This text is used for the Lectionary Year C on July 17, 2016.

The summer before my freshman year in college I worked at an agriculture experiment station run by the University of Tennessee.  They hired me as a laborer; they had recently planted a peach orchard and needed extra hands to tend to it.  I remember long hot days filled with humidity, bugs and peaches.  We culled peaches often, fearing that the weight of all the fruit would harm the trees. We picked ripe peaches and sold them to the public.  And we had to dispose of overripe fruit.  That smell remains in my memory.  Whereas our culled peaches had the subsistence of a baseball, these spoiled peaches were almost impossible to pick intact.  They were soft and slimy, oozy and… you get the picture.  This was summer fruit.

This week’s lectionary text concerns the fourth vision of Amos.  Its central image is summer fruit.  To most congregants, the phrase summer fruit may bring to mind watermelon, peaches, cantaloupe and the like.  We think of picnics and refreshment, perhaps even church socials in parks.  That picture could not be more antithetical to this vision.  The Hebrew word for ‘summer’ in verses 1 and 2 is the exact same term used later in verse 2 by God when He replies, ‘The end…’  The vision here is not meant to conjure a cornucopia of produce.  Rather, the image concerns fruit that has reached its end point—spoiled, rotten fruit.

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