This week, I am preparing to preach from Amos 5:18-24. It is one of my favorite passages in the Old Testament to preach from, but also one of the most challenging to hear.
The reason is that it forces us to consider how we seek to live a worshipful life focused on living out God’s desires for justice and compassion for all. Worship is not something we do on Sunday mornings, where we gather to sing a few songs, hear the Scripture read and proclaimed, and go home to never think of what we did again until next Sunday. True worship leads us into the community to continue the worship through our love of God and our actions toward one another.
Amos’ most famous line comes in Amos 5:24. In the NRSV, it says, “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” God desires justice and righteousness in our actions more than God desires worship to be something we do on a Sunday morning. I prefer Eugene Petterson’s “The Message” translation of 5:24 because it impactfully says what the passage calls us to hear. It says, “Do you know what I want? I want justice – oceans of it. I want fairness – rivers of it. That’s what I want. That’s all I want.”
That translation gets me every time, especially when I think about in the context of inclusion for individuals and families with various disabilities. Fairness is all that we desire because it is what I believe God wants for the disability community. Providing accommodations and resources that allow those with disabilities to worship and live within the church is an act of expressing the fairness of God that sees everyone as a child of God and a person of immense value.
Fairness is about giving each person what they need to thrive. It is not about ensuring everyone has the same thing or assuming that what works for one will work for all. Fairness is about providing equal access and accommodations that foster inclusion into the spaces we often take for granted.
We can only be a fair and equitable community of faith when we recognize that the needs of others are valuable. When the church operates with a mindset that providing accommodations or resources to an individual or community is “giving them extra attention” or “taking away from others,” we are not expressing the fairness of God. Instead, we operate with a limitation mindset where we limit what we do or feel we can offer because we do not want to harm someone else. In this way, providing what is fair to someone else is seen as being unfair to others. When we operate like this, we fail to truly live out the fairness of God in providing access to worship.
What might be fair for one person may be seen as unfair for someone else only when we think of the self as being more important than the other. It is when our focus on ourselves, or the scarcity of resources, that we often limit what we can do for someone else because we are fearful of something being taken from us to give to them.
That is not how fairness works. Fairness is not about taking away from someone. It is about giving what someone may need to provide the access and ability to worship, connect, and serve as someone else freely enjoys.
Accommodations are about fairness. When the church sees accommodations as an act of fairness, then it will be able to have deeper conversations about true inclusion and the work needed to make all feel as though they can freely worship together.
Fairness is what God desires of all of us. Fairness is what the disability community is asking of the church. I believe fairness is what God asks of the church in its life with the disability community.
Shannon Blosser 