The prophet Amos was looking at a basket filled with summer fruit. He had seen such a sight hundreds of times before. Yet in this glance at this particular basket of summer fruit Amos had the strange feeling that he was seeing something more than just a basket of fruit. He felt within the prompting of One who asked: “Amos, what seest thou?”

Have not you and I shared at some time this experience of the prophet? Have you not found yourself looking fixedly at something and suddenly realize that you were seeing more than the material object — feeling that you were looking into a 4^th dimension of meaning — that you were glimpsing some eternal reality behind that material thing that the object or episode or circumstance had symbolic significance for you?

Jeremiah had this experience as he watched the potter turning clay on the wheel and shaping it into an earthenware vessel. “Why this is just what God does with men and nations,” thought Jeremiah. “He turns them on the wheel of circumstance and molds them to fulfill His purposes.” Jesus had this experience when He saw a woman feverishly turning her house upside down looking for a piece of money she had lost.  Beyond or through the vision of this homey episode He saw the eternal seeking, searching love of His Father for every person as infinitely precious in His sight. (Illus. E. S. Jones, Sailor, wife’s face — “understood for first time meaning of the cross.”)

There is a deeper spiritual significance in every view our eyes may fasten on. Each experience of every day can be a window opening on heaven. Every person we meet may be a guide on our way to the Father’s house — if we but have eyes to see. The prophets are not the only ones to whom the seer’s vision is given. All life is symbolic of eternity as the writer of the Fourth Gospel is at pains to show us.  We live in a two-storied universe where all things on the ground level may serve as previews or blueprints of what is above.

But to come back to Amos and his basket of summer fruit -what was that something more which he glimpsed? What was the interpreting voice of God saying in the conscience of the prophet?

“Fruit was the last sign of harvest in Palestine. When the fruit was gathered the harvest was over.  What then is the meaning of this vision of a basket of summer fruit? The meaning is that Amos saw the end.  This is the crop. A basket of summer fruit was no poetry in the estimation of Amos. It was not an ornamental selection of fruits, looking upon which men would say, ‘How lovely, how luscious, how delightful, how appetizing!’ Summer fruit had about it a mournful suggestion in Palestinian lands and times. ‘What seest thou?’ Why, the end, the gathered harvest, the upmaking of all things, the year in its results; good or bad, there it is. Can this fruit be changed now? No. Will not the sun work some miracle of ripening upon it? Never more. There is an end of ministry, of service, of stewardship of life.”(Joseph Parker — People’s Bible on text)

The end comes to all things and sometimes it is given to men to glimpse its approach. That was the experience of Amos as he glimpsed the basket of summer fruit.

The national affairs of Israel in Amos’ day had reached a high water mark of development.  Jeroboam II was on the throne. The boundaries of the Northern Kingdom had been stretched farther than at any time since the days of David and Solomon. Trade flourished. The land was prosperous. The people thought these good times would go on forever. But Amos saw in the basket of summer fruit the end of the harvest season, the Indian Summer of Israel’s prosperity and proclaimed that as he looked on the basket of summer fruit God said to him: “The end is come upon my people Israel.”

And sure enough, twenty years after Amos prophesied in Israel her doom was sealed. “The Northern Kingdom was literally wiped off the face of the map and its inhabitants were dragged away into exile.” (Dietrich — The Witnessing Community —  p. 90)

“What seest thou? A basket of summer fruit. The end is come upon my people Israel.”

When war was declared between Germany and Great Britain in 1914, Lord Grey and a number of British Government officials worked feverishly through the night. Then as the new day dawned, Lord Grey walked to his office window and looked out over the sleeping city. Along the deserted sidewalks below, he could see a solitary lamp lighter at his work, extinguishing one street light after another. With that commonplace vision before him Lord Grey was moved to say what he saw actually and symbolically: “The lights are going out tonight all over Europe and we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” He saw the coming end.

When the Iraqi revolution flared up so suddenly to interrupt our pleasant summer pastimes, I was in New York. Some of us who were attending a Ministers Conference there hurried down to the United Nations Building to listen to the debate. The pros and cons for thrusting U.S. Marines into Lebanon were all so plausible and so confusing. Coming away from that experience I heard one man say: “However this imbroglio in the Middle East turns out, I have the feeling that from now on everything in the world as we have known it is going to be vastly changed.”

On last Wednesday morning I listened and watched the TV casts of President Eisenhower’s address to the United Nations Security Council. The President’s six proposals of our government for easing the crisis and stabilizing the boiling Middle East, all sounded very reasonable and level-headed to me, but David Brinkley in his commentary said that nothing was likely to come of the speech, that the prevailing opinion in Washington was that the President’s address was only an attempt to put the best possible face on a very bleak and deplorable situation.

Has the end come in a faltering American foreign policy, as many are now saying? Have we really lost ground and slipped from the position of strength we held at the close of World War II to a position of supine weakness so that for all who have eyes to see every crisis is just another basket of summer fruit foreshadowing the end?

But you see, it was not just the end of an era of Palestinian prosperity that Amos saw in the basket of summer fruit, not just the inevitable cycle of the years which brings all things to their fruition, not just the natural growth of a Kingdom from youth to senility. Amos saw the Lord God, the Potentate of time, coming in judgment upon His people Israel. “The end is come upon my people Israel,” he hears the voice of the Lord proclaim. “I will not pass by them any more. God is about to destroy His people for their sins.”

For the Hebrew mind the concept of time is always tied up with God’s acts. The end of a period is not simply the cessation of opportunity to do something, or the fulfillment of all natural forces, or the impossibility of change in the past’s solidity. The end meant Judgment — God’s judgment — an evaluation according to the standards of His revealed character and a meting out of punishments and rewards to all who have shared responsibility for making that epoch’s harvest what it turned out to be.

Amos saw Israel as a basket of summer fruit “ripe for judgment” “because of her sins,” because morality and ethics have not been a part of the people’s religion. The horrible cloud of approaching catastrophe that chilled the soul of Amos with a foreboding doom was not that the people of Israel were irreligious or that they were atheists, or that they would not go to church; but that they worshiped a god who was a moral namby pamby. They were religious enough. Their sacred celebrations were colorful and spectacular. Attendance at services was unprecedentedly high. Everybody but Amos thought they were in the midst of a religious revival.

But the religion they practiced was not moral. It did not gear into life. Church going did not result in honesty, truth telling, justice, charity mercy and righteousness in home and business and statecraft. “Why you sell the poor for a pair of shoes,” thundered the prophet. “You corrupt justice in the courts. You take prices and deal in false measures in your merchandise.”

The root of all the evil in Israel’s life for Amos lay in the fact that she had broken her covenant with God. This covenant implied righteousness in human relationships. Therefore, where there is no justice, God’s name is taken in vain.” (Dietrich — Ibid.)

People are important to God. And those who do not treat them as His children with respect and dignity and love as the children of God are ripe for His righteous judgment. I heard Dr. Sam Burney Hay, President of Stillman College, our church’s institution of higher learning for Negroes, speak in praise of a teacher’s work there by saying: “Why she makes every student feel that he or she is a child of God.”

The Archbishop of Canterbury was speaking not only with scientific realism but in the spirit of the prophetic succession in which he stands when recently he stirred up such a controversy by saying that it might well be within the Providence of God that the human race might destroy itself by nuclear weapons.

It does not take a precocity of spiritual insight nor a deep knowledge of the Biblical portrayal of the moral character of the God and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to see all sorts of visions of baskets of summer fruit on the American scene today in this August of 1958: the horrible threat of nuclear warfare, the current panic over reports of a study for national surrender plans, the apparent perils of our unstable, inflated economy, et cetera, et cetera. They are here, all about us, signs of an approaching end of an era, of God coming in judgment upon His people for their sins.

Now you may say: “This is a very gloomy message. We need encouragement, spiritual uplift. There is little hope and comfort to be gleaned from such a scripture as Amos’ vision of the basket of summer fruit. Why bring us such a serving today?”

I insist that there is no more hopeful or comforting a doctrine in all of Holy Scripture for us in times like ours, than this word from Amos. Stern though it is, it proclaims the sovereignty of God. Suppose it were possible for men to perpetuate unto all eternity a social order based on greed, injustice, oppression, inhumanity? Suppose it were possible to propel a personality through a whole life time on emotion and personal likes and dislikes with never a reference to or squaring with those moral qualities of honesty, justice and truth? Would it not prove that the God of Amos, Hosea, Jeremiah and Jesus was a pure illusion?

Oh, we may discern things going to pieces in the broad swamps of history, in a church, in a family, in a personality, but they are not ever chaotically or meaninglessly going to pieces. There is always a reason for a collapse. There is a judgment of God in every debacle.

All man building and man making in business, government and church must be brought to terms with the moral character of God as revealed in His scriptures. These grand and awful principles of the righteousness, honesty and integrity of God will not unbend or bow themselves out of human experience. There is a future for the God-fearing, the God-serving, the God-trusting people. But those who refuse to translate, into the fast moving and changing script of contemporary history, the unvarying principles of the eternal justice, love and mercy — these are doomed to be thrown on the refuse heap of the universe.

Therefore, stern, ominous, and foreboding as any vision of a basket of summer fruit may be which we may see in our time, it is not without its signs of hope and promise. It calls us to repentance, to return to our covenant relationship of obedience and faith in our God, the Lord Omnipotent, who reigneth forever and forever in this His universe. When and if we do, we can rest confidently secure throughout the ages.