Bible Passage: Amos 6:1-7
Pastor: Joel Jenswold
Sermon Date: September 28, 2025

Bulletin – September 28, 2025

In the name of, and to the eternal glory of, Jesus,

Our text from Amos this morning is very visual.  It paints a picture.  Can you picture in your mind the scene Amos paints?  He describes people quite at ease.  They are described as sprawled out on couches made with ivory inlay on the framework.  In other words, that is a NICE piece of furniture!  The menu for dinner is lamb and stall-fed beef.  This is the food of the rich.  Most common-folk seldom had meat.  But those Amos pictures dine on it as a matter of course.  And the beef is stall-fed.  This is not from cows that have been out on the range roaming and grazing and becoming lean and muscly.  These cows were kept in a stall to fatten them up.  These cuts of meat are marbled with fat.  These are USDA prime cuts of meat!

The people sprawling on the couches have lyres in hand.  A lyre is a stringed musical instrument, like a small, hand-held harp.  They are improvising tunes (v. 5).  They are just making it up as they go.  There is wine on hand.  Not a bottle to politely pour.  Not a glass to sip.  There are bowls of it.  Bowls as big as your head!  The whole room smells like Clive Christian No. 1 Imperial Majesty parfum (cost: $215,000).  Only the finest fragrances are tolerated in this crowd!

Can you picture it?  But now let me ask, what’s missing from this picture?  What is noticeably absent from this scene?  The Lord tells us.  They do not grieve over the ruin of Joseph (v. 6).  The people have no sorrow over the sad spiritual condition!  The descendants of Abraham and Isaac and Joseph are ruined!  They have turned away from the LORD.  They have turned to other gods.  Exile in a foreign land is coming!  They should be repenting of sin, not guzzling wine!  That is what’s missing!  Repentance!

Let’s back up for a moment and examine the times in which Amos prophesied.  Amos prophesied during what is called the Assyrian Period.  It was a time when Assyria was the “bully” in the neighborhood.  Amos and the prophet Hosea were contemporaries.  They were the last prophets before the Assyrians came and carried off the 10 northern tribes, the Northern Kingdom, into exile in 722 B.C.

Economically these were booming times for both the southern kingdom of Judah with its capital in Jerusalem and the Northern Kingdom with its capital in Samaria.  Both southern and northern kingdoms had enjoyed a time of rest from fighting their neighbors.  With no wars to fund, the nations’ economies hummed.  In fact, these were times of unprecedented wealth for many.  And with this prosperity came the besetting sin of material abundance:  spiritual complacency.

At this point, parallels to our own situation seem obvious, don’t they?  We are just such a nation!  We are a nation at peace.  This is not to ignore deployment of  U.S. armed forces to hot-spots around the world.  But we have not seen a “war-time economy” like our parents and grandparents knew in World War II.  The engines of our economy are humming.  Churning out creature comforts Amos and Hosea could never have dreamed of!

2700 years have passed since Amos wrote his words, and a lot has changed.  But a lot of things are similar.  The picture is not all that different today.  We sprawl on our comfy, cushy sectionals.  Motorized ones!  You know the kind I am talking about.  The end spots are equipped with little motors that recline you to any angle you want.  Of course, we need motorized recliners because who could possibly be expected to recline a chair “the old fashioned way” by hand!  We dine on lamb and beef…and chicken, and pork, and shrimp, and lobster.  Music remains a pleasant diversion.  We stuff AirPods in our ears and listen to our play list, making up the words as we go.  Wine?  We got it.  You want red or white?  You want dry, semi-dry, or sweet?  You want German or French?  We spritz ourselves with fragrances that cost $87 a bottle.  Thus we wait for the next Amazon Prime Day.  What’s missing from the picture?

This isn’t a diatribe against comfy sectionals or wine or nice after shave.  But it is a call to realize what was missing at the time of Amos can still go missing today!  Where’s repentance?  In the midst of all of the creature comforts of life and the “easiness” of it all, we can grow spiritually dull and complacent.  Some of you have heard of the ancient “7 Deadly Sins.”  Now, to be clear, all sin is deadly!  But the ancients warned of seven particularly “bad” ones.  One on the list was “laziness.”  The word for this sin is acedia.  “Acedia” isn’t physical laziness; it’s spiritual laziness.  It’s boredom with the things of God.  It’s dozing and daydreaming in church.  It’s having a Bible that hasn’t been opened in…ever!  The early monks called acedia “the demon of noontide” because about noon was when they began to feel, “I’m bored of all this monk stuff!”

What shall we do about our own acedia?  What shall we do when we realize we have not grieved the ruin of Joseph?  We have not grieved sin?  Repentance has been missing from our lives!  What shall we do?  Repent!  Confess your acedia!  Take the “demon of noonday” that afflicts you to the Son of God!  Look to Jesus, who was never lazy about the things of God.  Of him it was said, Zeal for your house will consume me.  Jesus was filled with zeal and excitement about his Father’s house!  The things of God, the will of his Father, excited, animated, moved him!  Moved him all the way to the cross.  There he was fully “consumed.”  Consumed for our sin.  Consumed for our apathy, our laziness, our acedia.  Consumed for our salvation!

Friends, the very thing that saves us from our acedia is also the antidote for it in our lives.  Are you disgusted at yourself because you don’t love Jesus more than you do?  Disgusted that you think church is boring, disgusted that you don’t rush home every day because you can’t wait to get back to reading your Bible?  The cure is the cross.  Heavy, regular, frequent doses in Word and Sacrament!  The cross is where acedia goes to die!  The cross is where new energy is born and grows.  The cross is where we will be energized to live in repentance and faith!

Amen.