Note: this Guest Card Talk is connected to our other card talk on the Book of Amos.

“The closest I ever came to having sex was right after prayer.”

For many young adults, this observation would serve as a catalyst for a more active prayer life, but for us pious young men at a Christian college, this advice from a graduating senior served as a warning. Intimacy is risky and dangerous and, if you’re not careful, you’ll end up in the wrong holy of holies.

Recent examinations of Christianity’s approach to sexuality have been rather damning with their criticism and deconstruction, from extensive exposes on various church-related sexual abuse scandals, to full-throated takedowns of “evangelical purity culture.” Even the patron saint of courtship, Joshua Harris, has kissed “kissing dating goodbye” goodbye.

But despite Christianity’s well-published and long-running anxiety about all things sex, historical records seem to indicate that few religious traditions are exempt from such tension. The sacred and the sexual may be uncomfortable bedfellows, but they sure can’t be accused of not trying. Long before Augustine began ruminating about the sinful superpowers of semen, fertility cults from Baal to Dionysus were planting their seeds in every known religion. Even texts found within the Hebrew Scriptures - such as Song of Songs - have been known to arouse more than pious hearts.

Which brings us to Amos, the lonely shepherd of Tekoa. In Amos 6:1-7, the prophet makes explicit reference to a marzeah, a cultic ritual attested to widely throughout the Fertile Crescent and beyond. While the origins of the term remain a mystery, widespread attestation across cultures paints a rather consistent picture of marzeahs as cultic festivals that centered on feasting and drinking, sexual lasciviousness, and were often connected to funerary rites. Sort of like an ancient Mardi Gras.

The word itself only appears twice in the Hebrew Scriptures—also in Jeremiah 16:5, with possible allusions in Ezekiel 8:7-13 and Isaiah 28:1-6—but also seems to influence Amos’ earlier criticisms of the northern kingdom of Israel in Amos 2:6-8:

Thus says the Lord:

“For three transgressions of Israel,
and, for four, I will not revoke the punishment,
because they sell the righteous for silver,
and the needy for a pair of sandals -
those who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth
and turn aside the way of the afflicted;
a man and his father go in to the same girl,
so that my holy name is profaned;
they lay themselves down beside every altar
on garments taken in pledge,
and in the house of their God they drink
the wine of those who have been fined.”

There is certainly a temptation here to clutch our pearls at the mere mention of the mingling of altar pieces and body parts. At first blush, Amos’ denunciations wouldn’t seem out of place at a True Love Waits rally. In fact, this passage may even be listed as a Scripture reference on a youth lock-in “covenant agreement.”

Curiously, however, Amos does not seem to condemn such celebrations on their own merits. Rather, Amos’ concerns are primarily with the desecrating division that has devolved religious practice into social exploitation. The ritual has not only superseded the ethical, but been financed by the unethical. In short, the perpetrators have developed a “celebration of discipline” that divorces love of God from love of neighbor (well, some neighbors), a concern most famously expressed in his diatribe against such an unholy division in Amos 5.

Unlike standard prophetic polemics against pagan religious practice, Amos turns his tirade toward Jewish observances specifically endorsed by the Law - festivals (specifically, the hagim prescribed in Exodus 23:15-16), burnt offerings, grain offerings, and fellowship offerings (as prescribed in Leviticus 1-3), and even music. Of particular note is the way the relationship of these ritual practices and acts of justice are structured in relationship to each other. At the foot of Sinai, Moses follows up God’s Greatest Hits (the “10 Commandments”) with a variety of B-sides and album filler material about compensation for knocked-out teeth and singed thorn bushes. Following an extended rumination on property rights, Moses then delivers a robust set of commandments that some Bibles helpfully label as “Social Responsibility” or “Laws of Justice and Mercy,” focusing on the treatment of widows, orphans and aliens, including words that should sound awfully familiar to anyone paying attention to Amos:

“If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not be like a moneylender; charge him no interest. If you take your neighbor’s cloak as a pledge, return it to him by sunset, because his cloak is the only covering he has for his body. What else will he sleep in? When he cries out to me, I will hear, for I am compassionate.” (Exodus 22:25-27)

Then, and only then, does Moses finally get around to some brief directives on ritual celebrations. For Moses - followed closely here by Amos—the priority is clear: Justice First. Ritual Second. No Justice, No Peace (Offering). In contrast, Amos only finds people who have become experts in ritual and flunked the final exam of righteousness.

Taken collectively, Amos’ striking denunciations of Israelite practices in chapters 2-6 point directly toward a wealthy class whose conspicuous religious consumption was made possible only through exploitation (which, not surprisingly, appears to have been an attribute of marzeahs in other cultures, as well). In addition to the detailed criticisms listed in 2:6-8 and 6:1-7, notice also the following accusations leveled by Amos:

“They do not know how to do right . . . who hoard plunder and loot in their fortresses.” (3:10)

“You women who oppress the poor and crush the needy / and say to your husbands, ‘Bring us some drinks!’” (4:1)

“You trample on the poor / and force him to give you grain.” (5:11)

As one notable prophet would later observe, the house of prayer had been turned into a den of robbers.

The Kentucky poet Wendell Berry has consistently lamented the way Christianity has divorced spiritual and material realities, reflecting a lively Gnosticism-by-another-name habitating inside America’s pulpits and pews. Most memorable perhaps is the following sentiment expressed in “How to be a Poet”:

“There are no unsacred places;
There are only sacred places
And desecrated places.”

Just a wee bit south of Berry, another Appalachian poet was learning this truth in her own characteristically eccentric way. In the tiny Tennessee community of Caton’s Chapel, a young Dolly Parton found “God, music, and sex” coexisting in a small abandoned country church that offered both spiritual and sexual resonance to the developing saint. Between the walls adorned with hand drawn testimonies of youthful sexual escapades and the discarded keys and strings that gave birth to sacred melodies, Parton recalls, she “broke through some sort of spirit wall and found God,” even as she simultaneously experienced an epiphany of sexuality and self-identity. Perhaps taking Berry a step further, Parton offers her witness that even seemingly desecrated places can be sites of sacral revelation.

And none of this would surprise Amos.

Amos does not fear that the sacred has been tainted by the sexual. On the contrary, recognizing the sacredness of both the dwelling of God’s name and the abode of God’s image, what raises the prophet’s ire is that both have been desecrated by the diminishment of the flesh. In the degrading of bodies through exploitation, economic indifference, and greed, Amos writes, what should be a holy celebration has been transformed into a parade of unrighteousness.

To blend the vision of Berry, Parton, and Amos, we might say:

There are no desecrated places;
Only sacred people,
And desecrated people.

Dave McNeely is the Coordinator for the Faith & Justice Scholars Program and an Adjunct Religion Professor at Carson-Newman University in Jefferson City. He is a licensed Baptist minister who spent a decade in youth ministry, and has an undergraduate degree in Religion (Greek minor) from Carson-Newman, an M.Div. with specialization in Christian Education from Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond, and additional study in Justice and Peace Studies at Iliff School of Theology. He was a contributor to A Game for Good Christian’s anthology This Present Former Glory and recently co-authored his first book, Chad and Dave Read the Bible, Vol. 1: The Christmas Story.