Sunday, July 14, 2013

Sermon: Getting Straightened Out


Amos 7:7-17 (8:4-8b)
Getting Straightened Out
James Sledge                                                                                                   July 14, 2013

When I was a kid, my family often took camping trips in the North Carolina Mountains. We mostly did the Blue Ridge Parkway and National Parks sort of thing. We went to Tweetsie Railroad on occasions, but my parents weren’t so big on the touristy spots, much to the chagrin of my brother and me.
We lived in Spartanburg, SC at the time, which is quite close to the mountains. One of our “local” TV station was in Asheville, NC, and so we often saw commercials for mountain attractions. And beside TV ads, the drive into the mountains was peppered with billboards advertising all sorts of tourist traps. One that fascinated me as a small child was a place called Mystery Hill. The billboards spoke of defying gravity and showed people standing normally but at odd angles to the walls. It looked magic to me, but we never convinced our parents to go there.
I did once go to a place called Gravity Hill. There are actually a lot of places by that name around the country, places where things seem to roll uphill. When I went, we rode in the car down to the “bottom” of a hill, put the car in neutral, released the brake, and lo and behold, the car began to back up the hill on its own.
Places called Gravity Hill are optical illusions created by some confluence of terrain features that tricks your mind as to what is truly vertical and horizontal. Mystery Hill was apparently as even more elaborate optical illusion created by disorienting you as you were taken into a room where walls and furniture and everything else actually leaned to one side.
Under the right conditions, optical illusions can be so convincing that you can’t help but see them, even when you know they are not true. Our eyes cannot always be trusted, and so there are times when it is very helpful to have some outside reference by which to test what you think you see. And so when carpenters are building a wall, “Does that look straight to you?” isn’t going to cut it. Something more reliable than eyesight is needed.
And so all decent carpenters and builders have a level, probably several of them, to show for certain if that wall is really running straight up and down. An older and simpler device, one that is still very useful in situations where a level won’t work very well, is a plumb line. All it takes is a string with a weight tied on the end of it. Hold the string, wait for the weight to stop swinging, and you have straight up and down clearly shown. If I had had one with me when I went to Gravity Hill, it would have clearly exposed the optical illusion. And in those rooms at Mystery Hill, it would confirm that the walls that are off, not gravity.
In our Old Testament reading today, the prophet Amos seems to say that God holds up a plumb line to Israel, and finds them horribly askew, not at all what they are meant to be. Amos spoke in the time after Israel has split in two. The smaller kingdom of Judah, with its capital in Jerusalem was to the south, and the much larger, wealthier, and more successful kingdom of Israel was in the north, with its capital in Samaria.
This was a time of relative peace and prosperity for Israel. Things were going very well, at least for wealthy. These seem to have been heady times for the rich who were building fine homes and expanding their estates. The poor were not doing so well, however, when Amos arrives to confront both the religious and political leaders of Israel.

Amos, by the way, is not from Israel, but from Judah. And so when he shows up at the sanctuary in Bethel, condemning the king, it probably felt a bit like a Canadian evangelical showing up in Washington and announcing  that God was going to smite the president and Congress and the Supreme Court. Just imagine the reaction if a foreign religious fanatic showed up in town yelling, “God curse America!” and you probably get some notion of how Amos was viewed by many.
So we can perhaps appreciate why Amaziah, the head priest at the national sanctuary, confronts Amos as he does. Who does he think he is, coming into the king’s house of worship and saying God will strike him down? Although Amaziah perhaps betrays his muddied loyalties when he calls Bethel “the king’s sanctuary” rather than Yahweh’s.
I suspect that if we studied some of the pastors who have served prominent DC congregations over the years, we would find a few who have spoken like Amos. But we’d probably find a lot more who had gotten really comfortable with power and prestige and didn’t want to bite the hand that fed them. For most of us pastors, it’s a lot more tempting to be Amaziah than it is to be Amos.
Of course all of this hinges on what you use to gauge right and wrong, to measure whether things are as they should be or not. What sort of level or plum line gets employed?
One of the trajectories in Western and American culture that began with the Enlightenment, and that seems to have accelerated in the last half century or so, is a suspicion and even downright rejection of judgments that arise from outside ourselves. There’s certainly a potential upside to saying, “Don’t let anyone tell you what you can or can’t do.” There are indeed people who want to hold others back because of prejudice or self-interest. But taken far enough, setting up the self as the only true authority makes gods of each individual. No outside plumb line measures the choices, decisions, morality, and structures of our individual lives or of the societies we build.
A fundamental article of biblical faith is the notion of divine revelation: information, knowledge, insight, and direction that we could not have found on our own, but that is revealed to us. Without it, we build our lives and our societies without accurate levels and plumb lines, and they are less than they might have been, sometimes horribly so. And I can’t help thinking of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman and the quest for justice on this morning.* Revelation is not a “God said it, I believe it, that settles it” sort of thing. It does not eliminate the need for the difficult and sometimes ambiguous work of interpretation and seeking understanding. But it does insist that our lives cannot be right and true if they are not straightened, realigned with a God whose ways are not our ways, who calls us to love our neighbor and even our enemy. And again I wonder if George Zimmerman has lived by this plumb line, whether things might have turned out very differently that night.*
Now like a lot of people, I’m a bit uncomfortable around biblical passages like today’s that use God’s measures to render harsh judgments. Some biblical prophets sound a bit too much like Jerry Falwell or the Westboro Baptist folks. Of course I’m also personally uncomfortable with being judged. It’s nice to think that when people criticize me or say I’m acting in ways I shouldn’t, that they’re wrong, that as long as I feel right in my heart about it, I am right. But that’s simply not always true, as becomes all too clear when measured against God’s plumb line, when held up to Jesus’ call to follow him and live as he lived.
When Jesus comes to us, he does not simply ask us to believe in him. He invites us to follow him and discover a new way of living that changes us and makes us new. He demands obedience, and at times he can sound absolutely Old Testament prophet-like. “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven,” who lives according to God’s plumb line.
But of course if we really do believe in Jesus, if we believe he comes from God to invite us into true, full and abundant life, if we have faith in him and trust in him, then surely we will want to follow him and live our lives by the measure he shows us.

* These lines added in light of the “not guilty” verdict handed down to George Zimmerman the night before.

No comments:

Post a Comment