July 11 Proper 10
Among all the wonderful photographs from a mission trip to Kenya from my college days—pictures of the Great Rift Valley, pictures of the little public transport trucks called ‘mutatus’ into which dozens of riders seemed to pile, hanging from the windows and standing on the bumpers, pictures of the severe beauty of the Pokot people we worked with in the bush country—among all those photographs oddly enough the one that stands out in my memory is of my friend Brian laying a brick.
He’s using a plumb line, which doesn’t sound like it would make the picture any more memorable. Masons have been using plumb lines since long before the prophet Amos’s time. But Brian was using the tool on a single concrete block. He was squatted down, grimacing and sincere, making this first block of the wall just so for the camera.
Now, you don’t have to be a master mason to understand that a plumb line wasn’t made to be used on individual bricks. Plumb lines are made for walls. Brian’s concrete block was 8” tall. Which means that after subtracting the brass weight at the end of the string as well as an inch or so to let the thing swing freely, Brian was left with a length of string about the length of his finger to check his work with. Using a plumb line on a single brick is a little like using the odometer in your car to measure the width of your driveway. Great tool. Wrong job.
Brian was caught in a photograph using a tool in a ridiculous way. This makes for slow masonry work. But how often are we Christians caught using our faith, or describing our faith in much the same way? Faith is a personal matter, we’re told. But seeing the Christian faith as a means to private goodness rather than a common good might just be as wrongheaded as using a plumb bob on a brick.
In Amos’s vision at least one thing is clear: God knows more about the proper use of tools than Brian. God is standing next to a wall built with a plumb line, and God is using a plumb line to see if that wall is still standing up straight.
Then God tells Amos that a plumb line will be set in the midst of Israel. It’s an image that suggests this judgment isn’t doled out in individual portions. God didn’t have the people line up and step up to the string one at a time to see how upright they each were. No, the line was set up in the midst of the community. Plumb lines are for seeing whether the whole is being properly made.
Amos’s vision is actually the third part of a conversation he’s been having with God. First God is going to send locusts to devour fields. But Amos pleads for mercy, and God relents. Then God is going to send a shower of fire from the sky. But Amos pleads for mercy, and God relents. Then Amos sees his vision of God with the plumb line, and God says, I’m not going to pass by this time.
There’s an important difference in these judgment scenes. The first two are of terrible forces—locusts and fire—that God was going to send on Israel. But the third, the real one, the judgment that the little prophetic ping pong match between Amos and God was always supposed to lead up to, the third scene of judgment is about showing the truth of what Israel had become. That’s what plumb lines do. They judge by showing us what is.
So apparently, God’s judgment on this community was really about showing them something wrong in their common life, perhaps exposing a destructive force that was already in their midst. And here’s the problem. There are people in Israel who (as we read a chapter earlier in Amos) “lie on beds of ivory, and lounge on their couches…who drink wine from bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph. Therefore they shall now be the first to go into exile.”
The judgment is on a culture whose people care only for their own wealth and power, and have lost a commitment to the common good. They are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph, over the misfortune of the little people in Israel. Why should they? Their own ivory beds are still intact.
Now, I’d like to take a step away from the Amos story and go back a bit further in Israel’s history. Curiously, Amos refers to the Hebrew people as “Joseph” rather than “Israel” or “Judah” as we’re accustomed. Remember the supposedly happy ending in the story of Joseph? He’s the youngest son of Jacob who is sold into slavery by his jealous brothers. But eventually he wins Pharaoh’s favor, interpreting his dreams and saving the life of his family by bringing them to Egypt. And they all had enough to eat in Egypt because Joseph had helped Pharaoh take control of the known world’s food supply.
It sounds like a happily ever after. But Old Testament scholar Walter Bruggemann reminds us that the story of Joseph in Egypt is really the beginning of the story of how Israel found themselves enslaved and in exile. And Bruggemann says that a very basic set of choices about how to live was emerging at this moment in the Old Testament. The way of Pharaoh was about finding security through wealth and control. Buy more grain. Store it up in bigger barns, Joseph told him. Which meant Pharaoh was also plagued by the fear of losing his wealth and power and control. Remember those anxious dreams?
But eventually Moses would lead Israel out of Pharaoh’s land and towards a different way of life. A way of life shaped by the covenant between God and Israel at Mt. Sinai. On the way to Sinai, there’s another telling food story. Israel is given manna, food which cannot be stored or hoarded like Pharaoh and Joseph did so carefully. Manna lasts only a day, then it’s spoiled. Israel is forced to trust God’s provision of manna each day rather than their own cleverness in cornering the manna market. They are being prepared for a common life shaped by the covenant, by the Torah.
Bruggemann insists that the ongoing struggle for the rest of the Bible is between two ways of living. One way was akin to Pharaoh’s anxious, fearful work to amass wealth and power for himself as a means of security. And the other way of life was according to the covenant at Sinai. A covenant that was about attention to the common good rather than the possession of wealth and power by the few.
Amos, Bruggemann says, is but another prophet in another time telling Israel that they have strayed again from covenant life. Israel’s powerful elite are lying comfortably on their beds of ivory, drinking wine from bowls, but they have not grieved over the ruin of Joseph. They have lost sight of Israel’s common good. God sets up a plumb line in the midst of the people showing them that their common life is not leading to justice. The poor are being forgotten. Judgment is coming.
Over and over and over again this story plays out in scripture. From Joseph to Moses and the exodus to the kingdoms of Saul and David and the tragic end of Solomon; from the exile in Babylon and the prophecies of Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Amos, the story is the same. And the story, the prophetic call back to the life God intended is still playing out centuries later when that lawyer asked Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” The answer, once again, was simple. Keep the covenant. Which boils down to loving God and loving our neighbor. And our neighbor, Jesus teaches, is simply anyone who needs our help. If we lose sight of our common life, we’re doomed.
Amos’s vision is as relevant as ever. We’re the wealthiest nation the world has ever known. And we spend almost seven times as much as number two China does on military defense. We’ve got more of everything, but it seems like the more we have, the more anxious we become about losing it all, or losing enough to be something less than the most powerful people in the world. If there’s a single moment in all of the Bible that suggests that Christians should live according to such hopes and values, I have yet to stumble upon it.
Amos’s plumb line is set in the midst of us still, and it still provides a standard for the people of God to look towards and to help us form a different kind of community. The church is still called to be a community of the common good, not personal gain. A community whose faith is not in unfettered self interest, fueled by fear, but a manna fed community, a Eucharistic community, a community of gratitude whose dependence is upon God’s grace and whose attention is always on the common good.
Which means that it’s time to trade Brian’s plumb line for Amos’s. Using the Christian faith only as a measure of personal uprightness, believing that our best shot at wholeness and happiness and righteousness is to each attend only to our own lives is a sad foolish use of a wonderful tool. If we’ve been seduced into Pharaoh’s way, if we’re each crouched down, attending to our personal plumb lines, setting the little bricks of our own lives, the first step towards a different way may be simply listening to Jesus’ call to look up. To look up at least enough to see the neighbor in need on the far side of the road. To look up not as proof of our personal virtue, but as the first small step on a journey to the common good. Amen.