Darkness May Become Day 3/5/44
Scripture: Amos 5: 8-18
Text: Amos 5: 18b; “The day of the Lord is darkness, and not light.”
Truth sometimes comes startlingly from the mouths of little children - simple in their observations and direct iin their comments. Often it comes from plain folk whose paths have not led them through the ways of sophistication, nor through formal philosophy.
One of the most ancient of the Scriptures is the book of Amos, the record of a herdsman’s teaching in a day that was disastrously careless and “comfortable.”
Amos came out of the obscurity of the fields to talk to the people of his nation who apparently needed to be “jarred.” He addressed himself to people who took it for granted that they knew all about God, and that God was on their side. This herdsman appeared 7 or 8 centuries before Christ, but he said some things that have lived to this day, and will outlive us.
Amos might have been speaking to us in the 1920s, for those days of ours resembled the days in which he lived and spoke. To the casual eye, satisfied to see what was on the surface, everything was all right - very much so. The “better people” were very comfortable and had visions of becoming absolutely comfortable in a sort of perpetual prosperity. Perhaps unconsciously, but nonetheless surely, the scripture, “All things work together for good to them that love God,” was shortened to “all things work together for good.” [period] Progress was assumed to be natural, and an upward trend in evolution a part of the inevitable way of the universe. God wasn’t needed, unless perhaps He could help out a bit, here and there with the stragglers on the ride upward.
In Amos’ time, the king, and events, had done a good job, for the time being, of making the “better people” comfortable - quite comfortable. Most of the privileged were too rich for their own good - or anyone else’s good. Many were amazingly callous. One stood no chance of justice without a “pull.” Religion was formalized, ritualized, legalized, until there wasn’t much genuine morality left in it. Under the cloak of piety, outrageous things went on unchecked and unchallenged.
But no one was disturbed. God was all lined up with them, business was booming, foreign affairs had settled down quite happily so that there was no immediate threat to their prosperity or security. There was nearly a half century of history ahead yet before Israel was to be destroyed - and who was interested in possible calamity that far away? A bother - this “borrowing of trouble.”
Then this simple farmer, a herdsman and fruit-grower, from a remote section of the country up north, began to talk - all out of step with the times. He was an agitator, a troublemaker, a stone in an otherwise comfortable sandal. You can imagine how popular he was! He said it wouldn’t do - and how he said it!
“The lion hath roared, who will not fear? ..... As the shepherd taketh out of the mouth of the lion two legs, or a piece of an ear; so shall the children of Israel be taken out that dwell in Samaria in the corner of a bed, and in Damascus on a couch.” You cattle that “oppress the poor” and “crush the needy.” And so on! Not at all smooth talk.
What a nuisance he must have been. He said it wouldn’t do! Whether they knew it or not at that moment the God of righteousness was still in the picture. And God wasn’t lending Himself to their kind of game. The “day of the Lord” was coming, and it wasn’t to be sweetness and light; but for them, darkness, plague, fire, ruin, despair and death.
Of course nobody of consequence paid any attention. Historians of the people remembered later on, vividly and painfully. But his unpopular words fell on impatient, irritated ears at the time. Everybody knew who was chosen of God and whose side God was on - until in the course of the years it was discovered too late that they didn’t know!
Doesn’t it seem obvious that something like this is always happening? Isn’t it likely that Amos might have said similar things to a comfortable world in the ‘20s - in particular to our part of the world? We are forever running into some “day of the Lord” that is difficult. What else is this gigantic calamity that is now stalking abroad? How about the sorrows and failures and disappointments that come tearing into our private lives tearing their way through us? Are they something to be dismissed with a Pollyanna smile? The prophets were anxious to know what this recurring trouble that comes to people, and a world, is about.
They said it was about God. They said most of it came from bumping into the moral order of the universe. They were sure that the darkest days of our experience were days when we were confronted with the judgment of the Almighty, and couldn’t get away from it any longer. They were not the ones to advise us to “pack up your troubles in the old kit bag and smile, smile, smile.” The whipped up smile is only temporary morale. It is no cure for real evils.
More often than not, we connect the Almighty with solace, comfort, peace, hope, love. When calamity comes, we say “where is God? I must get back to the realm of light where I can be sure.” The prophets said, “Look for God in the calamity. You’ll find him there more surely than anywhere else. If you are going to find him at all, you will find him there - in the midst of your suffering - “in the darkness,” if you please.
Now it seems that we are set here to run certain normal risks that are a part of the nature in the midst of which we grow. Illness lays hold upon us, or death seems to wrench away so heartlessly someone we love. We have to run these risks without complaining that God has it in for us whenever we feel hurt by them. As a matter of course, God has something to do with them, too.
But the prophets connected Him with the disasters which we continually bring on ourselves, by running smack into what somebody has called the “structure of reality,” and what they called God. Smashing into His fixed order of right and wrong is not fun - and that is just what we do.
Prosperity comes and we take it for granted, and believe complacently that comfort is the birthright of everyone who knows how to get it. Depression comes, and we wonder what rocks the boat without realizing that our very complacency may have had something important to do with it. We take it for granted that peace is the normal estate of mankind and then labor for explanations when peace is shattered by the torrent of war. We get busy with explanations. We say war is a “clash of ideas,” as though we were the innocent bystanders, when these detached ideas got into this dogfight, and we got drawn into the mess.
Now really, do “ideas” clash? Does an idea shove a piece of steel into a man’s neck or stomach? Does an idea drop a bomb or launch a battleship or fire a torpedo? People do these things! People clash. People say “we’re going to have oil, tin and rubber without asking anybody for them. We’re not going to take the orders, we’re going to give them.” People say, “Oh no, you’re not! You are going to go just so far and no farther. We’ve got that stuff and we like it. If you want it you’ll have to pay our price for it. You keep in your place.” People launch the attack. People rally to the counterattack. People push the bayonets, pull the triggers, aim the torpedoes, release the bombs. People clash because they are what they are - too intent on their own self interest to find a generous way of living with others. And neither combat nor defeat nor victory will change all of that. The best that a victory can bring is a chance to work human relationships out in God’s way. And God have mercy on the victor’s soul if he fails to seize that opportunity if and when it comes!
When it comes to a broken home we talk about “incompatibility” as though that were a sheet let down from the skies full of misfortune. Two who thought they were “made for each other” conclude that they mistook the signs and that the clock had better be turned back to one again - “As you were.” Perhaps one concludes that he just possesses an unfortunate disposition inherited from his uncle on his mother’s side. Perhaps he is running away from a moral judgment so fast that he (or she) is not making any explanation, but says merely, “It’s one of those things; I guess it was meant to be that way.” What is honestly meant is “I mean it to be that way. This is the way my selfish ‘I’ intends to run ‘me’.” It is people who either get along or clash.
Couldn’t we give these tough spots in life their right name and call them God’s judgments? Hasn’t God been saying to mankind through the ages and right now, “Either you both put forth the effort to get along with each other in good will, or you run into disaster; for I have set it in my moral universe forever that it is not a matter of your convenience but of My laws of right and wrong.”
History doesn’t make good sense when it is explained in terms of mysterious cycles in which tensions just mount up until an automatic explosion occurs. It makes better sense if it is seen as a matter of God’s steady judgments. It isn’t something we do as we are swept along. It is something that is done to us according to whether we have set ourselves on the right way or the wrong way.
If I should get so blindly engrossed in my own affairs that I run face foremost into a stone wall, the broken nose would be not so much something I accomplished, as something that was done to me because I was putting forth no effort to keep parallel with the wall, rather than across its fixed position. The facts that we bring into contempt do something to us. God is a fact.
We talk sometimes as if we were in a kind of hangover from brute ancestry. You hear talk of the primitive barbarism of Nazis or Japanese. We may notice that they are saying the same sort of thing about us. “They” aren’t civilized - “they” always being the other side! We might as well dismiss such childish “tis-n-taints.” It isn’t primitive at all. It’s horribly mature. Childish petulance is bad enough. Mature malevolence is worse. And we have to manage it. We have the power to do more harm in this world than Machiavelli, or Napolean or Genghis Kahn ever did. And we are doing it, on both sides, in the name of a cause.
And there is hope in it if we want to find that hope! It is not the triumph of the cock crowing after he has ripped open the other rooster’s throat. It is the hope that we may learn of God’s will in the midst of the darkness, that the darkness itself may become light.
Nobody ever gets far by asserting that God is on his side. Nor does he make progress by howling about his rights. What rights do we have? Do we have a right to think that the world is flat? Do we have a right to safety? Isn’t right rather a matter of what God has forever ordained - and our business forever to be seeking to know and do that right. When we cease talking of rights as a possession and see right as a course of action, light may bring the day in the midst of our darkness.
Here and there, if we look around, we notice that there are those who emerge from darkness to light. A sailor boy wrote this letter to the minister of a church he had visited. He talks bluntly like some sailors do, but I think you will be interested in the edge of his insight. He says:
[read it; Xm. Cent. Pul. March, ‘43, p. 53.]
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Dates and places delivered:
Wisconsin Rapids, March 5, 1944