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.