At Ease in Zion

Alas for those who are at ease in Zion,
and for those who feel secure on Mount Samaria.
Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory,
and lounge on their couches,
and eat lambs from the flock,
and calves from the stall;
who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp,
and like David improvise on instruments of music;
who drink wine from bowls,
and anoint themselves with the finest oils,
but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph!
Therefore they shall now be the first to go into exile,
and the revelry of the loungers shall pass away (Amos 6:1a, 4–7).

After wrestling last week with the tensions in First Timothy about living a “quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity,” this week I’ve chosen to focus on a voice that never learned to keep quiet: the prophet Amos. If Timothy counseled strategic accommodation with earthly powers, Amos represents its antithesis—the unwelcome outsider who refused to let institutional comfort go unchallenged.

Amos wasn’t supposed to be a prophet. He was a herdsman from Tekoa, a small town in the hill country of Judah, who also tended sycamore trees. He had no credentials, no training, no business standing before the altar at Bethel to pronounce judgment on God’s people. As he told the priest Amaziah, “I was neither a prophet nor a prophet’s son” (Amos 7:14). He was simply a working man whom God pulled away from his ordinary life and sent north to the capital of Israel with an extraordinary and unwelcome message.

The scene in this week’s text, the OT reading for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost (RCL, Year C), is one of breathtaking luxury: people reclining on beds inlaid with ivory, eating the finest lamb and veal, drinking wine from bowls rather than cups, anointing themselves with the most expensive oils, improvising songs like David himself. It’s the ancient equivalent of a lifestyle magazine spread—everything beautiful, refined, and self-indulgent.

Yet amid the music and the feasting, Amos notices what’s absent. While the elite celebrate, they “are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph”—the suffering of God’s people all around them. It is a picture of private abundance alongside public ruin, of playing beautiful music while the ship sinks.

The Titanic Orchestra

What makes Amos’s condemnation so penetrating is that he isn’t attacking obviously scandalous behavior. The people aren’t bowing to idols or looting the poor. They’re doing things that elsewhere might even be praiseworthy—making music, celebrating abundance, enjoying beauty. The Hebrew verb for their musical improvisation is elsewhere used positively of God-given artistic gifts.

The disconnect is in the timing: celebration and luxury while neighbors face collapse. It’s the moral image of the orchestra on the Titanic, playing as the decks tilt.

“They are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph.” Joseph stands for the collective people of Israel—those enduring economic collapse, political oppression, social breakdown. While some drink wine from bowls, others go without. While some recline on ivory beds, others have no bed at all.

This is of a piece with Amos’s earlier word about worship without justice: “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies” (Amos 5:21). Religious celebration and social indifference cannot be comfortably joined. The question lingers: How do we enjoy blessings without becoming blind to others’ suffering?

The Mirror, Not the Telescope

A colleague once said, “If you like the prophet Amos, you don’t understand him.” If reading him leaves us feeling vindicated rather than implicated, we’ve probably missed the point.

It’s tempting to train Amos’s words on obvious culprits—the wealthy elite in their literal ivory towers, politicians who feast while constituents struggle, activist groups that betray their own principles. There’s truth in all those applications. But there’s also danger. The danger lies in using Amos as a telescope to magnify others’ sins rather than as a mirror to examine our own accommodations. That’s its own kind of selective vision.

Our Own Ivory Beds

Where are our forms of being “at ease in Zion”? The most obvious answers are the easiest to consider. Material comfort, entertainment choices, homes and habits can all become a way of measuring ourselves against others. But Amos cuts deeper than lifestyle audits.

Our ivory beds can be subtler: the comfort of moral superiority, the soft cushions of theological certainty, the security of institutional respectability. We can recline quite comfortably on our convictions about justice while remaining oblivious to the suffering in our own communities. Even our activism can become a way of anointing ourselves—feeling righteous while staying at a safe distance from the ruin we claim to oppose.

Old Testament scholar Karl Jacobsen frames the question this way: “Where do we live too much at ease, where do we miss the opportunity to meet the needs of a ruined or ruining ‘Joseph’?” Notice he doesn’t ask whether we live at ease, but where. The assumption is that we all have our own forms of comfortable obliviousness.

Conclusion

Amos doesn’t offer an escape route or a program for better living. He simply holds up a mirror and asks us to see what God sees: the disconnect between our comfort and others’ ruin, between our celebrations and their suffering.

The text ends with a stark warning:

“Therefore they shall now be the first to go into exile, and the revelry of the loungers shall pass away” (Amos 6:7).

What’s judged here is not only individual failings but the entire system that allows some to feast while others face ruin. No one gets to claim exemption based on theological correctness or institutional loyalty.

Amos leaves us with hard questions rather than easy answers—questions about how to live with prophetic awareness in a world where Joseph still faces ruin, how to enjoy legitimate blessings without falling into the obliviousness he condemns, how to look first for the logs in our own eyes before pointing to the splinters in another’s. These are questions that will not let us off the hook but might open our eyes.