Sermon 071209
Amos 7:7-15; Ephesians 1:3-14
I read a book this week that really challenged me. It was a book that speaks against all kinds of things going on in society today. I’ll list some topics, and think about what comes to your mind: Self-Righteousness, Deceit, Greed, Oppression of the Poor, Arrogance, Materialism, Heart filled worship of stuff, and Heartless worship of God…
I can’t tell you what you pictured, but there are any number of headline grabbers that would fit, just from the last few days alone. But the book I read was written before last week. In fact, it was written just of 2,700 years ago. It’s author was a guy named Amos. And as far as I can tell, it would be hard to find anything more relevant to our lives in 2009 than what God had him write.
Amos lived at time we can relate to. The recession aside, we have to admit that we have life pretty good. And the people of Israel at Amos’ time would say the same thing. They were rich and growing richer. Powerful, and growing more powerful. Their prestige, and war chest, and power seemed to expanding with no end in sight (just like home prices a few years ago… what could go wrong!)
And success is a great thing! But what the people let it do to them spiritual wasn’t. Instead of growing in thanksgiving with the blessings, they grew spiritually lazy and fell into all kinds of awful messes. They began to be characterized by greed, and smug attitudes, oppression, and all the other stuff we started the sermon with this morning.
And God was justifiably angry with these people. They started worshipping other gods (some idols, some their own success) instead of worshipping their creator God who had actually provided all this success. So God sends his prophet to proclaim his judgment. An outsider, not a professional prophet, or a man from the royal courts, but as Amos says in his own words, a guy who was making a living in the fields: But the LORD took me from following the flock, and the LORD said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’
And what we end up with is book full of red-hot law and judgment. Such a harsh message that even Amos, the messenger, pleads with God not carry out such wrath. The people don’t deserve any kind of mercy, but Amos says, “Lord God, I beg you, stop!” in chapter 7. And God does, 2 times, but finally we get to our lesson; the point at which God doesn’t stop. So there is a message of wrath that runs the length of the book until the last 5 verses, which are among the most stirringly beautiful in the entire Bible.
But our verses are the beginning of the inevitable judgment of God, administered so the people would repent and turn back to Him instead of their wealth and success. We start with the first couple verses of the reading: This is what he showed me: behold, 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.”
The image is of God standing on or beside a perfectly aligned wall with a plumb line in his hand. It’s just a simple construction tool, a string with a weight on it that is held up next to a wall to measure if it is built straight and square. I know about using tools like this because they don’t work in my house. My house has stood in the same place for 91 years, and nothing is square or straight in it. My guess is when I turn 91 people will say the same about me.
But you can see why God would use an image like this concerning his Word and Law. Because plumb lines deal with reality, they don’t mess around with softening results, or making excuses or explanations, they only say that a wall is plumb, or that it isn’t. And God’s Law does the same. It makes no attempt to soften blows on our pride, or accept any excuses, or both with hearing our explanations of our sinful hearts, and minds, and mouths. It has only one verdict: Right-Wrong, Holy-Unholy, Acceptable-Unacceptable.
And we can go about doing all the arguing we want. We can score a perfect 10 in mental gymnastics, we can justify, excuse, or ignore our sin as much as we like. But we can’t change reality. God didn’t pass by the people in Amos’ day and he doesn’t neglect us with the plumb line either: Then the Lord said, Behold, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass by them.
This lesson got me thinking about some football drills I used to do in college. We would line up an offensive lineman against a defensive lineman and at the whistle, the O line guy would try to defend a tackling dummy, and the D line guy would try to hit it. But overhead hanging from a crane was a camera. And no matter how you thought you did, you would find out the next day when you watched the video of your performance with the coaches. The saying about the camera was, “the eye in sky don’t lie.”
And here with God holding up this measure of uprightness, his holiness, and his Law, we could say, “God’s Plumb ain’t dumb.” It speaks! And we could agree with the people Amos spoke to by saying; it doesn’t tell us what we want to hear, just the reality, just the truth. They weren’t happy with the verdict in their time: Then the Lord said, “Behold, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass by them.
We’ll talk about how the people, and the high priest, and the king responded to all this in just a minute, but before we do that, we need to get to the rub of this verse for us. We need to take an honest look at what the reality is in our own lives. The Reality is this; the Plumb line is still around, still making judgments about our sins, still speaking the truth about us and to us. And the truth is, what it has to say isn’t pretty.
It’s not an easy thing to think about. Because it’s not easy to accept that there is a supreme authority in our lives and that supreme authority isn’t you or me. It’s not easy to confront the fact that God has real standards for your life. What is good and bad, right and wrong, what is just and unjust in your life. And often times, we run from this reality and resort to trying to use other measures in our lives. Measures that aren’t so tough, or that leave us some elbow room, or that don’t quite make us feel so accountable for our actions.
You’ve seen in this last week with the coverage of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. He was caught cheating on his wife. But I can’t begin to tell you how many times I heard the word “BUT” in how people talked about it. He cheated BUT, his marriage was in trouble, he truly loved the other woman, he’s not the only one, etc, etc. Much softer and easier than just stating the reality: He sinned, he broke his solemn vows, he fornicated.
But we do similar things when it comes to ourselves. Sometimes we use what I like to call the “speed of traffic argument.” I’m not talking about the freeway (although there may be some sins to confess there) but society. So often we try to find comfort in thinking, “I was only keeping up with everyone else.” We want to use outside forces as the judge of our behavior rather than the word of God. And this leads to a real drift from God’s word as we accept the shifting sands of society’s views on all kinds of things (sexuality, homosexuality, injustice, life issues, wealth, responsibility). It’s just as bad an idea today as it was when Amos spoke against it. You can go the speed of traffic, and you can still drive over the cliff with the traffic too.
The other temptation is to change the measure. We try to use things other than God’s Word to tell us how we’re doing and what to do. It would be like waking up to smoke and a fire alarm blaring and saying, “Boy I’m tired, I don’t want to leave now, so I will go by my alarm clock instead. It’s telling me I have 4 hours yet!” The reality of your sinfulness doesn’t change just because you don’t want to believe God’s word, or because you would rather replace what God has to say with what you want to say about your sin.
The last thing we do is that we try to Judge ourselves by the actions of others rather than according to the Word. This is another bad idea, but we all do it don’t we. Maybe I’m lying, but not as bad as that guy. Maybe I’m stealing, but I’m not Bernie Madoff. I know I Gossip, but psst, you want to know who a REALLY bad gossip is? Maybe I’m lusting, but I’m not hurting anyone. We could do this all day.
All I can say is if you find yourself saying, “at least I’m not as bad as this person” (and I do this too!), is, “GREAT, you just got yourself a first class seat… on the Hindenburg. We’re all going to the same place without God’s grace in our lives. “Oh the Humanity” doesn’t begin to explain the fire and destruction our sins deserve.
So now that I have lifted your spirits, let’s get to the heart of the matter. Answer the question, “So what now?” “What does all this mean for me?” It means that we will respond one of two ways to God when he confronts us with our sins, and it all depends upon how we understand who God is, and how God chooses to relate to us. What the purpose of his Law (the plumb line) is. One response, which after much thought, I have decided to call the WRONG response is to run away from God, or to try and push Him away. This is the kind of thing we see in our lesson from High Priest Amaziah.
Amaziah is made aware of how he has sinned and how all the people and the king had sinned against God. And instead of going to God for help, he tries to go somewhere else for rescue: Then Amaziah the priest of Bethel sent to Jeroboam king of Israel, saying, “Amos has conspired against you in the midst of the house of Israel. The land is not able to bear all his words. For thus Amos has said, “‘Jeroboam shall die by the sword, and Israel must go into exile away from his land.’” Do you ever do that. You do something you can’t bear and instead of going to God, you call a friend who you know will take your side?
And when that doesn’t work for Amaziah, he decides to take another tack. He tries to push God and his word away, to isolate them and their influence in his life. And Amaziah said to Amos, “O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, and eat bread there, and prophesy there, but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom.” We can relate to this too. There are parts of our life we want to apply God’s Word to, and other areas we don’t want to meet God’s Word and Law. It’s true for each of us in this sanctuary.
The thing these two responses have in common is that they understand God’s Law, his Judgment to be only a burden, or as a means of burden can captivity and obligation. That’s not why God gives us is Law.
God’s Law, for as much as it hurts sometimes, for as much as it challenges us, and makes us uncomfortable, and aware of our sinfulness, is a great gift from our Loving Father. This is the root of what I will call the RIGHT response to God’s Law. God makes us aware of sin for one reason and one reason only, that we can go to the one who holds the plumb line to be made right. That we can go to Jesus who lived a perfect life and died on the cross for us. That we can trade in our sinfulness, and unholiness, and crookedness, and receive perfection of Jesus merited to us in its place.
In short, God gives us his Law in order to make us turn to the Gospel, to repent and return to his Grace, and Forgiveness, and Unmerited Love. God never calls us out on our sin to separate himself from us, but in order to make us aware of our distress our drowning, and to turn to Him for help and a lifeline. He loves you that much. He loves you so much that there is never a point at which you can’t turn back to him, and He’ll be right there to welcome you home. Even that is a gift from God, the Holy Spirit working in your life in your darkest moments.
I want to encourage you this morning. I want to remind you of who God is and what he has done for you. I want you to have every confidence that God is working in your life, even as you feel the tug of the Law on your hearts and minds. And there are such beautiful statements about God’s love and grace in our Ephesians reading today: In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us.
This is the blessing that we have Brothers and Sisters. That for as much as we can’t run from the truth of God’s Plumb line, we also can’t every outrun God’s grace. And that because of Christ’s death for your sins, you have been made, as Ephesians says, Holy and blameless before him. God’s Plumb ain’t dumb. But in God’s grace it has something new to say about you. No matter how wrong you have been, as repentant sinners, you have been made right to God.
AMEN
