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.
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