Sermon on Amos 7:7-15

The 7^th Sunday after Pentecost, 11 July 2021

A Sermon on Amos 7:7-15 by Samuel Zumwalt

Amos 7:7-15 © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers]

 

⁷ This is what he showed me: behold, the Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand. ⁸ And the Lord said to me, “Amos, what do you see?” And I said, “A plumb line.” Then the Lord said, “Behold, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass by them; ⁹ 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.” ¹⁰ Then Amaziah the priest of Bethel sent to Jeroboam king of Israel, saying, “Amos has conspired against you in the midst of the house of Israel. The land is not able to bear all his words. ¹¹ For thus Amos has said, “‘Jeroboam shall die by the sword, and Israel must go into exile away from his land.’” ¹² And Amaziah said to Amos, “O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, and eat bread there, and prophesy there, ¹³ but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom.” ¹⁴ Then Amos answered and said to Amaziah, “I was no prophet, nor a prophet’s son, but I was a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore figs. ¹⁵ But the Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’

 

GOD’S CHILDREN: TRUTH TELLERS

 

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

 

Out of Plumb

 

Many years ago I mistakenly confused a horizontal line level used in brick laying with a vertical plumb line. I heard about it at the door from the wife of an engineer. So, at the outset, I want to be clear that “a plumb line is a string with a weight tied to one end used to establish a vertical line so that a wall can be built straight” (Nelson’s New Illustrated Bible Commentary).

 

Amos publicly declares that God has told Amos that God has held the plumb line of His commandments against the northern kingdom of Israel’s life, and they don’t measure up. They have worshiped other gods in their houses of worship, and they have not lived according to His commandments as God’s people. They have not kept covenant. Because they have repeatedly demonstrated they don’t want God, therefore God will no longer be there for Israel. Their houses of worship will be destroyed. King Jeroboam’s bloodline will come to an end by the sword. In other words, God’s people have built their life together crookedly. Walls out of plumb fall!

 

Today Amos would be called judgmental and intolerant for telling the truth. People whose lives are out of plumb with God’s commandments tend to attack those who tell the truth. Their goal is to silence God’s Word. I think of the late atheist Christopher Hitchens who had the audacity to attack Mother Teresa for being pro-life and for caring for the poorest of the poor. Only someone utterly possessed by the demonic could call good evil. Hitchens was out of plumb.

 

Someone writing a letter to the editor of a newspaper called the notion that marriage has always been between one man and one woman “nonsense.” He proceeded to cite the presence of polygamy in the Bible and the sad situation of widowed parents as proof that one father and one mother are not the norm for marriage. The writer managed to string together a personal attack on traditional Christians, a willful ignorance of the biblical metanarrative, and a tepidly weak and brief argument built on exceptions to the rule. Sadly, his view is hopelessly out of plumb.

 

If God could turn His back on those whom He had chosen to be His covenant people on account of their wickedness, does anyone here think that God won’t do the same to those whose lives are intentionally and deliberately out of plumb with God’s commandments?  Herod Antipas and his wife silenced John the Baptist’s truth-telling by cutting off his head, but they showed all the more how far out of plumb they were with God’s commandments. Expelled Soviet writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn was the darling of the West until, at a 1978 commencement speech at Harvard, he declared both communism and western democracy to be rooted in the same Enlightenment worldview that assumes human beings are the center of everything. Those who gave Solzhenitsyn an honorary doctorate felt he was biting the hand that fed him. Like Amos, Solzhenitsyn was more interested in telling God’s truth than in being popular.

 

Paid to Speak Lies

 

Amaziah, Jeroboam’s priestly yes man, went to his king accusing Amos of preaching sedition. Not once did Amaziah consider the possibility that God had, through Amos, sent an external Word, a Word from outside the happily disobedient northern kingdom of Israel. Rather Amaziah, like Herod Antipas’ wife with John, just wants the prophet Amos to shut up forever.

Indeed, having told on Amos to the king, he tells Amos to go back to where he belongs!

 

Amos’ response to Amaziah is classic: “I’m no prophet. I don’t get paid to tell lies to the king, and I didn’t volunteer for this. I was back home contentedly taking care of my flock and tending my trees when God called me and sent me to speak the truth to His rebellious people.”

 

Dear ones, the book of Amos is in the Bible, because much later the people of God recognized a prophet had been among them telling the truth. The Word he spoke came true: Jeroboam II’s son Zechariah was assassinated only six months after he became king, and the northern kingdom of Israel was conquered and exiled by the Assyrians in 721 BC.

 

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s truth-telling against the old Soviet Union was prophetic. The evil empire died after 70 years of repression, murder, and thumbing its nose against God. Given the rapid pace in the West to build a culture further and further out of plumb with God’s Word, we do well to ponder if Solzhenitsyn was not Amos speaking truth to power in our midst. As he said, the West’s loss of courage and its failure to name evil are evidence of spiritual bankruptcy.

Those who persist in building out of plumb with God’s commandments will see it all fall down.

 

Now here are the billion dollar questions for those who claim to be Christian. Will we call evil good and good evil? Will we embrace other gods as if they were not God’s competition? Will we be so biblically illiterate that we cannot discern the lies that claim to be truth? Will we say there is no difference between God’s Truth and all the attractive stories that are out of plumb? As Paul wrote to the Ephesians: “But that is not the way your learned Christ” (4:20).

 

That We May Be His Own!

 

None of us can ever be righteous before God by our own efforts. That is the truth about you, me, and everyone. It does not follow that because we are born in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves that it doesn’t matter how we live. The problem, indeed the flawed reasoning of those who confuse pop psychology with the Gospel, is that lives that persist in being out of plumb with God’s commandments will fall down. A marriage built on persistent infidelity is doomed. Luther was quite clear that the Christian life is built on daily repentance. Furthermore, in his theological last will and testament, Luther wrote: “It is therefore necessary to know and to teach that when holy people, aside from the fact that they still possess and feel original sin and daily repent and strive against it, fall into open sin (as David fell into adultery, murder, and blasphemy), faith and the Spirit have departed from them. This is so because the Holy Spirit does not permit sin to rule and gain the upper hand in such a way that sin is committed, but the Holy Spirit represses and restrains it so that it does not do what it wishes. If sin does what it wishes, the Holy Spirit and faith are not present…” (Smalcald Articles, Tappert 310:43-44).

 

Our Baptism into the Lord Jesus’ death and resurrection are about daily fleeing to God’s mercy confessing that we are sinful and unclean, lost and condemned apart from God’s Son. Only God’s Son Jesus’ life is perfectly plumb. By listening to and admitting the Truth that God is only the center, we are ready to seek His mercy. By listening to and admitting the Truth that God alone holds the plumb line and determines what is good, we are ready to seek His grace. Mercy is not getting what we do deserve. Grace is getting what we don’t deserve. And so, when we are built like living stones on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ as the Cornerstone, then we understand confession and forgiveness, not as permission to keep on doing what we want as if we were the center, but, as constantly being put back into plumb on a daily basis. Practicing one’s Baptism daily pushes the old enemy’s lies further away from us. Reading and studying God’s Word gives the Holy Spirit the opportunity to show us evil as it is!

 

The reason Holy Communion is only for the baptized is that the unbaptized communicant receives the Lord Jesus as God’s plumb line showing a life out of plumb and yet still in rebellion against the One who says: “unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:5). In the same way, the baptized communicant who is comfortable in her or his sin receives the Lord Jesus as God’s plumb line showing a life out of plumb and yet still in rebellion against the One who says: “If we say we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us” (1John 1:10). Hear again the truth about us: each of us comes empty handed to God’s altar. Confessing our inability to free ourselves, we receive God’s Son as the One who suffered and died to take our sins away. We receive Jesus, the Medicine of immortality.

 

You and I are called to be Truth Tellers like Amos. A well-equipped Christian steeped in God’s Word, and knowing how to rightly divide Law and Gospel, can engage with God’s Truth the devil’s empty promises (and that’s what the world’s false stories are!). We remain humble when we admit upfront to our neighbor that we are sinful and unclean, lost and condemned apart from Christ. Admitting the truth about ourselves invites the neighbor to do the same. We become more effective Truth Tellers when we can say we believe as we do, because God’s Word has spoken thus and we are convinced it is true. Our neighbors may not believe as we do, but they will know a prophet has been among them when God’s Word comes true in their lives. It will sooner or later! And so we should pray for everyone in the world to be drawn to Baptism’s saving water, to be called daily by the Holy Spirit from death to life, and to be built and rebuilt (please, God!) upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus as the True Cornerstone of a new creation!

 

In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

 

©Samuel D. Zumwalt, STS

szumwalt@bellsouth.net

St. Matthew’s Evangelical Lutheran Church

Wilmington, North Carolina USA

 

Bulletin insert

 

God’s Children: Truth Tellers

 

Praying

 

“In your loving kindness, O God, you have adopted us into your family as children of light: Grant that we may not become entangled in the darkness of error and lies, but may always live in the brightness of your truth; through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen” (The Daily Prayer of the Church, 616).

 

Listening

 

Amos 7:8    “Behold, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel;”

St. Ephraem the Syrian (4^th century monk, scholar, hymnist): “To show that he himself was this stone [that the builders rejected], he said concerning it, ‘Whoever knocks against that stone will be broken to pieces, but it will crush and destroy whomever it falls upon.’ The leaders of the people were gathered together against him [Jesus] and wanted his downfall because his teaching did not please them. But he said, ‘it will crush and destroy whomever it falls upon,’ because he had resisted idolatry, among other things” (Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Amos, 109).

 

Amos 7:14    “I was no prophet, nor a prophet’s son…”

 

St. Gregory the Great (late 6^th – early 7^th bishop of Rome; Doctor of the Western Church): “How good it is to raise up eyes of faith to the power of this worker, the Holy Spirit, and to look here and there at our ancestors in the Old and New Testaments. With the eyes of my faith open, I gaze on David, on Amos, on Daniel, on Peter, on Paul, on Matthew – and I am filled with a desire to behold the nature of this worker, the Holy Spirit…The Spirit changes the human heart in a moment, filling it with light. Suddenly we are no longer what we were; suddenly we are something we never used to be” (109).

 

Amos 7:14   “I was no prophet, nor a prophet’s son.”

 

St. John Chrysostom (late 4^th – early 5^th century patriarch of Constantinople): “He did not say this to exalt himself but to stop their mouths that suspected him as no prophet, and to show that he is no deceiver, and what he says does not come from his own mind” (109).

 

Amos 7:15 “But the Lord took me from following the flock….”

 

St. Gregory the Great (late 6^th – early 7^th bishop of Rome; Doctor of the Western Church): “If the spirit of prophecy had always been present to the prophets, the prophet Amos when asked would never have said, ‘I am no prophet…By these words of the prophet it is plainly shown that while he was bearing that testimony about himself he was filled, and on the instant rewarded with the spirit of prophecy, because he humbly acknowledged himself to be no prophet” (110).

 

Reflecting

 

1. Do you understand that Scripture is the norm by which all prophecy is measured and also by which the distinction between true and false prophecy may be discerned?

 

2. How do the stories you treasure and the beliefs you hold measure up against God’s Word?