Readings: Amos 6:1a, 4–7; Psalm 146; 1 Timothy 6:6–19; Luke 16:19–31

Amos, the shepherd-prophet — perhaps an aficionado of music as was that other shepherd David? — thundered in the name of the Lord against those resting “at ease in Zion,” those who sang “idle songs to the sound of the harp” but were not “grieved over the ruin of Joseph,” chasing after riches rather than righteousness and too busy cheating the needy to bother with “the tradition upon which the nation was founded, the Book of the Covenant” (Bruce E. Willoughby, Anchor Bible Dictionary).

The people’s music can be anesthetizing as well as shocking, a complacent settlement with the assumptions of the age — “idle songs” — as much as a kaleidoscopic window onto the wisdom of the past and the uncertainties of the future. Music is never “neutral,” as technology is never “neutral,” because it is always being originated or employed or enjoyed by someone. “In Scripture, music encapsulates the vocation of human beings. … God made us to make music, and to be made by the music we make” (Peter J. Leithart, First Things).

The God of Israel, named and heard and met in Christian worship, is celebrated by the church’s music as our holy and righteous sovereign, who has poured out his life in unspeakable generosity to embrace us, and so whose character — including his standing with the poor and his lifting up of the forgotten — is to form our practice, as it was to form Israel’s, and as it came to concrete reality in the life of the Israelite Jesus. May our music signify, not our idleness, but our seizure by the gospel.