Proper 10B July 12, 2015

Amos 7:7-17 and Mark 6:14-29

The prophet Amos, who lived about eight centuries before Christ, had a
vision which we heard described in the reading earlier. In the vision he saw God as
a builder standing at the top of a wall with a plumb line in his hand. Some high
tech builders now use laser beams instead, but many still use plumb lines.
This is a plumb line here. Thats all it isa weight on the end of a string. But
what it tell us whether a wall is straight. Now you might think that all this is a bit
silly surely we can see easily enough whether something is going up straight or
not, but if you look again at the lines on the back of your worship booklet you will
realize that your eyes can play tricks on you. And what is it that tricks you into
seeing it wrong? Its the things around it. If theyre not straight, they distort your
perception.
If you stand next to a wall on level ground with nothing crooked around it,
your naked eye will give you a reasonably good reading of the angle of the wall. But
if you walk into a room where the floor has a bit of a slope, one wall is leaning this
way a bit, one wall is leaning that way a bit and the window is diamond shaped,
youve got very little hope of working out with the naked eye which one is closest to
straight. You may end up picking the most out of line as the only straight one. You
need a plumb line or a spirit level and then you can make a much better judgment
using that reference. A plumb line gives you a measure for a perfectly straight wall.
In this text the result of the Lords measurement is that it is Israel that is out
of plumb and therefore needs to be destroyed. Its high places abandoned,
sanctuaries destroyed, and the Lord himself will rise against the royal house of
Jeroboam with a sword. The historical fulfillment of Amos prophecy occurred in 721
BCE with the fall of the northern Kingdom at the hands of the Assyrians.

The threat of judgment is bound up with the promise of Gods presence. God
has manifested Gods presence in Amos himself. Gods promise in this passage is to
set a plumb line in the midst of the peoplea line that demands judgment of the
wall presently in place, but that promises new construction as plumbed by the line.
This is Amos role in the lives of the people.
Many of the stories we have about Jesus show us Jesus doing a similar
thingholding up the plumb line to the people around him. And in todays gospel
we have an example. Its one of the best known stories, in which John the Baptist is
beheaded due to the resentment held by Herodias, the wife of Johns brother. This
story is also told by a Jewish historian named Josephus. He was advisor to three
Roman emperors and was sympathetic to John the Baptist. John had told Herod
that it was immoral for him to marry his brothers wife. Herodias hated John for
saying that. We are told that Herod liked to listen to John, perhaps because he
recognized that John was telling him the truth about his actions, but Herod was a
weak man. When his daughter Salome danced for his birthday banquet, Herod was
pleased and told her he would give her anything she asked for. She asked her
mother what she should ask for, and her mother said the head of John the Baptist.
So even though Herod was deeply grieved, he didnt have the courage to refuse her.
He sinned against his conscience. The conscience resists any deviation from the
truth. Nevertheless, it is possible to ignore the warnings of your heart, your soul
and your mind until those warnings cease to be heard. Paul tells us in his first
letter to Timothy that sinning against a good conscience leads to spiritual
shipwreck. When that happens we must bring our desires to the Lord in repentance.
The righteousness and justice of Jesus Christ as well as of John the Baptist
can look like some kind of fanaticism when viewed in the midst of the decadence,
greed and hardness of heart in our culture. It is only by constant reference to Jesus
and to the way he looked at things that we can learn to see ourselves and our
surroundings without being deluded into complacency by the distortions all around
us. We do have a plumb line from God. We see it in the lives of John the Baptist

and of Jesus Christ. But there is more. Not only are we being plumbed by Gods
measure, we as children of God are called to be that measure ourselves to the world.
At the beginning of his gospel Mark quotes from the prophet Isaiah: I am sending
my messenger ahead of you, the voice of one crying in the wildness: Prepare the way
of the Lord, make his paths straight. Amen.