Christ Church Washington D.C.

I have been told that several weeks ago there was, shall we say, an unwelcomed contribution added to the Potomac River with millions of gallons of raw sewage. And this is a shame, not just because it’s gag reflex nasty, but because it’s a corruption for a time of what was intended to be a life-giving blessing, a river of refreshment flowing through the city.
As we continue on in Amos today, what happened to the Potomac is a picture of what happens to the worship and the witness of the church when there is no true repentance. What should be a life-giving source of righteous refreshment becomes putrid, becomes offensive when tainted by hypocrisy and mere religious formality with no reformation of our hearts and our deeds.
To cleanse the Potomac, as it were. To remove corruptions that have seeped into our souls this past week. Have you proudly thought yourself holier than your brother? Have you been impatient and harsh towards your children or your spouse without following up with earnest repentance? Have you relished in the downfall of a rival? Have you tweeted about an enemy but never paused to pray for them first? Of course you have. This or some other sin.
And so repentance is the rhythm where the Lord does his dredging and his cleansing work of his people so that our worship and our witness may be a potent blessing in the land. Well, before I read the text today, which is a lengthy hunk of prophetic meat, I want to remind us how the book begins. The first words of Amos in the book are,
This is the creator and the covenant king of the church, not offering his humble opinion on the state of things, not looking to have a round table conversation on the truly regrettable effects of idolatry in the land. This is the Lord roaring through a prophetic megaphone to the nation and to his people. He roars that he may rouse a complacent nation who has placed themselves in his cross
hairs. So the question ought not be, as the text is read, how do I feel about this text? Rather, it should be, what is so urgent that would cause the Lord to roar? What is so urgent that would cause the Lord to roar? Quick intro before I read the text. Amos is a shepherd prophet whom the Lord had called out of the southern kingdom to pronounce a scathing rebuke upon the northern kingdom, a kingdom who had experienced
a season of remarkable physical blessing, land expansion, but who had not received the blessing so that they could be a blessing. It was exactly the opposite. They had grown fat in their comfort, idolatrous in their appetites, and hypocritical in their religion, utterly self-deceived now about their standing before God. That is the context. With that, I will read our text for today.
We’ll begin in Amos 5, chapter 5, verse 18, and I will go all the way through 6, 14. Amos 5, beginning in verse 18.
I hate, I despise your feasts. I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and your grain offerings, I will not accept them. And the peace offerings of your fattened animals, I will not look upon them.
Take away from me this noise of your songs to the melody of your harps. I will not listen, but let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Did you bring to me sacrifices and offerings during the 40 years in the wilderness, O house of Israel?
And I, I will send you into exile beyond Damascus, says the Lord, whose name is the God of hosts. Woe to those who are at ease in Zion and to those who feel so secure on the mountain of Samaria. The notable men of the first of the nations to whom the house of Israel comes, pass over to Kalna and see. And from there, go to Hamath, the great.
Then go down to Gath of the Philistines. Are you better than these kingdoms? Or is their territory greater than your territory? Oh, you who put far away the day of disaster, but bring near the seat of violence. Woe to those who lie in beds of ivory, who stretch themselves out on their couches. They eat lambs from the flocks and calves from the midst of the stall.
Sing idle songs to the sound of the harp. And like David, they invent for themselves instruments of music, who drink wine in bowls and anoint themselves with the finest oils. But they are not grieved. They are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph. Therefore, they shall now be the first of those who go into exile. And the revelry of those who stretch themselves out shall pass away.
God has sworn by himself, declares the Lord, the God of hosts, I abhor the pride of Jacob. I hate his strongholds. I will deliver up this city and all that is in it. If ten men remain in one house, they’ll die. And when one’s relative, the one who anoints him for burial, shall take him up to bring the bones out of the house, and shall say to him who is in the innermost parts of the house, Is there still anyone with you? He will say, No.
And he shall say, Silence! We must not mention the name of the Lord now. For behold, the Lord commands, and the great house shall be struck down into fragments, and the little house into bits. Do horses run on rocks? Does one plow where there is oxen? But you have turned justice into poison, and the fruit of righteousness into wormwood.
Have we not by our own strength captured carnium for ourselves? For behold, I will raise up against you a nation, O house of Israel, declares the Lord, the God of hosts, and they shall oppress you from Labo Hamath to the brook of the Ereba. The word of the Lord. For Lord and our God, we pray that you would apply this where it needs to go. I pray that you would humble the proud,
I pray that you would comfort the humble. And the people of God said, and amen. Well, today to wrap our arms around this hefty text, rather than getting into the granular of it, which space does not allow, I want to consider it like a section of this roaring symphony. Amos is a roaring symphony. I want to consider four key movements from our text and then land with two key takeaways for us today in 2026.
In Washington, D.C. So with that, let’s dive in to this roaring symphony. Movement number one, we might call it, you desire the day that you should dread. You desire the day you should dread. This is verses 18 through 20. It begins with, woe to you who desire the day of the Lord. And the day of the Lord in scripture is a day of divine visitation.
It is a day, if you think of tombstone, of a reckoning, of judgment. And so Israel, the house of Israel, was hastening the day of the Lord. Essentially saying, it’ll be fantastic when the day of the Lord comes. Bring it on. Let judgment roll down from heaven to earth. Bring it on. We desire that day. We would like to see that day come. But here’s the disconnect.
Here’s the delusion that Israel was under. They were the ones in the center of the bullseye when judgment would come. When the hammer fell from heaven, it would land on them first. If they were in their right mind, the day of the Lord, barring repentance, would be a dread, not a desire. And so Amos says, you think that you’ve outrun a lion.
Not realizing you’ve sprinted into a bear’s den. You think you’ve reached a safe house, not realizing that there are serpents crawling behind the sheetrock. They think the day of the Lord will be a sunrise for them, not realizing it will in fact be a tsunami that will crash upon them if they will remain in their stupor. The Lord is roaring to awaken them to this, that they might repent before they come to ruin.
Second movement, verses 21 through 27, which we might call, right worship begins with repentance, not with rituals. Right worship begins with repentance, not rituals. The reason Israel had a false sense of security, believing that they were in fact the Lord’s favorites, that he was for them and against everyone else, is because they had such a pristine liturgy.
Their religious paint-by-numbers worksheet was flawless. They did the feasts on the right days. They did the sacrifices in the right orders. Their harmonies were on point. Their amens were the heartiest in the land. How could God not be pleased with them? It was all by the book. The Lord had to be happy. But the Lord says, through Amos, I despise your feasts.
Do not delight me. They disgust me. They make me gag. You thought you were lighting sweet perfume by your culture, by your worship, but it smells like a dank morgue to me. I’m not impressed. I am provoked by your songs. They are so much noise and static. Then verses 26 through 27, he reveals that even their worship, which they thought was so pristine, wasn’t actually pure.
They had pet idols. They had presumptuous sins that no longer panged their conscience that they had made peace with. And so Amos hints, yes, you’re still in the land. That has a shelf life. Exile is coming. Worse than anything you’ve known, that’s what he means by beyond Damascus. But in verse 24, we find a very important word.
A word on what repentance and reformation will look like. What’s the photonegative of a culture marked by hypocrisy and idolatry? Amos calls it justice. Rolling down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Again, draw out that pleasant Potomac metaphor. The Lord is saying,
you want to convert the river of your worship and culture from festering sludge to clean, clear, life-giving water that is a blessing to the land? Then you must repent. Remove the sewage of hypocrisy, of idolatry, of lip service worship, and prime the well with true righteousness and true justice and let that clean water flow. We’ll come back to verse 24 at the end, so we’ll set that aside for now.
Go on to movement three in this symphony. So you’re desiring the day that you should dread, right? Worship begins with repentance, not with rituals. Movement three, your leader’s physical comforts have blinded them to the nation’s spiritual calamity. Your leader’s physical comforts have blinded them to the nation’s spiritual calamity. We see this in chapter six, first six verses.
So again, this was a season of great material blessing in the northern kingdom. Not surprisingly, its leaders hoarded the best portions for themselves. And so Amos comes roaring with a great woe, especially to complacent leaders. He says in the first three verses, those who are at ease in Zion, who are secure amongst the notable men of the first of the nations.
And then he lists some nations, nations notably, who were now examples of divine judgment. Then verses four through six, he paints a picture of the opulence and the luxury that they enjoyed. They stretched out on ivory beds, ate lamb while they listened to harps, drank whole bowls of wine while getting manicures. And hear me here, this is very important.
Blessings are wrong. That is one of the ditches the church can tend towards. No, Timothy says, all things are to be enjoyed, appreciated when received with thanksgiving and gratitude. But the outrage of it all in this context is found at the end of verse six. They lived in such decadence, but they were not grieved over the ruin of Joseph.
That’s the issue. They enjoyed such decadence, but were not grieved at the spiritual calamity that had descended upon their once blessed land. And remember, Joseph is a name that God has given for the nation of Israel. They idolized their comforts while the whole nation had fallen into spiritual calamity.
And this spiritual calamity, Amos says, will now lead to physical calamity as well. This brings us to the final movement in our text today. Amos declares, your revelry will soon turn to ruin. Your revelry will soon turn to ruin. We see this in verses 7 through 14.
Therefore, pronouncement, therefore, this is what’s going to happen. Because of your calloused comfort, your pride-hardened hearts, he says the party is about to have an abrupt stop. The revelry will come to an end. And Amos envisions Israel as a great house that is about to be thoroughly struck down, blown apart, and leveled.
And there’s a haunting irony in verse 10, where previously they desired the day of the Lord, they wanted the day of the Lord. When it finally arrives, Amos says, if you even speak the name of the Lord, you will be rebuked. Don’t even speak the name of the Lord now because of what our sin has brought upon us. And again, Amos names the chief offenses of the nation,
and its leaders that they let out in. Pride, injustice, unrighteousness. And today ends with one last irony. Namely, Israel will go from boasting about how they with their own strength had subdued nations. Instead, the Lord is going to raise up another nation to oppress them and to humiliate them and then to finally send them into exile.
Puritan Matthew Henry commenting on this text said, those who are not reformed by the judgments of God will be pursued by them. Those who are not reformed by the warnings and the judgments of God will be pursued by them then. And we know historically that in the 8th century BC, the Lord used Assyria as an instrument in his hands to judge the northern kingdom of Israel and to send them into exile.
It happened in time and space. So that’s our text for today. The warning and woes for the nation that had turned her back on the Lord, who grew fat on his gifts while rejecting the giver and neglecting the most vulnerable. Now for us, what do we do with this text? How do we plug this text in as we go forward this week? There’s two key things that I want to help us understand.
That I really want to drill down on for just a moment. First, it helps us understand the state of our nation. Second, it helps us understand our call as the church. First, understanding the state of our nation. A narrative that is often set forth in our time is the idea that nations are not, cannot be moral agents.
Interestingly, those same folks will say America never had a Christian nation, but look at all the sins of her past, right? Which reveals that, yes, we actually do understand how God built the world, that nations are moral agents, and that’s because they are. And as such, nations can receive blessings for faithfulness or judgments for a lack of faithfulness.
The book of Amos makes it abundantly clear. God deals with us, yes, as individuals, but also as nations as well. Verse 8 of chapter 6, he says, I abhor the pride of Jacob. And he doesn’t mean the man Jacob. He died over a thousand years ago. He means the pride of the nation, the pride of Jacob.
He’ll judge them as a nation by raising up another nation to punish them. Even back in chapter 1, Amos does a checklist of nations, nations that have come to ruin, including pagan nations, because of their rebellion. Or recall the king of Nineveh repenting at Jonah’s warnings and then calling for realm-wide repentance as a result of his repentance. Examples could be multiplied.
All over the scriptures. Proverbs 14, 32. Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to the people. And the reason this is vital to grasp in light of the warnings from Amos today is because it helps us understand our situation as a nation generally.
We know blessings from the hand of God like the world had never seen. And at our founding, we knew it. We believed it. We believed it so much that we printed in God we trust on our currency. We believed it so much that we baked into our pledge one nation under God. It was so foundational that even those like Franklin who were by no means Orthodox or Evangelicals still acknowledged it. He said,
And yet, how far we have fallen. Our ancient text today is a very present rebuke to our land now. We have grown fat on God’s gifts while rejecting the giver.
We have perverted justice and protection to the most vulnerable, namely to the children in our land. We have subsidized the destruction of the family unit under the name of welfare, which often de-incentivizes marriage and dismisses the essential role of fatherly responsibility. We even have language like the marriage penalty when we talk about taxes. Think about that for a second.
Our government prints money that says, in God we trust, and then it seizes that money from the citizens through excessive taxation to funnel some to Planned Parenthood, and to the indoctrination of our nation’s children, and to godless propaganda and sexual perversion. Our leaders cover and refuse to prosecute unconscionable evil in the name of political expedience. We’ve taken the loveliest and most historic church buildings in our land,
and have converted them as centers of rebellion and resistance to the living God, bantering them in trans flags, revealing a visceral hostility, a visceral hostility to the creator and his image in the world, the one who made them male and female and all quite good. Like in Amos, we’ve literally put a bullseye of judgment
on the cathedrals in our land. To put it frankly, America has apostatized. We have rejected the God we claim that we trusted in, claim we trust in every time we spend a dollar, and we have replaced it with worship of idols like the nations did in Amos. The idol of self, the idol of autonomy, the idol of lust, the idol of easy comforts that have numbed us to our spiritual calamity. And as a result, in many ways, we are a nation actively
under judgment. But praise be to God, the story is still being written. And though we may have turned our back on the Lord, the Lord has not yet turned his back on us. And there are glimmers of hope, rumblings of reformation and revival, of awakening from spiritual slumber in our land. This is evidence of it, even what’s happening right now. And this is the second application of our text. Yes, we must understand the state of our nation, but secondly, we must understand what our
call is then as the church, because we are the ones that possess the answer to the woes in this land. And though we are in our nation’s capital, a place that churns with political solutions, what is most needed in DC is fundamentally not something political or not something partisan. Sure, we can celebrate that there’s been encouraging movements, some legislation that has moved the needle closer to sanity over the last year.
But we as Christians must understand DC’s fundamental problem is not an issue she can legislate herself out of. It is not an issue she can lobby her way out of. She can’t executive order her way out of it. She can’t bribe her way out of it. She cannot PR spin her way out of it because her fundamental problem is not a political problem. Our fundamental problem is a spiritual problem.
It will not come through any self-righteousness that we can gin up in ourselves. It will not come through any resolutions that we cleverly craft through ChatGPT. If righteousness will be established in our land, it will come in one way, in one way only, by turning back again to the righteous one.
To the Lord Jesus Christ in repentance and true faith. Because Christ and Christ alone is the hope of Washington, D.C. Christ and Christ alone is the hope for our land. Christ and Christ alone can dredge the Potomac of our souls and remove our sin and our shame. Only his blood can cleanse us of our religious hypocrisy, of our flagrant idolatry.
We want Christians there and we want them to do a heck of a job to the glory of Christ with integrity and courage. But what D.C. needs at the fundamental level is not a new political consultant. She needs propitiation for her sins and the imputed righteousness of another. 1 John 2, 1-2
John 3, 1 John 3, 1-2
is a well deep enough to cover every sin in our city and in our land. And Christ’s spirit is powerful enough to bring life and resurrection to anyone. If he can do it for you, if he can do it for me, he can do it for everyone. Every time you look in the mirror, you should just feel a fresh wind of hope break over you, thinking that clearly nothing is so lost that Christ can’t find. Clearly nothing is so
clean. Clearly no one is so rebellious that Christ can’t make righteous. And so the call for the church is simple. Yes, be faithful in whatever sphere of influence the Lord has gifted you. But the call for the church is simple. Let us lift high the righteous one. Let us lift high the Lord Jesus Christ. Let us do it with courage. Let us do it with faith. Faith in the one who
said, when I am lifted up, I will draw all men to myself. You don’t need to draw people to Christ. You don’t need to convert people to Christ. In fact, you cannot do either of those things. That’s his work. But you can lift high the name of Christ in your workplace, in your worship, in your family, in any part of the sphere of influence the Lord has given to you. And Jesus said, when I am lifted up, I will draw men to myself.
And when he does, something really remarkable happens. Jesus doesn’t just forgive people. He remakes them. He doesn’t just forgive people. It’s like, okay, get out of hell free card now. That’s not the gospel. That’s part of the gospel. That’s good news, not going to hell. But that’s not the entirety of the gospel. He doesn’t just forgive people. He remakes them. He changes their affections.
So that they become increasingly repulsed by what is putrid and drawn to what is righteous. And as the spirit works, converting both pagans and politicians and maturing saints, a thousand tiny streams of true Christ-wrought righteousness start to flow and gather together so that the river begins to grow and starts to spread throughout the city, spread throughout the land.
And so it may it be. May it be in this place, in this time, and may it be for the glory of Christ and for the salvation of our city and for the joy of our great-grandchildren. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Our Lord and our God, we know we don’t deserve it, but we do ask of it. We pray that your face would shine upon us. We pray that though we deserve judgment good and hard, you have been so gracious to us. We thank you for the glimmers of hopes,
pray, Lord, that we would not be enchanted by political solutions, that we would lift high the name of Christ, the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, and he would cause righteousness to flow once again like a river. And the people of God said, and amen, amen.