%1

Amos was one prophet who knew how to afflict the comfortable. He seemed to have it in for those who had done all right for themselves. His theological motto could well have been: If it feels good, God doesn’t like it! Amos skips from warning to judgment to condemnation with a kind of zealous glee. Thus says the Lord, “You’re all going to Sheeeoooool!” What a downer. Amos is such a party pooper. Such a curmudgeon. If he showed up at our church, we would do an intervention. Chill out, Amos, we would say. Get yourself into therapy. Obviously you have issues.

Habakkuk has a complaint. There is violence. There is wrongdoing and trouble. Ruin and strife and contention are in his face. He cries out for help, but God doesn’t seem to be listening. He sounds the alarm, but God does not show up to make things right. As a result, the institutions of law are paralyzed and justice is intermittent. The wicked have the righteous by the short hairs, and that which passes for justice is crooked as a dog’s hind leg.

I can never read stories about Jesus and his closest conversation partners, the Pharisees, without remembering JOY with some bemusement. JOY was the junior girls’ group in the small mission church in which I grew up, and it stood for “Jesus first, Others second, Yourself last.” It is perhaps no accident that this tiny social group spawned a number of staunch feminists, but that’s another story.

One of the strengths of my Anabaptist tradition is that it takes the Bible and biblical authority seriously but also expects believers, particularly younger people, to argue and raise questions about the text. The parable of the shifty steward in Luke 16 was a delight to my friends and me in our coming-of-age years. Any adult defending a “one right answer” approach to biblical interpretation had to be prepared to take on a barrage of questions about this parable from avid teenagers.