What Does God Require? (A Sermon on Micah 6:1-8)

Introduction - The Prophets and Micah in Particular

Reminder of the Role of the Prophets

We are in the middle of a series called “The Book of the Twelve: The Gospel in the Minor Prophets.” Each week, we’ve spent time with a different prophet, hoping to understand their message and to also catch glimpses of the Gospel of Jesus. Before we begin to hear from Micah, our prophet this week, I’d like to remind us of the role of the prophets by reading from Abraham Joshua Heschel, the late Jewish rabbi who was also quite prophetic in his own right, marching with MLK during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s:

“The prophet knew that religion could distort what the Lord demanded of humanity, that priests themselves had committed perjury by bearing false witness, condoning violence, tolerating hatred, calling for ceremonies instead of bursting forth with wrath and indignation at cruelty, deceit, idolatry, and violence. To the people, religion was Temple, priesthood, incense…such piety the prophet Jeremiah brands as fraud and illusion. [Prophets recognized that] worship preceded or followed by evil acts becomes an absurdity. The holy place is doomed when people indulge in unholy deeds.”

If we were to boil down the prophets to a few major insights, we might arrive at these three points:

1. God loves justice, and Israel, as God’s Covenant People, are called to a higher level of justice than their neighbors.

2. God gets angry at evil. This anger is not abusive, but it is intense. It reveals how much God cares about the goodness of the world God created.

3. God has hope for our world. All of the prophetic books ring with the sounds of harsh anger but also with the hope for restoration of God’s people and the entire world.

With that, let’s hear from Micah, who served in the southern kingdom of Judah during the reigns of the kings Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. Friends, hear the word of the Lord from Micah 6:1-8:

1 Listen to what the Lord says:

“Stand up, plead my case before the mountains; let the hills hear what you have to say.

2 “Hear, you mountains, the Lord’s accusation; listen, you everlasting foundations of the earth. For the Lord has a case against his people; he is lodging a charge against Israel.

3 “My people, what have I done to you? How have I burdened you? Answer me.

4 I brought you up out of Egypt and redeemed you from the land of slavery. I sent Moses to lead you, also Aaron and Miriam.

5 My people, remember what Balak king of Moab plotted and what Balaam son of Beor answered. Remember your journey from Shittim to Gilgal, that you may know the righteous acts of the Lord.”

6 With what shall I come before the Lord and bow down before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?

7 Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of olive oil? Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? 8 He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Today’s scripture is set within a cosmic courtroom. The LORD is bringing a case against Israel and the witnesses are the very mountains, the foundations of the earth. When God first began a covenantal relationship with Moses and the rescued Hebrew slaves, it was the heavens and the earth - all of creation - that stood as witnesses to the relationship and its agreements. Here too then creation itself stands as a witness to the wrong Israel has done and the right they have left undone.

In Micah’s day, people were prospering and increasingly rich…this increasing affluence led to increasing callousness and eventually to blatant disregard of the foundational laws from God. The rich were getting richer; the poor were being taken advantage of, yet the worship of God in the Temple continued as if nothing was wrong. Listen to the searing accusations of Israel’s leaders from Micah 3: 

“Listen, you heads of Jacob and rulers of the house of Israel! Should you not know justice?— you who hate the good and love the evil, who tear the skin off my people, and the flesh off their bones; who eat the flesh of my people, flay their skin off them, break their bones in pieces, and chop them up like meat in a kettle, like flesh in a caldron.” 

The Prophet’s Sensitivity and Our Abysmal Indifference to Evil

Instead of being like caring shepherds guiding the sheep of Israel, the leaders were exploiting the people for their own benefit. We might think that these leaders were particularly bad, far worse than our leaders today, but in all likelihood the wrongs were fairly everyday. Hear again from Heschel as he describes the prophet’s sensitivity to evil:

“the sort of crimes and even the amount of delinquency that fill the prophets of Israel with dismay do not go beyond that which we regard as normal, as typical ingredients of social dynamics. To us, a single act of injustice - cheating in business, exploitation of the poor - is slight; to the prophets, a disaster. To us injustice is injurious to the welfare of the people; to the prophets it is a deathblow to existence: to us, an episode; to them, a catastrophe, a threat to the world…it seems incongruous and absurd that because of some minor acts of injustice inflicted on the insignificant, powerless poor, the glorious city of Jerusalem should be destroyed and the whole nation go to exile. The prophet’s words are outbursts of violent emotions. His rebuke is harsh and relentless. But if such deep sensitivity to evil is to be called hysterical, what name should be given to the abysmal indifference to evil which the prophet bewails?”

“What name should be given to the abysmal indifference to evil which the prophet bewails?” Heschel tells us that those who were actually guilty in Israel’s society were few, but, in the eyes of the prophet and in the eyes of God, all were responsible. “Prophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profaned riches of the world…God is raging in the prophet’s words.”

I remember a friend visiting Portland from out of state and walking with me to one of my favorite coffee places downtown (it’s Water Avenue, if anyone is curious). As we stepped past homeless folks wrapped up in sleeping bags in doorways, I noticed my friend’s gaze looking downwards, noticing them in a way I had stopped noticing them. He was seeing them as people suffering, while I had become accustomed to thinking of them as obstacles, parts of the scenery that were getting in the way of my day’s business. My friend’s gaze is not unlike the prophet’s sensitivity to evil.

Some of our abysmal indifference to evil and to suffering makes perfect sense when considering our psychology. Psychologists have long observed a dynamic they call “just world belief” - it is the mental mechanism behind victim blaming - when we see something terrible befall another, we are quick to rationalize, to explain how they deserved the terrible thing because they made a bad decision or perhaps are even bad themselves. After all, surely, the man in the sleeping bag tucked against Portland’s highrise has a drug problem. It was his personal failing that landed him on the streets and so our conscience remains unscathed and our peace of mind undisturbed so that we can carry on with our business.

The prophets, however, won’t let us just carry on. If we spend any time at all with them, our view of the world is challenged, our sensitivity to evil is heightened, our anger and perhaps our guilt is pricked, and we begin to feel the hot fire of God’s indignation at the state of our world in a most profound way.

The Beloved Community and the Kingdom of God

Micah paints a picture for us of a society that is seriously ill and out of whack with the beloved community God has always had in mind for us. It is the image of the beloved community, the kingdom of God, that breaks through in the moments where Micah and the other prophets speak of hope and restoration. Such a moment can be found in Micah 4 where Micah describes the day when all peoples will stream to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob. There, God “will judge between many peoples, and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more; but they shall sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.”

It is this place that Jesus himself refers to as the kingdom of God. A place with no more fear, no more war - where people put down their many weapons designed to dominate, oppress, and control others, and learn instead the ways of the God who created the cosmos in joy and in love and who longs for us to be caught up in wondrous obedience to those ways - to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. We’ve seen how true it is that prophets speak in metaphor and poetry, that Jesus himself in describing the kingdom of God often used parables, confusing stories that point us toward the kingdom, but never fully reveal it. Yet, today’s passage ends with supposedly simply direction: act justly, love mercy, walk humbly. We might still be left with a million questions about how to do that in the midst of a complicated world filled with inconsistencies, deceit, and evils both within and without we do not have the slightest idea about how to confront.

I’d like to spend our last few minutes together this morning focused on those three commands. Let’s begin with Act Justly.

Act Justly

We live in an increasingly digital world, one in which we document and share the things we do on a daily basis as often or even more than we actually do things in the world. A friend in seminary called people who post about justice online but don’t engage in anyway in the physical world “slacktivists.” They had all the right views (at least in their estimation), yet barely lifted a finger to help alleviate the suffering of those under the boot of the wrong, whatever it was. Likewise, some of us, myself included, have a tendency to think, think, think (like Pooh Bear) about the right things we should do, but do not find ourselves acting on such thoughts with a regularity that could be described as acting justly. We are afraid, or bewildered, or too proud to do the things that we could rightly call acting justly and so we sit in inaction or find ourselves busy with things that aren’t just.

Jesus encourages and challenges his followers with these words in Matthew 5:

“You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”

You have been given great gifts, friends. Gifts that might heal the little corner of the world you find yourself in. Do not put those gifts in a closet; do not hide your light under a bowl. But, act, give of yourself to those around you, especially those who are suffering.

Love Mercy

The second command is “love mercy.” In other translations, it reads “love kindness.” Kindness is often lacking in our world. It is cast aside for expediency, for effectiveness, for pride. I’ve shared this story with the youth groups a handful times before - when I was in 6th grade, I joined the local ice hockey team having never really skated on ice. I played a lot of roller hockey in childhood and I foolishly thought my skills would transfer to the ice just fine. I showed up for tryouts and experienced a rude awakening. I could barely keep myself up on the ice, let alone skate backwards, perform quick stops, and show off hockey skills. It was in this moment that one of the other skaters on the ice, took pity on me and showed me kindness. Through the rest of the tryouts, he stayed next to me and coached me on how to skate backwards, the best way to stop quickly, and to keep my head up. It was a very embarrassing experience for me and the only real highlight was that stranger’s kindness.

Friends, sometimes the trouble the person next to you is facing is clear as day - they are fumbling, tripping, falling and you could lend a hand. Oftentimes, especially in our communities, trouble in need of kindness is harder to spot. Many of us suffer silently, leading lives of quiet desperation. Kindness oftentimes has to be patient, to lean in and to see what is truly going on beneath the surface. Underneath our supposed “fineness,” there may be significant pain and trouble. Kindness oftentimes has to be slow. We need to have margin in our lives to be kind; to be able to pause our lives for the sake of another. Kindness also requires a strength that cruelty does not. To be kind is to offer support, friendship, care - things that people of strength can offer. We are called to be kind, yet we may struggle to be kind. This is where the third command comes into view.

Walk Humbly

The third command is one that the other two commands hinge on. How are we to act justly or to love kindness if we do not walk closely with the One who is Just and Kind? And, that bit about humility. Humility is sometimes a quality that is hard to quantify, yet we seem to know it when we see it. It’s a willingness to be corrected, to not be quite so shocked that we have something wrong when we are shown the right. Walking humbly is what the disciples were called into. “Follow me,” Jesus said. What about when it’s uncomfortable or makes us look foolish, we might ask. “Follow me,” Jesus simply says.

There’s an old saying from the Mishnah, which is a collection of rabbinic thought from 200BCE to 200AD. It says this: “Let thy house be a meeting-house for the wise; and powder thyself in the dust of their feet; and drink their words with thirstiness.” The idea is that disciples would be covered in the dust of their rabbis as they walked humbly behind them. To be covered in the dust was a symbol of how closely you were following your instructor.

Years ago, a friend of mine wanted to show me a secret hideout he had found in the park by our house. I followed him in my bike through muddy trails and brush. When we arrived to the hidden area he wanted to show me, I noticed that my shirt and shorts were covered in the mud and dirt that had kicked up from my friend’s bike wheels as we made our journey. If we are focused on the following, we will find ourselves powdered with the dust of Jesus feet. I once remarked to a friend that it seemed that the more closely I followed Jesus, the messier it seemed my life became. Religious pretentiousness tends to clean us up on the outside - Jesus said this of the Pharisees: “you wash the outside of the bowl, yet the inside is filthy.” The Pharisees were known for their commitment to purity and would never be seen associating with the unclean. Yet, if we go where Jesus goes, we find ourselves getting messy.

The crap we lug around inside is brought to the surface and sometimes we get roughed up on the journey with Christ. This is a humble place to be, one unconcerned with our appearance and esteem, instead wholly concerned with the one who leads us. If we are to be just and to be kind, our walk with God must be marked by humility. Only then can we accept the help we need to become more whole. Only then will we follow Jesus into the sometimes hard and messy places he tends to like to go to: places like reconciliation between enemies, helping the stranger, the displaced, the sinner; even the inward journey of acknowledging our own brokenness and accepting that we need someone who can put us back together.

Friends, may we not be like the proud who rejected Micah’s message and who ignored Jesus in the midst of his ministry. May we be humble as we walk with God, trusting him to show us the good and true and how, by the Holy Spirit, we might be a source of healing in the fractured world we find ourselves in. Amen.