Transcript
Amos: Justice Rolls Down
First Baptist, Richmond, November 9, 2025 Amos 1:1-2, 5:14-15, 21-24
Let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
I’ve just gotten back from a mission trip to Liberia, in West Africa. Four other members of the church went with me: Abby Freeman, who was born and raised in that country; Debbie Boykin, who served as our sole medical professional; Leslie Beale, who loves Africa as she loves her own soul; and Vanessa Carter, who usually serves as our church cook. I had asked Vanessa fifteen years ago where she would go if she could go anywhere in the world. She thought about it for a minute and then her eyes lit up. “Africa,” she said, softly. So, when I heard about this trip I knew she had to go. I’m going to be honest: she did not love the seven-hour flight to Brussels, the five-hour layover, and the second seven-hour flight to Monrovia, but once we got there she was in full missionary mode. The only time she seemed disappointed was when there wasn’t enough to do.
We were met at the airport by a delegation from the church that had invited us: Mount Galilee Baptist Church in Careysburg, Liberia, a suburb of Monrovia. The Reverend Jimmy Diggs introduced himself, and although we had never met in person we had talked several times on the phone, making plans for this trip. I was so glad to see him I hugged him like an old friend. He told me that in Liberia, when friends hug, they do it on both sides, and we did. But that was nothing compared to the greeting I got from Olivia Weah, who served as an intern here at First Baptist while she was a student at the seminary and who traveled
several hours to meet our plane: she squealed when she saw me, ran to me, and leaped into my arms—her feet literally came off the ground. So:
Welcome to Liberia!
We took a shortcut to Careysburg through pitch-black darkness and through the middle of the Firestone rubber tree plantation. Still, it took nearly two hours to reach our destination: a lovely place called Quelu Farms and Resort just on the outskirts of town. We had a late supper and fell into bed just before midnight, worn out from our travels.
The next day was Saturday. Our team slept late, had coffee by the pool, and then, after breakfast, visited the church where I would be preaching on Sunday and the clinic where the rest of the team would be working Monday through Wednesday. Worship the next morning was just about what you would expect: two hours and 45 minutes of joyful African celebration interrupted only by the 20 to 25 minutes that I was preaching. But they were gracious to me and afterward we all went back to the resort for a feast that lasted the rest of the afternoon.
But the next morning we were up early to help with a feeding program started by the church that provides elementary school children with a muffin and a cup of milk on their way to school. We fed 216 children that morning, all of them dressed in their school uniforms, carrying their pencil cases and composition books. Jimmy told me that some of them wouldn’t have anything else to eat all day, which made me wonder:
What if we hadn’t been there?
After that we moved on to the free clinic the church was sponsoring, and there must have been 100 people waiting in the dim recesses of the government building we were using: mothers holding babies on their laps, old men hobbling in
on crutches, children with runny noses, looking up at us with those big, beautiful eyes. And then I told them why we were there. I said, “I believe that God is real, and I believe that God is love, and I believe that God sent Jesus to show us what real love looks like. And this is what Jesus spent much of his time doing: helping and healing people who were sick. We don’t have his healing power, but we do have his healing love, and I hope by the end of the day you will feel better. We’ve come to be a blessing.”
And then the team took over with Debbie Boykin in charge and I went with Pastor Jimmy on a different kind of mission. He wanted me to see Providence Baptist Church in Monrovia, the one founded by Lott Carey, who was sent by this church to Liberia in 1821 as a missionary. Lott Carey was a brilliant, hardworking, former slave who had bought his own freedom a few years earlier. He went to Liberia with the encouragement of the American Colonization Society, an organization that had the idea of “repatriating” former slaves in Africa, even though they had never been to Africa, even though they were born in the United States. But Lott Carey went—he wanted to go—and he planted the church that is now not only the first but also the biggest Baptist church in Liberia. His name is legendary.
But it was while we were driving to that church that Jimmy began to tell me about Liberia itself. He told me that it was booming back in the sixties, on its way to becoming a first-world nation, but then, in 1980, there had been a bloody coup followed by two civil wars, the Ebola virus, and COVID-19. Now, he said, “we are a nation of haves and have-nots,” and the main problem seemed to be corruption at the highest levels of government. I heard this from others on the trip, from cab drivers and cooks. “Corruption,” they said. “It’s all because of corruption.”i When
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became president in 2006 she called corruption “the major public enemy.”
I didn’t see it first hand while I was there, but I could see its effects. Jimmy and I drove on partially paved roads that were so full of potholes you couldn’t drive more than ten miles an hour. No lines on the road, no traffic lights. Garbage piled up in heaps wherever people found the strength to push it out of the way. The road was filled with cars, trucks, bicycles, pedestrians, and the ubiquitous three-wheeled cabs known as tuk-tuks in some parts of the world but in Liberia as ke-kes. I noticed that many of them had religious slogans painted on the back and realized that Monrovian traffic alone could turn you into a person of prayer.
You can’t drink the water in Liberia. Electricity comes and goes. I couldn’t find cell service anywhere. And yet, some people in that country live in huge mansions with manicured lawns and high-speed Internet and household servants attending to their every need. That doesn’t seem right. That’s my definition of injustice, by the way: when you look at something and say, “That’s just not right!” Justice is when you try to make it right, when you try to make sure that the ordinary citizens of Liberia have enough to live on, that is, and not just the wealthy. And that brings us to the Book of Amos.
Amos was from Tekoa, just south of Bethlehem. In his own words he was “neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet.” He was a shepherd. But God called him away from his flock and sent him to Samaria, the capital city of ancient Israel. When he got there he saw a kind of corruption he had never seen before, and an almost unbelievable inequity between the rich and the poor. He writes about the wealthy “lying on beds of ivory” (6:4) while the poor are “trampled in the dust” (2:7) One of my friends in seminary used to love to quote this verse from chapter
4, addressed to the wealthy women of Israel: “Hear this word you cows of Bashan, who are on Mount Samaria, who oppress the poor, who crush the needy, who say to their husbands, ‘Bring, that we may drink!’ The Lord God has sworn by his holiness that the time is coming when they will take you away with hooks, even the last of you with fishhooks!” (Amos 4:1-2).
The situation Amos addressed then is not so different from the situation in Liberia now. My research suggests that there is “a small class of elites, mostly concentrated in Monrovia, and a large rural population struggling with poverty.” The top 20 percent of Liberians control about 60 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 20 percent control only 2.2 percent. ii It’s a nation of haves and have-nots. You might say it’s because the wealthy have worked hard for what they have, and you might be right, but one day Jimmy pulled over to let someone wash the mud off his car and I promise you, three young men came running up out of nowhere with buckets and sponges. He almost had to fight them off before giving the job to the most eager among them, who washed the car while I was sitting inside, a huge grin on his face the entire time.
It’s not that the poor aren’t willing to work, it’s that the little bit of money that trickles into Liberia tends to stay in the hands of the rich and powerful. Later that same day Jimmy took our team to a beachfront resort that might have been on the French Riviera. We sat there sipping soft drinks, looking around at wealthy Liberians who were basically lying on ivory couches, saying to their husbands, “Bring, that we may drink!” It didn’t seem right.
But if everybody had had money in ancient Israel Amos wouldn’t have had a problem: He wasn’t anti-wealth; he was anti-injustice. These people, whose ancestors had been slaves together in Egypt, were now treating each other
differently on the basis of what they did or didn’t have. The rich were oppressing the poor, crushing the needy. They were doing it because they could afford to do it. Amos came to tell them just how much it would cost them in the end, and it would cost them plenty. Israel would be conquered by a foreign power. Its citizens would be carried into exile. If there were any among them wondering how they could avoid such a fate Amos would have told them.
In fact, he did tell them.
In chapter 5 he says to the wealthy, “Seek good and not evil, that you may live, and so the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with you, just as you have said.” And in the very next verse he say, “Hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gate; it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.” “May be,” Amos says. There are no guarantees. But he hopes that his words will knock these people off their ivory couches, force them to see the injustice of the situation, and move them to seek good and not evil, to hate evil and love good.
In his commentary on this passage Mark Hamilton writes, “The desires of the heart must find new objects.”iii I love that, and it helps me to realize that for God, the desires of the heart are not money and power, but justice and righteousness. In the most-quoted verse in this book—Amos 5:24—God says, “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
Picture it for a moment. Picture God’s justice and righteousness thundering like a waterfall, flowing through the streets of Monrovia. Picture the leaders of that nation along with its wealthiest citizens using their money and power to make things right. When I do it I can almost see steamrollers flattening long ribbons of steaming asphalt as they re-pave the roads. I can see front-end loaders
scooping up piles of garbage and filling up trucks that will take them to a landfill somewhere. I can see the houses made new again, the leaky roofs replaced and the sagging walls straightened, and all of them supplied with adequate electricity, clean, running water, and reliable Wi-Fi. I can see people going to work in the morning, happy, well-fed, and whistling.
When I talk about those things I think about this country, and about how those things are true for so many of us. We have good roads, modern infrastructure, and a low unemployment rate. Our leaders through the years have wanted to make sure that life was good for every American, and not only those at the top. But over the past few decades the gap between the rich and the poor in this country has grown wider. Currently the top 10 percent of Americans control two-thirds of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 50 percent control only 2.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. We, too, have become a nation of haves and have-nots.
What can we do about it?
We can love our neighbors, especially those who are poor. We can advocate on their behalf. We can do whatever we can to help them. I was so impressed by the feeding program at Mount Galilee Baptist Church in Careysburg. They saw those kids walking to school every morning. They knew that many of them hadn’t had any breakfast and that some of them wouldn’t have lunch or supper. They baked some muffins and filled up a pitcher with milk. They offered what they had to whoever wanted to come. At first it was just a few who were willing take food from strangers, but soon it was more and more, and soon they weren’t strangers but friends—those good-hearted people from the Baptist church who greeted them with a smile and gave them something to eat.
Jimmy Diggs says they would love to feed those kids five days a week, and not just three, “But, you know,” he says with a shrug, “it costs money.” “How much money?” I asked. “Oh,” he said, “we’re probably spending a hundred dollars a week.” And I thought about those people I had seen in church on Sunday, so many of them who had almost nothing, scraping their pennies together and giving them to this feeding program so that children with empty bellies might have a little something to eat at the beginning of a school day. Those people were doing what they could to let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. It wasn’t much. Just a trickle.
But it was flowing in the right direction.
—Jim Somerville © 2025
