Pentecost 7B

7th Sunday after Pentecost, Year B

In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Brothers and sisters in Christ: grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Our lessons today begin with a plumb line. Amos was given a vision from God. He tells us that he sees “the Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand.” When asked what he sees, Amos doesn’t mention the Lord, or the wall…rather he only mentions the plumb line. And of course, that’s exactly what the Lord WANTS Amos to see.

Every time I come across this passage, I have memories of my dad, who would get me to help him with some of the carpentry he often did, when the only thing I could do that was useful to the task was to hold the plumb line. I couldn’t swing a hammer, and I wasn’t old enough to be trusted with a saw, and I wasn’t strong enough to carry materials from the basement to the back yard. But I could certainly stand on a ladder and hold the plumb line. The challenge was for me to hold it still…which is quite a challenge for 8-year-old boys. I was more interested in playing with the “bob” - the weight on the end that to me looked like a missile. I’m sure if Dad had let me play with it, I would have had a great deal of fun. Right up until the point where that sharp, heavy hunk of metal went flying through a window.

Craftsmen use plumb lines to determine what is the true vertical. The line uses gravity to establish a perfectly straight up-and-down. It is absolutely true, regardless of the surface on which you stand when holding the line. It is true regardless of the other lines around you. It will always - so long as gravity doesn’t change or fail - always give you a true vertical. Sure, you can get close by just eye-balling it, but our eyes and our brains are susceptible to deceit by the lines around us. If the lines around us aren’t true, we are likely to guess a vertical that’s based on the false lines, not on the true vertical.

When God shows this plumb line to Amos, he’s not merely talking about building a wall. He’s comparing a craftsman’s plumb line with the true vertical of God’s truth - His Will, and His Law. And when measured against God’s plumb line, the people find that they are not straight. They do not measure up. But notice that they don’t see it that way. The priest Amaziah comes to Amos and instead of listening to what God’s messenger has to say, instead he kicks Amos out. “Go, flee away to the land of Judah, and eat bread there, and prophesy there...” In other words, “we don’t want to hear what you have to say, because we don’t like it…whether it’s the Word of God or not.” Amaziah believes that he and the unrighteous king Jeroboam are just fine the way they are. They don’t have any interest in being told that they’re in the wrong. They don’t have any interest in being told that they need to change. And they certainly have no interest in being told that punishment - God’s punishment - is coming their way. To listen to any of this would be to admit that the path they were on was anything other than the right path.

It’s easy for us to fall into that same trap. It’s easy for us to think that we are “good people” and we are on the right path. We’re comfortable. We go to church. We obey the laws of our city, state, and nation. We don’t hurt anyone else. We’re the kind of people that God wants us to be, so He should love us for that, right? No…that’s not why God loves us.

One scholar reminds us of the danger in this thinking: "If we think we are upright and plumb and deserve God's favor, 'we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.'" (William W. Carr, July 15, 2012 in "Lectionary at Lunch: Homiletical Helps")

That same scholar also suggests that we should have included Amos’s response in our reading this morning. Listen to what Amos says in verses 16 & 17:

16 Now therefore hear the word of the LORD.

“You say, ‘Do not prophesy against Israel,

and do not preach against the house of Isaac.’

17 Therefore thus says the LORD:

“ ‘Your wife shall be a prostitute in the city,

and your sons and your daughters shall fall by the sword,

and your land shall be divided up with a measuring line;

you yourself shall die in an unclean land,

and Israel shall surely go into exile away from its land.’ ”

[The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Am 7:16–17.]

Amos tells them how they - particularly the king and the leaders of Israel - have failed to measure up, and what the Lord is going to do about it. The people are going to die violently, the land will be divided up, and the survivors will be exiled - taken out of the Promised Land. This is a grim future to look forward to…it’s no wonder they didn’t want to hear it.

We have another king in our lessons this morning with a similar problem. Herod is confronted with God’s Truth - the knowledge of the great and mighty works of a craftsman from Galilee - Jesus of Nazareth. Some of his advisors tell him that Jesus might actually be Elijah, who has returned to announce the coming of the Messiah. Others tell Herod that Jesus is merely “one of the prophets of old” - not one as great as Elijah, Isaiah, or Jeremiah…but just similar to one of the many others…nothing special. Herod, however, has his mind made up - Jesus must be John the Baptist, come back to life after his beheading. After all, Herod saw John’s actual head on a plate, so he KNEW he was dead. Herod’s conscience is weighing heavily after that execution. He knew he shouldn’t do it, but he backed himself into a corner and left himself no choice. His promise to a young girl in front of a room full of dignitaries forced him to protect his honor by keeping the promise.

But Herod had the same problem that many others of his day had. He couldn’t see Jesus for who he REALLY was. He was measuring Jesus by a faulty measure. He could only see 3 options to Jesus’ identity, and none of the three were actually true. Herod was not using a plumb line; he was eye-balling it. He did not have God’s Truth to guide him…he was only using his own knowledge and the advice of other equally fallible sinners to make his decisions. He had no way to gauge a true vertical.

We are all sinners in the same way that the Israelites were also sinners, and we have the same plumb line of God’s Law that we also cannot live up to. Our challenge is whether we choose to eye-ball it, or to actually use the plumb line we have been given. When we look at Jesus Christ and see him for who he TRULY is, what do we see? Do we see a mere mortal who was blessed by God with power to do a few miracles? Do we see a moral teacher / coach who taught some valuable moral lessons about how to live a good life and make the world a better place? How to behave in such a way as to gain favor in God’s eyes?

Or do we use that plumb line to see Jesus how he truly is: as the Lamb of God Who Takes Away the Sin of the Whole World? Many times in the Gospels we find people who either can’t see Jesus’ true identity, or they flat-out REFUSE to see him in truth. They are comfortable as they are. They, like Jeroboam and Amaziah, don’t want to know the truth, because it’s hard to hear, and it’s hard to live up to…impossible even.

But when we DO use God’s plumb line … when we see Jesus for who he TRULY is, that’s when the Gospel really shines. We’ve seen how far from straight we really are. We see that we can’t measure up to God’s Law. And right when we come to the point of feeling lost and in despair, Jesus shows us who he is. He is our Savior. He is the One Who IS perfectly straight. He is the One Who points us STRAIGHT UP to the Father. Jesus is the one who took our poor measurements and showed us the true vertical when he was lifted up on his cross to die. And he is The One Who ascended straight up into Heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father. It is because of him - and ONLY because of him - that God thinks of us as anything but sinners - crooked children who defy Him constantly. Jesus is the reason that we have hope for our future.

So let us all use this plumb line of God to recognize our own crookedness and see how our measurement is lacking. But let us also use God’s plumb line - His Only-Begotten Son - to see how our crookedness is made straight in God’s eyes. Let us recognize that no matter how close we think our own sense of vertical might be to true vertical, that we don’t have to guess; we only need to use and trust the truth of God - exactly as a craftsman uses a plumb line - as an absolute than can always be trusted no matter how much our own eyes and senses tell us otherwise. With truth as our measure, whatever we build will be right and true and stable.

In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.