H. Michael Brewer
Crescent Springs Presbyterian
28 March 2004
THE PLUMB LINE
Amos 7:7-9
Amos, that blunt Jewish prophet of God’s wrath, once saw a vision involving a plumb line. If you’
ve never seen a plumb line, it’s easily described. Basically it’s a string with a piece of lead on one
end. The lead is typically shaped like a teardrop and it hangs upside down on the string with the point
aimed downward. For thousands of years, carpenters all over the world depended on plumb lines to
level their buildings. Since the weight always points straight down, a plumb line can reveal whether a
wall is leaning or a doorway is out of kilter. The eye may deceive us and the lay of the land may be
misleading, but the plumb line never lies.
In his vision Amos saw a wall, apparently a leaning wall, and God stood next to the wall holding a
plumb line, testing this wall. The straight and unequivocal plumb line revealed that the wall was askew.
The plumb line passed judgment on the wall, if you will. And God spoke to Amos and said, “I am
placing a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel, and I will no longer ignore their crookedness. I
will no longer look away when my people lean toward evil.”
The vision of Amos came to mind for me some years when I visited the cathedral in Coventry,
England. During World War II, the thousand-year-old cathedral was destroyed by German bombers
in World War II, reduced to a heap of smoking rubble. The cathedral was rebuilt within a few years
and among many beautiful works of art there, one particularly caught my eye. On a platform near one
wall is a model of the city of Coventry. The model doesn’t reproduce the city in perfect detail, but
there are enough prominent buildings in the model that even a visitor can recognize the city. Near the
center of the model is a small version of the cathedral itself. And suspended above the miniature city
is an old-fashioned plumb line.
As far as I can tell, the city of Coventry is not much better or worse than most cities. That somber
piece of art with the plumb line dangling over the city suggests that God’s judgment falls upon all
human endeavors—our cities, our culture, our accomplishments, our wars. What fascinated me most
was that the plumb line of God’s judgment hung directly over the tiny model of the cathedral building
itself. The point of the plumb line was like an accusing finger aimed at the cathedral. Even the conduct
of the earthly church is not exempt from the judgment of God.
The image of the plumb line makes us uncomfortable because it reminds us that there is a standard
for right and wrong that has nothing to do with our preferences or our opinions or our compromises.
That’s why some prehistoric carpenter invented the first plumb line, dangling a rock from a piece of
rawhide, because we can’t always trust our own perceptions. Often enough in some handyman
project I’ve pushed a board into place and thought to myself, “There! That’s nice and straight.” But
then I’d get out the modern version of a plumb line—a level—and I’d lay it on the board and
discover that my eye isn’t that reliable. A plumb line isn’t fooled by the appearance of things; it
reveals the reality of things. A plumb line ignores the lay of the land and points directly at the center of
the earth.
And frankly that’s the idea that makes us nervous, the Biblical conviction that the universe has a
moral center, and that center is God, and all things must be judged in relationship to that center.
That’s not how we want the world to work. We want to use our own standards for right and wrong.
And our standards are considerably more flexible than God’s.
For instance, deep inside we never entirely outgrow what I call the Middle School Defense.
“Everybody else is doing it!” which may be true more or less, but one wonders if plurality is adequate
grounds for morality.
And then there’s the Dr. John Defense. Remember the old Dr. John song? “You came in with my
best friend Jim, and here I am trying to steal you away from him. But if I don’t do it, you know
somebody else will.” The Dr. John Defense is likely to be trotted out in discussions of shady business
ethics, selling pornography, cloning humans, and building bombs.
And then there’s the ever-popular No Harm/No Foul Defense. You know, “What I’m doing isn’t
hurting anybody, so why shouldn’t I do it?” That’s a popular justification for various kinds of sexual
activity, substance abuse, obesity, and refusing to wear a seat belt. The I’m-not-hurting-anybody
Defense relies on two shaky premises: first, that we live in a world in which our actions don’t affect
others, and second, that we are always smart enough to know clearly what is hurtful and what is not.
If you really believe either of those things, I happen to have a deed to the Brooklyn Bridge that I will
happily sell to you at a very reasonable cost.
We want to judge for ourselves what is right and wrong without any pesky plumb line getting in
the way. We want to follow our own hearts unswervingly, forgetting the biblical warning that the heart
is deceitful above all things (Jeremiah 17:9). The book of Judges in the Old Testament depicts a time
of national chaos in ancient Israel, a period of incessant warfare and idolatry and human sacrifice, and
the writer of the book sums up the whole hellish situation by saying, In those days “every man did that
which was right in his own eyes,” (Judges 17:6). Or in the words of the wise man that compiled the
book of Proverbs, “Sometimes there is a way that seems to be right, but in the end it is the way to
death,” (Proverbs 16:25 NRSV).
At this moment some of you are probably asking, “Mike, what’s the point of all this sin and
judgment talk? Are you trying to scare us or depress us?”
Neither! Life is already scary and depressing enough without getting threatened in a service of
worship. Even so, this business of the plumb line has some implications that we must take seriously,
what we might call lessons of the plumb line.
Lesson #1 - We are called to be holy people. How we live matters. God is holy and God’s
people are called to be holy as well, and holy people do not simply live life according to what’s easy
or what’s popular at the moment or what’s self-serving or what feels right. As far as I can tell from
the biblical story, holiness has never been easy or cheap or particularly popular, and God’s people
rarely do a very good job of holy living. But even if we do not live up to that challenge, but that
doesn’t give us an excuse to abandon that vision or to cease striving for that calling.
Lesson #2 - Most of the time doing the right thing isn’t all that hard to figure out, not with God’s
help anyway. I don’t want to reduce the Bible to a rulebook, but we do believe that the study of
Scripture within a community of faith guided by the Holy Spirit will resolve a great many of the moral
uncertainties in life. How we live matters to God and God will reveal the basics of holy living to those
who genuinely seek God’s guidance. Most of the time the problem is not that we don’t know what’s
right. Simply put, friends, there is a world of difference between not knowing God’s will and not liking
God’s will.
Lesson #3 - If we accept that all of human existence is lived under the judgment of a holy God,
then we will be humble and very reluctant to pass judgment on anybody else. The measure of
judgment you apply to others will be the standard by which you yourself will be judged, says Jesus.
This is not the same thing as saying that anything goes. This is simply the recognition that we all live in
a neighborhood of glass houses where throwing stones is generally a poor policy.
Lesson #4 – The plumb line is not just about judgment; it is also about grace. A plumb line is not
just for condemning things; it’s also for repairing and restoring things. Carpenter’s have a term to
describe a board or a wall when it is properly aligned with the plumb line. When a board is level and
straight, carpenters say that board is true.
Jesus talked a lot about truth, and for Jesus truth was whatever matched God’s will, whatever was
faithfully aligned with God. Jesus used to preface his teachings, “Truly, truly I say to you.” What Jesus
said was true, was aligned with God, but even more than that, Jesus was himself the truth. When we
come to Jesus, we are set right with God, we are aligned with God’s will, our lives are conformed to
the plumb line. This isn’t our own doing or our own goodness. It is entirely the gift of a gracious
Christ who brings us into his heart and shares his righteousness with us.
When we behold Jesus hanging on the cross, we see God’s plumb line. On the cross we see God
passing uncompromised judgment on human evil, we see a holy God utterly rejecting the corruption
of sin. But on the cross we also see God’s redeeming, renewing, renovating, restoring love for
sinners. On the cross we see the love that offers us a way to be straightened, a way to brought back
into the will of God, a way to be made true by the great truth.
Rarely does a carpenter pull out a level or a plumb line to find a reason to destroy something. A
plumb line is generally used to restore and repair. That is the great desire of God’s heart—to make
true again a fallen creation and to get the lives of God’s children back in line with God’s hopes and
dreams for us. The cross is God’s plumb line in action. The cross is simultaneously God’s terrible
judgment and God’s awesome love.
There’s another piece of art I remember from Coventry Cathedral. After the bombing of the
Cathedral, someone found two charred timbers that had fallen in the shape of a cross. Those burned
beams were nailed together and eventually hung in the church and inscribed with these words:
“Father, forgive.” Those blackened pieces of broken wood are an ugly thing to be hanging in a
cathedral, and a beautiful thing, too. A cross made from war and firebombs and destruction and
hatred, a cross raised up from the wreckage of human sin, and lifted up straight and true as a sign of
divine grace.
It sounds like something God would do, bringing judgment and forgiveness together like that. In
fact, it sounds like something only God could do.
Soli Deo Gloria!