Sermon for Epiphany 4A
Micah 6:1-8
You know what? I’m a grown
man. I’m not afraid of the dark, anymore. I can walk confidently through most
days. It’s good to be a grown up. Yet, while I’m a grown up, there is one
phrase that strikes fear deep into my heart.
“We need to talk.”
Have you ever noticed that the phrase, “We
need to talk,” is not an invitation to light-hearted conversation? “We need to
talk,” means that we need to have a foundational, likely overdue, conversation.
For example, my wife has never said, “We need to talk,” and then we chatted
about a t.v. show or a weekend away. “We need to talk,” is always serious and
about clearing out a block in the relationship.
Whenever I hear those
words I also get a little nervous, what did I do? I imagine my wife feels a
little nervous when I say the same thing. Even though I’m nervous I know that
what lies on the other side of that
conversation is a stronger, truer version of us as a unit. Sometimes I’ve had
to sit down with some of you and talk, and some of you have emailed and called
and said effectively: “Josh, we need to talk.”
How about you, what’s your
experience with that phrase, “We need to talk,”? It’s almost never good when
your boss has that conversation, or if you are the boss and call that conversation,
it may not go well. But, if the relationship is equal then that conversation is
about clarity. But then again almost no relationship is equal, or equal across
all domains. But if love and respect is present then the need for talk can be
healing and offer a window to strengthen the relationship.
In today’s Old Testament
reading we hear from the prophet Micah. It’s an awfully famous passage, indeed
I’d wager that it’s probably the only bit from Micah that any of us have heard,
“and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?” It’s a pretty good and pithy statement of
what life ought to be in response to God. In fact, I’ve even seen that some
churches have this passage as a sort of mission statement. But most of us might
not know that what brought about this whole statement in the first place was
that God saying to the people: “We need to talk.”
So what brought about this
serious talk? If you look at the passage, you will see that God says, through
the mouth of the prophet Micah: Hear what the Lord says: “Rise, plead your case
before the mountains, and let the hills hear your voice. Hear, you mountains,
the controversy of the Lord, and you enduring foundations of the earth; for the
Lord has a controversy with his people, and he will contend with Israel.” This
is actually a funny play on words because the word, or rather, the name Israel means “to contend with God.”
It was the name given to Jacob after wrestling with the angel after which he
received a crippling wound and a new name: Contending with God, Israel. So the
people of God have this relationship with God but let’s not lose sight of the
fact that it is a contentious relationship, an in this passage God brings up a
controversy that he has with the people who have been contending with him for a
long time.
Not only does God have a
controversy, have a problem to discuss, but God is making it public, he wants
the mountains and the hills to hear what’s going on. The created order is
invited to hear this controversy. God says, ““O my people, what have I done to
you? In what ways have I wearied you? Answer me! We need to talk. Here the
controversy is laid bare: the people of God, both them and us, have treated God
as if we are weary of him.
We’ve all be here haven’t
we? We grow weary of those closest to us. We get . . . I don’t know, too comfortable, too familiar
and we forget basic kindnesses and respect. We need to reset ourselves, we need
to talk. That’s what’s going on here: the people of God are weary of God.
So God decides to remind
them of their history with him, he recounts their emancipation from slavery
under the Egyptians, about the leaders he gave them, Moses, Aaron, and Miriam.
God goes on to reference other wonderful acts of his presence among them.
Now, if I were counseling
a couple I might ask one side of the couple to not bring up the past so
strongly, that it sets the other in a defensive posture and that they should
instead move forward from the present in mutuality and co-equal respect. But in
this instance, the couple is not equal. God is God, and they are not. God is
not our buddy, God is not our Jiminy Cricket conscience, God is God: the one
who gives us life, breath, and being, from whom all our works are begun,
continued, and ended. So I think we can give God a little leeway here.
It’s actually interesting
how God reminds them of the history that they share because throughout a great
deal of the Hebrew Scriptures, it is the people
who are reminding God to remember the
covenant they have made. But he reminds them and then the voice changes, now
the people respond: “With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself
before God on high?” They have had the talk, there is clarity: God is God and
you are not. Now what? “With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself
before God on high?” The people are wondering how to respond to the gracious
gifts that God has brought. How to respond? How to pay back a never failing
avalanche of graces? Let’s try, they say, “How about burnt offerings, how about
10,000 rams, how about tens of thousands of rivers of oil, how about my child?”
They get it now, they’ve had the talk, they want to respond to God’s love and
grace, and they are getting crazy with it. But in their craziness they realize
the extremes of grace that God has gone to, so they want to match that extreme.
What comes next is, to me,
like God taking the people and saying, “Shh…shh,…you know what I want? I don’t
need all these gifts, here is what I want: I want you to do justice, and to
love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God. Can you do that? That’s all I
want, I don’t need the sacrifice, I want you to do justice, love kindness, and
walk humbly with me.”
It’s so simple. But
difficult. I daresay that most of us would much rather get the rivers of oil
and sacrifice the rams than do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly.
You’ll note here a few
things. Most importantly the prophet doesn’t say, “What does the Lord request?”
It says, “require.” Relationship with God has certain requirements that are necessary
for the deepening and strengthening of that relationship.
Next we see that God wants
us to do justice. Do justice. Not dream of justice. Not wish for justice, not
think about justice, but do justice. This is one area where I actually disagree
with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He said that “the moral arc of the
universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I’m not so sure. There is
nothing natural about justice, justice doesn’t just spring up or evolve on its
own. Justice has to be done, justice has to be done by individuals in ways both
small and large.
If you are not sure where
to start I have two suggestions. The first is to simply, and perhaps most difficult, be keenly aware of how
you might be allowing unjustice exist in your tiny realm of influence. Once the
subtle racisms and sexisms are found you can begin to undermine them, to do
justice. My other suggestion for doing justice is to think big but act small. For
example, there is a the Refugee Support Services group that meets at the
Galilee Ministries of East Charlotte that meets close to here on central
Avenue. Go, take the Refugee 101 course, it’s free and takes less than an hour.
There you will learn about the long plight of a refugee who, by the way, God
demands our care of consistently in the Scriptures. Then, of you want, through
the Refugee Support Services you can choose to befriend a refugee family. Not
to fix, not to convert, not to make like you, but to befriend, to be with.
If that’s too much
involvement for you then do justice with advocacy. Did you know that North
Carolina and only one other state try 16 and 17 year olds as adults in the
court system. What kinds of decisions were you making at 16, were they adult
decisions? Friends, we need to stop thinking about justice and do justice. If
you want to know more about do justice in this area search Raise the Age NC and
you can find a petition and other resources.
God wants us to do
justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with him. Loving kindness is
interesting. We are to be attracted to kindness, to love it. To be kind, not
nice, there is a difference.
Finally, to walk humbly
with our God. This gets to the core of our existence. To walk humbly with God
is to know that there is a God that has graced us with everything. That God is
God and that we are not. The humble bit here doesn’t get as much press in the
church as the walk humbly bit, including in this sermon. But to know God, is to
know that we are properly humble before God’s holiness and that there is no
good in us, except through God.
All of this started
because God said, “We need to talk.” And I’m glad that God did have that talk.
Whenever these hard talks occur however, when love and commitment are present,
which they always are with God, on the other side of these talks there is
deeper love and commitment as well as a renewed understanding of what the relationship
is. Our relationship with God is first and foremost a relationship, we must
never be scared away by God’s holy otherness, but that God has requirements to
do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with him.
