July 13, 2006
Gravitas
Pentecost 6/10B Amos 7.7-15
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… ” [Amos 7.8]
Plumb lines are one of the simplest of tools for harnessing one of the most complicated of phenomena, a phenomenon so mysterious that even the most brilliant astrophysicists are yet quite to understand it.
We call it gravity. Earth life would be even graver without it. Space cadets, professional basketball players, and ballet dancers seem simply to ignore it. They just float, instead. But not so with rest of us.
Aristotle said it’s why stuff falls. Then, he went on to something more interesting. Newton devised a formula and measured it. Einstein thought it caused by something like a curved-space ball. Heisenberg and his fellow quantum mechanics imagine that little bits called gravitons charge all about to make it so, but they’re yet to catch one.
You can make your own plumb line by simply tying a chunk of lead or some other heavy object to one end of a string. [Plumbum is the Latin word for lead.] Used properly, a plumb line measures the straight and level. Just take hold of the loose end of the string and let the weight gently swing to and fro until it’s still. When it stops, you’re more or less in touch with the center of the earth and on the upright. It’s a comfortably reassuring place to be, until you realize how much you’re actually on the tilt.
God took the plumb line for a remarkable metaphor and liked it so much he used it to call Amos’s attention to show and tell. But Amos, who wasn’t especially interested in giving up his tree surgery franchise for whatever it was God had in mind for him, claimed that he was not all that much of a techie and not in to metaphors, anyhow. He claimed he had no idea what to do with the plumb line, but as is so often the case with when God asks something of us, he ended up doing it, anyway.
Lasers have pretty well replaced plumb lines these days, so the analogy may be lost on this quantum generation. But the church, enamored as it often is with matters it considers of great gravity and even mystery, surely must remember. Strange, this story about Amos’s call coming again for us at a time like the present. Once again, maybe God is calling for an Amos and may already have just now chosen one. Let us pray that we not fail to see the forest for the trees.