Amos 7:7-17
“The Standard”
July 11, 2010 - Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

         “You need this too,” said my father-in-law, and dropped a heavy metal slug wrapped in orange cord into my cart at Jerry’s. As I prepared to set posts for a back porch cover at our home in Springfield, Dad knew I needed a plumb line to get them straight.

         As early as 2,600 B.C., the Egyptians were using plumb lines or “plumb bobs,” as they are sometimes called. Basically just a weight, a stone back then, on a string, the plumb line is a marvelous instrument operating solely by the law of gravity. It’s a basic construction tool to establish a straight vertical line against which one may build a wall or any other vertical structure, keeping it perfectly level and true.

         In our text today from the prophet Amos, a plumb line is a symbol of the standard by which God measures your life and my life, a line marking what is straight and true. It’s a dramatic image of the very same subject which our Gospel lesson addresses today when an expert in the Law asks, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus had him draw the line himself by asking, “What is written in the Law?” The expert’s answer was later Jesus’ own answer to a similar question. He recited what Covenant people have taken to calling the “Great Commandments.” “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind,” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

         Love God and love your neighbor. Our Covenant president Gary Walter talked about these as the dual dimensions of the Gospel which bring us to the Cross of Jesus. There is the vertical dimension of love and devotion to God and the horizontal dimension of love and service to our neighbors, our fellow human beings around us. Both those lines must be straight and true if we, if you and I, are to enjoy God’s eternal blessings.

         The teacher of the Law found the Great Commandments written in Scripture because those two straight lines of love for God and love for neighbor were the standard by which God’s people are always measured. The prophets preached a message that constantly boiled down to a warning in one or both directions. Israel was either failing to love God or failing to love the poor and the needy among them, or failing to do both.

         We know from the history of the northern kingdom of Israel where Amos prophesied that they were failing in both commandments. That separate confederation of ten tribes was founded after Solomon died in about 930 B.C. when the rebel Jeroboam set up golden calves as idols to worship in Bethel and Dan. He tried to create a separate people by giving them a different religion from worship of the Lord, the true God.

         160 years later in Amos’ time, as Jeroboam’s northern kingdom is falling apart and nearing its end, despite the warnings of Elijah and Elisha, Israel still clings to its idols, to the sanctuaries built by Jeroboam that Amos mentions in verse 9. The vertical dimension of Israel’s spiritual life is absolutely crooked, but it is the other line, the other standard, which concerns Amos.

         If you leaf back to the middle of chapter 5, you find that the specific complaint God speaks through Amos has to do with taxes on the poor, with oppression of the innocent, with bribes corrupting the justice of the courts in favor of the rich. Those lovely lines from Amos 5:24 that Covenanters Bob Stromberg and Rick Carlson wrote so beautifully into a song about justice rolling down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream is preceded by the Lord saying He hates phony worship and offerings brought to Him when the poor are  being neglected. He doesn’t want to listen to Israel’s songs and music, unless they are also doing justice for those in need.

         So the image is a plumb line in God’s hand, but here in Amos it’s drawing that horizontal line, demonstrating that Israel’s is not living out the second Great Commandment, that they are absolutely crooked in their treatment of their neighbors.

         The plumb line is a building tool. It got replaced in part by the invention of the spirit level, those long straight edges with the bubble, in the nineteenth century, and more recently by laser levels, but not long ago plumb lines were still used for straight construction of tall buildings. The first skyscrapers went up with long plumb lines hanging down the elevator shaft to keep the building process perfectly true and vertical. It’s a building tool.

         Yet in verse 7 God is holding his plumb line “by a wall that had been built true to plumb,” but it was not straight any longer. That was the point of the plumb line, to mark off a structure that was no longer standing as it should. The structure of Israel itself, of the spiritual life of its people, was out of kilter, no longer in line. And so it was all going to be torn down.

         Last year I got fed up with the fact that the north door here on our new building did not close properly. It would not latch when it swung to, and there was a 3/8 inch gap that let in cold air in the winter and warm air in the summer. I called Stan and he brought out a rep from the company that made the door. We stood and held a long straight edge up against it and there it was, a long, out of plumb bow curve all along the vertical dimension of the door. It couldn’t be straightened. The only solution was to take it out, throw it away, and put up a new straight, true door in its place.

         That’s what God saw in Israel there in 762 B.C. The wall had warped out of line beyond any repair. The people’s hearts were twisted away from God and away from their neighbors in need. God’s only solution was to throw it all away. So verse 9 says,

         The high places of Isaac will be destroyed
           and the sanctuaries of Israel will be ruined;
           with my sword I will rise against the house of Jeroboam.

         God held up His plumb line and saw that Israel was tilted, askew and out of line beyond any hope or repair. He would wait about 35 years, but then the Assyrians would come and fulfill the prophecy of Amos, the prophecy of verse 9 and the prophecy of verse 17 that “Israel will surely go into exile, away from their native land.”

         Isaiah 28:17 is the same message. God says, “I will make justice the measuring line and righteousness the plumb line,” and then tells how he will sweep away all the places His bent and selfish people want to hide from their sins and lies.

         In our text the Lord is particularly harsh on a priest named Amaziah, who wants to silence Amos. Amaziah accuses the prophet of conspiracy, of being in it for the money. He tells him to go back to his home in Judah in the south and offer his prophesy there. Amos responds with the assurance that God sent him with this plumb line prophecy and that Amaziah and his family would be judged for refusing to listen to God’s word. The priest himself was out of true and could only be torn down.

         The expert in the law who asked about eternal life in our Gospel lesson also didn’t want to listen to what God in was saying to Him in Jesus. Even after the plumb line of loving your neighbor dropped from his own lips, he wanted to quibble about it, and so he asked, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus responded by letting down an even better, clearer plumb line, a plumb Bob, with a capital “B,” if you will, a living, breathing standard for what it means to love your neighbor.

         Remember that the Samaritans were racial cousins to the Jews who lived in that same northern kingdom area where Amos was prophesying. God dropped a plumb line against the Samaritans back then which marked them for destruction. Yet 800 years later Jesus took the figure of a despised Samaritan and transformed him into the living plumb line by which loving our neighbors has been measured ever since.

         God’s own love is wonderfully persistent and relentless. Yes, He knocked down Israel, Samaria, for loving neither Him nor others. Yet there He is centuries later, telling us a story that shows even a Samaritan redeemed and living the true, straight life of love for which God intended us all. God loves everyone as long and as patiently and as expectantly as He loved the Samaritans. God loves you that way.

         Jesus loved the expert in the Law who stood before Him splitting hairs about whom he was supposed to love. He didn’t want that man to go away lost in selfishness and to miss his aim of eternal life. So Jesus directed his attention to an unforgettable, inarguable standard by which to measure his own love. Jesus showed him plumb Bob the Samaritan, loving by giving up his time, loving by offering medical care, loving by sharing his own food and transportation, loving by giving away his money, all for someone he didn’t even know.

         If we listen, we will hear Jesus saying to us what He said to the expert in the Law, “Go and do likewise.” You and I are being held to that same standard, that same living plumb line, and so is our whole world.

         Our psalm for today, in Psalm 82, verses 3 and 4, sounds the same note and drops the same plumb line on a cosmic scale. God is pictured in old pagan terms, sitting among all the gods of the world and to them He says exactly what Amos said to Amaziah, what Jesus said to the Law expert, “Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy.” It’s a standard that applies even to gods, to nations, to the whole world, and especially to you and me as Christians.

         The standard for us is in fact the straightest, the truest, the most plumb life that has ever been lived. It’s no wonder that the church fathers saw the Good Samaritan as an allegory for Jesus Himself. There’s the poor, helpless sinner, beaten up and robbed by the devil, left for dead by the side of life’s road. Along comes the kind and loving Savior who picks the sinner up, forgives his sins, pours out the oil of the Holy Spirit and the wine of His own blood, and pays all sin’s debts with His own rich merits. Jesus dying on the Cross and rising to bring us eternal life is the ultimate Good Samaritan and He is the ultimate plumb line by which we measure our own lives and behavior.

         Which might make us all despair. If Jesus is the standard, how will we ever live up to it? If the holy and perfect and loving life of the Son of God is the line which marks my life as straight or crooked, how can the verdict ever be anything but “crooked?” God might as well tear my tilted self down now, like He tore down the walls of Israel’s sanctuaries and the lives of priests like Amaziah.

         But the standard of God in Jesus Christ is full of grace. It can do something that no other plumb line, no other standard can. If we truly seek that vertical dimension of love for God, if we trust in Jesus by faith and seek Him with all our heart, His love will be a line that draws our bent and warped lives back into the straight and true.

         Jesus’ plumb line is like those invisible lines on your computer desktop. You move the icons around, click and drag and drop them in place. But as you drop an icon, an invisible hand takes hold of it and pulls it into line, horizontally and vertically, with all the others around it. That’s how the plumb line of the grace of Christ works when you drop yourself and all the random and disordered pieces of your life into His hands. He gently, persistently—with the same love He’s teaching you—starts pulling it all into His line.

         Still one more time I quote the great Church father Irenaeus, “He became what we are so that we might become what He is.” God dropped the plumb line of Jesus Christ down from heaven into humanity like those great long plumb lines dropped down the middle of skyscrapers. Except that Jesus has the power to pull what’s been out of line—even for years and years—back into line, back into the true, perfect line of His own life.

         So if you, like I often do, find your life out of line, out of kilter, off balance, leaning so far over you wonder how you can even stand up any longer; if you put yourself up against God’s standard of love and just sigh with despair; if you don’t know how to love; if you struggle with loving and helping people who don’t seem to deserve it; if you can’t find a way to forgive and love someone who has hurt you, then let the plumb line of God, the love of Jesus Christ, drop back into your life this morning.

         It won’t happen overnight. Building walls brick by brick, keeping everything true and even against a perfectly vertical plumb line, is a slow process. Repairing or rebuilding a wall that’s warped or leaning or even falling down also takes time. Yet the line and the grace and the strength and the love to rebuild your own heart and soul and mind is there in Jesus.

         One place to begin is to remember that Jesus gave us that homely example of plumb Bob the Samaritan. I believe that He drops little plumb Bobs like that into our lives regularly, simple, homely, doable examples of what it means to live in and live out His love. They may be plumb Bobs or plumb Sallys or plumb Georges or plumb Melissas, but Jesus works in and through His people to bring us all into plumb.

         Years ago I was wondering how I might show some of Jesus’ love to kids who live and go to school in this neighborhood. I felt out-of-line with the compassion and concern I knew He had for those students. And Jesus dropped into my path a young man who was mentoring a student at Kennedy Middle School up the hill. He explained that all it takes is an hour a week during lunch, to sit and listen and befriend an at-risk young person there at the school. And I said to myself, “I can do that. That’s an example I can copy, a way I can follow Jesus’ direction to ‘Go and do likewise.’” That young man was a plumb Bob for me.

         I invite you to welcome the plumb line of Jesus into your heart and life. Let Him start realigning and rebuilding your soul by His standard. And I invite you to look with me for those people, those living plumb Bobs, He keeps dropping in our way, to show us how to love along His line. And may His love make and keep us straight and true until that gracious line draws us up completely and wholly unto Himself.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2010 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj