Plumb Line In Our Lives

Homily 7/13      on Amos 7:7-17

I’d like to take a look at the Old Testament lesson today.  The gospel of the Good Samaritan is so familiar, from way back to our children’s Bible story books, that I wouldn’t have much to add. But with Amos today, I’m not going to explicate so much what he says as how we are to understand it.  I’d like to explore Biblical interpretation.

Let’s take a look at the passage from the prophet Amos with the allegory of the plumb line.  Would you look at your bulletins and just scan it for a few moments?

You’ve heard Ann Patry read the OT lesson from Amos, and you’ve looked it over.  In it Amos has a vision of God by a wall with a plumb line, commenting unfavorably on Israel’s loyalty, faithfulness, and rectitude.  Then Amos says God predicts doom on Israel’s future as a nation.

 Now, if you were in San Francisco, standing on a street corner, waiting for a bus to take you up Nob Hill to Grace Cathedral, and a man on the corner took up a position and yelled to the passers-by that God talked to him and that God told him what to say to all who would listen, and if he then quoted God in the words that Amos did, and gave the allegory of the plumb line and predicted doom and disaster on all those around, would you listen to that man as carefully as you listened to Ann, or would you shake your head and deliberately head for the next corner to take the bus?

Why the difference in attention, in respect for the words?  Why is Amos a prophet and the guy on the corner a nut case?  What we’re dealing with here is context, and context makes all the difference.  Amos’ words are only one part of a whole tradition of Hebrew/Jewish insight into questions of the existence of God, the nature of God, God’s relationship to humans, God’s work in the world (or not,) human freedom of will, creation and creaturehood, etcetera ad infinitum.  The words of the man on the corner are 10 verses of words picked out from an anthology containing scores of authors and editors, putting forth diverse opinions about all the topics above, and collected from a span of 1000 years.

When we read the Bible we have to put ourselves in another culture to even begin to understand where they’re coming from.  Translating from one culture to another is, in itself, hard to do and harder yet to know if we got it right.  Translating, understanding another culture, interpreting—all this must go along while we listen to Ann read Amos’ words.  As we listen to the words of Amos, we need to know that he is of a culture that values the visionary as a means to communicate with God.  He is of a culture in which many thought that if a nation disdains God, God will punish it, but if it acts righteously, God will favor it.  (It’s clear that God is in a punishing mode!)  He is of a culture that has the audacity to quote God!  The quote marks are there; these are not quote marks around Amos’ words when he speaks for God; the quoted words are the words Amos heard God speak.  These are very different mind-sets from ours today; I find it interesting that we can so easily nod along with it and say, “Nice reading, Ann.”

What do we really make of Amos’ words?  Do we go along with the idea that God speaks sentences in Hebrew?  Do we go along with the idea that God manipulates certain nations to destroy other nations to wreak vengeance for God?  If we don’t share these opinions, then what do we do?   And here’s where we have to find interpretive principles to listen to Amos and take his message seriously.  To find from him what we can apply to our own lives and what we can’t.

As we have come upon modernity, we have found ways to deal with the divide from antiquity.  Early on, before literacy was widespread, the problem of interpretation didn’t seem to bother the hearer.  They probably took the words at face value and literally.  As literacy did become widespread, the very power to read and understand the word invested the written word with a sort of authority which made one hesitate to question it.  If you read it in a book, it was true.  If you saw it in a newspaper, you didn’t question it.  I remember my father saying that theological questions in the rural Swedish Covenant church where he grew up in the 1890s were settled by someone pointing out, “Sa stor det,”  --  “So stands it” meaning,  it’s in print, so it has to be right.
 
The fundamentalist movement in the 1800s suggested that the Bible is printed and is God’s word, which makes it right and true.  The issue of contrary and contradictory points of view within the Bible is brushed aside, not dealt with.  It was, perhaps, a bibliolotry—a worship of the printed form of the Bible, even to a reverence for a given treasured translation.  In the early 20 century the need for interpretive principles became apparent; we needed to apply historical interpretations, literary interpretations, linguistic interpretations, source interpretations.  And we ourselves, as avid Bible readers,  need to be aware of and apply these insights as we read the Bible, as we study the Bible, or we will be in danger of misunderstanding the author’s intent.  Before we can apply the Bible to our lives, we need to know the context from which it comes, we need to make analogies from their lives to our lives.  We need to know what God’s use of a plumb line meant to Amos, and how, when we do know what that means, it can be applied to us.
 
Well, what does it mean to Amos?  It’s a builder’s device to make sure a vertical structure, like a wall, are truly vertical—90 deg. to the ground, that the structure is not tilted or askew.  Amos could count on the Israelites applying that analogically to their national life—that their national life had gone askew, left the path of righteousness and loyalty to God, and God, being in their mind punishing and favoring, would implacably punish them.  Our job is to see if this is true for us, for our national life, for our community life, for our personal lives.  How must we act to being us back to plumb?  My point today is not so much about the meaning of the plumb line story as it is about the duty of a Christian to move beyond 8th century BCE and apply it to the 21st century ICE.

Then, as an addendum, I thought about the role of Jesus in the interpretive process.  When Jesus appeared on the scene, he was hailed as the Messiah, Savior, and also as God because he seemed to have an innate authority to bridge the gap of years and history and cultures, to say what the prophets and priests of Judaism meant.   Amos spoke God’s very words in quotes because Amos  felt he was not the author of the words; he received the words; he spoke those words out to the Israelites in quotes.  Jesus spoke without quotes.  He spoke from inner authority.  Perhaps this is why we call him God, because he was not speaking for God; he was God--and unlike the prophet, he spoke without quotes.

Lenny Erickson