New Moons and Old Systems

Reflections on the lectionary for September 18th

The harvest moon rose this past weekend. I first saw it from the seats at Red Rocks, where I was catching a show, when it peeked out from between the clouds that had covered the skies for a couple of days. I saw it again this morning (slightly diminished as it wanes) on my morning run, looking pale over the morning sun hitting the Rockies. I like to follow the phases of the moon, especially since I often go running in the pre-dawn hours, and the moonlight helps me keep my footing.

The moon informs my life in small ways, but it doesn’t control my life very much. I don’t work in any field that dovetails with astronomy or anything like that, and besides being a consumer of it, my life doesn’t have much to do with agriculture. But for most of human history, most people’s lives have been intimately connected to the phases of the moon. The moon that rises this time of year is called the harvest moon because it signals the beginning of some harvest seasons, and also provides the light by which those harvests could continue past sundown. Without the light of a harvest moon, it could be difficult to get the crops in from the field in time. Other moons are similarly named for the seasons in which they appear—the hunter’s moon, the strawberry moon, and so forth. Only recently have very many people been able to live their lives without giving much thought to the phases of the moon.

In the lectionary reading from the prophet Amos for September 18th, the moon—and the harvests, seasons, and holy days it governs—show up in surprising ways. The prophet Amos worked and wrote in the 7th century BCE, in a society dominated by a close relationship with the land. The festivals and holy days of ancient Israel still persist into today’s Judaism (and sometimes Christianity), and they were often pinned to a lunar calendar that closely aligned with agriculture. In that way, religion blended into the land, which blended into economics, which blended into seasons and traditions, and it didn’t really occur to people to abstract some part of that out from the rest, the way we might be tempted to do today. The new moon, in Amos 8:5, marks the moment of religious festivals and observances, but it also controls economies and the doing of business—including the times when the wealthy were able to squeeze the poor with business practices that were predatory, dishonest or outright wrong.

In Amos 8:4-7, the prophet is doing what prophets do: he is shining a light on political and economic practices and asking how they stand up to the standards the society—and society’s God—had set. The answer, if you’ve read very much of the prophets, won’t surprise you: society fell short of the ideal. It wasn’t that the people didn’t show proper reverence to God in religious settings, or anything like that. They were showing up for rituals and observing holy days just fine. The problem, for Amos, was that holiness and righteousness were missing from the rest of life. This basic message fits well with what a lot of people think is wrong with the world: in our own time, a lot of religious people spend their time wringing their hands about how holiness and righteousness are missing from the world. But Amos gets specific: the holiness and righteousness missing from the world have to do exactly with economic justice and social justice. The problem doesn’t have to do with what people say, it has to do with what people do.

The prophets will radicalize you, if you read them very closely. Their critiques of governments, religion, capitalism, and social relations are as salient today as they were 27 centuries ago. The prophets are forever criticizing kings, priests, and middle managers for guarding their own wealth and power at the expense of the poor. They level devastating critiques of institutions, sparing none of them for any sentimental reasons, and their only durable loyalty seems to lie God and with the folks on the underside of systems—what Amos 8:4 calls “the poor of the land.” Amos’ criticisms are not about individuals, really; they are about what broken systems allow individuals to do. Amos is angry—and Amos claims that God is angry—about how systems allow the wealthy and powerful to become more wealthy and more powerful, and exclude the poor from any meaningful opportunity. If you’ve ever felt trapped by labor laws, predatory lending, structural racism or misogyny, or other caste systems that we pretend don’t exist, the prophets have something to say to you. If you’ve ever despaired about the militarization of borders, the unequal effects of pollution, or just the ways capitalism is arrayed against you, then you probably have a friend in someone like Amos. Amos sees that the entirety of the system is set up to benefit a few people, and that the people on the underside of that system can be sold into slavery for a debt the size of the price of a pair of sandals. Some things are different since the 7th century BCE, but not too many things have changed.

Certainly between the 7th century BCE and the 1st century CE, not too much had changed. In Luke 16:1-13, the injustice of society is on full display. It’s a story of a rich man, a bunch of debtors, and a manager between them whose job it was to extract payment from the poor to give to the rich. It’s not entirely clear to me, or to most other readers of this parable, what meaning Jesus expected folks to take from it. Are we supposed to commend the manager, as his wealthy boss did? Are we supposed to identify with him, or with the debtors who even after the manager’s transgressive actions still found themselves on the underside of a difficult situation? It’s a muddy story, even by the standards of parables, which never have the kind of clear-cut outcomes that we might hope for.

But Jesus’ story of the dishonest manager relies on the same structures of stratification and inequality that defined the world Amos lived in, and that also define the world we live in. It assumes that some people are rich and others are poor, and that the latter will always have to rely on the former for credit and generosity. Some commentators on this passage assume that what the manager is doing, in 16:5-7, is knocking the interest off the loans, and asking the debtors only to repay the principal. That might be the case (there isn’t a ton of evidence one way or the other), but thinking about the loans that way just underscores that the wealthy man was relying on the poor as much as the poor were relying on him. The interest they paid funded his lifestyle. That old saying, that it takes money to make money, has been true for a long time.

Returning to the prophet, Amos is calling out the very foundations of this system, by pointing out how the system itself is manipulated by the wealthy, and how it structurally limits the possibilities for the poor. Perhaps that’s part of what Jesus was saying, too, in this parable that feels ambiguous. It’s a set of reflections that’s as much at home in our own time and place as in the past. We certainly have not solved the problem of economic inequality and injustice. If anything, it has gotten worse, and it remains entangled in other kinds of inequality. Religion, especially Christianity, has accommodated itself to this state of affairs, tolerating and even encouraging the stockpiling of wealth. Amos would not be pleased—or, rather, Amos would insist that God is not pleased. Religion can be a money-laundering front, rendering righteous the money that’s gained by immoral means.

“When will the new moon be over,” so we can take a break from public piety and get back to overcharging, extorting, and cheating people? Maybe we don’t pay much attention to the moon anymore, but the sentiment is the same. Economic justice is as hard to come by now as it was in Amos’ day and in Jesus’ day. We still sell the poor for the price of a pair of sandals. We still keep the small pieties while tolerating or even perpetrating the many systemic injustices of our world. Amos was a radical for his time and place, and he’s a radical for ours too, alongside the broader prophetic tradition, which asks us to condemn the crimes of systems while also imagining a world where no one is trapped inside them. We don’t seem to be any closer than we were 27 centuries ago.