Amos

7:7-17 Amos and the Plumb line from God

(with Luke 10:25-37) Summary: God is constantly measuring us, as individuals and as a society, against his standards--- love for him by respecting his law and holy character, and love for our neighbor. Our neighbor is anyone, no matter what their background, but especially for God the weak and vulnerable in society. Social justice is a priority for God and should be for us.

Sermon: My last year of high school and first two years of college I was fortunate enough to get a summer job working on a building crew. Fortunate because the work was interesting and the pay was better than what most of my friends got working at the local Burger King. I learned a lot about construction in three years but I also learned that I was never going to make it as a professional in the building trades. The master carpenters would give me an assignment of cutting 6 2x4s into 3 foot, 3 1/4 inch lengths and unfortunately, every one I brought back was a slightly different size. After a few weeks, we all decided two things: first, I better stay in college, and second, I was much better at carrying the 2x4s, cinderblocks, nails, and other building materials the professionals needed, rather than trying to do anything on my own. But I did learn a lot about building--at least from a conceptual standpoint. Amos is prophesying to Israel a lot about how God wants us to build our life as individuals and how he wants us (as individuals) to build our society. He uses the analogy of a plumb line, something that I used when I was working in construction, lo, those many years ago. Can someone tell me why a plumb line is used? We must have either professional builders or some weekend projects people out here? Pause.

 Building something straight and true is really, really important. Okay back to you weekend builders-- what happens if you don't build something straight and true? Especially, what happens when you build higher on something not straight and true? Pause. Heres one thing I learned during my summer job. If something doesnt start straight and true thats just the beginning of your problems. Because you can guarantee that the next thing you build on top of it is going to be even more out of true. We did one inner wall partition, put it up level by eye, then put drywall on one side only, and then we sat down for lunch. 30 minutes later there was a giant loud crash as the wall partition fell over because it wasn't straight and true and the heavy drywall forced it to fall. There are so many building terms that are a part of our life and are all reflective of how we should live before God. Its a square deal; its on the level; its dead on. Who can tell me where the expression dead on comes from? (pause). Yes, if you put in the headers correctly and frame a door out correctly the nails must be completely perpendicular and straight --they must be dead on. If you do not do that, not only will the door not close correctly in its frame, but the door will swing open or swing closed by itself through gravity. If you dont build correctly, if you cut corners, if youre not skilled, or if youre not playing by the rules of building, then this is how people describe your lifes work: crooked, not on the level, not true, out of alignment. When you hear about a disastrous collapse on a construction site somewhere in the world, usually its because someone has either cut corners on materials or has not built correctly. When you hear that, please think about this passage from the prophet Amos, nearly 3000 years ago. Amos has a vision of Gods plumb line coming down to measure the institutions and society of the Israel his day, and they are sorely our of alignment with how God wants them. He measures the government, indicated by the King. He measures the religious life of the people, represented by the priest Amazekiah. He measure how social justice is lived out, and he finds them all out of alignment with God. He sees that the poor are cheated by the rich, that the rich have no concern for the poor, and the rules God set up after the Exodus for a just society are not being maintained. So God tells Amos to prophesy that disaster is coming and God is not going to help Israel. And disaster does come, in the form of the Assyrian army in 722 BCE. Israel is destroyed, and its people taken away in captivity.

 And what is Amoss reward for being Gods prophet? We read in verse 10, Amazekiah the Priest tells the King Amos has conspired against you! What I love about Scripture is how nothing really changes. Our technology gets better, but human nature doesnt. Amoss reward for speaking Gods word is to be labeled a traitor, a troublemaker. Hes told to get lost, leave the Kings court, and make a new home for himself in another country. You see, it is always easier to shoot the messenger than pay attention to the message. Then as now. The King and the Priest pay no attention, they send Amos away and within two years, the Assyrian Army destroys Israel. When you use a plumb line, you build up from a starting point, which is one of the four corners of the building. The point of the plumb line rests on this cornerstone point from which all else must be constructed. What is that cornerstone point in this story of Amos? Its the same in Jesus time as it was in Amos : you shall love the Lord with all your hear and all your soul and all your mind, and You shall love your neighbor as yourself Was Jesus the author these words? How many people think they came from Jesus in the Gospels? I hate to break your bubble on this one, but Jesus is merely quoting from the Jewish Law, the Torah. The first passage is from Deuteronomy 6:5, and the second from Leviticus 19:18. By the time of Jesus, all the progressive rabbis in Judea were teaching this was the summary of the Law, and Jesus supports them. In short, he is endorsing the approach. The young lawyer knew that, but, maybe because lawyers like to define and refine, and parse meaning, or maybe because he wanted to make sure there were some limits around his commitment to the Law, he asks Jesus, And just who IS my neighbor? The young lawyer doesnt want this neighbor thing to get too far out of hand. After all, the consequences of who is my neighbor on his time and money commitment could not be open-ended. And then Jesus tells him the most famous parable in the Gospels: The Story of the Good Samaritan. Not only is every human being in society my neighbor, but even the people we dont know or dont like, such as those irritating Samaritans with their impure following of the Law and their failure to worship at the Temple in Jerusalem, they are my neighbor as well. In fact, everyone I encounter is my neighbor. That is not at all what the lawyer wants to hear. The commitment to be righteous, to be on the level before God, to be straight and true, comes at too inconvenient a price. It is an open-ended commitment. And this lawyer

wants to know the limits, the boundaries, the extent for which he is on the hook to God. But Jesus will not let him off. Or let US off. Both of these passages are telling us an inconvenient truth. God is the creator of the world, it is all his world, we are all his creation, and any human in Gods Creation is my neighbor. And, the people who do Gods will are Gods children, and sometimes they look and think and act very different from what we here expect them to be. God, not us, is in control of that plumb line. That I something our founders, John & Charles Wesley, recognized and made a central part of their assemblies. They went to miners, factory workers, prisoners, the people proper English society and the proper Church of England was very uncomfortable with. That is our Methodist heritage, and we should be proud of it today. And we should embrace it and continue it, and in many ways we do. In England, Methodists worked to bring education to the poor through this new invention called Sunday Schools. They worked for prison reform, improved standards of hygiene with radical ideas like free, clean, public water, and they worked for the elimination of child labor. They battled, with others, quite successfully to abolish the slave trade in the Britain Empire a generation before the U.S. did. In America, our record in support of abolition is a lot less positive, and from 1800-1950 we backed away from our commitment to knowing who our neighbor was, especially when they were of a different race. But in the post civil rights era, I challenge you to find a denomination in the U.S. that has done a better, more sincere job of putting clergy into Churches without regard to the pastors color. Finally, right here in Wilmington, the premier organization for working with poor kids in the inner city whose life is moving away from that plumb line, Urban Promise, has a Methodist connection with this parish we all know about. Vicki and I both count Rob Prestowitz a friend, and I list him a true saint of this City of Wilmington. We know from Amos and from Jesus that IS the kind of society God wants us as his followers to establish here on earth. Satan, the accuser, has his hand out there in creating a life not life out of alignment with Gods purposes. We read and hear about it every day in the media. Our job as followers of Jesus is to confront that, both in our personal lives and in society, and get life back on the level. Everyone is my neighbor in Gods creation, and, even though it is often inconvenient and a little too open-ended, and I am Gods representative to them. Amen