Amos, What Do You See?

Scripture Lessons: Colossians 1: 1-14 and Amos 7: 7-17 Sermon Title: Amos, What Do You See? Preached on July 14, 2019 Scripture is full of wonderful metaphors. When God speaks through Scripture, we hear the divine speak in terms that we can understand, which is gracious in and of itself. God, who could so easily speak over our heads, is unlike those who use 50 cent words to make themselves sound intelligent, and instead, speaks to us of heavenly things using what we know about already. You can think of Jesus saying that God’s love for us, who are sinful and disobedient, is like that of a Father who welcomes his prodigal son back home or a woman who loses her fortune and then finds it again. Rather than using words like “predestination” or “limited atonement,” Jesus just says: faith is like a mustard seed. Then Paul says that the world is like a woman in labor, we suffer because new life is coming. Likewise, in our Second Scripture Lesson, God, through the prophet Amos, uses something that we know: a plumb line, to explain something that we don’t know or don’t fully understand, the importance of righteous judgement. Judgement is hard to understand, mostly because we don’t like it. No one likes the sound of judgement. Certainly, I don’t, but to explain God’s righteous judgement using the metaphor of a plumb line makes it a little bit better, because this metaphor helps us to see that life lived outside certain standards of behavior is like living in a house with a crooked wall. Sooner or later, it’s going to fall down, and what will hurt worse than fixing the wall is it falling down on us. That’s what a plumb line is for. A plumb line is basically just a weight with a string tied to it. When the weight is suspended it can show you a straight line up and down. I know you use it as a reference, though I’ve never actually used one. You can tell I haven’t by looking at anything that I’ve ever built, but I frequently used something like it in Mexico. Our church still goes to Mexico for mission trips. When I was in High School, we drove to either Monterey or Juarez in the old bus we called Woody (may he rest in peace) and there we’d stack cinderblocks to build houses. Due to our inexperience with stacking cinderblocks, brick lines were used to make sure that we stacked those blocks in straight lines to build a sturdy house for a family to live in. A Brick line is something like a plumb line. One hooks a wooden block on two corners, the string that stretches between provides a straight horizontal line to stack the cinderblocks according to. A plumb line does the same thing, it just gives you a straight vertical line. The brick line was the most important tool of the person we called, a “house builder.” That person was like the guy who holds the clipboard on a road maintenance crew. I loved these trips to Mexico so much that even after I was a high school student, I kept going back as a college student and was then promoted to this role of “house builder”. This was a big title, and my primary role was checking on all the brick lines. However, I wasn’t very good at it. In fact, the group of High School students stacking blocks got ahead of me. They had the whole back wall of our house stacked before I had had a chance to check their lines. This wall was bowed out so far, I didn’t know what to do, so I chose to just look the other way. My friend Dave Elliot was the other house builder, and if I took the wall down, he’d be way ahead of me. I didn’t want that, so I just kept going with one unstable wall to this four walled house. If that sounds like a horribly immature and irresponsible decision, that’s because it was. I hope you’ve never done anything like that, but it’s hard to know what to do sometimes when things are out of whack. It’s hard to know how to fix some things. There are times in life when we live in denial of problems that we’re afraid of dealing with. God doesn’t like it when we do that. Why? Because God cares as much about the family who’s going to live in the house as he does about the group whose building it and the college kid who’s overseeing it. Fortunately, God knows that sometimes we get caught up in the maintenance of our own ego and fail to face the truth of who we are and what we’re doing, and so, God sends righteous prophets, like Amos, to warn us of the results of our bad behavior. Our Second Scripture Lesson began this way: The Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand. And the Lord said to me, “Amos, what do you see?” And I said, “A plumb line.” Then the Lord said, “See, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass them by; The high places shall be made desolate, And the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste, And I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword.” The walls of the house of Israel are crooked, and God is going to tear them down to build them up again. That’s a terrifying idea, but what’s more terrifying to God is allowing his people to live in a house with crooked walls any longer. Can you imagine what it would have been like for this family to move into the house that I was building them in Mexico? Three straight walls, one crooked. I might have said something like, “Three out of four ain’t bad.” To which the mother would have said, “I’m not sleeping in this house. I’m not letting our children sleep in this house.” Fortunately for the family who lived in that house, and fortunately for the reputation of our church in Mexico, the guy who was supervising me came by to check the walls and made us take that wall all the way down to build it back up again. Dave Elliot’s house ended up being finished way ahead of mine, but it feels better to do the job right. Doesn’t it? It feels better to live a righteous life, according to God’s standards of justice. It’s best to live in a society where the poor and the voiceless are provided for. It’s best to live constructing walls for the wellbeing of all God’s children. What the book of Amos reminds us of is that God cares about all His other children as much as he cares about us, so God sends prophets who call us to tear down the crooked walls that we build which abuse the poor and the widow. And should we fail to listen, God tears them down himself. That’s sad in a way, but necessary, because sometimes we don’t listen. And sometimes we don’t listen because Amos isn’t the only one speaking. After Amos declared that the Lord is “setting a plumb line in the midst” of Israel, Amaziah, the priest said to Amos, “O seer, go, flee away…never again prophesy [here].” Why? Why would Amaziah say this? Because some people can’t handle the truth and don’t want anyone else to have to handle it either. Amos speaks an inconvenient truth. But the truth is inconvenient to some people. It always is! Some people benefit from crooked walls and are afraid of how it will look if one has to be torn down on their watch. Our society is not very forgiving of people who make mistakes, so rather than apologize we deny. Rather than start over, we cover up. The King of Israel is probably thinking about how he’ll be portrayed by his biographers and if he’s keeping up with the King of Aram, so as both Amos the Prophet and Amaziah the Priest are attempting to influence the King of Israel, Jeroboam, the king, must decide who he’ll listen to. That’s how it often is. The King is a lot like all of us. He’s glad to sweep things under the rug, which is wrong. However, under the right kind of pressure he’d stop. With enough grace and encouragement, he would change and would act right. Unfortunately, though, Amaziah is there silencing Amos the Prophet and justifying the King’s bad behavior. I wonder if you have a friend who’s like Amaziah. Whenever you call, she’s on your side. After talking with her you don’t feel so bad or so alone. I have friends like that. I have friends whom I call whenever I want to complain about anything, and no matter what it is, they’re ready to commiserate and slander whoever has been trying to correct my bad behavior. Then, once I’m ready to hear the truth I go talk to my wife Sara. We need people who love us enough to tell us the truth. If we’re lucky, then we’re lucky enough to have friends who love us and support us. So, I hope you have a friend, who loves you so much that most of the time she just listens, but who some of the time, loves you so much she can’t help but tell you when you’re being irresponsible and immature; that your crooked walls of behavior are about to collapse on top of the people you love. That’s why I don’t like it when the President talks about “fake news.” I know the press is hard on him, and I know they don’t get it right all the time, but I also know that while evil can be at work in those who stand in our way, sometimes the evil we must fear the most is the one who cheers us on while we’re running in the wrong direction. We can’t just silence the prophets. Crooked walls have to come down and there are times in our lives when God sends people who say hard things because He loves us enough to tell us the truth. And if we just brush off the prophets, the crooked walls will stay, then fall, when we could have fixed them. God holds a plumb line, that the crooked walls of society be rebuilt before they teeter and collapse on the desperate and the disenfranchised. God holds the plumb line up to our own behavior, because God cares for those who suffer under the crooked walls that we build. You see, God isn’t the housing inspector who walks around searching for code violations just to wield power. That’s not what God’s righteous judgement is. For our God is about rescuing us all from darkness. Even the darkness of our own making. And what is God’s will? That you and I and all God’s children have a house of four straight walls to live in. Amos’ great vision was that “justice roll down like water, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” May it be so. Amen.