Micah
Micah
Micah 6:6-8
The old adage is that we should be careful what we wish for. For a while, what our ancestors in faith wished for was a king. They got what their wish and paid the price almost immediately. Kings get drunk on their own power. Kings let the adoration of the people go to their heads. Kings take what doesn’t belong to them. Kings really don’t care about the average person. All the while, the people tend to worship the king as if he’s God. He promises them protection and riches. Besides, it’s just so much easier to worship someone who is right in front of you than it is to worship the God who is with you and within you. Still, the kings were for the most, part, an unmitigated disaster. To this day, this remains true of politicians who act like they are kings.
When the kings didn’t work out so well, the people started dreaming about a temple. They wanted an amazingly beautiful home for God. Then, they would not only know God’s address but they could visit at any time. Best of all, if the people ever felt like things were just not quite right, they could call on the priests at the temple to intervene with God on their behalf…for a price. According to the priests, what God loved most were animal sacrifices, animals which the priests just happened to have on hand for your convenience…and for more than a little cash.
Here’s the problem with the temple and the priests. In the beginning, it was every person’s job to live a faithful life, to love God, to love your neighbors, to follow the rules. God said, “If you do this, I will be your God and you will be my people.” Interestingly, the temple and the priests mostly blocked people from living that faithful life. If God lived in the temple, then God was kind of shut out of everywhere else. If the only people who had access to God were the priests, turning to God became the work of professionals. If you can buy your way out of anything, then you can do pretty much whatever you want.
Really…stop and think about this. Before the temple and the priests, God was everyone’s business and was in everyone’s business. God was in your home and the marketplace and out in the fields while you tended your sheep. With the advent of the temple and the priesthood, God became a business and was primarily the the concern of those who were employees. The priests worked to maintain their power and prestige and to keep the coffers full.
To this very day, the religious professionals (yup, people like me!) are often seduced into “selling” something more marketable than actual faith. We should have cool music and espresso machines. We should focus on creating an impressive building. We should promise the people prosperity and good health; or we should only tell them what they want to hear or at the least, we should promise them that only the like-minded will worship here. Smart people know that whatever is comfortable sells. Who needs to have the whole structure of things challenged? Who needs to have somebody telling you to take a long hard look in the mirror? The answer, of course, is all of us. What if the faithful thing isn’t business savvy and smart?
As a people of faith, there is a life that we are called to live, simply because it is the faithful way to live. That life involves caring for the people around us who are in need. That life involves challenging the societal structures that left those people’s needs unmet and that keeps them that way. That life involves taking a long, hard, self-critical look at ourselves and that can be painful. That life requires that we actually change how we live and that change is hard. Bottom line—we can’t live a faithful life and expect to fit in with everyone at the same time.
I hope you’re connecting the dots before I say it. When our ancestors decided to be like everyone else and have a king, things got pretty brutal, pretty fast. When they decided they wanted to be like everyone else and have a temple and priests, lived faith was replaced by temple attendance and obedience to the priests. Still today, when we forget who we are and who’s we are, when we try to just fit in and be like everyone else, things fall apart. There are still a lot of people who figure that if they sit in a pew every now and then and write a check that they’re good with God.
In Micah’s day, the temple was about as corrupt as possible. Just before our text, God recognizes all this corruption—people cheating each other in the marketplace, people totally forgetting what faith actually was and who God had been for centuries—and Micah files a lawsuit on God’s behalf. There had been an agreement between God and the people—a covenant—and that covenant was legally binding. Micah is essentially God’s lawyer, pointing out violation after violation, just ticking off the list.
The people are rattled by all this prophetic noise. (Screaming prophets…always pointing out everyone’s flaws, making people look at the one thing they don’t want to see.). After all, they had been “God’s chosen people” for longer than anyone could remember. Is it possible that after centuries of enjoying that status, they were about to become “God’s abandoned people?” “Yes,” Micah says, “maybe you should start preparing for that and while you’re preparing, just remember, the problem here is not God. The problem is that you abandoned God a long time ago.”
The thing to notice is that the people then do exactly what the religious authorities have trained them to do. They become completely convinced that what they need to do is to buy God off. If this is a lawsuit, they’re looking for a backroom settlement. Like the partner who angers their spouse and just happens to come home with an armload of flowers, they think that if they just find the right gift, then all will be right again with God. Of course, sometimes the wrong that we’ve done makes us escalate the gift. “Expensive wine? Plane tickets? What’s required this time? How much is this going to cost me in the end?”
What’s clear is that the people already recognize they that they are in the wrong. If you don’t believe you’ve done anything wrong, then you’re not looking to buy anyone off. In this case, they conclude that they need a bigger sacrifice. God’s love is for sale. That much is sure! They’ve been taught that at the temple by the experts! The only question is, “What’s the price?” Let’s see now…God likes sacrificial lambs, right? How about 10,000 of those? God likes expensive oils, right? What if we create a river of that oil? Maybe our God is more like the other nation’s gods? Maybe we need to take a hint from their worship practices. Maybe we need to become like them. We all know that they sacrifice human beings—usually slaves whom no-one really cares about. What if we take what matters most to us—our first born sons—and sacrifice them to God? I know it seems extreme but this whole situation is extreme!
Then, it happens. In one single sentence, Micah makes the real problem clear: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to act with loving kindness and to walk humbly with your God?” That’s the whole faith, expressed in one sentence. Faith isn’t about listening to the religious experts. Faith isn’t about visiting the temple and buying expensive swag. The sacrifice God wants isn’t your sheep or your oil or your child. What God wants is for you to sacrifice yourself. God wants you to live differently, not just differently than everyone else, but differently than you’ve ever lived so far. God wants you to re-order not just your priorities but your whole way of being in the world.
Here are the priorities. Priority one is to do justice. Justice in the Hebrew Scriptures is not an abstract concept. Justice is pursued and lived and brought to life doing two things. First, you do justice by standing up on behalf of someone who is being treated unjustly. When you see something, you actually say something. Even more importantly, when you see something, you actually do something. In ways that almost inevitably cost you—money, time, effort, care—you do the right thing to fix the wrong that’s happening right in front of you. You don’t do the math. You do justice!
Of course, that’s not enough. When you do justice, you need to work to change the structures that allow injustice to persist. So, there are built in structures of racism and sexism and classism and so on. While polite people don’t talk about those things, faithful people do. The church matters not because it’s where we buy God off but because it is where we come together to bear witness to the victims of injustice, where we challenge the structures of injustice, and where we support one another and empower each other to work for change. This is not a partisan project. This is the plain talking, hard work of making sure that children eat, that those who are ill are cared for, and that everyone’s voice is heard.
Second, we need to act with loving kindness. The Hebrew word here is “hesed.” “Hesed” is not about giving people what they deserve. Rather, “hesed” is about lavish kindness, and mercy and love and grace. If you are living with this kind of loving kindness, then love and mercy and grace will be your default settings. This will be how you meet a stranger, not just what you hold in reserve for your closest friends. Of course, when you lead with loving kindness, you may not get loving kindness in return. This is precisely the point. A lived faith is not defined by someone else’s response to us. Nor is a lived faith defined by doing whatever I feel like doing. Nope…the question is, “What’s the next loving thing to do?” In this light, the church matters when we come together to practice to loving kindness. The church matters when we support and encourage each other to act with this loving kindness in the world beyond the church that can sometimes seem utterly devoid of love.
Finally, we are to walk humbly with God. Notice…it’s not that we are to walk with God straight to the temple. Rather, the walk being referred to here is the walk that we take every day. Wherever we go, God goes with us. Often, God will be leading us. Occasionally, God will be leading us to where we would rather not go. That’s the thing. God leads. We follow. We walk together, every step of the way. Sometimes, in this light, the value of the church is having a place to practice walking with God. It’s so easy to lose our focus. It’s so great to have people to turn to for help, a group which could include everyone from our neighbors in town to our ancestors in faith from centuries ago.
The other very human challenge is to take that walk with God and stay humble. It’s easy to spend our days deciding who to blame for the hard stuff and how to get all the credit we can get for the good. To walk humbly with God is to let go of the whole credit and blame game. God loves us so much more than we deserve. We’re called to love like that, too.
What then shall we do? Let’s do a little justice. Let’s show some loving kindness. Let’s walk humbly with our God. And, as a church family, let’s do those things together.