St. Paul's Episcopal Church

St. Paul's Episcopal Church
425 Cleveland Ave SW
Canton, Ohio 44702
Phone: 330-455-0286
Fax: 330-455-9818
E-mail: office@stpaulscanton.org

Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Canton OH
Amos 7:7-15, Mark 6:14-29

July 12, 2009
The Rev. Barbara L Bond

The Plumb Line

I decided to build a wall. I thought, how hard can it be? So I grabbed some bricks and slapped on some mortar, and placed the bricks just so, you know? Stacked them up, sort of off-set. It was looking really nice. And it got higher, just about where I wanted it. It would make a nice retaining wall in the garden, I thought.

And then I backed off a ways and looked at it sideways. Something wasn’t quite right. I needed something to check it out – you know, like a ruler or something. Then I remembered the plumb line. That’s a really low-tech tool that has been around at least three thousand years. It looks like this! (Demonstrate) If you drop it down, the string attached to the weight makes a straight line. This plumb line does not lie. So I dropped it down next to my garden wall, and – oy vey! My wall was sway-backed!

A scene something like that was going on with the Prophet Amos. God approached him with a plumb line, and the wall Amos was standing next to was nice and straight, because it had been built with the plumb line as reference. But apparently God’s people Israel had been behaving with no reference to such a standard. Their behavior was rather like a sway-backed wall, and when God’s standards are set beside it, the divergences are clear.

King Herod was feeling rather upset with the plumb line, in the person of John the Baptist. John preached repentance, and he called the divergences as he saw them. And he saw that King Herod diverged pretty often. Yet Herod was rather fascinated with John. John was a preacher who could get under your skin and did not compromise. And Herod rather liked to listen to him, and he protected him. One of Herod’s weaknesses was women, and he lusted after his brother’s wife. When his brother died, Herod married her, which wasn’t quite kosher. He diverged from what was proper, and John called him on it, said in effect that he was living in adultery. The wife, Herodias, was not amused, wanted John killed. But Herod wouldn’t go that far – he just had John rounded up and put in prison. And he still listened to him there, ranting and raving, and telling uncomfortable truths. Herod probably thought, “Dang that plumb line!” but Herod was fascinated nonetheless.

Then that old lust got a hold of Herod again. His wife’s daughter offered to dance at a banquet, and Herod was delighted, promised her anything if she would just dance. And the girl consulted with her mother, who told her to demand John’s death. So that’s what happened: the girl danced, and John was killed. Herod was distraught – he really liked John, and he felt guilty about this sordid little incident. When Jesus started doing deeds of power, Herod wondered if John had come back to life. Apparently there was a new plumb line loose in the land.

Sometimes events bring us into awareness of where we have strayed. I think our problems with the national and international economy are evidence that our standards were not the divine plumb line for ethical behavior, but rather workings and manipulations based on greed and taking advantage of people. I asked earlier, how hard can it be to build a wall: Well, how hard can it be to build up a Ponzi scheme and bilk thousands of folks? How hard can it be to sell a bunch of subprime mortgages and build up an empire based on shaky loans? How hard can it be to skim the cream off the top? Not hard at all, especially if you have no scruples, no plumb line. But we have backed off a bit and looked at those walls and they are worse than sway-backed. They are beginning to topple. Where was the plumb line when all that was being built?

It is easy to look at other people’s sway-backed walls, and not see our own. That’s when we need the plumb line for our own behavior, when the teachings of Jesus tell us how to live our lives. For instance, I wonder at all the stuff I’ve bought, how if I’d paid more attention to the plumb line, I might have helped more people, and accumulated less junk. Another example, this one more positive: A few years ago I was coming home from Germany, where I had bought lots of beautiful Bavarian clothing. My friends suggested I just hide the new clothes among my old clothes and sneak past customs. I was tempted. But then I asked myself: what is the price of my integrity? So I totaled up what the customs would be, declared it, and handed the startled customs officer $100. Dang that plumb line!

What is our plumb line? Jesus reduced all the Jewish rules for behavior to two commandments: love God, and love our neighbor. On these two, hang all the law and the prophets, he said. On these two, we can hold a reference point, a plumb line, to guide us through life. How then shall we live? That’s the answer: Love God, through prayer, worship, community attendance; love your neighbor, through service, through caring, through contributing to the needs of others. It’s really pretty simple: the plumb line is right there, a ready reference for our lives, if we pay attention.

AMEN