A Prophetic word
Amos 5: 24
Rev. Peter R Green, at Enmore Park, Sunday 16 March, 2003

"LET JUSTICE roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!" Today is a time for the prophetic voice to be heard in our land.

Ours was a good land. Ours was a just land. We have fought in many wars, but never before started them. We stood for the rule of law. We struggled for unity among divided nations. Ours was a good land. It is not a perfect land. Ask our first inhabitants about that. But, even in our darkest times, there was a sense of the need to do justice, to be righteous, but not self-righteous.

And this is a suffering land. Our land has just been through a major drought, and now the rains have come. But now the river of justice is dammed up, the streams of righteousness have been drained off, and our land lies in the grip of a different drought: a spiritual drought marked by injustice and unrighteousness.

Do we still hear people saying, "Dear me, I don't like these things."? Let them be silent.
Where is the voice, crying, "This is what the LORD God says"? Who declares His judgment against a generation grown complacent, a land winking at oppression and deceit?

God sees the injustice in Iraq. The Lord knows that the people groan under the heavy hand of Saddam Hussein. What have the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs gone through? It's unimaginable! What has even Saddam's own family suffered because of his lust for power? We feel for the minorities, for the Shi'a, for the Jews, for the Mandaeans, for the Christians, daily bearing the brunt of Saddam's paranoia.
If we feel it,

if we see it,

if we hurt with them,

then God feels it,

God sees it,

God hurts with them.

And God will avenge the evil they suffer.

And God sees the injustice in Australia, in America, in Britain. The Lord knows that rulers and the rich grow fat while the poor groan under their heavy hands.
The Lord sees the evil done in our land;

he feels it;

he hurts with them,

he will avenge the evil done.

It has always been part of the Christian message that the cross proves that God is there in our times of suffering, that he experiences our evil and it causes him to suffer with his people.

Don't think that we can resist war in Iraq and yet neglect the evil in our own land, and in the world we inhabit. Don't imagine that this is the end, that this is the only battle.
What we see today is the most blatant expression so far of the evil done in our name. What we see is the latest and largest outgrowth of the poisoned bush of radical self-interest.

A nation which wages war against its own turns easily to war against others. War and circuses blind the people to their own situation and paralyse their response to it.
A nation which pours vast prizes on men who destroy profitable companies and yet can't bring itself to protect the just entitlements of its poorest labourers is a nation which can as easily push Afghan refugees into the ocean and as easily block medicines to Baghdad's children.

This threatened war is about us, it is not about Iraq. The threatened war is about the kind of nation we want to be. It is about our own concept of justice. The threatened war is about our own, God-implanted concepts of right and wrong, of righteousness and unrighteousness. Above all, it is about whether or not we will

...do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with our God.

When our leaders decide that the time has come for Australians, for the first time ever, to invade another country that has not invaded anyone else, that is about us. When our leaders decide to participate in the wholesale destruction of the conventions which have governed international relations for over half a century, that is about us. When our leaders say that we have the right to remove règimes because we don't like them, that is about us.

The Word of the Lord declares,

Babylon the Great is fallen

and

The Kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our God and of his Christ.

All power raised against God's standard of justice is comprehended in Babylon, and it must fall.

So the Word of God also comes to us,

"Come out from among them, and be separate," says the Lord.

We are right to refuse to participate in these barbaric acts.

So this is certainly a time to resist the evil that we humans, in our wickedness, plan and do.
But it is equally a time to repent, a time when we acknowledge among ourselves and before God, the almighty ruler of the universe, that we ourselves have erred, that we ourselves have sinned, that our own choices have contributed to the actions of those who raise armies and threaten destruction in our names.

There is a great and precious promise in the Second Book of Chronicles in the Torah, a promise in which Yahweh, the Lord, says,

If my people, who are called by my Name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and forgive their sin and heal their land.

Will we pledge ourselves, from this day, to change, so that we will become great in the eyes of our God, and so that he can once again bless and heal?