In the early 1950’s one drug which was used to treat infections was called
Chloromycetin. A powerful antibiotic, this drug was often prescribed for the
most minor of ailments, including sore throat, cold, flu and acne. Produced and
heavily promoted by Parke-Davis Pharmaceuticals, it was prescribed at a rate of
about four million times a year.
Advertising for the drug often carried pictures of smiling children remarking
about how it tasted pleasant and didn’t need to be refrigerated like other
antibiotics.
The drug should really have been used, if at all, in more serious infections
like Typhoid and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, and only when other drugs were
ineffective in treating those diseases. Witnesses in congressional testimony
testified that 90% of all the prescriptions being written for this drug were
inappropriate.
It had been known for years that Chloromycetin had terrible side effects,
including aplastic anemia, which keeps the body from producing blood and results
in a painful death. Thousands of people died from taking this drug. But its
producers kept marketing it and doctors kept prescribing it, despite the
warnings being sounded.
The company was eventually called to testify before the US Senate regarding the
effects of Chloromycetin. One senator, Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, was
particularly perplexed by the difference in the way the drug was advertised in
the US, vs. England.
He noted that in American medical journals the advertisements carried warnings
that the drug was known to have fatal side effects. In British medical journals
that warning didn’t appear. Nelson asked the drug company representative why the
warning didn’t appear in the British journals.
The representative replied that the company had complied with British
regulations regarding advertising of pharmaceuticals. In fact, they were in
compliance with the laws of every country in which the drug was sold, and it was
sold all over the world.
Now let me translate what that means into plain English: Since they don’t
require us to mention that this drug has killed a lot of people and ruined the
lives of many more, we’re not going to say anything about it. We’re only
mentioning the death part when we’re required to.
Those of you who remember Senator Nelson can just imagine how he reacted to that
statement. He said, “So you mean to testify that your company will stand on the
proposition that we will send drugs to Tanganyika, we will send to Latin
American countries, we will sell drugs to all the underdeveloped countries in
the world and since they do not have any standards, we will fool them all we can
and make a big profit and never tell the doctors that there is a serious risk of
blood dyscrasia?”
The drug rep responded by saying that Nelson was indicting every drug maker in
the US and the UK. Nelson said, “You bet.” In February of 1968 the FDA finally
agreed to mail a warning to every physician in the country about the devastating
effects of the drug. Five months later production of Chloromycetin was down 80%.
Now you might wonder what this story has to do with a prophet named Amos who
lived in Judah about 2750 years ago. I would reply by pointing out that of all
the things a prophet might speak about, of all the issues which he might
confront in society, of all the concerns he might raise to the king and the
Israelite religious leaders, in Amos 8 he speaks about consumer fraud.
Now you might think that’s kind of odd, but that’s the word of God that Amos
says he has been told to speak. Now I want to give you enough background on
what’s happening here so that you understand the situation Amos was confronting.
Amos lived at a time when the Promised Land was divided into two kingdoms:
Israel in the north and Judah in the south. Amos was a farmer and a shepherd
from Tekoa in the southern kingdom of Judah. But he was called by God to go
north and speak to the king of Israel.
The king at the time was Jereboam II, who reigned during a time of general
peace. But the peace of his reign masked a situation in Israel where wealthy
land owners and bankers and nobles took advantage of an unjust and corrupt legal
system for their own financial advantage.
Those who had even the smallest amount of debt were often foreclosed on by
greedy financiers who knew that they could keep the foreclosed land for
themselves. The poor were often forced to sell their own children into slavery
when they couldn’t afford to pay the bills.
When one of the peasants went to court and tried to ask for justice, the wealthy
frequently bribed the judges to rule in their favor, cheating the poor out of
what little they had. Amos rails against all of these practices, saying that God
will eventually see to it that justice prevails.
As you might guess, Amos was not well received by Israel’s leaders. He was
confronting them with their systemic abuse of the poor in their society. Ending
these abuses would require them to give up their substantial financial advantage
over most of the people in Israel. They weren’t about to do that.
The priest Amaziah told Amos to go back home and prophesy in his own country.
Amos responded by saying that Israel would be invaded and the priest’s own
family would be killed, while he would be hauled off into exile in some other
country. Amos sounds like a real expert in public relations, doesn’t he?
In the passage we read for today Amos again prophesies that Israel will be
invaded and demolished by another country. God shows him a basket of ripe fruit
to illustrate just how ripe Israel is for the taking by the Assyrians.
Why would God allow something so horrible to happen? Here’s where the consumer
fraud part comes in. Merchants in Israel during this period were known to
defraud consumers who went to buy wheat to make bread.
They were more concerned with making money than having any semblance of
godliness. Merchants were prohibited from selling on Saturdays. Six other days
of the week they could sell to their hearts desire. But Saturday was the
Sabbath, and they were supposed to rest. God commanded so in the Ten
Commandments.
But the merchants were so profit driven that they complained about having to
close up shop on Saturdays. Never mind the fact that the God who gave them their
land was supposed to be worshipped that day.
The same thing happened for some of the religious festivals. The Israelites were
required by divine law to observe a religious festival at every new moon. At
that time they measured the length of a month by watching the moon. When at
least two people saw the sliver of a crescent moon appear in the sky, it was a
new month, and the people observed a holy day as commanded by God.
But these New Moon rituals got in the way of business. You weren’t allowed to
work during one of them, so business owners again had to close up shop. And they
complained about it costing them money.
Again these are God’s own people whose ancestors were taken out of slavery and
given this land. They’re making money hand over fist and they’re complaining
about observing the religious holidays their God requires. It’s amazing how
money causes us to lose perspective.
Another problem Amos raises is the outright defrauding of consumers who bought
wheat by volume for bread. An ephah of wheat is roughly equivalent to a bushel.
So when you went to buy wheat at a public market the merchant would measure out
a bushel, fill it with wheat, and you took the wheat home in your own container.
The problem was that those bushels somehow seemed to get smaller and smaller as
time went on. Merchants knew they could make more money if they used smaller
bushels and told people it was an ephah. Since all the merchants were doing it,
no one had any recourse but to keep ponying up more money for less food.
Another scam involved the process of paying for goods. Merchants received
payment for their goods by the shekel. The shekel wasn’t just a coin, it was a
measurement of weight since not all coins weighed the same. So you put your
money on a scale and kept shelling out until the weight of your money was a
shekel.
The problem was that merchants were notorious for rigging the scales in their
favor. Consumers were surprised at how much more money they had to put on the
scale to reach a shekel. The merchants swore that they were using standard
weights, but the peasants knew better.
It was a systemic way of cheating people and dishonoring God, and the leaders of
God’s own people were the perpetrators. Amos prophesied that natural occurring
events, which people interpreted as divine warnings, would occur as a way of
communicating God’ displeasure with Israel.
He talked about earthquakes and eclipses. Those events would be followed by
tragedy and sadness. Amos said that if they people kept doing what they were
doing, God would eventually stop sending them prophets. Then the society would
wander aimlessly without any divine guidance.
The book of Amos is not a happy book. It’s fascinating, but not necessarily
uplifting. But those of us who want to understand the connection between the
Bible and the way we live our own lives have to ask ourselves how the message of
Amos applies to life in our day and age.
I don’t think there’s any way to get around the fact that at least in Amos,
God’s sense of justice in Israel requires businesses to be fair and honest in
their dealings with consumers. Consumer fraud is a theological issue – it
offends God’s own sense of justice and righteousness.
People in a society need to be able to trust their merchants to put out a
product that is what they claim it is and does what they claim it does. They
need to know the bad consequences of consuming the product, as well as the good
ones.
They need to trust that the method of payment for goods and services is honest,
that the true costs of a product are not being concealed as a way of dishonestly
influencing people to buy something.
Those are not simply market issues – they go to the very core values of society.
For us as people of faith those issues are faith issues. We cannot talk about
the Christian faith and not talk about fair business practices. Amos wouldn’t
stand for it.
One of the problems we having in talking about this issue is that everyone has a
different idea of what that justice should look like and how it should be
implemented. In the US you have two major schools of thought, even though there
are a variety of approaches.
One approach, a traditional approach in our country, is to say that consumer
fraud should be dealt with by the free market. If consumers at one wheat
merchant think the ephah being used for measuring wheat is too small they should
patronize another merchant who sells a more honest ephah of wheat.
If enough people abandon the dishonest sellers, those sellers will eventually
straighten up and sell an honest ephah for an honest shekel. If they don’t,
they’ll go out of business.
You see people advocating heavily for this approach to solving all kinds of
problems in society, some which are not even rooted in business. For example,
one of the candidates for the US Senate from Kentucky, Rand Paul, sees this as
the best approach to solving problems of racial discrimination.
Right after he won the primary election he was unabashed in saying that he
disliked civil rights legislation which made it illegal for businesses to deny
services to someone because of their color.
While he hates racism and would never patronize a business that discriminates,
he felt that businesses should be allowed to discriminate against people because
of their race. When consumers find out that a business discriminates, they will
stop patronizing that business until the owner changes the policy or goes out of
business.
The problem is that until the late 1960’s we took that approach to racism in
business practices and despite what Paul says, the market didn’t put racist
owners out of business. Some of you can probably remember the days when
businesses could and did discriminate against people of color.
And because the market didn’t solve this problem on its own, the voters decided
to step in and make it illegal. Even when it had the chance, the market failed
fix serious business related problems like child labor, fair labor practices
like overtime, employee safety practices, employee disability compensation, and
others.
And despite all the bluster by people who are vehemently pro-business and pro
free market, the market has failed to stop employers in any state from hiring
undocumented immigrants to work illegally for them.
In other words, the people who gripe about the Mexicans coming here illegally
are some of the same people who hire them illegally to work on the cheap. Market
forces have been unable or unwilling to fix that problem.
This approach has done well in terms of forcing companies to put out a better
product at a lower price. And to some extent it has kept businesses from being
fraudulent in their claims about their products. But it has its limits.
The other major school of thought is that the government should have a strong
role in regulating business practices and ensuring that consumers are not
defrauded by business owners. That has been the approach of most developed
countries in the last 50 years.
We have all kinds of state local and federal departments dedicated to ensuring
that all the different aspects of business are carried out honestly so that an
ephah is really an ephah wherever you go.
That approach has its good and bad points too. It has raised the standard of
working conditions in our country, it has helped consumers be more informed
about the products they buy, and it has raised the standards of business
practices.
At the same time businesses have always figured out ways to get around
regulation and oversight. Some of the regulations force businesses to jump
through unnecessary hoops in order to sell their products. And some people just
don’t think government bureaucrats have any place overseeing businesses that
they may not understand.
When you look at the book of Amos and consider these questions, I don’t think
Amos is really on either side of this issue. He doesn’t advocate a strong
government role or the forces of the free market. For him the question is one of
personal righteousness on the part of business owners.
Fraud is not just a crime for Amos – it’s a sin, one that God will not overlook.
That can be a difficult argument to make these days since business owners are
not required to have any religious leanings at all.
What we can say is that Amos describes God as being on the side of the consumer
in his situation, and that God requires honesty, fairness, and justice from
those who are privileged to have their own business and set business policy. I
think that’s something most people of faith can agree on.
A few years ago we were trying to raise a little extra capital around here by
selling off some old outdated audio and video equipment on E-bay. We had all
kinds of video cameras and sound equipment and film projectors.
I started selling these items over the internet to people and they would send
the church the money. We actually made a good chunk of change on some of them.
But one of the things you have to do in order to sell on E-bay is guard your
reputation as a seller.
If you sell someone something and it doesn’t turn out to be what you said it was
or work like you said it works, buyers can complain and lower your rating as a
seller. If buyers do that, you won’t be able to sell in the future because
everyone who buys on E-bay will know that you’ve misrepresented an item you’ve
sold. They’ll just buy from someone else
One of the items I tried to sell was our church’s old reel to reel tape player
and recorder. As far as I could tell it worked. I played an old tape of a sermon
from the 1970’s and heard it clearly.
I couldn’t tell whether or not it recorded though. I plugged in a microphone and
the meter registered my voice when I spoke. So I assumed that the machine would
then record my voice since it was picking it up.
I sold it to some guy on Long Island who wanted to play some of his old reel to
reel tapes. I assured him that everything worked. But he couldn’t get it to
record anything. He took it in to a place that services old equipment and was
told that the recording mechanism couldn’t be fixed.
So he filed a complaint on E-bay, saying that I had misrepresented the condition
of that item. And he was right. I just didn’t realize it. He knew I was selling
on behalf of a church and remarked in his complaint about how ironic it was for
a church to be misrepresenting items that it was selling.
I felt terrible about it so I offered to give him his money back if he was
willing to take the bad mark off my reputation as a seller.
He said that was fine and sent us back the recorder. I felt bad because I had to
go to Dennis and ask him to write a check for the refund. Dennis was really
great about it, and when he sent the guy his money back, my seller rating went
back up again.
When we go to work, even if we’re not the boss, even if we don’t set policy, our
own commitment to holiness requires us to be honest and forthright about the
products we sell, the services we provide.
Honesty isn’t simply good business practice. We shouldn’t be honest just because
we fear the consequences of being dishonest. We should be honest and fair
because we seek to be like the one who gave his life for us.
Fairness is not simply an issue of government policy or market forces. It is the
only was people can live with one another in this world. It is at the heart of
what we mean when we follow the greatest commandment of all: love your neighbor
as yourself.
Whether it’s in measuring an honest ephah of wheat or providing the services we
claim to provide, we must always treat those around us with the fairness we
would want to receive.