Year C
Luke 10:25-37
The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn
The Standard of the Plumb Line
Remember the Three Stooges? In one of their films they were hired be a wealthy woman to fix her very valuable table. It was wobbly. So after the usual Stooges commotion, they concluded that a couple of the les of the table were too long. They set to work sawing and eventually they got the table level but it was now 6 inches off the ground. The woman picked up a hammer and chased them out of her house. The goal for tables is that all four legs are stable and not crocked or at least high enough to fit a chair underneath. The goal for God’s people in the lessons today is that our love for God and for others should be stably balanced. No wobbling allowed and Amos, in the OT text today, tells us that to accomplish stability God sets a plumb line in our lives.
A plumb line is a weight suspended from a string used as a vertical reference line to make sure a structure is centered. It can be difficult while in the middle of a project to determine a true horizontal or vertical line without a measuring tool. A plumb line remains true, and all work must line up with it or risk being crooked. When God said today He was setting a plumb line among His people, God was setting the standard by which all must line up or risk being crooked.
The plumb line is God’s moral law against which we determine right and wrong. It has been said that wise people are those who line up their lives according to God’s plumb line rather than trying to move it to satisfy their own agendas. The prophets in the Bible, like Amos, definitely do not leave us guessing as to what they believe line up with God’s plumb line, the law of love. They tell us that God requires we do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God.
The reading today from Amos begins a series of readings in the weeks ahead from the prophets. Amos seems to have lost all hope that the people would realize the serious nature of their sin and renounce it. They had failed to live up to what God required of them. Today we hear a warning from all the texts that justice and mercy toward others are the measure of our faithfulness to God. The parable of the Good Samaritan, so very familiar to us, illustrates vividly this measure of faithfulness and God’s ethical standard of love.
If I were to ask each of you today to describe love for another person, I’m sure there would be a variety of answers. A teenager might call love “an itching in the heart that you can’t scratch.” A bride-to-be might say that “love is a feeling that you feel when you feel that you’re feeling a feeling you’ve never felt before.” The Lord’s definition of love for another person is found in the gospel story today; a story of human need and helping hands. It’s a story that when heard sets the plumb line and demands that it hearers look for opportunities to practice love for others in powerful ways and perhaps to learn from surprising sources how to do just that.
For when we seek to practice love for others in our lives, we travel by grace, sent as the 70 disciples in Luke had just been sent by Jesus to respond to our neighbor along the way which means that to truly love our neighbor, we will have to stop and take some risks. It was a huge risk for the Samaritan to stop and give aid to the man who fell into the hands of robbers. The road from Jerusalem to Jericho about 17 miles was risky to travel. It had a bad reputation and was notorious as a place of likely attack and robbery. It became known as “the red or bloody way.”
The victim in the ditch no doubt seemed to be dead and hearing that the Levite and priest pass by we immediately want to turn them into bad guys but priests were forbidden from going where there was a dead body. They simply represent the traditional way religious men would have dealt with the situation. They were not wrong in their actions. It was safer for them to pass by or risk ritual impurity and the hearers of this story would have understood the decision to pass by on the other side. The hearers would have also expected that the third person in the story would have been a Jewish layperson.
But oh no! Jesus sends down a Samaritan; an outsider, an enemy of the Jewish people, who brings help and attention, justice and mercy. Jesus’ answer to the lawyer makes a point that is terrifyingly clear. Choosing God means choosing people; choosing God means choosing anyone who needs you. The lawyer does not pretend to misunderstand. He says when asked who was the neighbor, “The one who showed him mercy.” But we don’t hear the end of story because the end is still being written by you and me, “Go and do likewise” Jesus said.
This may sound easy but as we know, it is not. At one time or another, all of us are like the lawyer, looking for ways to get off the hook. Yet, thankfully, we and others through the generations have made choices to choose God, to walk in the way of the plumb line of God even when other choices get in the way. In Colossians, Paul writes with great affection to this community of imperfect people who have, despite their imperfections, chosen God. It must have been very encouraging for the Colossians to read that Paul sees them as a community where the gospel is alive and well and bearing fruit of faith, hope, and love.
This is the kind of love Jesus meant when he said to the lawyer, “Go and do likewise.” It’s a love that bears the fruit of compassion and mercy for others. A clergy friend of mine once told me of a time when he was part of an inner city clergy group who were participating in a meeting at a church located in the heart of a depressed and violent part of the city. The church was involved in offering programs for its neighbors, the poorest of the poor. The meeting was held on a very cold winter morning. And as he and the others arrived for the meeting, they had to pass the front doors of the church to get to the parish hall where the meeting was taking place. Each of them saw that a homeless man was bundled in blankets, sleeping on the front steps of the church.
During the meeting, they all spoke about ways that the church is called to live into the gospel command to love our neighbor and show mercy, many spoke of the man they had seen on the steps. Their hearts went out to the man. His presence encouraged them in their work, to think of additional programs to aid the least among them. During the meeting one of the church staff came to tell them disturbing news—the man on the church steps had actually died of hypothermia. They were devastated by the news.
My friend told me that whenever he hears this parable of the Good Samaritan, it reminds him of that day, for they were not entirely like those who passed by on the other side, yet they also were not like the Samaritan, who was moved with pity and bandaged the traveler’s wounds. To love our neighbor means that we will have to stop and take risks. There is a plumb line held against all or our actions, great and small. Are there people we pass by? Are there times when we are tempted to say, “That’s not my problem?” We really should try hard to not do that because our God doesn’t. I think that to be a neighbor means to reach out to those who are my neighbors, for everyone is loved and created in the image of God. If we pass by on the other side of the street we risk being crooked.