From our Pulpit Supply preacher,

Marc Falcone:

This week’s lectionary selection from the Book of Amos seems grim. God tells Amos that “the time is surely coming” when God “will make the sun go down at noon” and turn “all your songs into lamentation,” and make that time “like the mourning for an only son.” But, commenting on the full text of Amos, the great Jewish scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel assures us that “Amos’s primary mission is not to predict, but to exhort and persuade.”

This Sunday, I will explore whether the lectionary selection from the Book of Amos helps us see David Axelrod’s recent plea that we lean into politics on the side of democracy and justice as biblical. Axelrod declared that it’s our country’s history to “question and challenge” systems that cry out for “real, even radical reform.” I will ask you to consider whether this is also a demand of faith. Along the way, I will discuss Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s reading of Luke 3:3-5, in particular Luke’s quotation of another Hebrew prophet, Isaiah: “Prepare the way of the Lord,” and Bonhoeffer’s contention that preparing the way of the Lord requires the Christian disciple to disrupt “a depth of human bondage, of human poverty, and of human ignorance that hinders the gracious coming of Christ.” Bonhoeffer contends that this command to prepare the way of the Lord includes “a commission of immeasurable responsibility” given to people of faith: “The hungry person needs bread, the homeless person needs shelter,” AND “the one deprived of rights needs justice.”

In the prophetic tradition, Amos exhorts us to prepare the way by describing the injustice in the way things are and God’s displeasure with it. David Axelrod pleads with us not to turn away in disgust from the way things are, but to prepare the way for justice.

“This is one of those fractious times in our history when the very idea of democracy, what it means and what it demands, are in question. We’re a country that has endured many periods of disruption and turbulence and doubt—a civil war, for God’s sake, the Great Depression. We’ve been through some stuff, and it’s really important to remember that. There’s no doubt that cynicism is having its day. And it’s pretty tempting to watch the small, squalid, nasty nature of our politics and want to avert your eyes and walk away. And believe me, that’s exactly what those in power who find the constraints of democracy cumbersome and inconvenient are counting on. So, I’m urging you to resist that impulse. I’m begging you to lean in. It’s absolutely right—-in fact, it’s our responsibility as citizens—to question and challenge a system that periodically cries out for renewal and real, even radical reform. That’s our history.”

Excerpted and adapted from David Axelrod’s remarks at the 2025 University of Class Day exercises, June 6, 2025, Chicago, Illinois.

Marc Falcone