The Reverend Holly Antolini, Sunday July 13th 2025
©Holly Lyman Antolini
Sermon for Proper 10 Year C, Revised Common Lectionary
Amos 7:7-17; Ps. 25:1-9; Colossians 1:1-14; Luke 10:25-37
Show us your ways, O LORD, and teach us your paths. Lead us in your truth and teach us, for you are the God of our salvation; in you have we trusted all the day long. AMEN.
It is a delight to be invited into this community of faith, to ponder God’s word together with you, and to break and share with you the bread that is Christ’s Body, given to revive, nourish and strengthen us first to KNOW how God would have us serve God’s people, and then, as the Collect says, to “have the grace and power faithfully” to DO SO!
Isn’t it interesting that the Collect separates the “knowing” from the “doing?” Doesn’t that make sense, though? It does in MY experience, uncomfortably so! So often I KNOW what’s needed for the general welfare and yet I fall short of actually DOING it! Maybe I lack the moral energy. Moral activity is a muscular thing, after all, requiring conditioning and practice every bit as much as running or swimming does! Or maybe the risk seems too high: we might provoke others to anger and resistance.
Which brings me to Amos. This is a passage I love at any time, but NOW seems a time when we especially NEED a “plumb line.” You all know what that is, yes? The piece of thread or string or cord with a weight on the end, so that it hangs absolutely straight, and can be used to “true” a wall, measuring the placement of each new brick against it. How wonderful that expression, that one “trues” a wall! If a wall isn’t erected scrupulously straight, it is “untrue,” and will fall!
What in our lives these days needs a plumb line? What risks being “out of true?” Being false, you might say? What is at risk of falling… or falling apart?
Amos’ plumb line led him to place bricks of prophetic warning one atop the other, foreseeing disaster for his people Israel. His heavy and portentous words caused the King, Jeroboam, and the King’s professional prophet Amaziah – there were dozens hired at any royal court - to object that Amos wasn’t being loyal, and even that he was conspiring against the King in speaking out as he did. They demanded that he go into exile.
Amos responded that he was no professional prophet, hired to tell the King what he wanted to hear. He was a mere arborist, a “dresser of sycamore trees,” and his searing truth was a word directly from God, a word he was driven – impelled against his own best interests, one must say – out of the countryside all the way to the royal court to speak, like it or not. Not he, he warned, but the whole nation of Israel stood at risk of being exiled.
Of course, on top of Amos, in the lectionary today we also have the story we’ve named “The Good Samaritan,” the so-well-known story from the Gospel of Luke to help “true” our lives to God’s plumb line in this trying time. The lawyer in this story is part of the scribal community that was famously (infamously) suspicious of Jesus from the start of his ministry to its devastating finish, people with at least a modicum of power who feared they stood to lose it if Jesus, with his message of love and his healing ministry among the poor, “took power.” The lawyer is going after the cracks in Jesus’ “Jewishness,” in hopes of forcing him into a blasphemy. Instead, Jesus adroitly turns the test on the lawyer himself, asking him to answer his own question from the Hebrew Torah, the law. So the lawyer, a sucker for proving himself “right,” quotes “The Shemah,” the heart of the Hebrew Torah, “"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind;” and then adds, “and your neighbor as yourself." Jesus approves. But now the lawyer continues on the trajectory of justifying himself, and asks, “So, Jesus: WHO is my neighbor?”
And Jesus unfolds the story, with the known Jewish authorities – the priest and the Levite - spurning the injured fellow lying by the side of the road because he might render them unclean and unfit for Temple service, whereas the foreigner Samaritan – whose faith didn’t have the same intense purity code the Jewish faith did, and who was therefore outcast by scrupulous Jews as unclean himself – stopped and helped, going out of his way not only to tend to the poor man personally, but making sure he would have care until he had recovered.
Clearly, according to Jesus here, our neighbor is NOT confined to the people nearest and most like us! Our neighbor is anyone in need. And we can hop over any differences to offer mercy to those folk. In fact, by choosing the Samaritan as the one who offers care where the priest and Levite do not, Jesus strongly implies that we’re MORE likely to offer mercy if we KNOW what it feels like to be shunned or dismissed or otherwise treated as a non-person, as the Samaritan did. Being a foreigner or an outcast MIGHT actually, for this reason, find it easier to reach out in love, to risk further condemnation even, than someone comfortable with her or his circumstances.
The story is not ambiguous about this. The plumb line is clear: if someone has need, she/they/he is our neighbor. And Jesus would have us reach out and care for them. Bar no one. Even if it gets us in trouble, as treating the injured man would have gotten those religious authorities in trouble by defiling them.
If we want our lives to stay true, so the tale of the Samaritan demonstrates, our plumb line must be CARE. Care, like that of the two young Mexican counselors, Silvana Garza Valdez and Maria Paula Zarate, 19-year-old young women who succeeded in rescuing 20 young American girls, campers in one of the privileged camps along the Guadalupe River in the Texas hill country where 27 other girls lost their lives in the devastating Fourth-of-July floods. Or the young Coast Guard rookie, petty officer Scott Ruskan, who “plucked mud-covered children to safety after his helicopter crew flew through the appalling weather to reach their campsite in rural Hunt early Friday afternoon.” [Richard Luscombe in The Guardian, “Teen counselors and rookie rescue swimmer save dozens in Texas camp flood.”]
It seems a simple guide to the straight-up life. But golly is it hard to live by it, consistently, these days, and, frankly, every day, ever. No wonder Jesus warned that the wide gate and the easy road leads to destruction, that choosing love meant choosing the narrow gate and the hard road.
The urgent counsel of these Scriptures, laid alongside each other, makes me grateful for Paul’s prayer for the Colossians – and for US – in our third Reading for today, that “we may be filled with the knowledge of God's will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding.” And that we not just KNOW God’s will, but will be filled with the strength & power to LIVE BY IT, “lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as we bear fruit in every good work and as we grow in the knowledge of God.” That we may “be made strong with all the strength that comes from God’s glorious power, and …prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled us to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light.” May it be so. Amen.