Micah 6:8

Micah 6:8

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

January 29, 2017

Scripture: Micah 6:1-8

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.

Years ago my mother gave me a sweatshirt. Here it is. Can you read it? It says “Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your dog.” As some of you know, my wife Jane and I have a Pembroke Welsh Corgi. I don’t think it’s possible to walk with a Pembroke Welsh Corgi any way other than humbly. I mean, people are much more attracted to our Corgi than they are to either Jane or me. Lots of people in our neighborhood know the Corgi’s name—Ringo—and know neither Jane’s name nor mine. Walking with a dog as cute and appealing as a Pembroke Welsh Corgi is truly a humbling experience. I think he’s smarter than we are too. Walking with a corgi is a good spiritual exercise. It is an exercise in walking humbly, albeit with a dog not with God.

I imagine you all know those famous lines from the prophet Micah. The NIV we use here translates those lines as “He has shown you, O man, 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.” But different translations of the Bible render it in slightly different ways. Here’s my favorite one: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” NRSV It’s closer to what’s on my sweatshirt, and I prefer the word kindness to the word mercy. So I’ll use kindness here instead of mercy. Don’t worry about it. If you prefer mercy that’s fine. That’s the word the NIV uses.

As I contemplated that famous verse this last week thinking about what to preach this morning one thing jumped out at me. Micah’s admonition sounds so simple, but over the centuries people of faith have been so good at making the life of faith so much more complicated than that. I think Micah was reacting against people in his day who were making their faith a lot more complicated than that. His day is some 2,700 years ago, and Micah tells us that people then were making the faith be about something far different from Micah’s beautiful instruction. They were making it be all about a complex system of sacrifices. Burnt offerings. Calves precisely one year old. In a bit of hyperbole thousands of rams or ten thousand rivers of oil. Referring to what may have been a very ancient practice of the Hebrews but hadn’t been for a long time by the time Micah came along maybe even a person’s firstborn child. The ancient Jewish laws around these sacrifices could get really complicated. You had to know just what to sacrifice for any particular purpose. You had to do the sacrifice at the right time and in the right way. Beyond that, all those sacrifices weren’t really about how you live your life. Some of them were about obtaining forgiveness of sin, but the laws of sacrifice didn’t tell anyone about how God wants us to live. So Micah says it’s not at all about sacrifice. Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God.

People in Jesus’ time we making the life of faith perhaps even more complicated than they were in Micah’s time. The Jewish leaders of his day, both the Sadducees and the Pharisees, made the faith be all about obeying the laws of Moses. Those are the laws found in the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament. They said obey them. Obey all of them. Do you know how many of those laws there are? 613. That’s the traditional number for laws of Moses. I have trouble remembering all of the Ten Commandments. I wouldn’t have a chance of remembering all 613 Torah laws. Like Micah, Jesus said you don’t have to. He said “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all you mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.” It’s not that doing that is always easy, but it’s sure a lot easier than remembering all 613 laws of Moses and obeying them.

People in our time make the life of faith a lot more complicated than Micah did too. We have a lot of latter day Pharisees among us. They make the Christian faith be all about rules. Don’t you dare break the rules, they say. They do that in particular around rules of sexual behavior, but many of them have a lot of other rules too. They’re mostly “don’ts.” Don’t drink alcohol. Don’t dance. Don’t play cards. Don’t work on Sunday. Don’t miss church on Sunday, even if the Seahawks are playing an early game in the eastern time zone. Don’t get divorced, no matter what. For some extreme modern Pharisees it’s women don’t speak in church and don’t presume to teach men and for heaven’s sake don’t let the thought of being a preacher or a pastor cross your mind. Don’t, don’t, don’t. Rules, rules, rules. That’s what the Christian faith is for an awful lot of our fellow Christians today.

Micah knew better. Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God. Three little admonitions that are more like encouragements than like rules or laws. Still, there are always questions about any saying actually means in practice. I think it helps us know just what those admonitions mean for us if we look just briefly at their meaning. Do justice. Biblical justice, the justice Micah had in mind, isn’t about due process, like justice so often is among us today. It is about caring for people in need. The ancient Hebrew prophets often specified three categories of people toward whom God calls us to do justice. They were the widow, the orphan, and the stranger, that is, the non-Hebrew living among Hebrew people. I think that last one, justice for the alien, speaks to us particularly powerfully today when the dignity and rights of foreign immigrants and refugees are under strong attack by President Trump and his supporters. The thing to know about all three of those categories is that they were the most vulnerable people in Hebrew society. Micah’s “Do justice” comes down to taking care of the most vulnerable people among us, no matter who they are or where they come from.

Love kindness. A lot of Christians seem to think that the Christian life basically comes down to being nice. Actually, the Christian life is about a whole lot more than that, but Micah’s call to us to love kindness is important. Even though they think being Christian means being nice, Christians can be awfully mean. There’s no fight like a church fight. I’m not sure why, but that sure seems to be true. So Micah reminds us to be kind toward one another. That doesn’t mean we all have to agree about everything. We don’t. It does mean that we are to respect each other even, or especially, when we disagree. To be gentle with one another. To take care in our relationships that we not cause unnecessary harm. Love kindness. A really good reminder.

Walk humbly with your God. This one may be a bit more obscure than the other two, or at least it is for me. I mean, don’t we always walk humbly with God? How can we be anything but humble toward God? Well, somehow we often find ways. So often we people of God get very arrogant toward God. We do that when insist that we know the one absolute truth about God and other people who know something different than we do are just plain wrong. Sometimes we go way beyond saying they’re wrong and say they’re damned for all eternity because they know God differently than we do. That attitude is pure human arrogance. It claims what we cannot claim, that we know definitively and eternally who God is, what God is like, what God does, and what God wants from us. Yes, we have our ideas, our confessions about those things; and they are important. But when we claim absolute certainty about them we forget a couple of really important things. We forget that God is infinitely beyond us. God is so beyond us that we can never fully know who God is or what God wants. Yes, we act on our understandings of those things, but God is so much bigger than we are that we must always remain humble about them. We must always leave room for the possibility that we may have gotten something wrong. We may have misunderstood. Somebody else may have understood something important about God that we have missed.

When we claim to know absolute truth about God we also forget that God is God and we are not. We people of faith set ourselves up as gods all the time. We want to take responsibility for our lives, forgetting that God is charge and we aren’t. We want to take responsibility for fixing the world, forgetting that it is God’s world not ours. Forgetting that God calls us to work with and for God, not to be God. That’s not walking humbly with God. That’s being arrogant toward God.

So let’s thank God for Micah’s instruction here. Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God. When we understand what those things really mean they become a sacred guide for the life of faith. They remind us that the life of faith isn’t about a whole bunch of complicated laws and rules. It is about living a life that is faithful in the sight of God. It is about always remembering the basics, the foundational things of the life of faith. Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with your God. May God help us to do it. Amen.