Aiming for the Sweet Spot

Last week I wrote about Amos’s anger management issues. This week I want to balance the picture by considering the hopeful vision that concludes the book that bears that prophet’s name. It’s one of the few passages in the book that can be described with that word “hopeful” (if it’s not the only one), but it’s the message that he leaves us with—his final word, so to speak—and that has to be worth something.

In this final section of the book Amos looks forward to the restoration of the kingdom of David: “On that day I will raise up the booth of David that is fallen and repair its breaches and raise up its ruins and rebuild it as in the days of old” (v. 11). It’s another instance, and there are a lot of them in the Bible, of a yearning for the “good old days” when the mighty David was king, Israel was respected on the world stage, all the harvests were plentiful, all the children were above average, and all the slots were loose. Everything was perfect back in that day, and Amos plays to the longing of his readers to go back to that time.

“The time is surely coming, says the Lord,” he writes, “when the one who plows shall catch up with the one who reaps and the treader of grapes with the one who sows the seed; the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it” (v. 13). It reminds me of the old hobo song in which “the sun shines every day on the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees, the lemonade springs where the bluebird sings in the big rock candy mountain.” Amos envisions a utopia for the people of Israel, who “shall never again be plucked up out of the land that I have given them, says the Lord your God” (v. 15).

But it’s a vision built on nostalgia for a time that may not have been as rose-colored as it looks from a distance. As Billy Joel once observed, “The good old days weren’t always good, and tomorrow’s not as bad as it seems.” A lot of people in our day look back to an earlier era when America was “great”—when we dominated the world stage, people stayed married, children were obedient, and things were just a little bit simpler and kinder. The 1950s are often looked back upon as such a time, and a lot of the nostalgic longing we see today is for that idealized period.

And yes, if you were a white, middle- to upper-class, heterosexual man, things were great. But it was also a time when the world teetered on the edge of nuclear annihilation, women were silenced and constrained in many ways, gay people had to stay in the closet for fear of their livelihoods or even their lives, and Black people were coming to the end of their patience with a system of oppression and discrimination that had kept them down for centuries. It was a time of I Love Lucy and the Ku Klux Klan, of churches full-to-bursting and rampant male chauvinism. The ‘50s were a mixed bag at best, just as the 2020s are now.

Amos’s vision is faulty for a couple of reasons: it is based on an idealized picture of the past, and it is based in violence and domination. You can whitewash and sugarcoat David as much as you like, but you can’t deny that both his public and his private lives were riddled with violence. He came to prominence through an act of violence, he gained and secured his throne through political machinations that were tinged with violence, he was a brutal warrior, and he got one of his wives through rape and murder. The kingdom under David was a high-water mark in the history of Israel, but it was nonetheless a textbook example of the domination system run amok.

As Christians we need to have a vision for the future that rivals what Amos predicts in the last six verses of his book. But we need to be careful to model our future vision not on some idealized past or on the basis of domination and violence, but rather on the life and teachings and example of Jesus. Our ethics must be the ethics of the commonwealth of God, where the last are first and the greatest is the servant of all.

Likewise, as Americans we need to hold before our eyes a vision of true liberty and justice for all. I’m not all that interested in making America great again, as though our best days are either in the past or in a regurgitated version of the past. I’m interested in our forming a more perfect union—a country where everyone can find a place; where we are not afraid of diversity, equity, and inclusion, but rather we embrace those ideals; where we honor our peacemakers at least as much as our warriors; and where we are once again the envy of the world, only not for our military or economic dominance but because of our compassion and commitment to justice.

These two visions—the Christian and the American—are not identical, but they are not mutually exclusive, either. There is a sweet spot where the two intersect, and as American Christians it’s that sweet spot that we need to aim for. In my vision for our shared future, I give the last word to Amos: “[We] shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them; [we] shall plant vineyards and drink their wine, and [we] shall make gardens and eat their fruit” (v. 14).