Three points. 1. "The day of the Lord" – the day when he comes in power – in person. The people Amos is speaking to are looking forward to it! but they shouldn't be: God is not pleased with them. For them it will not a day of light but a day of darkness, but it's not too late to change that, and now is the time to find God. The message is "Come to God before he comes to you." Imagine a bright sunny day. Someone is handing out lit candles. People are saying "No thanks!" but the night is coming, and when it does people will wish that they had taken a candle when it was on offer. So it is in our reading from c. 600 BC and today: accept God here and now, take him up on his offer, find him while he may be found. We live in the light of God's grace but the darkness is coming. So now, while it is light, take a candle for yourself so that you will have the light of God with you always. So that's the first of four things: God is coming to judge the world and we should seek him, find him and make peace with him now, while we still can. It's like He's handing out candles on a bright sunny day and people are saying no thanks. But the night is coming and people will wish that they had taken the light while it was on offer. 600 years before Christ the prophet Amos spoke about "the day of the Lord". Christians believe that that "day" was partly fulfilled when came to earth to live and die and rise. The life of Jesus was "the day of the Lord". Christians believe that at the end of time or at the end of this period, this age, Jesus is coming back Jesus will return to earth from heaven to judge the living and the dead and to make all things new. He will end this present age of disease and death and decay and usher in a new age where heaven and earth are united, and the Kingdom of God comes, the Kingdom of "righteousness, peace and joy". The Bible says that at communion – "we proclaim Jesus' death until he comes in glory". In every communion service we consider the past, the present & the future. In the past we remember Jesus' life and death, as well as those who have gone before us into heaven and our own sins. That's the past, the “looking back”. In the present we ask God to come and be with us here and now, by his Spirit and in the sacrament of bread and wine, so that we may be the body of Christ. For the future we look to the hope of heaven after our lives on earth have ended and we remind ourselves that Christ is going to come back to the earth, judge the living and the dead and make all things new. So the past, the present & the future, are all play important parts in what we believe and in how we live. As Christians we don't just look back to the life of Christ 2,000 years ago, but we also we look forward with hope to a bright future, to "the day of the Lord" that is coming. 2. God wants relationship not religion. Religion is a means to an end – imagine a family where the parents have a rule that every teatime the whole family eats together. Now they have that rule so that there is one point in the day when everyone is in the same place at the same time so that can be communication and unity and discussion etc. This gives everyone chance to catch up with everyone else, for people to talk and listen to each other, for praise and problems to be aired, and behind all this is love: the parents have this rule because they love to see their kids and because they know that it will build strong loving relationships within the family. That is one of the few rules in the house – apart from this one commitment the kids are pretty much free, within reason, to come and go as they please. Even then this rule is not written in stone – it's an ideal to be aimed for and it has to be worked at lest it slip but as long most people come to most mealtimes then it's working. BUT . . . the bolshie teenager doesn't agree. She takes advantage of the fact that there's some leeway and comes to fewer and fewer family mealtimes. So the leeway is reduced: she now has to come to at least four a week and if she is not going to be at one she must send her apologies in advance. A simple business-like courtesy, the sort of thing that adults do everyday. Except she's not an adult. She keeps the letter of the law, but resents it and pushes it to the very limit, and get this: when she is at a family mealtime she neither speaks nor listens and leaves as soon as she can. Tricky, eh? She isn't breaking the law, but she is keeping it to the bare minimum and without any good grace. A law can be imposed externally but not change the heart. So it is with God's people. God gave them religious laws, but their hearts were not in it. In our reading from Amos the people are following the letter of the law but their meetings and services and sacrifices and prayers are only done to meet the legal requirements. Remember that family mealtime? That's what God wants religious services to be like. God, our father, calls us together to be with him and with each other as a family. He wants to be with us and he wants us to want to be with him and to want to be together. But we are bolshie teenagers. We do the bare minimum and do that grudgingly. So in our reading today God says he hates and despises their religious meetings, because the people do not love him and do not love each other. Wow! God wants relationship not religion – religion is, at best, a means to an end, a way to be with God. Religion is like a car – it's job is to get us somewhere. It's nice to have a nice car but if your car doesn't work then your better off getting a bicycle. Sometimes people sit in their car with the radio on, or spend a long time cleaning their car, or are always improving it, and getting somewhere in a nice car is better than getting there in a bad one. What matters is whether we are even moving. So: Relationship and religion. You can have either without the other. God's ideal is that we have both, but too often we have religion. So: the first point is that Jesus is coming back to be the judge of all and to make all things new. Are we looking forward to it and getting ready for it? The second point is that God wants us to have a relationship with him rather than a religion about him. Are we missing out on real and regular encounters with him? 3. The social and the spiritual. The prophet Amos is bringing God's word to a very affluent, decadent society. The rich are getting richer and poor are getting poorer. Like Britain? In the 1890's or the 1980's? Or today? Maybe like our whole global economic system, where the first world lives on the back of the two-thirds world. The gospel, the good news, God's word or message to us is primarily a spiritual one, but is has a vital social dimension. In fact the social and the spiritual are inseparable and meet in the person of Jesus himself – who/what he was and is i.e. both the highest (the Son of God whom we worship) and the least & lowest (the suffering servant). In Jesus' teaching there is a very strong "social gospel" – his teachings about how we should care for the poor and share what we have with others (In fact, the topic of money and material possessions is the second largest subject that Jesus teaches on after the Kingdom of God). How we treat the poor and vulnerable is a major theme in Amos. We remember Jesus saying that the greatest commandment is to first love God with our whole selves and then to love our neighbour as ourselves. That two-fold commandment sums up all the law and prophets. So: to recap. The first thing was that Jesus is coming back – remember the candles handed out on a bright sunny day in anticipation of the coming darkness? Now is the time to receive God, now is the time of his grace and favour. The second point was that God wants us to have a relationship with him and not just a religion about him. The third of the four is that there should be a social side to our Christianity; it may be primarily a spiritual thing but Jesus' teachings on how we should treat the poor make up a large part of his overall message and are pretty plain and direct.

Amen

13 Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope. 14 We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. 15 According to the Lord's own word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left till the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. 16 For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. 18 Therefore encourage each other with these words.