So what’s your favorite summer fruit?…

I don’t know what was in the basket in Amos’ vision, but for me one hallmark of summer fruit is that you’ve got to use it fast. We got some peaches this week from the folks who drive a truck up from the south, and Phil and I had to chat about how many to buy, knowing that even when they’re perfectly ripe, we can only eat them so fast. And if those peaches, or plums, or berries, sit around a little too long… you get bruises and fruit flies and puddles of goop. Summer fruit is a glorious thing while it lasts. But within days, or hours, it becomes a disgusting mess, no good to anybody. Eat it, freeze it, can it, but do something fast. 

Our text from the prophet Amos doesn’t really explain the meaning of the fruit. Old Testament scholar Tyler Mayfield says it’s based in part on wordplay: the word for “summer fruit” sounds very similar to the word for “end.” Just as ripe fruit can spoil quickly, the kingdom of Israel is approaching an end. 

Just one chapter earlier, Amos had another vision. God showed him a plumb line. Raise your hand if you know what a plumb line is?… Sometimes called a plumb bob. It’s a very ancient tool that’s still used by builders and surveyors today. You have a weight, usually lead, on the end of a string. And you let it hang. And once it stops swinging, gravity means you’ll have a straight up and down line that you can use to make sure your wall isn’t leaning. 

God tells Amos, I am setting a plumb line in the middle of my people Israel. As with the fruit, the image in the vision isn’t really explained, but we understand that something is askew, crooked, bent. The foundations are bad, or the build is shoddy. The structure cannot stand. Summer fruit and plumb line both point to the same deep truth about God’s people in Amos’ time: Something was deeply wrong –  rotten, askew – with terrible consequences in the near future. 

The book of Amos is part of the Old Testament; it’s one of the prophetic books, books that record the words of the prophets who spoke to God’s people on God’s behalf. The most famous passage of Amos comes from chapter 5: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream!” That famous line follows God’s frustration at a people who make offerings and hold festivals but don’t honor God by how they order society: “I reject your festivals; I won’t even look at your offerings of fatted animals; take away the noise of your songs!” It’s part of God’s call to stop making a show of faithfulness while wallowing in injustice. Amos, speaking for God, says, “Doom to you who turn justice into poison, and throw righteousness to the ground!… Seek good and not evil, that you may live; hate evil, love good, and establish justice at the city gate!…”

Amos was a shepherd and arborist who felt called by God to leave his home in the southern region of Tekoa to go speak God’s words to the leaders and people of Israel in the mid-eighth century before the time of Jesus. David’s united kingdom had split some time earlier, into a southern kingdom, Judah or Judea, with Jerusalem as its capital, and the northern kingdom, called Israel. Israel was enjoying a brief period of peace and prosperity… and apparently the wealthy and powerful used this moment to accumulate wealth and cheat the poor. We hear God’s accusation through Amos in today’s reading: “Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land!” God accuses the wealthy of being impatient with keeping holy times of rest, eager to get back to cheating the poor with false weights and poor-quality products, “buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals.” 

Amos declares, “The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds. Shall not the land tremble on this account, and everyone mourn who lives in it?…”

Prophets are called by God to speak God’s word in times when things are rotten or askew. God appoints a prophet to call the leaders and the people to repent, restore, repair, renew, to avoid the consequences of their current actions and their current path. Being a prophet is not an easy vocation! Right after the plumb line passage, someone tattles on Amos to the king, telling him that Amos is being a real downer and possibly committing treason. Amos is advised to run away and go prophesy in his home territory, for his words are not welcome in Israel. Other Biblical prophets are persecuted, exiled, or even killed. 

There are also beautifully comforting passages in the prophetic books, that offer assurance of God’s continued care and promise a future beyond suffering. The peaceable kingdom from Isaiah – the lion snuggling with the lamb – is one famous and glorious example. There’s a line we learn in seminary that’s often quoted in sermons: Prophets are called to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable. But, you know, it’s not uncommon for the prophets of the Bible to afflict the afflicted, too – by saying, You had this coming. You brought this on yourselves. And that brings me to something I want to explore here: the concept of judgment. 

God’s judgment, divine judgment, is an important theme in Amos and elsewhere in the prophetic literature. And it’s an idea that I suspect a lot of us are pretty ambivalent about. On the one hand, I bet some of you prayed today’s Psalm pretty hard. The idea that God is watching, that cruel and evil deeds are noted, and that eventually, there will be consequences for leaders whom we see as evil and dangerous, has an understandable appeal. But we’ve also heard God’s judgment thrown around as a weapon and a threat against people we love. 

What are we talking about when we talk about God’s judgment? 

I think there are several axes that this concept moves along; we need at least a three-dimensional model! First, there’s individual versus collective judgment. Does judgment, and the suffering that may follow, result more from our individual choices and sins, or from the way we organize our common life, the injustice and suffering that we tolerate together? And does it land on people individually, or on the community or nation as a whole? 

Second, there’s the question of judgment in this world or the next. Do our bad actions (or failures to act), whether individual or collective, bring down punishment or consequences in the short to medium term? Or does the reckoning happen after we die? There are many jokes and cartoons that hinge on someone coming face to face with St. Peter at the pearly gates to Heaven, and discovering exactly what is written about them in the Book of Life. But that’s not a particularly Biblical idea. 

Third, and importantly, when divine judgment is not in our favor, there’s the question of whether the suffering that follows is a punishment, per se – something extra sent by God, the proverbial lighting bolt – or simply the consequences of our bad actions. The summer fruit rots; the crooked wall falls. 

We hear a lot from evangelical Christianity about individual punishment in the afterlife, in the form of damnation to hell. That’s actually a long way from the dominant concept of judgment in the prophetic literature. The prophets are much more concerned with collective judgment, though they’re also very aware of the role of leaders in creating or tolerating an unjust or rotten society. 

The prophets are not at all concerned with an afterlife; that simply wasn’t a very important idea in pre-Christian Judaism. They anticipate consequences in this world – though sometimes those consequences may take a generation or two to mature. 

The second book of Kings tells us about King Hezekiah: the prophet Isaiah tells him that his kingdom will be conquered, and his people, even his own children, taken into exile – but none of this will happen during Hezekiah’s lifetime. Hezekiah literally tells himself, There will be peace and security during MY life… so who cares? I think of that so often with respect to the climate crisis. 

So the prophetic concept of divine judgment is collective or corporate, and happens in this world, this life, though the timing can be mysterious. As for punishment versus consequences: that’s interesting. In the Old Testament, texts about judgment are often retrospective, trying to make sense of why bad things happened. How did we get here? Where did we go wrong? How did we bring this down on ourselves? Why is God angry with us? 

Often, the Old Testament names terrible events as God’s punishment for the people’s wrongdoing. As something God has brought upon them to discipline and correct them, to get them to recommit to living the way God has called God’s people to live. 

But often, it’s easy to see that suffering as a natural consequence rather than a punishment per se. For example, there’s the situation Amos rails against: leaders who are much more interested in enriching themselves than in building and tending a nation that manifests God’s purposes – justice, mercy, nobody hungry or desperate or excluded, dignity and safety for everybody. When leaders abandon that work, the foundations weaken; the nation becomes rotten, askew, vulnerable to disaster, attack, collapse. Which happened to the kingdom of Israel. 

What’s our relationship with the biblical concept of judgment? Thinking about that question this week, it’s really hard not to think about the floods in Texas, and the lives lost there. 

In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, a couple of notably bad takes emerged. Some people were quick to say that if people in Texas don’t like climate disasters, they should have voted differently in the last presidential election. Those voices weren’t invoking divine judgment, but it’s buried somewhere in that “eff around and find out” perspective. On the other hand, there were the usual voices saying that it’s inappropriate to talk about what went wrong, insisting that we limit ourselves to thoughts and prayers. The Biblical prophets also encountered leaders reluctant to heed warnings or change their ways. 

No person of good conscience thinks the children who died at Camp Mystic, or anyone else who lost their lives that terrible night, deserved what happened to them.The idea of divine judgment as individual punishment is clearly not helpful here. Not just because it’s awful, but also because it shrugs off any shared accountability. If I’m still standing, I must be OK! 

In many ways this is exactly the kind of event that we see Biblical prophets interpreting through the lens of divine judgment. It’s collective rather than individual, affecting a whole region – and implicating a whole state, a whole nation. It’s this-worldly, not an afterlife situation. And it’s pretty easy to see it as the consequence of intensifying weather due to human-caused climate change, and the choices and actions of leaders from the federal down to the very local level. Many layers of failure helped turn this natural disaster into a human tragedy. To point to just one: The guy at the regional National Weather Service office whose job was to coordinate local warnings in that area took Elon Musk’s early retirement offer a few months earlier. The NWS did their job that night; the right alerts went out. But the guy with couple decades’ experience working with local officials, the guy who knew how to tell folks, This could be a biggie, send out the cavalry, was gone, because of DOGE’s purge of federal employees. 

Would his presence have made a difference? There’s no way to know. That’s just one of so many ways that night could have gone differently. It didn’t have to be this way. 

This isn’t just an intellectual exercise in whether we can map a Biblical concept onto current events. Is divine judgment a useful framework for us? Does it help us make sense of calamity? 

I think it might. First, because there were (and are) prophets. We don’t serve a God who just spots a sinner and squashes them like a bug, end of story. In the Bible, when things were going badly wrong among God’s people, when things were dangerously rotten or askew, God sent prophets to try to tell leaders and people that the path they’re on leads towards struggle and suffering. Amos says, “Seek good and not evil, that you may live; hate evil, love good, and establish justice at the city gate!” Chapter four of Amos rehearses all the bad things that have already happened to God’s people, and their refusal to learn from them, with God’s frustrated, anguished refrain: “Seek me and live!” The Bible is full of texts like that, God speaking through prophets and saints to call God’s people back to better paths. 

The prophetic books are also full of texts describing in detail exactly where leaders and people are going wrong. Buying the needy for a pair of sandals is the tip of the iceberg. Judgment goes hand in hand with a reckoning: what happened, and why? Peeling back layers of responsibility, things done and left undone. Afflicting the afflicted by naming names and calling for accountability, with the goal of understanding and amending. Whether the calamity has already happened or can yet be prevented: there are things to learn, here, and things to repair. There’s a better path. Always. 

God sent the prophets; God sends voices in our time – investigative reporters, scientists, whistleblowers, community leaders, poets, occasionally even pastors. God gives us those people, those voices, so that we can heed, and learn, and change, and live. Because God wants better for us, and from us. 

And that points towards something else really important about divine judgment: it’s nested within the much bigger truth of divine love, divine mercy. The author of the letter to the Colossians talks about Jesus as this embodiment of God’s desire to reconcile and make peace with all people and all things in heaven and earth. 

Scripture and the experience of the holy ones through the ages bear testimony to that deep desire of God’s heart – to call us out of the harmful patterns we create for ourselves and each other, to reconcile and restore, to heal, welcome and celebrate. As we hear other prophetic texts in the coming weeks, I invite you to notice the recurring theme of God’s yearning, frustrated love. 

Judgment isn’t a lightning bolt. It’s more like someone who really knows you and really loves you, sitting you down at the kitchen table with a mug of tea and saying, Hey. I’m worried about you. Some of the stuff you’re doing is not good for you. I’m afraid you’re not safe. Except the you is all of us, and the stuff is big and complex and systemic and hard to change. We live in difficult, complicated times – as did our faith ancestors. 

Judgment is a hard, heavy word. It sounds like a door slamming; but in the Biblical context, it’s more like a door opening. The Biblical concept of judgment insists on interpretability: there’s something to understand here, something to learn, even in what may seem senseless and overwhelming. It insists on agency and possibility: if we can understand and learn, we can change course towards a better future. And it insists on relationship: even in calamity and disaster, we are held and loved by a Mercy larger than the universe.