Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 30, 2011

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

We all, I suppose, have our favorite Bible passages, and those few lines that we just heard from Micah make the short list of my all-time favorites. So do the Beatitudes, which we also just heard, but this morning I want to talk about the passage from Micah. I love those lines. I’ve loved them for as long as I’ve known about them. I love them so much I used them in my ordination service. I get a sort of warm, fuzzy feeling inside every time I hear them. Now, most of you know me. You know that I’m not the type who’s going to be satisfied just with warm, fuzzy feelings; and I’m not about to let warm, fuzzy feelings go unexamined. Maybe I should, but I don’t; and I won’t. So when this passage came up in the lectionary this week I started to wonder what it is about it that I love so well. Why does it seem to touch me so? When I asked myself those questions the first thing that popped into my mind was: Because these requirements are easy. They aren’t impossibly difficult, like Jesus’ command to love our enemies or to be perfect as God is perfect. They don’t demand that some people pretend to be somebody they aren’t, like Leviticus’ blanket condemnation of same gender sexual relationships. They don’t demand rote, mechanical compliance with laws that don’t seem to make much sense, like some of the dietary laws in the Torah. They’re easy. Do justice? Sure. I try not to treat people unjustly. Love kindness? Sure. Who doesn’t love kindness? After all, isn’t Christianity primarily about being nice? Walk humbly with your God? Sure. It’s not too hard to feel humble when I compare myself to God. So sure. I’m all over this stuff. It’s easy. It makes the life of faith easy. What’s not to love?

OK, but here’s the problem. You knew there was going to be a problem, didn’t you. When you turn to people who know what this passage is really saying, people like biblical scholars, those learned types who have a nasty habit of overthrowing our simplistic understandings of the Bible, you discover that these commandments, to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God, really aren’t easy at all. In fact, they’re quite annoyingly difficult. That’s what I discovered this past week when I made the mistake of reading some of those scholars’ comments on this passage. Rats!, to quote Charlie Brown. Here I thought I was off the hook. Turns out I’m not. Rats! See, here’s at least a little bit about what those commands in Micah are really saying.

Do justice. OK, but what’s justice? The Hebrew word here is mišpat, which, those annoying scholars tell us, is “a dynamic concept that calls on God’s people to work for fairness and equality for all, particularly for the weak and the powerless who are exploited by others.” New Interpreter’s Bible You mean it’s not just about me treating the people I encounter fairly? It’s about working for justice for the poor and the weak, the ones our society ignores when it isn’t running over them? But that’s hard! Rats!

Love kindness. Surely that’s easy! Well, no, it turns out that it’s not. The Hebrew word here is hešed. That’s the word Hebrew scripture uses for God’s faithfulness to God’s covenant with the people of Israel even when the people themselves are not faithful. The scholars say it has to do with love, loyalty, and faithfulness. NIB You mean it doesn’t mean just be nice? Well, no it doesn’t. It means be loyal. Be faithful in all of your relationships. It means express love in all of your relationships. But that’s hard! Rats!

Walk humbly with your God. Surely that one is easy. Isn’t it? Well, no it isn’t. The scholars say that the Hebrew word translated here as “humbly” can also mean “carefully.” They say that it means that “We are to walk with God, careful to put God first and to live in conformity with God’s will.” NIB Put God first? You mean Micah is telling me it isn’t all about me? Live in conformity with God’s will? But that’s hard! I don’t always know what God’s will is, and often when I do figure out what it is I find God willing something hard that I’d very much rather not deal with. Like going to seminary. Or loving my enemies. Rats! I liked my simplistic understanding of these phrases so much better than what the scholars tell me they really mean.

So do I have to strike Micah 6:6-8 off my list of most favorite Bible passages? I thought about that a lot this past week. I was tempted, but I concluded that no, I don’t have to do that. I can continue to love these verses. They can stay on my very short list of most beloved Bible passages. But to get to the point where I could leave them on that list I had to come to a deeper understanding of what they mean than “they’re easy.” For what it’s worth, here’s what I came up with.

There is good news in these lines from Micah, as difficult as they may really be. And the good news isn’t just that we don’t have to slaughter animals up here in the chancel and pour rivers of oil down the center aisle, not to mention not having to kill our firstborn children as a sacrificial offering to God. That’s not really the good news here, although I am awfully glad we don’t have to do those things, especially the one about sacrificing firstborn children. No, the good news here is a lot more than that. The good news in what Micah says God wants from us is that rather than a commandment Micah gives us an invitation. In the great Hebrew prophetic tradition Micah is expressing a vision of what God wants from us that is an alternative to that other great Hebrew vision of God’s will, namely, the law of Moses. The Torah law. The 613 laws that are contained in the first five books of the Bible. That’s where the commandments to offer various kinds of sacrifices to God that Micah and many other prophets reject come from. Micah sees faith differently. Micah sees that God doesn’t want our mechanical compliance with a universal set of laws, a kind of one size fits all legal code that doesn’t take into consideration the particular circumstances of a specific person’s life. That’s mostly how it is with law. Here’s the rule. You either obey it or you break it. You stole that loaf of bread to feed your starving children? Doesn’t matter, the law says. You broke the law against stealing. That’s all the law cares about. Trust me on this one. I spent a lot of my life dealing with law. I know that Judaism often interprets its law in a much more humane way than that but still, Micah is giving us a vision of God’s will that is something different from the law.

Micah gives us not laws but a set of broad principles. Justice, kindness, and humility aren’t laws, they are ways of living. They aren’t details, they are principles; and because they aren’t details but principles they don’t so much order us as they invite us. They don’t dictate our actions, they invite us into a sacred conversation, a conversation about what these principles mean precisely to us, specifically in our lives. That conversation isn’t so much between us and Micah’s text as it is between us and God. It is a conversation about what it is possible for us to do, about God’s will for the world and the circumstances of our lives. It is a divine conversation in which we and God together decide just what God’s principles of justice, kindness, and humility mean for us.

That doesn’t mean that this text from Micah has all of a sudden gotten easy again. Far from it. God will almost certainly think that we can to do a whole lot more in the world than we think we can. God isn’t going easily to accept the way we use the circumstances of our lives as excuses not to do justice, not to love kindness, or not to walk humbly with God. God’s going to hear our excuses, then say: Yeah. That’s nice. Now get to work! And that work may be very difficult indeed.

The good news in this way of looking at Micah’s text isn’t that it gets easy. It is rather that Micah invites us into conversation, into relationship with God, not into mechanical compliance with laws but into faithful relationship with our God who is always faithful to us. And that, my friends, is very good news indeed. It is good news because we know that the God into conversation with whom Micah invites us is always faithful, is always merciful, is always forgiving, is always gracious. God will demand more than we want to do, and God will forgive us when we don’t do all we can. We know that. We know it because we know Jesus Christ.

What Micah says God requires of us turns out not to be easy, and that’s OK. It’s OK because as Christians we are called not to lives of ease but to lives of discipleship. And just what discipleship means for you or for me isn’t chiseled into stone tablets. It is discerned in faithful conversation with God. Micah’s right of course. What does the Lord require of us? To do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God. As hard as that can be, in faithful conversation with our God of grace and mercy we can do it. Amen.