Half a Bubble Off

Half A Bubble Off--August 9, 2017

"This is what the LORD showed me: the Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand. And the LORD said to me, 'Amos, what do you see?' And I said, 'A plumb line.' Then the Lord said, 'See, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass them by; the high places of Isaac shall be made desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste, and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword'." [Amos 7:7-9]

I have a love-hate relationship with my level.  I'm just gonna own that.

A level, or a they are sometimes called, "bubble levels" or, my personal favorite, "spirit levels" originally on account of the liquid in the tube which creates a bubble to mark plumb-ness with, is one of those tools that brings an awful lot of bad news when you are using it correctly before it can give you good news.  A spirit level (I can't stop using that phrase!), as you have probably seen before, will have a flat edge, and then inside it will be a clear tube filled with colored liquid and a bubble inside, and then little hash marks in the middle of the tube.

The idea with a level is that if it is held against a surface that is truly horizontally flat, or vertically plumb, the bubble will rest right in between the hash marks in the center of the tube.  But if it is inclined or leaning, even slightly, the bubble will show you by being off center.  Hence the expression (often applied to me) about being "half a bubble off plumb."

We all like to imagine we have great vision and would be able to tell with the unaided eye if a wall is straight or a surface is flat, but it turns out we are... what's the word?  Ah yes:  wrong.  Our eyes fool us.  A lot.  We are fine for rough estimates, but precise measurements are just too much for our naked eye.  We need something like a bubble in a marked tube to show us clearly what we would otherwise only be guessing at.  We need a tool that will tell us what we need to see, even if it something we do not want to see.

Case in point.  I was hooking up the washer and dryer in the new laundry room the other day, and after feeling both proud and sweaty from the initial task of lifting, moving, and wiggling those giant metal boxes into the right spot and hooking up the hoses and changing the electrical cords, and such, I was reminded that my job was not done until the machines had been balanced to be level.  Sigh... I can handle the big, visible stuff, easily.  But the fine tuning of adjusting the feet just by a smidge here and a smidge there seemed really unpleasant.  Besides, I thought to myself, the machine looks just fine.  It looks flat.  I'm sure it's fine....

But I got out the level anyhow.  And my eyes were proven wrong.

See what I mean?  Bad news first, before good news.  The level had to show me where the machine was out of plumb so that it could be addressed--because my eyes couldn't see that level of incline, and because my tired willpower didn't want to have to see it.  But the spirit level did what I needed, without stopping to ask whether I wanted to see what it had to show me.  I needed to see the truth.

After all, a washing machine that is out of plumb will rock and shimmy and shuffle across the floor, and in the mean time, risks causing damage to the dryer, the wall, or the floor.  I could look away in blissful ignorance and just hope it was fine, but that would not stop an unbalanced washing machine from causing damage to its surroundings.

Suffice it so say that after enough adjusting of the feet of the machine, and enough lifting, nudging, and enough re-measuring, the washing machine in our house is now sitting flat and balanced.  The level told me so.  It enabled me to see what I would otherwise have missed with my naked eye or ignored with my mind.

That's what a level does.  It brings the bad news of what is out of plumb first, so that things can be put right.  The whole point of such a tool is to get things adjusted, changed, corrected, so that the wall can be straight, the foundation can be solid, or the washing machine can be balanced.  The goal is for things to be put right--but that means being able to say first when things are not right, when something is rotten in Denmark, as the Bard says.

Before they invented the spirit level, of course, they had the plumb line.  A weight, hopefully with a pointy end at the bottom, is suspended from a string or cord, and you can measure whether something is plumb--truly vertical--or not.  And like a level, a plumb line is there to give you bad news when necessary... so that things can be put right and you can have a wall that is straight up and down, which means your house will not fall over.

Now, it's critical to say at this point what should already be obvious: the point of either of these tools is ultimately constructive--to help build, preserve, and make whole.  You don't measure your project, find out it's off plumb, and then destroy it all or give up on the project.  You may have to adjust, or take down and then re-erect, or re-inforce, whatever you are building, but the intention--the goal, if you will--is to have a building that stands upright when you are done.  A plumb line brings judgment, so to speak, but it is judgment for the goal of making things right... of putting things in balance.  You and I may hate to have to see it when it tells us there is more work to be done, but that is far better than letting something out of plumb cause destruction later on because we were too tired, too lazy, or too apathetic to be bothered.


That's why we need the visions of prophets like Amos, who at least in this one instance actually saw a plumb line.  It was sort of like God's children's-sermon-object-lesson for Amos--a way for him to understand, and then for us to understand as we read, that all of God's harsh words against the people of Israel in Amos' day were meant to be the constructive words of a master builder who is determined to set things right. And Amos understood that sometimes you have to hear the bad news of what is out of plumb first, in order for things to be set right. 


So Amos regularly tells the powerful of his day that they are aloof, out of touch, and insulated from the sufferings of the poor around them... and that this is not acceptable. 


And Amos tells the religious establishment, including all the priests and official court-prophets who told the king of the day what he wanted to hear, that their religious shows and government-approved spirituality cannot cover up the ways they are cheating people in business and getting rich while others starve. 


And Amos tells the dealmakers and powerbrokers, too, that for all their affluence and all their influence, they are destined for the dustbin of history.


It is not bitter or vengeful or malicious when Amos brings this report--it is with the clarity of a spirit bubble that simply says, "Things are crooked here."  The intention is always to build things up rightly--but that never means just painting over shoddy work in the hopes no one will notice. 


Sometimes it is hard for our ears to hear that good, creative, constructive purpose in the harsh words of a prophet like Amos... or prophetic voices in our day who tell us where our hearts, our priorities, our greed, our fear, and our apathy are crooked, too.  But we need those voices... and usually a way to tell if we need to hear a prophet among us is if her or his words make us squirm a little. 


Those voices, like the bubble on a spirit level, help us to see what our own poor vision would not recognize. 


Those voices, like the straight line of a plumb bob pointing down to earth, compel us to see with new eyes what we would have preferred to let ourselves ignore. 


And those voices, because they come from a place of love ultimately, allow us to gain a vision for a future in which things are set right, the crooked is made straight, justice is done, the hungry are fed, and all find a place of welcome in the house of God forever.


Whose voice have you not been wanting to listen to because it makes you squirm... and how might such voices help you and I to see clearly what we need to see?


Lord God, raise up prophets and plumb lines, spirit-levels and Spirit-led voices to help us to see what our eyes cannot on their own.