The Plumb Line and the Wall (Proper 10B Hebrew Scripture lesson)

 

The Plumb Line and the Wall

Proper 10B
15 July 2015; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

Amos 7:7-15; Psalm 85:8-13; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:14-29

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

When I was on pilgrimage to the Holy Land a couple of months ago, we had to cross the security barrier between the State of Israel and Israeli-controlled Palestine six times.   The barrier is stark—in places, an eight-meter tall wall topped with razor wire.  On the Palestinian side, there is ample graffiti: “Mr. Netanyahu, tear down this wall,” “Make hummus not walls,” and a dove of peace in an armored flak jacket.    

Those who built the wall say that it is a necessary evil, keeping terrorists from the West Bank out of Israeli marketplaces, synagogues, and schools where they might detonate the bombs that were increasingly seen in the Second Intifada.  People on the Palestinian side, as well as human rights activists in Israel proper, see the wall as an inhuman bottling up of the population, holding people’s jobs and livelihoods hostage to whims of immigration and security officials, a surreptitious way to steal land and neighborhoods from Palestinians and turn them into settlements of Israeli right-wingers and small fanatical Jewish sects.  

The barrier reminded me of other walls:  the one in Berlin before 1989 that kept an unwilling population from leaving to freedom in the west, and the one currently on the Southern U.S. border trying to keep people without documents from entering the country from Mexico.   All of these walls had or have perfectly reasonable and right reasons that demanded them:  national security and prosperity, maintaining the kind of nation the builders hoped to keep, perhaps even humanely preventing tragedy and suffering.  But those kept in or out by the walls never seem to be able to see it quite in the same way.  

 

Today’s Hebrew Scripture lesson contains a vision of a wall, that symbol of stability and protected prosperity to its builders.   This vision to Amos takes place at a time that the Northern Kingdom of Israel or Samaria is a separate country from the Southern Kingdom of Judah.   Israel/Samaria is ruled by king Jeroboam II, whose successful 41-year reign (786–746 BCE) is marked by territorial expansion, an aggressive and military-based foreign policy, and unprecedented economic prosperity.  Times are good, or so people think. People think the good times are a blessing from God.  They are devout in their religious observance, centered at the state-sponsored shrine in Bethel.  Religious leaders there teach a religiosity that supports the King and the prosperity he has brought about.

It is in this setting that Amos preaches his vision of the wall (here in the Jewish Publication Society translation): 

“This is what [the Lord God] showed me: He was standing on a wall checked with a plumb line.  And the Lord asked me, ‘What do you see, Amos?” ‘A plumb line,’ I replied.” 

The image is known to people who have done any building: to determine the true vertical and make sure the construction is not leaning, we hang next to it a line attached a weight, sometimes of lead, thus the name “plumb” line. 

“And the Lord declared, ‘I am going to apply a plumb line to My people Israel; I will pardon them no more.  The shrines of Isaac shall be laid waste, and the sanctuaries of Israel reduced to ruins; and I will turn upon the House of Jeroboam with the sword.’” 

The vision says Israel/Samaria has gone astray.  Their wall is no longer true, no longer vertical.  God will apply a plumb line to show how far they are from true, and destruction will follow.  

The prophecies of Amos blast the injustice of Israelite society—such things as bribery, slavery, extortionate lending and prostitution: 

“Thus says the Lord:

For three transgressions of Israel,

For four, I will not revoke it:

Because they have sold for silver

Those whose cause was just,

And the needy for a pair of sandals. 

[Ah,] you who trample the heads of the poor

Into the dust of the ground,

And make the humble walk a twisted course. 

Father and son go to the same girl,

And thereby profane My holy name.

They recline by every altar

On garments taken in pledge [for loans],

And drink in the House of their God

Wine bought with fines they imposed.…

They store up lawlessness and rapine

In their fortresses…

…who defraud the poor,

Who rob the needy” (2:6-8; 3:10; 4:1). 

Amos condemns how Israel’s religion gets in the way of truth:

“I raised up prophets from among your sons

And nazirites [vowed religious] from among your young men. …

But you made the nazirites drink wine [in violation of their vows]

And ordered the prophets not to prophesy” (2:11-12) 

Amos says the religion of Israel/Samaria is a sham.  Believing their prosperity is a blessing from God, they blame the poor for their poverty, only getting what they deserve.   For all their religion, their faith is in a god of personal wealth and pleasure, not in Yahweh, the protector of the widow and the orphan, defender of the needy, the alien, and the stranger.    Their religion is a sham, an excuse for ignoring the needs of others.  And their religious leaders are complicit in suppressing any criticism of the system, any hint of guilt at oppression.

What you have to remember about Amos is this:  he is not from Israel/Samaria.  Amos is a blue-collar kid from the Southern Kingdom of Judah, an agricultural worker from the hick village of Tekoa.  He is sent to preach his call to repentance, not to his own people, the Judahites, but to the people north of the border, the Israelites. 

Sound familiar?  The religious authorities in Beth-el support their government, their national traditions, and are part of the controlling elites.  This Amos is a migrant laborer from South of the Border, unwelcome and looked down on. 

Amos says Israel’s prosperity is based on oppression and abuse of the poor.  The injustice at the heart of it all will bring a cursing, not a blessing: foreign powers will come and destroy the nation.  Yahweh, the great turner of tables, will destroy the crooked wall so that he can build anew.

Such a message is unpatriotic, even subversive.  And so Amaziah, the priest of Beth-el, the King’s own chaplain as it were, intervenes.  He is going to let this alien subversive know what it means to be told not to prophesy! 

Amaziah says: “Soothsayer! Why don’t you just go back from where you came, you foreigner, back to Judah!  Try earning your living there with your ‘prophesying’.  But don’t you dare do it here at Beth-el. This is a king’s sanctuary and a royal palace! Love it or leave it!” 

Amos replies, “Well, I’m not really a prophet, if you want to put it that way, and certainly don’t have a union card!  I am just a migrant farm laborer.  But it was Yahweh who forced me out of that line of work and from my home country by ordering me here to give his word to the people of Israel.” 

Then, in the verses that follow today’s lectionary reading, Amos makes it very personal.  Instead of a general prophesy of doom for Israel, the unjust land, he says that Amaziah will himself lose everything:  “Your wife will be forced into prostitution, foreign soldiers will kill all your children, your land and property will divided up with a measuring line and sold.  And you will end up an alien in a foreign land, and will die there” (7:15-17). 

This is not just a nasty “and back on you!”  Amos is saying that injustice works two ways, and that in God’s economy, those who oppress will sooner or later find themselves oppressed.  Those who exclude the alien will become aliens.  Those who abuse others—whether by religion, law, or military force—may end up being abused.  And it is not simply a question of intention or whether you yourself abuse.  We are talking about social sins here. Those who benefit from systems of injustice run the risk of having the tables turned and being treated unjustly themselves, regardless of their intentions or values.   

What strikes me in this story is this:  The King and the Priests had it all explained.  Their religion, no doubt properly explained and endorsed by carefully chosen passages of scripture, told them that God was on their side, and that what they were doing was right and good.  Not a lot different from wall builders in our age.  Not a lot different from us. 

But Amos applies the plumb line.   And what is it?   Justice and  fairness, compassion for those who don’t have a seat at the table, who don’t have a piece of the pie, those on the wrong side of the wall. 

It is the same point that Jesus makes when he says the heart of the law is to love our neighbor as ourselves every bit as much as it is to love God.  It is the same as when he tells us to treat others as we would be treated.  It’s the same as when he says that on the last day, the only thing that will matter in separating the righteous from the wicked is how we treated others, particularly those most in need. 

Fr. Tom Buechle told me this week that one of the great difficulties facing our efforts to build a Hispanic ministry in the Rogue Valley is that many of those living here whose first language is Spanish are afraid to attract attention by community participation.  Too high a profile might attract attention from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.  And so, regardless of whether they are documented or not, they are reluctant to break out of isolation in small family and workplace groups.  How very sad, and what does this say about those who claim this is Christian nation even as they support restrictive immigration policies?    

According to Amos, the difference between a wall of oppression or a reasonable boundary is whether you have compassion, whether you can see the oppressed for who they truly are, whether you are willing to loose the yoke and break the bond. 

I wonder how we stand—crooked or upright—when the plumb line of compassion is applied to us.  I wonder how we might tear down some of the walls we use to oppress others, or that we benefit from.   

Let us pray.

Grant, O God, that your holy and life-giving Spirit may so move every human heart, that barriers which divide us may crumble, suspicions disappear, and hatreds cease; that our divisions being healed, we may live in justice and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.