Sermon – The Roar You Can’t Ignore

(I preached the following sermon at Christ Lutheran Church, Harrisburg, PA on Sunday November 9, 2025. The reading was taken from Amos 1:1-2; 5:14-15, 21-24.)

If you’ve ever stood outside here on 13th Street when a car rolls by with the bass thundering so hard that you can feel it in your chest, you know what I mean when I say:
You can’t ignore that sound.
It stops you. It demands your attention. You can’t pretend it isn’t there.

Or when the fire trucks come barreling down the street, sirens wailing so loudly you have to stop talking, stop thinking, and just wait — because the noise fills everything.

That’s what the roar of God sounds like in Amos.
“The Lord roars from Zion.”

It’s the sound that stops us in our tracks.
It’s the sound that won’t let us spin or make excuses or hide behind comfort.
It’s the sound that says, “Wake up.”
Wake up to what’s really happening around you.
Wake up to what’s been done in God’s name.
Wake up to what you’ve accepted as normal.

Because the roar of God always breaks through the noise of a society that wants to stay asleep.

When Amos was called, Israel was enjoying a time of peace and prosperity — at least, that’s how the headlines would have read. The economy was booming. The rich were richer than ever. There were massive building projects. Trade was strong. There were military victories and expansion of land.  Religious festivals were full.

But it was all a lie.

Because underneath the glittering surface was rot.
The courts were corrupt.
The judges were bought.
The poor were being taxed into starvation and stripped of their land.
The wealthy lived in luxury while the powerless lost everything.
And the leaders, both political and religious, stood up and said,
“See how God has blessed us!”

But Amos saw through the spin. He knew this wasn’t peace.
It was exploitation with a halo on top.
It was prosperity for the few and poverty for the many.
It was a system that fed the wealthy by devouring the poor — and dared to call it God’s will.

That’s why Amos would feel right at home in America in 2025.
Because, like Israel, we’re living in what could be called a second Gilded Age — where wealth gleams on the surface while people suffer underneath.

SNAP benefits are being cut while families stand in food lines.
There are political fights about feeding hungry people – as if not feeding people is a legitimate or moral option.  
Medicaid cuts are on the horizon that will push tens of millions off health care.  
Somewhere between 22 and 24 million people are about to see their health care premiums skyrocket, some by as much as 400%— and many will drop insurance altogether.  

And while that happens, a ballroom full of the powerful and wealthy gathered at Mar-a-Lago to toast themselves under chandeliers, eating more in one night than some families will eat in a week.
A government shutdown continues, forcing workers to labor without pay.
And we are about to crown the world’s first trillionaire.

This is not peace. This is not prosperity. This is idolatry dressed in a tuxedo.
It’s worship of a false god.

We have built golden calves of money and power and called them success.
We sacrifice the poor at the altar of profit so that the god of wealth can be satisfied — but that god is never satisfied.
We sacrifice the health of the vulnerable so that the rich can hoard a few more billions.
We sacrifice truth at the altar of ideology.
We sacrifice compassion at the altar of convenience.
And then we dare to bless it all “in God’s name.”

But Amos says: God rejects that kind of blessing.
God’s not fooled. God’s not impressed.
It’s the antithesis of shalom — God’s vision of peace, wholeness, and enoughness for everyone.

Amos was a borderland prophet — with one foot in Judah and one foot in Israel.
One foot in God’s dream of shalom, and one foot in the gritty corruption of what actually was.
He could see both realities.
And that’s what made him dangerous.

He wasn’t a palace priest or a court prophet.
He was a shepherd, a farmer — somebody who knew what it meant to work the soil and live close to the land.
And when God’s roar came, he spoke plainly to Israel:

God isn’t fooled by your luxury.
God isn’t impressed by your worship services.
God isn’t moved by your prayers when your hands are still full of exploitation.

Because the worship of a corrupt people is a cover story, not a confession.

Amos held up a mirror to Israel — and it’s the same mirror we have to face.
We live in the richest nation in human history, and yet somehow we’re told there’s never enough.

Never enough for healthcare, but always enough for weapons.
Never enough to feed the hungry, but plenty for billion-dollar corporations.
Never enough to fix or fund our schools, but more than enough for another war.
Never enough for our neighbors, but always enough to deport families or build bigger prisons.

That’s not scarcity — that’s sin.
That’s a sickness of the soul.
And God is still roaring against it.

But here’s the good news for you, Christ Lutheran: Amos isn’t preaching at you.
He’s preaching for you.
For the poor who have been trampled.
For the sick who have been forgotten.
For the workers who have been exploited.
For the families who are hanging on by a thread.
For the neighborhood that society has left behind.

Your worship is not the empty kind Amos condemns.
Your worship is the kind God delights in — worship that feeds the hungry, heals the sick, and proclaims good news to the poor.
The clinics here at Christ Lutheran, the meals we share, the community we nurture — these are acts of resistance.
They are living prayers.
They are what true faith looks like when it walks and breathes.

Still, Amos doesn’t just call for critique.
He calls for a shift — a complete turning from what is to what will be.

“Seek good and not evil,” he says, “that you may live.”
It’s not just about feeling sorry. It’s about changing direction.

The call is to move — from greed to generosity, from comfort to courage, from despair to hope.
From “us versus them” to “us for them.”
From hoarding to healing.
From scarcity to shalom.

Now let’s talk about that word — shalom.
We translate it as “peace,” but it’s much deeper than that.
Shalom isn’t just the absence of war — it’s the presence of wholeness.

It’s when everything is in right relationship — God, people, creation.
When no one is hungry.
When everyone has enough.
When systems are fair and hearts are free.
When everyone belongs.
When the violence stops, and the neighborhood can breathe again.

If “justice” is the river, shalom is the ocean it flows into.
It’s what happens when love takes shape in public.
It’s the world as God intends it to be.

And here’s the thing — when God’s roar comes, it’s not just noise.
It’s movement.
Because the cheap peace of Israel didn’t last.
The empire fell.
The mansions crumbled.
The temples were gutted.
The wealth evaporated.
The leaders were carried away.
And in their place, God began something new.

When the dam breaks, justice rolls down like waters.
And once it starts flowing, no one can stop it.

Here in Harrisburg, we know something about that.
When the Susquehanna swells after days of rain, nothing holds it back.
It rises, it moves, it changes the landscape.
That’s what God’s justice is like — not destruction for its own sake, but renewal.
Cleansing.
New creation.
A flood of shalom.

And that roar — the roar of God — it isn’t just meant to wake up the poor.
It’s meant to wake the powerful.
To wake the rich.
To wake a nation that has fallen asleep in comfort.

The roar is God’s own voice calling them — and calling us — to repent, to turn toward love, to care for the poor, to seek the good, to join the movement of God’s justice rolling down through history.

Because this isn’t just our call to action.
It’s God’s action calling us to join in.
The river is already moving.
The roar is already sounding.
The Spirit is already stirring.

So when we feed the hungry — that’s God roaring through us.
When we comfort the sick — that’s God’s voice speaking in our care.
When we stand up for the forgotten, when we speak truth to power, when we proclaim that every person is a beloved child of God — that’s the roar of heaven echoing through the streets of Harrisburg.

So let the cars blast their bass and the fire trucks sound their sirens — let those sounds remind us of something holy.
They are the sound of something that cannot be ignored, the sound that makes us stop and listen.

That’s what God’s roar is like — unstoppable, undeniable, unignorable.
And it’s not just a roar of judgment.
It’s a roar of hope.
It’s the sound of a new world being born —
a world where justice rolls down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Thanks be to God.