About 17 years ago, my wife and I bought a house in rural North Carolina. The house which was built in 1940 came with a fair amount of land, had been vacant for 3 years and was definitely a fixer upper. As we were able, we made repairs and upgrades and did most of the work ourselves. I learned a lot, moving from room to room, wall to wall floor to floor. Some of the wall floor and ceiling coverings concealed the fact that the house used to be divided in different ways. As we peeled back floor coverings we got to see what the past five floors looked like. As we scraped walls or removed drywall or paneling we got to go back in time also. We finally got to work on the kitchen and living room. Floor joists needed to be replaced so I cut out the entire living room floor and fixed it, then came the kitchen. We were excited to have an opportunity to relocate the appliances and lighting and actually have more than one outlet in the kitchen, but my first focus was the floor. It’s important to work from the ground up to get things right. Here was the thing. In that kitchen, if you dropped a liquid on the floor, which can happen quite a bit in a kitchen, you had to go to the other side of the room to clean it up and then work your way back to where the spill occurred. I would say that I wasn’t sure if the house had “settled” over the years or if it’s construction was a little off, that is, I would say that but I took out the floor and was able to analyze the whole room. There were a few things off with the original construction. Don’t get me wrong, the house was very sturdy and not complicated by modern truss systems. The house was easy to work on for those reasons, but it did have it’s quirks. I’ve done professional woodworking and pipe organ construction over the years, but the real secret for parts of the work was having a fantastic neighbor that was a carpenter and who was willing to share some trade knowledge with me. When I was trying to analyze the room, he said, hold on, I’m gonna let you borrow something that’s going to make your life a whole lot easier. He went home and came back with a telescoping tripod and a small box. The box held a gimbaled laser level and plumb line projector. That means if you set it down or put it on a tripod and turn it on, that it will project a line perfectly horizontal to the earth and vertical to the earth. This allows you to do quite a few things easily and correctly. Make floors flat and level, make walls that doors and windows will work in and that will support weight safely and appropriately. Have counters that round objects won’t roll off of and will match up with corners and ceilings, just to name a few. In construction, you have to start from the bottom, level, and each addition must be level or vertical unless other construction or engineering principles are applied like those used to have sloped roofs or arches. So I built a flat and level floor where you could spill milk and bend over right there and wipe it up. The way that I knew there was a fault in the original construction, and that the builders had relied more on assumptions than on plumb bobs and bubble levels, the precursors to the laser level, was the errors of the floor had transmitted to the ceiling. For the cabinets to be level, there would be a gap at one end of the room between the cabinets and the ceiling. In construction or woodworking, like so many professions or crafts, errors tend to compound themselves. Amos, the prophet in our first lesson for today, would have been truly envious of my neighbor’s laser level, and that wasn’t even his expensive work one. Plumb bobs or plumb lines were strings with a weight tied to one end. You would then suspend the string and weight from a fixed point at the wall you want to construct. The string will hang vertical to the ground and will allow you to see what is called true. Brickmasons can only lay so many courses or rows of brick at a time to allow mortar to dry so that the courses won’t start to lean and veer off vertical or true. If you’ve ever laid brick, or stacked childrens’ blocks or books, I’m sure you’ve noticed how important it is to keep things lined up and vertical. When you are stacking objects, it’s easy to accidentally start favoring one side. When that happens, as the stack gets higher it becomes more and more likely that the stack will fall over as the stack gets more and more out of plumb and physics and gravity will just take over no matter how grand you want your block tower to be. All the little imperfections in each block try to steer the stack off course, that is why watching the plumb line is critical. So Amos is using a pretty cool metaphor here. When things aren’t done correctly on a construction site, pieces have to be torn down and done over because each block, each wall, each corner affects the whole structure, and Amos uses the plumb line metaphor where God is watching the building of the kingdom against the line that is true. True walls will be stable. True walls do not lean or waver to and fro as they are built upward. True walls can bear great weight because they are true. Have you ever seen the physics demonstration or just a generally cool thing where you can stand on an empty soda can and it does not crush or collapse, that is until one side gets out of vertical? God desires a strong kingdom, one that is built true and just, and as it is built cannot veer over or favor one side, lest it be out of plumb and Amos is offering a wonderful illustration of God plumb lining our efforts, society, culture and churches. The prophets of the Bible do have a common theme. We can see a very similar metaphor in Isaiah. That prophet wrote, “A voice of one calling: “Prepare the way for the LORD in the wilderness; make a straight highway for our God in the desert. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill made low; the uneven ground will become smooth, and the rugged land a plain. And the glory of the LORD will be revealed, and all humanity together will see it. For the mouth of the LORD has spoken.” The Gospel of Matthew points out that this was exactly what John the Baptist was doing and we see what fell John in our Gospel for today. The theme of the prophets point toward God’s displeasure with God’s people favoring the powerful and veering from plumb and creating those of the mountain and those of the valley. Israel’s prophets frequently spoke out on behalf of the poor. They explicitly called both rulers and citizens to uphold the cause of the poor and needy, or what Nicholas Wolterstorff first called the Quartet of the Vulnerable. Jeremiah Zecheriah, Isaiah, Micah, Amos, Habakkuk, Zephaniah all take up this issue and many warn of accountability and the structure effectively collapsing if not corrected. John the Baptist and then Jesus carry on this message. The quartet of the vulnerable are the widow or the orphan, the immigrant and the poor are those the prophets list as those oppressed in the system. We also see Jesus’ concern for the marginalized and outcasts and an omnipresent pushback by those who benefit from those who benefit from a system that takes advantage of those in the vulnerable groups. We see Amos trying to deliver a warning and the priest who wishes to maintain favor with the powerful, seeks to silence him. In the Gospel we see a king making extravagant promises and boasts in order to impress courtesans at a party reluctantly having John the Baptist executed instead of backing away from his boasts. Through the words of the prophets and Jesus we see the building behind the plumbline wavering and leaning from injustice, excess and greed. We must forever be aware that there is a plumbline and hear the warning in Amos that the church can become complicit to some pretty shoddy building in God’s kingdom. Pastor and Professor Matt Skinner suggests, “A more fruitful approach to this passage might address the claims that Christian prophecy makes to those who occupy positions of power (whether it be political, commercial, or social power). How do the privileges and self-preserving impulses of power prompt all of us to disregard prophetic words that call us to account through their demands for righteousness and justice? Do our desires to hold and wield power, even for benevolent purposes, lead us to presume that we are exempt from certain requirements of living in light of the gospel?” End quote. We must look to the example of Jesus in contrast to King Herod as our example for building the kingdom of God. Herod’s feast was self-centered, lavish and reckless and led to the death of God’s messenger while Jesus in the very next passage goes to a multitude away from the spotlight into the wilderness and selflessly feeds a large crowd of nobodies and instead of taking life to maintain control, power and prestige, Jesus offered his life on the cross for the life of the world.
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