I was watching a movie on Netflix while I was working out the other day, which is a way to help me keep my mind off the fact that I’m paying the YMCA a lot of money every month so I can get sweaty, gross, and out of breath.

Anyway, the movie opens with an assassin sitting alone in a room, contemplating a hit he’s been contracted to do. He’s been sitting in this cold, empty room in Paris for days, fighting off boredom while waiting for the target to appear. Since the target has yet to show, our industrious assassin starts looking through a scope at the people on the street many stories below. The scope appears to be from the rifle, but it’s not yet been attached.

The reason that I’m pretty sure it’s a rifle scope is that the picture onscreen has what appears to be crosshairs in the middle of a round field. The assassin moves the long cylindrical scope back and forth, focusing by turns on the innocent passersby below. It feels like a relatively standard cinematic convention—you know, forcing the movie viewer to see through the eyes of a killer as he (in this case) moves the crosshairs over a smattering of pedestrians.

As I say, all that felt pretty standard as far as movie tropes go—like I’d observed hundreds of this kind of videographic shot since childhood. But something caught me up short. At one point, the assassin passed the crosshairs over a little girl—couldn’t have been more than four or five—standing unaware.

Now, apart from the obvious reaction in a culture dipped to the elbows as it is in the blood of children … to see an innocent girl framed as a target—even though I knew the scope was unattached, my body did a big adrenaline dump. Even though in my mind I knew she wasn’t in any danger (it is a movie, after all), my body reacted as if it were real, and the little girl might soon be another statistic.

Has that ever happened to you?

You think you have a pretty good read on the world. Then, out of nowhere, something happens you weren’t expecting—or maybe something doesn’t happen—and it hits you that your perceptions of reality aren’t nearly as “etched in stone” as you spend most of your time thinking.

Underneath the surface, there's more happening than we often realize. The idea that reason trumps emotion is an ingrained yet misleading belief challenged by neuroscience insights. Historically, Western thought, influenced by Plato, viewed reason as a tool to control emotions. This binary view—reason as good, emotions as suspect—has been common.

However, neuroscience reveals that reason often relies on emotions to make decisions. Key life choices and moral decisions often need emotional input. This concept was highlighted by Jesse Prinz, a philosophy professor from the University of North Carolina, during a lecture I saw in 2007. His book, "The Emotional Construction of Morals," argues that our moral values stem from emotional responses shaped by culture.

This means that our emotional reactions, often quicker than rational thought, significantly influence our moral judgments. Every time we’re tempted to change the channel when those commercials about abused animals come on, for instance, what nauseates and angers us isn’t the careful study and research we’ve put into animal neglect and cruelty but our emotional response to those images, which are trying to wake up our reason to the injustices around how animals are treated.

In fact, we realize that many emotional responses occur within milliseconds, much more rapidly than the mind can think the situation over rationally. That’s why we tell vulnerable people to “trust your instincts” because, over a lifetime of being on guard against threats, vulnerable people have built up an impressive early-warning threat detection system. That’s why we can be instantly “triggered” just by hearing a word spoken, reading a phrase, or glancing at an image.

Indeed, most people have had the experience of feeling anxious and uneasy or happy and content—without even knowing why.

As Fred Craddock has said, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can kill me.”

So, while we navigate roles in life—employee, supervisor, spouse, parent, citizen, Christian—we often do so without fully understanding the undercurrents of our perceptions. Much of our experience of the world remains below our conscious awareness, and sometimes, our understanding can be profoundly mistaken.

That, of course, is precisely what’s at issue in our passage from Amos this morning. Israel, in the midst of receiving a devastating rebuke from the mouth of God, is pretty sure it’s got this whole faith thing figured out. But God’s outraged.

Our text opens with grief transformed into fury.

”Alas,” God cries out, “for you who desire the day of the Lord!

Why do you want the day of the Lord?

It is darkness, not light;

as if someone fled from a lion,