· Amos 7:7-15
· Psalm 85:8-13 (8)
· Ephesians 1:3-14
· Mark 6:14-29
This line in Amos is one of my favourite in the Hebrew part of the Bible: "I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass them by." (Amos 7:8)
Being a carpenter myself, I can tell you this about a plumb line: it is the only tool that is always true. A level, a square, a measuring tape, they all become warped if you mishandle them, but a plumb line can never go wrong. You hang it, it shows you exactly the way down. And there is something even more interesting about the plumb line. For the layman, it's a tool for plumbing walls or columns. In fact, that's why we call something [SQG] "plumb" when it's truly vertical. But for a trained carpenter, it's also a layout tool, that allows you to bring a mark down from where it's measured to where the construction will take place. We can use it to transfer the layout of a foundation to the bottom of an excavation. We can use it to locate the bottom of a column when we know where the superstructure will be.
So isn't that the most excellent metaphor for Christ? Compare Christ to the plumb line. Not only is he the only man who is entirely true to the Lord and incorruptible, but he is also the one who brings down the layout of God's plan to us, at the bottom of the excavation. He takes the lines of God's plan and draws them in the dirt for us, and then he begins to build the foundation. In stone, of course.
By the way, contrary to popular belief, carpenters do not work only in wood, neither today nor three thousand years ago. A carpenter does structural work, whether it's wood, concrete, stone, mud brick, metal, fiberglass, whether it's a house or a ship. So the man Yeshua, son of a carpenter, is a man who was building structures. The man Yeshua knew how to transfer a layout with a plumb line. He knew how to build a wall that's structurally sound. God didn't just pick anybody to do this job, he picked a carpenter. He picked someone who knew how to read a plan and realise it.
The first stone that Jesus picked is his best friend, Simon son of Jonah. Simon isn't much of a foundation; he's rash, unreliable, and not particularly loyal. Luckily, Jesus is also God, so he has the word that creates what it declares. Why did Jesus say "you are a rock, and on that rock I will built my church"? Well, on the one hand, we could speculate that he might not have said it at all, and that the author of Matthew wrote it in to support Peter against Paul in early church politics. But if we assume that Jesus really did say that, he didn't say it because Simon actually was a reliable person on whom to build an organisation, but because by saying it, Jesus can make it so.
Here is an interesting bit of history, by the way. If you look at the Basilica Cathedral of Saint Peter in Rome, you might say it's the epicentre of the church of Christ in the west. And if you look underneath, which of course archaeologists have done, there is an older, smaller church, and then an older one under that, and I don't know how many layers of old construction are under the modern church, but when you get through all of those, at the very bottom, there is a burial. A very simple burial, just a body covered with a plain cairn of tile, as I recall. That body was recovered and examined, and it's got nothing to do with anything. It was apparently a decoy for grave-robbers. But next to the cairn there is a retaining wall that was built to prevent erosion of the hill and therefore the graves on the hill. Oh yeah, because before there was a basilica there, the Vatican was a hill. And in the retaining wall, there was a hidden hole with bones in it. On the wall there was an ancient graffiti that said "Peter is here." And the bones were tested and they were a man between 65 and 70 years old, which is the age Peter is thought to have died. And there are no foot bones, as if the guy had his feet broken or cut off, say, to get him off a cross he might have been nailed to. And the bones have a purple dye stain on them, from being wrapped in purple and cloth-of-gold, not at death, but after the flesh had decayed away and only the bones remained. And the dirt on the bones showed it decayed in dirt, not in a cavity in a wall, and the dirt matched exactly the dirt under that decoy tile cairn.
So the conclusion of the Roman Catholic Church as of June 1968, is that these are the bones of Saint Peter, who was first buried in a pauper's grave, and then removed, wrapped in rich cloth, and re-buried in a hidden cavity in the wall where his bones would be safe. And when they dug up the bone yard in the third century or so, they left that wall and built the church over it, and then the next church, and the next church. So as far as we can tell, it seems that the physical church of Christ really was built, literally, on Peter.
But as for the real church of God, the spiritual one, it takes a lot more than one stone to build it. And we are all stones in God's church. If Jesus can make a rock out of unreliable Simon Bar-Jonah, he can make a rock out of any of us, for his sake. And he sets us in the wall that's built with the plumb line. Each one of us might be a stone, but it takes all of us to make up the walls that make up the church of God.
That's very important. I saw something on Facebook a while back that said "life is not about finding yourself, it's about discovering who God created you to be." Well, I think that's complete hogwash. Because the point of God is not about you. Yes, yes, God loves you. But that's not the point. The whole point of Jesus was that it's not about you. Why do you think he said "deny yourself, take up your cross, then come, follow me?" Deny yourself. That's the first step. Stop thinking it's all about you.
Jesus taught us two kinds of things: things about the Kingdom of Heaven, and things about how to live this life. And if you pay attention, all the things he taught about living this life are to forget ourselves. Give what we have to others. Forsake possessions. Forsake status and family and all our attachment to material desires. And then work, not for ourselves, but for the poor, and for the glory of God. Nowhere in the Bible does Jesus say you need to "discover who God created you to be." God created you to have free will and be anything you want to be; Jesus called you to forget what you want and work for him.
So when we look at this image of the plumb line, it should remind us that God's plan is a plan for all of us, not for each of us. The great design of God involves all of us working as one; one wall, set along the lines drawn down from God's plan, built with the plumb line of Christ who alone is always true. One wall, straight, plumb, solid. One church, standing as one to do the work of the Lord in the world. Wherever we are, whether in a large congregation or alone in the wilderness, we are no longer one individual, but an indivisible part of the church of God. Wherever we are, we do his work. Wherever we are, we follow the lines that Christ has drawn down for us. We are not individuals; we are stones in the wall built with the plumb line. Let us act like it.
The hymn for today is #576, We All Are One in Mission.
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