind of weapons that can kill large numbers of people.

To blame tragedies, natural or human, as judgements from God is dishonest because it perverts the very nature of God- God is love.

And any judging God does comes from the depths of God very character - love, unconditional, gracious, merciful.

Amen.