Admittedly I am not a rapper. The noises you are hearing I can only make in the privacy of my own home. I blush when I play this music in public. So why is this here? Well, I happen to have a father who is an Old Testament professor, and every once in awhile he’ll make a suggestion about how we might hear scripture in a fresh way. So, last week he suggests that Ancient Hebrew Gangsta rap might be a vehicle to think about prophets and relevancy. So, one old school beat, a distorted octave mandolin, and the first five chapters of Amos later, a strange new paradigm shifting musical expression occurs.

The truth is, I highly doubt Amos would have done anything of the sort. Like as not, it would have been more radical. My hope is that we can hear the prophets in fresh ways. That we might take seriously their message of justice and mercy. We need to pay attention to what the prophets tell us about worship, that our concern for the poor and oppressed, our use of money, and our use of military might are more central to our worship than what we do when we gather corporately to praise God.

This song is a silly way to get there. But, at the end of the day I hope that it opened some windows for you, or at the very least, gets you to read Amos again.......