Kim told me recently that I am about due for a lighthearted sermon. I told him I would certainly keep that in mind. Honestly, I would like nothing more than to make you smile and even laugh. Even though the world keeps lobbing grenades at us.
There is a film I love called Four Weddings and a Funeral. It is a comedy that follows a group of friends as they attend weddings together. Hilarious things happen – disastrous best man speech, lost wedding rings, a very nervous and stuttering priest, and so on. Then at one of the weddings they attend, someone dies, which is not funny at all. The funeral follows, a very tender scene. Then the comedy resumes, but now they are all, somehow, changed. Life does that to a person. We wear the hardships in our bodies. All of us do.
You don’t forget the traumas you have been through; they live somewhere within you. You don’t slough off the weight of grief. These things simply become a part of who you are, they change the way you see and how you live.
And so I spent some time this past week thinking about how changed the people of Highland Park are now from one week ago. Last Sunday they were enjoying a holiday weekend, like we all were. And the next day their world changed.
This one is personal for me because I have family in Highland Park. I have spent many beautiful summer days on the very same streets that were covered in blood last Monday. My cousin and her family were planning to be at the parade – her son was supposed to be in the parade – until her husband came down with COVID. The realization that COVID might have saved their lives gave me a feeling I can’t describe.
No one who was there on that day will be the same again. But even the people who did not attend the parade will be changed by this. Because random acts of mass gun violence have come to their hometown.
And we who are watching this from a distance, once again, are sad and angry and bewildered, because it’s just not the way it is supposed to be. We would all like to shout out in protest: This is not the way it is supposed to be!
Every third year in our Common Lectionary we have the summer of the prophets, and this is that summer. And every time it comes up I think, really? Does that feel appropriate to you? These guys, they lack a summery vibe – they’re so heavy, no lightheartedness in them at all. Over the years, I have become pretty good at ignoring the prophets.
But this may be the time to listen to them. Because the prophets come bearing the message that things are not the way they are supposed to be.
And here we have Amos, the man who rejects the title altogether but still bears the prophetic message: Things are not the way they are supposed to be.
Amos was, in his own description, a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees. He had plenty at home to keep him busy, but apparently out of the clear blue sky, like a random bolt of lightning, God called him to deliver a message to the kingdom of Israel. A message that put in the strongest terms possible: This is not the way it is supposed to be.
He shared it using the image of the plumb line. The Lord would set a plumb line in the midst of Israel to show how far the people had strayed from God’s way.
And truly they had strayed far off course. Things were not the way they were supposed to be in Israel. The rich were unspeakably rich; the poor were devastatingly poor. And the rich and powerful were more than willing to sacrifice the lives of the poor for the sake of increasing their riches.
They paid lip service to God’s law, but their actions betrayed what was in their hearts. They observed the sabbath, but anxiously waited for the day to be over so they could get back to cheating and exploiting their neighbors. You don’t have to take my word for it. It’s all there, written in Amos’s book.
Amos said, “They trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth and push the afflicted out of the way.” (See what I mean about heavy?) They would abuse their brothers and sisters to the max, even to death. No, this is not the way it is supposed to be in the world God created.
See how the plumb line reveals the truth: Amos, the herdsman, the reluctant prophet, the plumb line who shows us how things are supposed to be.
Don’t we need a plumb line in this world of ours! We have the scriptures, and we have the ability to read them. But the truth is we are tempted to read them in a way that lends justification to our desires, righteousness to our actions. It’s not hard to delude ourselves.
We need a plumb line, because the naked eye is prone to distorting things. We think we have that picture hung straight. But later we stand back and look at it, we see our mistakes from a different vantage point.
We think we were fully justified in our action, but later when we are telling a friend about it, we see the look in their eyes that tells us, no, we were not justified.
A plumb line might save us from ourselves sometimes. If we could just check ourselves against it we might see the right way before we go off and do something stupid, possibly even dangerous. A plumb line might make us pause, think. And, a plumb line might stir us to action when action is needed.
We have always struggled with the conflict of wanting to do right and wanting what we want. As much as the young lawyer who approached Jesus on that day, struggling with his desires. He wanted to inherit eternal life. Which was something he felt deserving of, it went without saying. In his own estimation he had lived a life without blemish. He had crossed all the T’s and dotted all the I’s. He was just taking this opportunity to do a final check, to have the rabbi confirm for him what he already knew.
Then Jesus dropped a plumb line.
There was a man who fell into the hands of bandits, who robbed him and left him half-dead on the road. A good priest came upon him – but he quickly crossed over to the other side. A good Levite came upon him, and he too quickly crossed over to the other side. Then a lousy Samaritan came along. This worthless soul picked the man up, dressed his wounds, and took him to a place where he could receive medical attention – and he paid for the man’s medical care. That miserable, good-for-nothing villain did this.
The clever young lawyer saw what Jesus did there, and this was a life-changing opportunity for him. He could become a new man, even better than he was before! Less self-satisfied. More compassionate. He could even become a man who carries the word out to the world: this is not the way it is supposed to be. But let me show you the way it should be.
Like Amos.
A person can be changed when the plumb line drops. When you see just how off-course things are, you can’t go back to seeing things the way you did before.
I called my aunt last week to see how she was doing after the July 4 shootings. And she said to me, “This is a life-changing experience for us. But you know what? Just as many people died of gun violence that day in the city of Chicago and no one seems to care. How horrible is that?”
My prayer today is that we will see the plumb lines around us clearly and recognize what they show us about the way things are, and the way things should be. That we will no longer shrug our shoulders in the face of tragedies, saying that’s just the way it is, nothing you can do. And that we all might be plumb lines for others in the world, showing others the way things might, and should, be.
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