Tuning Forks, Plumb Lines, and Prophets

Before coming to Emanuel UCC here in Bridesburg, I sang in the choir of my former church for nearly 20 years. Sometimes at rehearsals when the choir practiced an anthem, we’d practice one part of it a capella – with no accompaniment, just the choir singing. Sometimes if we were tired at the end of rehearsal, the choir didn’t quite stay on key during those a capella portions – we’d be singing away, and at the end of it, the organist would play the note we should have been singing – and we discovered that, in the course of singing just one verse of a hymn, just a few lines of music, we’d gone flat, off-key. Of course, the organ and piano likewise needed to be tuned from time to time, or they’d go flat – the piano tuner would bring tuning forks, which maintain perfect pitch, and compare the sound made by the piano to that made by the tuning forks, and make adjustments in the piano’s sound.

Both our Old Testament reading (Amos 7:7-15) and our Gospel reading about John the Baptist (Mark 6:14-29) remind us of the hazards of being a prophet – of being the person God chooses to send to a messed up situation with the words, “Thus says the Lord.” In a way, a prophet is a person whom God uses as a tuning fork, to show the rest of society how far off pitch they’ve gone.

Amos is considered one of the minor Old Testament prophets. He was active during the time of the divided Kingdom, about 200 years after the ten tribes of the Northern Kingdom, which collectively took the name of “Israel” had rebelled against Solomon’s son, Rehoboam, over excessive taxation, and split off from Judah and Benjamin, the remaining two tribes of the Southern Kingdom. At the time Amos prophesied, the 10 tribes of the Northern Kingdom were experiencing a time of great prosperity. They had constructed a national mythology that they merited God’s special blessings, which would continue until the coming of the “Day of the Lord” when God would finally vindicate them against their enemies. Yet in reality, with the prosperity came great inequality, with the elite living in ease while the poor starved. (Sound like anything you’ve read about in the newspaper lately?)

Into this situation walked Amos. He was not part of the religious establishment – not a prophet or a prophet’s son – but a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees – he had a day job. The book of Amos begins with prophecies against the nations surrounding the Northern Kingdom of Israel, moves on to a prophecy against Judah – and then prophesies against Israel: “for three transgressions of Israel and for four, I will not revoke punishment, because they sell the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth and push the afflicted out of the way; father and son go into the same girl, so that my holy name is profaned, they lay themselves down beside every altar on garments taken in pledge, and in the house of their God they drink wine bought with the fines they imposed.” Amos prophesies that the longed-for day of the Lord, far from vindication, will bring disaster, exile, and destruction of the Northern Kingdom - what the people think is the light of God’s vindication at the end of the tunnel is really the headlamp of the oncoming train of God’s wrath. The bottom line of Amos’ message: “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies….take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” In modern terms, Amos is saying “Stop playing church and start changing society for the better!”

And then Amos has a vision of the Lord, standing beside a wall, with a plumb line in his hand. A plumb line would be used by builders to make sure that the wall is vertical. Similar to the tuning fork mentioned earlier in my sermon, the plumb line is a device used to make sure that the builder is not wandering off track – because a wall that’s not vertical will not long remain standing.

This prophet with his harsh words and dire predictions comes up against the religious establishment, in the form of Amaziah, the priest of Bethel. Amaziah tells Amos to take his words of doom and gloom elsewhere, and calls Amos a traitor, a conspirator against the government, because he’s prophesying against the king at Bethel, the king’s sanctuary.

“Let justice flow down like a river.” Amos preached against the national mythology that Israel had built up for itself, that its prosperity was God’s reward for their faith. Amaziah and the other court prophets had accommodated their message to the political winds of the day, saying that God was blessing and prospering the king. Amos had a very different message – while their prosperity was indeed a gift from God, that prosperity was being unjustly denied to all but the elite, and therefore it would not last.

I actually wish this text had been in the lectionary readings for last Sunday, Independence Day weekend. One of the most difficult but most important duties of the church in general and pastors in particular is to provide a word from the Lord in a society that has lost its way. And churches and pastors have struggled with this duty down through the centuries. Many pastors resist speaking out at all. Other pastors, like Amaziah in today’s reading, tend to align themselves with national policies in a sort of “God and country” stance, that is to say, to be a good citizen is to be a good Christian. The failure of both of these approaches became obvious in Germany in the 1930’s and 1940’s, when many German churches declared that there was no incompatibility between Hitler and Christ. Talk about losing your way! Sometimes, as in the case of Amos, true patriotism – truly working for your country’s highest good – means saying things that the folks in charge don’t especially want to hear. The Gospel reading about the beheading of John the Baptist – who “went from preachin’ to meddlin’” in speaking out against Herod the Tetrarch’s divorcing his first wife to marry his brother’s wife, Herodias – shows that those in power will often respond to prophetic words by (metaphorically if not literally) killing the messenger. In Germany, pastors such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer who spoke out against Hitler likewise faced the 20th century equivalent of “dungeon, fire, and sword.” Still other churches limit their prophetic witness to one or two hot-button “family values” issues while remaining strangely silent about the economic injustice about which Amos and many Old Testament prophets spoke. I have no doubt Amos would have some choice words to offer about today’s economic injustices, where CEO’s are paid – I won’t say “earn” – hundreds of times the wages of their entry level workers.

It is rare person with the gift of prophecy to be able to size up a situation, approach it with the whole counsel of God’s word – not just proof-texts taken out of context – to bring the situation before God in prayer and listen to God’s still small voice, and then speak a word from the Lord. It is in this sense that theologians tell us that prophecy is not necessarily “foretelling” – not about being a fortune teller – but “forth telling” – telling forth what God has to say about the present, and how our course of action may play out in the future. As people of faith we need to be thinking theologically about the issues of our day, trying to discern God’s will in our individual lives and in society. As theologian Karl Barth put it, we should have the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.

“Let justice roll down like a river.” May we, like Amos, resist the path of conformity to the powers and principalities of the world, but rather to allow ourselves to be transformed by the renewing of our mind, so that we in turn can be God’s instruments in the transformation of the world in which we live.