Amos 5:18–24, Matthew 25:1–13
This week's lesson from the prophet Amos is one of the great calls to justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an everlasting stream." This is a common refrain among progressive Christians, a call to justice for sojourners and strangers and immigrants as well as all those in need.
Perhaps what we can see that is fresh in this passage is its apocalyptic context. Amos does not present the coming judgment, the renewal of the world, with the longing with which Christians often see it. Instead he says, "Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord? Why do you want the day of the Lord?" Judgment will come as "darkness" and as a surprise!
The discomfort is repeated in the parable of the bridesmaids, a parable I always find unsettling because it goes against our common sense understanding of ethics—that the bridesmaids should share, that we can care for one another, that God desires all to enter into the new kingdom of God.
I wonder if this discomfort itself with these texts can give us empathy for those forced to migrate, for those for whom the change that requires movement or the sudden change in circumstances that makes life untenable comes suddenly. The illness and bankruptcy, the eviction, the kidnapping by ICE agents. We see injustice occur in sudden, tragic, arbitrary reversals. Why can't justice feel just as sudden and uncomfortable?
If the call of these passages is to remain awake to the sudden, surprising justice of God that could fall upon us, then the command of Amos, to let justice roll down like waters, has new urgency. Judgment is upon us. So insist upon Migration With Dignity NOW. Welcome the stranger NOW. Do not wait or trust that the arc of history is moving toward a world where the Migration With Dignity principles are enacted for all people eventually, but advocate, urge, and take nonviolent action to bring about Migration With Dignity NOW. Especially when we remember that the MWD principles go beyond freedom of movement to the right to security, to have basic needs met, and to have civil and political rights, then the call for dignity NOW becomes a vision of an entirely new society, which is available within our grasp if we work together and reach for it. Here and now, in awe and fear of the coming judgment of God upon all injustice.
Hannah Bowman is a member of the Episcopal Migration Caucus who lives in Los Angeles, the founder of Christians for the Abolition of Prisons, and the author of Abolition Ecclesiology: A Spatial Theology for a Church Against Prisons (forthcoming from Fortress Press in November 2026)