Every week during the summer, I pick up a delicious basket full of summer fruits and vegetables from UpCycle Farm—tomatoes, zucchini, watermelon, strawberries, and more. My family eats, stores, or shares the food right away because if we neglect our food in the basket, it will rot quickly in the summer heat.

Amos, a herdsman by trade, understands the implications of his vision of a basket of summer fruit. The people of Israel have neglected the word of God for too long, and they have become “rotten”—songs in the Temple have become wailings, people die in the streets, the poor are cheated in the market place, and merchants rush through the sabbath so they can get back to the business of “buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals.” As a result of these deceitful practices, God says “I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord.”

That famine of hearing the words of the Lord continues today: People are dying in our streets, we trample on the needy, and we justify almost any behavior that will turn a profit. We glorify violence and sex and then seem shocked when our communities are beset with violent crime and sexual harassment.

We would do well to remember the basket of summer fruit. Rather than neglecting God’s word and pursuing the “rotten” practices of deceitful self-promotion, we need to be about the work of loving one another. May we feed on the word and bear the fruits of God’s love and grace in our daily lives.