Fourth Sunday after Trinity 2024

Drawing on Amos's vision of the plumbline, James asks what it looks like to measure our lives, our churches, and our communities against God's standards of justice, mercy, and faithfulness.

Transcript

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And so, Heavenly Father, be with us by your presence and transform us into the likeness of your Son. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. I'm really not very good at building things. I haven't got a lot of experience, and the few times I've tried, uh, it's been a lot of mess and a lot of hard work and not great result results. I have a brother and I have a brother-in-law, both of whom have achieved major extensions on their home. One of them built uh another story on his house, and the other one built a whole new uh extension onto the side. And they're the sort of people who have the building codes just kind of in their minds. They've read all the books, they've done all the work, they're very good with their hands. Um if I manage to build a piece of IKEA furniture, it's been a good day. And if Hannah and I managed to do that without any arguments, it's been a miracle. Not exactly an episode of Grand's designs. But even I know what this piece of kit is. And I'd I'd love to be able to tell you that this is a toy that George has. This is the one that I have at home, and it just shows you how domestic my capacities as a builder are. This we call a spirit level. Now, the job of a spirit level is to show you, to make a judgment about whether the thing that you've built is flat or not, or square or not, or if it is going up truly vertically or not. You'll be pleased to know that this pulpit has been well built and is properly flat. It's so easy when building to not quite get the angles right and to end up with things crooked, not quite square. The sides or the surfaces aren't straight. In the Old Testament, uh, in our reading today, they didn't have spirit levels. What they had was plumb lines. It was essentially a piece of string with a heavy weight at the bottom built on a uh 90-degree angle that could do the exactly the same job to tell you if the thing is square or not. And this is the metaphor that the prophet Amos develops in his criticism of the people of Israel. He says in our Old Testament reading, see, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people, Israel. Israel, I'm measuring you against this spirit level to find out how you shape up. We know what happens when we put IKEA furniture together badly. The shelves don't hold the books that they're supposed to hold, or the thing doesn't last as long as it's supposed to last. It breaks, it falls over. It can't contribute to the goodness of your home life in the way that it's designed. In Israel, the plumb line that Amos uses judges the justice in that society. Do the rich oppress the poor? Do the strong oppress the weak? Where is the justice for the victim? And just as a plumb line can be used to judge the relative verticality of a wall, so does God judge the relative uprightness of a community or a society. Building a society just like building a piece of furniture requires someone to point out when things are getting bent out of shape and when the structure of the society is not square. So before we move on, what's the plumb lines in your life? How do you know whether the life that you're building is square or not? I'd like us to hold on to that metaphor as we turn now to the New Testament or to the gospel reading, and we start to understand the argument between Peter and Jesus that we just read about. Both Peter and Jesus are on the same page about a lot of things. They both agree that Jesus is trying to build a kingdom shaped around himself. Kingdom, you might want to think of that as a culture or a society, a place where people do certain things and live in a certain way. And both Peter and Jesus agree that this society is going to be different to the societies around them, that it will set an example to the nations and to the societies of the world. And then something Peter wasn't expecting happens. Jesus holds up his own spirit level and he starts to describe what it looks like, what 90-degree angles and what straight sides look like in his kingdom. He says, We're going to build a kingdom that looks like this. This is what verticality looks like in my society. It's going to be a society in which people willingly suffer for one another. A society where people are willing to deny themselves, that they will take up their own crosses and follow Jesus. It's a society, Jesus says, you where you only win your life by giving it away, by losing it. And where the true profit, real profit, comes by forfeiting everything that the world has to offer. Everything just feels slightly off, and you feel like you're walking sideways around the house. Everything is just slightly off kilter, and it's a lot of fun for a few minutes to walk through the house and feel like you're off balance, and then you get outside and you go on to the next ride. Imagine, if you will, being born in a house like that. Where all you ever know is a 10-degree slant on the floor, where your first steps are taken with that 10-degree slant, where your family, your parents, and your loved ones all quite happily exist in the 10-degree slant world. It becomes the way that we do things around here. Surely it's the right way to live. I have a perfectly lovely life living at 10 degrees. How terrifying would it be for Jesus to walk in with his spirit level and say, Nope, you're off. You're not living straight up and down, you're not living square. You're actually at 10 degrees to the way you should be. And perhaps you spend some time with Jesus as he walks around this house, and through his actions and the way he walks and the things he says, you become convinced that his way is better than your way. And so you choose to leave the fun house, to go out into the real world, into freedom with him. And the first thing you discover is you have to relearn how to walk. You've learned how to walk at 10 degrees slant. That's what feels natural and good and normal to you. And then you walk outside into freedom with Jesus and discover this is disorienting and strange. Everything feels upside down. I don't feel like I'm on my true footing. For thousands of years, this has been the experience of Christians reading the teachings of Jesus. The only way to gain my life is to give it away. The only way to really truly profit is to forfeit everything the world has to offer. This doesn't just feel 10 degrees off from normal. This feels completely upside down to the way we have been trained to live by the crooked society in which we live. We have been trained to live at 10 degrees in most of the aspects of our lives. The way we love one another, the way we work, the way we do family and friendship, the way we do peace and reconciliation. But I'd like, in our few moments together left, to think particularly about how we have been trained at 10 degrees with our money. We're in a stewardship season all this month. The dean has asked us to think about our finances and our resources, the things that we own and the things that we have, and to reflect on our giving, not just to this cathedral, but in general. I'd like us to reflect on a moment that maybe we have been trained by the fun house in which we live to look at the stuff that we own and say, this is mine. I've worked hard for this stuff and I deserve it. I think if you walked into the mall this afternoon, if you went around Lancashire or most of the Western world and repeated that sentence, people would nod very happily and agree with you. This stuff is mine. I worked hard for it and I deserve it. We have been trained to hold on to our stuff and our wealth, and the way of Jesus is to share, to give away, and to live open-handedly. What will it profit someone to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? And so we hold on tight to the stuff that we have, and the stuff that we've amassed, and the stuff that we've worked extremely hard to earn. We hold on tight to those things, and maybe we don't notice that our very soul is slipping away from us. This is what I mean by reading the words of Jesus and thinking, this is totally off-kilter. This isn't the way things are supposed to be. I'm supposed to profit from working hard. I'm supposed to hold on to the things that are mine. If I let go of those things, then I'm gonna have they're gonna be gone. What on earth do you mean, Jesus? That it's only when I let go of my stuff that I start to gain the really important things. And my point, the thing I've been trying to say all morning is if you look at the teachings of Jesus and they feel off-kilter to you, it might be that you have been living and have grown up and have been trained in a world that's 10 degrees off. And Jesus is presenting us with a spirit level and saying, look, friends, this is what a truly upright life looks like. So please do consider giving to the cathedral. Please do consider giving to other charities. But this morning is far more important than just your maintenance of this institution. Funding this place is all well and good. We need to keep the lights on, we need to keep the heating on. More important than that, there is good ministry to be done here, folks, and there is missional opportunities. We have work to do and it needs to be resourced. But Jesus is not here to fund an institution. He cares far more than that about you, and he wants to bring you out of the hall of mirrors in which each one of us has grown up and lived. He wants us to no longer live at a 10-degree tilt. He wants to show us the true way, he wants to present us with a plumb line and say, live differently, be set free. This is just one sermon in five, and I really hope that as you're listening to them, you're hearing how they balance one another. Of course, financial planning is important, saving for the future is important, and I was really uh grateful for Canon Jenny's sermon last week as we hear all of these voices in the round with one another. But let me gently encourage you, friend, particularly in the area of your finances, allow Jesus to hold before you a spirit level. Maybe do it in community with a trusted friend, spend some time and ask yourself, are my finances, are the way I spend and give away my money, am I doing that in line with Jesus' way of living? Or have you maybe found yourself trained by the world to think differently, to think wrongly about the stuff that you have, the stuff that's yours? Jesus would ask us this morning where is the true prophet in that?