Sermon Archive

"Plumb Line", Amos 7:7-15

Date: July 12, 2009, The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
Author: The Rev. Dr. James D. Kegel

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GRACE TO YOU AND PEACE FROM GOD OUR FATHER AND THE LORD AND SAVIOR JESUS CHRIST, AMEN.
            In the chapel of a congregations I once served there were stained glass windows representing the prophets. We had an Isaiah window showing tongs holding a burning coal, one for Ezekiel with a wheel and four creatures and one for Amos showing a wall and a plumb line. The last powerful image comes from today’s text. God is showing the prophet Amos a vision of a wall of dressed stone and God is holding a plumb line to show that the wall is no longer straight but off kilter. The Lord asks Amos what he sees and when he answers, the Lord explains the vision: “See I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel, I will never again pass them by, the high places of Isaac shall be made desolate and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with a sword.” Amos had already seen two visions of the destruction of the northern kingdom, Israel, but God had relented and given more time for Israel to repent and return to their God. Now the time for repentance was over. God had decided no longer to pass them by. The judgment was coming and the royal house, the religious sites and sanctuaries would be destroyed.
            The setting of our text is Bethel, one of the royal sanctuaries that the first King Jeroboam had set up in competition with the Temple in Jerusalem. Bethel had long been considered a holy place, the site of Jacob’s vision of the ladder from heaven to earth, the site of the tabernacle in the time of the judges and even the name translates as “house of God.” Next to Jerusalem itself, Bethel is the most named place in the Bible. The sanctuary at Bethel was the chief religious site in the northern kingdom with its own cadre of professional priests and prophets. I have never visited Bethel and I am not sure that there is much to see there. The other temple site built by King Jeroboam has been restored and I visited Dan in the far north. There are actually two major archaeological sites at Tel Dan—one is the Canaanite city of Laish dating back to the Bronze Age and an Israelite city with ruins dating to the time of King Solomon and Kings Omri and Ahab just before the time of the prophet Amos. Both sites are very interesting. The Canaanite city has an arched gate built in the 18th century B.C. of sun-dried bricks that had been covered with white plaster. It is common knowledge that the arch was invented by the Romans but this gate was built fifteen hundred years before. It is the only such city gate to have survived from the time. The Israelite city also includes a city gate and near it a platform of five flat stones which was likely the “high place” of the city. There is also a cultic center with a horned altar on which sacrifices could have been made and a place in which a golden calf was placed. King Jeroboam, when he led the north to secede, placed these graven images in Dan and Bethel and proclaimed to the people of Israel that these idols were the gods who had brought the people out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. It was an act that God would never forgive—substituting the calf of Egypt for the Holy One of Israel. When I visited Tel Dan, I found an interesting difference in construction from the Canaanite period and the later Israelite period. The Canaanites built of mud brick or stones from the field; the structures built by Omri and Ahab were of dressed stone.       It is a wall of dressed stone that God stands by in the vision to the prophet Amos.   
            The image of God’s plumb line is both comforting and challenging—and if we were doing an in-depth Bible study on this passage we would also find it confusing. The Hebrew word anak is translated as both wall and plumb line and yet no one really knows what the word means. The closest anyone has come is something made out of tin so maybe it is a plumb bob out of tin. God’s judgment is both challenging and comforting.  If God does the judging then it is not we who judge ourselves either harshly or indulgently. The opinions of other people do not matter so much—it is God who judges and justifies us in Jesus Christ, who is to condemn? We do not need concern ourselves overmuch with the opinions of other people. The plumb line of God against out walls shows that we are all of us sinners. We are all of us off plumb. No one is righteous, no not one. But if no one can save themselves by their goodness, their knowledge, their education or effort, then we are free to accept God’s grace in Jesus Christ. We are saved not in virtue of anything in ourselves but by God’s great love and mercy. This is the message of the prophets—God’s judgment upon sinful Israel and Judah but also God’s mercy beyond judgment. God punishes wickedness and visits iniquity even to the third and fourth generation of those who are faithless, but shows mercy to thousands who love and serve God. God’s alien work is to judge and destroy those who turn away from God to sin but God’s proper work is to forgive those who are penitent and restore those who are fallen.
            The message of Amos is clear: it is God who is in charge and not human authority. There is an interlude in the list of visions—an encounter in our text between Amaziah the priest of Bethel and the prophet. There is a political dimension here. Amos was not a professional prophet but was a shepherd and a dresser of sycamore trees. He was speaking God’s Word in Bethel but he originally came from Tekoa, a village near Bethlehem in the southern kingdom of Judah. He was a foreigner called to another land by God. Amaziah was the professional, appointed by King Jeroboam to oversee the official sanctuary at Bethel. It was Amaziah who sent to Jeroboam and informed the king that Amos was preaching against his throne—“Jeroboam shall die by the sword and Israel must go into exile away from his land.” It was not exactly what Amos was preaching because God would destroy the house of Jeroboam but would let the king himself serve out his days but within thirty years the prophecy would occur—the northern kingdom destroyed, the house of Jeroboam eliminated and the people taken into exile to vanish from the historical record. Amaziah told Amos to leave, go to Judah and prophesy there. He could earn his bread as a prophet but not in the northern kingdom at the sanctuary of Bethel. But Amos told the priest that he was no prophet, nor a prophet’s son. He was not preaching to earn a living. His authority did not come from religious authorities but directly from God.
            This message is also comforting and challenging. The challenge comes to those of us who have spent years studying in church college and seminary to earn a credential and be ordained. It is a challenge to Lutherans who confess with the Augsburg Confession that nobody should publicly teach or preach or administer the sacraments in the church without a regular call—and the Latin of this is Rite Vocatus, the rite of vocation or ordination. In the Lutheran Church no one may publicly teach or preach or administer the sacraments without being an ordained pastor and no one may become an ordained pastor without a congregational call and no one may be called to a congregation without the approval of the bishop. For the sake of order in the church we have stressed the external call from a congregation and the ritual setting apart through ordination.  While there is comfort to congregations to know that pastors have been trained and vetted and publicly approved, the challenge that comes to pastors and congregations is being open to the call of God and not just ecclesiastical authority. Amaziah had the right credentials but Amos had God’s own call to preach. Amaziah told Amos he should leave Bethel and not prophesy but the Lord God had told him to prophesy: “Go, prophesy to my people Israel.” There may be times when following the denomination is the safe thing, doing things they way they have always been done may upset no one. Hearing a new word or a clear word of God may make us prefer an Amaziah or drive us to send the Amos away.
            But remember the plumb line. God is judging us and saving us. We are being called to repent and turn away from sin and back to God. The times of Jeroboam were prosperous; the people were at ease on their couches of ivory and singing their songs to the lyre and harp. The people honored God with their lips but their hearts were far away from God. Too often it is that way for us as well for us as individuals who go after our own ways rather than be disciples of the Lord. It may be true of congregations not listening for the word of the Lord to repent and be renewed. The time may come when God will no longer pass us by, when the word of judgment comes to us. We pray for the word of mercy and forgiveness and the strength for new life. Amen.

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