The time is surely coming, says the Lord GOD, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD.
A famine is normally defined as an extreme scarcity of food. When I think of someone living through a famine, I imagine desperate, all-consuming need – something that you cannot escape or stop thinking about. But in this section of Amos, God uses the word famine to refer to a scarcity of hearing the word of God. I wonder if a famine from the word would create that same desperate, all-consuming need. If we couldn’t see, hear or read God’s word, would that absence be all we think about? Even as a person of faith, I’m not sure.
I’ve had periods in my life where I didn’t regularly attend church or read scripture. I was quite content. Eventually I returned, so I guess eventually I noticed the effects of my self-imposed famine. So what of the times when I blithely walked away from the words of the Lord? Where was the all-consuming hunger?
And what about all of the wonderful people out there who don’t have faith? They don’t appear to have any hunger for God’s word, even though for some of them it’s been a decades-long famine. How does the absence of God’s word present as a famine to these people, some of whom are deeply loving and caring?
Amos is relaying that God will withhold God’s word, that when one seeks it, it’s not there. I’m not sure what to do with this. It is consistent with the experience many people of deep faith have, when they seek God, but don’t find God. Does this mean that God is really absent? I need to believe that this is not the case. God is always with us. Always. The question is whether we can sense God’s presence, or retain the faith to believe that, when we don’t sense it.
This morning, I’m thinking about the practices we have in place that can carry us through those dark times, when we experience the effects of a famine of God’s word. And even then, God is with us.
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