July 11, 2010 - Proper 10, Year C (RCL)
Today we move on
in the history of Israel.
Sixty or so years have passed; the time of Elijah and Elisha
is over;
King Ahab, the one whose wife was Jezebel,
was followed by Ahaziah, and Ahazian by Joram,
Joram by Jehi,
Jehi by Jehoahaz,
Jehoahaz by Jehoash, and
Jehoash by Jeroboam.
And all of them
were bad; all of them
were unfaithful
to God.
In the case of Jeroboam,
as kings went, he’d done a reasonable job at first.
He’d restored the borders of Israel,
won back land
that had been lost to the southern kingdom of Judah.
But then, secure and safe,
he, and gradually the whole kingdom
became overly confident.
they became self indulgent, obsessed with luxury;
they thought they were entitled to whatever they wanted
and that included all of the seven deadly sins;
they turned to idols,
and forgot
about God.
The rich got richer
and the poorer got poorer.
And God
got fed up.
It obviously
hadn’t worked, sending professional prophets to guide the kings.
So God decided to do something different.
Prophecy
at the time
was kind of a family business.
Some families
were farmers.
Some families
were tradesmen.
And some families
were prophets.
But kings seemed
to have given up
listening to prophets.
They paid them
no attention.
So this time
God sent someone
who wasn’t a professional prophet,
and wasn’t the son of a prophet.
Instead
he chose a shepherd.
You have to understand
how bizarre this would have seemed.
Shepherds
weren’t exactly the sort of people
who kings listened to.
Shepherds
spent most of their time
out in the fields
with their sheep.
So, as you can imagine, they weren’t exactly known
for their cleanliness,
let alone for elegant attire
suitable for a royal court.
And like shepherding was a fairly lonely job,
which meant they weren’t exactly known
for their eloquence either.
If you were going to choose a prophet
shepherds weren’t high
on the list of likely candidates.
On the other hand,
King David himself,
that greatest of kings,
had been a shepherd,
and we know that it was shepherds
that God first announced the news of Jesus’ birth to,
so shepherds must have something going for them.
This one did, anyway.
Amos the shepherd was chosen
to go speak
on God’s behalf.
And there’s another thing about Amos
that’s worth remembering.
Amos
wasn’t a local.
He came, apparently, not from the northern kingdom of Israel
where he would be sent,
but from down south.
from a small town
about 8 miles from Bethlehem.
A foreigner, a shepherd. Possibly
a spy.
Not exactly someone
who you expect the king to trust, you’d expect the king
to listen to.
God makes some strange choices.
But then, Jeroboam hadn’t exactly been listening
to anyone else.
So perhaps Amos
was worth a try;
perhaps this outsider
would shock the king
into attention.
So Amos showed up in Bethel,
one of the great religious centers of the Old Testament.
The name itself means “House of God.”
It was in Bethel that Jacob had his dream of the ladder to heaven;
later he built an altar there.
The ark of the covenant
was kept there for many years;
it became one of the centers for courts of justice.
But by the time of Amos
idols had been set up.
It had become a center for worship of other gods.
And so it was in the heart of opposition to God
that the prophet of God
was sent to speak.
And there,
he had three visions.
The first
was a plague of locusts,
devouring everything in the land.
But Amos cried out in horror to God.
“Don’t do this! It will destroy the land. Please forgive them.”
And God relented.
And then the second vision,
a shower of fire,
like a volcano or a meteor
wiping out everything.
And again Amos cried out,
“Don’t do this! It will destroy the land. Please forgive them.”
And finally the third vision.
A plumb line.
A simple piece of string
with a weight on the end.
Gravity makes it hang
perfectly vertically
so you can see if something is straight
or a little out of whack.
Amos’ third vision
was God setting a plumb line
in the middle of Israel,
a standard
by which everyone could see
how far the society
had gone astray.
And this time,
Amos didn’t object.
Even though
along with the plumb line,
God spoke words of judgement,
of places of idolatry demolished
and the line of kings
destroyed.
Amos didn’t object,
I suspect,
because this time the judgement
wasn’t just a blanket destruction,
terrorizing good and bad alike.
This time
each person would be measured against the plumb line.
How far astray they had gone
would be known,
and they would pay the penalty.
This time
there would be justice.
Each one getting
what they deserved.
Of course, when Amos passed on this message
to the royal priest,
it didn’t exactly make him
very popular.
In fact,
the priest sent a message to the king
exaggerating Amos’ words,
and a message to Amos,
suggesting rather forcefully
that it might be better for his health
if he were to give up prophesying
and go home to his sheep.
And Amos’ response
was to prophesy judgement
against that priest as well,
and to keep on speaking
in Bethel.
That’s the end of our reading today. It’s not entirely
satisfactory.
We want the end of the story,
or at least
more details about what it was that Israel had done
that was so wrong.
What did the plumb line reveal?
But that will have to wait for next week.
Today,
Let’s stick with the vision of the plumb line,
the things that shows you
what vertical is.
Or in the case of Amos,
what is right.
At that makes me ask,
what sort of plumb line
has God given us,
to help us know
what is wrong
and what is right?
This week in bible study
we read the story of Eve,
and of course, of Adam.
We read how they were created
in the image of God,
and how they ate the fruit
of the one tree
they were told not to eat from.
And that tree was the knowledge
of good and evil.
I have no idea why God didn’t want them to eat it.
You’d think knowing good and evil, or at least good from evil,
would be a good thing.
But perhaps until then
all they knew was good,
and eating
brought evil
into their lives.
Who knows?
But whatever the reason for the prohibition, they ate,
and knew good and evil,
and so it is that we human beings
have what we call a conscience,
that innate sense
of what is wrong
and what is right.
A kind of plumb line.
And then God sent the law.
Remember Moses, up on the mountain,
being presented
with two tablets of stone, and on them
the ten commandments?
And then
a whole host of other laws,
things to help the people
know right from wrong,
to help them
know how to live,
another kind
of plumb line.
And then a few centuries later,
about a hundred years or so
after Amos,
the prophet Jeremiah
came to the people down south in Judah,
and gave them
a new covenant, and God said,
“I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”
Kind of like
a conscience
on steroids.
Another kind
of plumb line.
And finally
the best, most effective plumb line.
Jesus Christ, God come among us.
It’s easy to write off the whole “What would Jesus do?” campaign, with its wristbands and other merchandise
as a kind of somewhat outdated
teenage craze.
But in the end
that’s exactly what we are called to do,
to live as Jesus himself lived, as best we can,
because he’s the best evidence we have
of how God would have us live.
As the apostle Paul wrote in his first letter to the Corinthians,
“Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.”
And that takes us
on one more step forward.
Because as much as we imitate Christ,
the reality is that he lived two thousand years ago,
and we live in a different world.
Sometimes we’re faced with decisions
that just weren’t an issue in Christ's time.
We can’t simply imitate him, because we don’t know
what he would have done.
And so what we do
is we put together
our conscience,
and the principles we find in scripture,
and what we know of Jesus,
and then, most likely
we look at someone we trust,
and see what their response is.
They act
as plumb lines for us.
Which means, in turn,
that we, most likely
act as plumb lines
for other people.
They look to us
to see what God
would have us do.
It’s a little scary, isn’t it?
The idea
that we might be God’s plumb line
for someone else.
And what it does
is calls us to go back to those other plumb lines,
to keep testing ourselves against God’s standards,
and to ask God to work in our lives,
to help us be
as close as we can be
to God’s standards
for what is right.
And knowing that, when we fail,
all we need to do
is turn to God
and God will forgive us,
and God will keep forgiving us
and keep calling us
to live in the image of Christ,
to live as we were created.
© Raewynne J. Whiteley 2010