Measure for Measure
Amos 7:7-17
My hometown of Stratford, Connecticut, takes its name from Stratford-upon-Avon, the hometown of a certain English playwright. If you had ever heard of Stratford before my arriving here, chances are it was because of the American Shakespeare Theater, which opened in Stratford in 1955 with a production of Julius Caesar. Over the years many famous actors graced the stage of the theater, including Katharine Hepburn, Christopher Plummer, and the voice of Darth Vader himself, James Earl Jones.
When I was in middle school, I went on a class trip to see a performance of Hamlet. However, by the time I graduated from high school, the theater, which had been struggling financially, was forced to shut down. For years that then stretched into decades, the theater languished, unused except by the growing number of wildlife making a home within its decaying walls.
A few attempts were made to revive the theater. A theatrical producer would line up a group of investors, but the deal always ran into one obstacle or another. Eventually the town took control of the property, but still the theater remained dormant.
Then in January of 2019 nearby residents woke in the middle of the night to see the theater ablaze. Flames tore through the rotting wood. Despite the efforts of firefighters, the theater burned to the ground. Nothing was left except the warped steel skeleton and a few wooden planks that the fire had scarred but not destroyed. The blaze was deemed suspicious. Eventually a trio of local teenagers was found to be responsible.
Of course, the teenagers who set the fire bear responsibility, but in some sense the town brought this disaster upon itself. Town leaders were never able to get their act together and work with the theater community and business leaders to revive the old building. One administration after another allowed its condition to deteriorate until it became a target for teenagers with no emotional attachment to it. To them the theater was just a pile of kindling waiting for a lit match.
Losing a theater that hadn’t hosted a performance in 30 years may not seem like a tragedy on par with Hamlet or Macbeth, but the town lost more than a building, it lost part of its identity. The American Shakespeare Theater had once made Stratford a destination and contributed to the cultural life of the town. Without it, the town has lost much of what made it unique.
Destruction and loss of identity are front and center in today’s reading from Amos. Israel, whom God had set apart to be a light to the nations, has lost its sense of identity. Rather than being a light to the nations, Israel has turned inward. Rather than showing mercy to the poor and justice to the oppressed, those in power care only for their own personal wealth and well being. The rich are getting richer while the poor are losing what little they have.
From God’s perspective, the nation is no longer redeemable. Half measures will not do; Israel must fall. The prophet announces the terrifying word of the Lord: “the high places of Isaac shall be made desolate / and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste.” Israel, God’s prized possession, will fall and the people will go into exile.
Amos is not a cheerful book. It is a book of unrelenting judgment. Unlike what we read last week in the story of Naaman and Elisha, there is no humor here. What there is, is a heavy dose of the truth, and the truth is that Israel is in need of correction.
And yet, this book of unrelenting judgment is still good news. It’s good news because it shows that God loves us enough to tell us the truth about ourselves. We may not want to hear it, but that doesn’t make it any less true. And the uncomfortable truth is that we are sinners. If there were any doubt, we need only look to the cross upon which Christ was crucified, not for his sins but for ours.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Who was Amos and why did God task him with delivering such a harsh word against God’s people Israel? The book of Amos is set around 760 BC. After Solomon’s death 170 years earlier, what was once the united kingdom of Israel split into two kingdoms, north and south. The northern kingdom retained the name Israel, and the southern kingdom took the name Judah. The prophet Amos is from the southern kingdom of Judah, but God calls him to prophesy in the north, in Israel.
During Amos’s lifetime Israel was enjoying a period of relative peace and prosperity, at least for those at the top. Having a stable throne certainly helped with that. The king, Jeroboam II, had been on the throne for nearly two decades. Also helping Israel’s situation was the absence of any serious international threats. Israel’s enemies were weak, and Israel took advantage of this to expand its borders through conquest. Things in Israel were looking great again. Not since the days of Solomon had the nation enjoyed such prosperity.
Yet God calls Amos to Israel to tell a different story. And as any good writer knows, one of their most effective tools is metaphor. Metaphor enables the reader or hearer to visualize the words. If, as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, then a metaphor paints a picture with words. And the metaphor that Amos paints with is a plumb line.
A plumb line is simply a string with a small weight attached to one end. When suspended, the weight pulls the string downward in a straight line, and this line is then used as a reference for ensuring that a wall is built at a 90-degree angle from the ground. A plumb line ensures that any structure that is supposed to be fully upright is so.
As Amos tells it, God’s concern is not with the uprightness of Israel’s walls but with the moral and ethical uprightness of the people in power—priests, judges, officials in the royal court, and the king himself. Their decadence, their greed, their disregard for the poor have moved Israel out of alignment with God’s commands. God has set a plumb line in the midst of Israel’s leaders, and it has revealed just how crooked they are, literally and figuratively.
See, I am setting a plumb line
in the midst of my people Israel;
I will spare them no longer;
the high places of Isaac shall be made desolate,
and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste,
and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword” (vv. 8-9).
Last week we heard how God gave victory to Naaman, the commander of the army of Aram, Israel’s rival. Now today we read of God’s bringing defeat upon God’s own people. What on earth (or in heaven) is God doing?
Actually, it’s less about what God is doing than what Israel, under the leadership of Jeroboam, has done. In chapter 5 the prophet lays out the accusation against Israel’s leaders. They trample on the poor and levy on them burdensome taxes while they themselves enjoy the good life, lying on beds of ivory and anointing themselves with the finest oils. “For I know how many are your transgressions,” says the Lord, “and how great are your sins—you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate”(5:12).
We’d much rather believe a comfortable lie
than confront the uncomfortable truth.
You don’t need that much imagination to see the parallels to our own time. We as a nation may not literally push aside the needy in the gate, but we have most certainly turned our backs on the poor. Right this moment hundreds of thousands of boxes of a life-saving peanut paste for those suffering from malnutrition are sitting in warehouses in Rhode Island and Georgia rather than being sent to those who without it will almost certainly die. Vaccines for malaria, a deadly but easily preventable disease, are not being administered. Our withdrawal of most foreign aid is already leading to increased death, disease, and violence, as there is now increased competition to obtain what few resources remain.
“Oh, spare me the bleeding-heart blather! We will always have the poor with us. No one should expect a handout. God helps those who help themselves” (something God never says). This kind of reaction—dismissiveness, defensiveness, and denial—is what happens when we are confronted with the law. We don’t want to hear it. We cannot bear to hear it. “The land is not able to bear all his words,” says Amaziah, the priest to whom Amos addresses his prophecy.
Amaziah, who is closely aligned with Israel’s corrupt king, tells Amos, “Get out of here, prophet! Go back to Judah where you belong, and don’t ever come here again. This is the king’s sanctuary.”
Amaziah doesn’t want to hear the truth, and neither do we. “They hate the one who reproves in the gate,” the Lord says, “they abhor the one who speaks the truth” (5:10). We’d much rather believe a comfortable lie than confront the uncomfortable truth, and the uncomfortable truth is that we are sinners. The law accuses us and our sin convicts us. I for one would not want to stand next to God’s plumb line because I know how crooked my life would appear. Next to the plumb line of God’s justice, none of us measure up. We will never be fully aligned with the law of God.
And yet, while the law tells us what God wills, the law is powerless to make us do it. The apostle Paul puts his finger on this problem in his letter to the Romans, saying, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Rom. 7:15). Paul knows what the law commands, but he just can’t bring himself to do it.
We see the same thing here in the book of Amos. It’s not as though the leaders of Israel were ignorant about God’s law. They knew that Israel had been set apart by God to be a light to the nations. They read the scriptures. They heard the prophets. They simply wouldn’t listen. And neither do we.
If our hope of salvation hinged upon our obedience to the law of God, that would truly be cause for despair. But you didn’t come here to be told there is no hope. If you did, you came to the wrong place. There is hope to be had here, but it lies not with us but with Jesus Christ. That’s what makes it good news.
It is Christ who is the true plumb line of God. It is Christ whose perfect obedience to the law, in both letter and spirit, fulfills for us what we could never do on our own. And it is Christ’s death on the cross that frees us from the judgment of the law. Where once we were measured by the imposing and impossible standards of the law, in Christ’s death we have received the full measure of God’s grace.
The measure of God’s grace. I know that might seem abstract, as though Christ died for an idea…the idea of grace. So let me put it in more personal terms. Christ did not die for an idea; Christ died for you. Christ was raised for you. Christ now reigns for you. Therefore, we have no reason to fear God’s judgment because the one who judges us is the same one who died for us. No matter how you measure it, God’s grace is personal.