“See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity…Choose life that you and your descendants may live.” Thanks to this line from Deuteronomy being in our reading this morning, I’ve had an early nineties Christian praise song stuck in my head all week. Now, I’ll tell you I’m not a huge fan of a lot of early nineties Christian praise music because a lot of it is pretty theologically questionable. And this song is for the most part no exception to that concern, but there is one line it in that I think gets, possibly unintentionally, right to the heart of what Moses was saying to the Israelites. The line I’ve been singing all week goes like this: “Choose life, the way that is true / From the One who chose you, your Father in heaven.” It’s the second half of that which gets me. “Choose life… From the One who chose you.” What we hear there is this statement that the choice we are invited to make is the response to already having been chosen. We don’t choose to BE God’s chosen, that choice was already made. Rather we choose because we ARE God’s chosen.
That’s what’s happening in the Deuteronomy text Teresa read this morning. The whole book of Deuteronomy is basically Moses’ farewell address to the Israelites. Having rescued them from slavery in Egypt, having led them across the desert to the very cusp of the Promised Land, having put up with forty years of their whining, Moses is about to send them off into their promised yet unknown future. Before he does that, he wants to send them off as prepared as possible, so he delivers this very long speech, in which he recounts their history, outlines rules to live by, and stresses their responsibilities and obligations. This is not unlike the lecture a parent might deliver to their pre-adolescent child about to be left home alone for the first time.
Today we heard the very end of this speech. Chapter thirty, verses fifteen through twenty are literally the very last words of Moses’ exhortation to these people whom he has loved and cared about for so long. I had a housemate who whenever I left the house would yell out the door after me, “make good choices,” and that’s basically what Moses left the Israelites with. Make good choices. If we think back to the parent-pre-adolescent child analogy, that lecture is not “here are all the things you need to do in order to earn the right to be my child.” Rather, that list of expectations and obligations are made out of love. Here are the things you need to do so that you, and any younger siblings, pets, houseplants, you’ve been left responsible for can live and thrive while I am gone.
For Moses, choosing life meant choosing God. It meant loving God, walking with God, listening to God’s voice, and following God. Some translations translate this act of listening as “obey God.” But in our modern context, blind, unexamined obedience to authority is at best short sighted and at worst dangerous. What Moses refers to here is not “do whatever God says because God is God,” but it’s be in relationship with God. It is the active practice of walking, listening, learning, of growing deeper and clearer into who you are and how God is calling you to be.
Choosing life is also not an individual action. We do not choose life simply by choosing God and ignoring others. Choosing life means choosing, loving, each other, both friends and neighbors and foreigners and strangers, and loving and caring for God’s creation. As Christians we tend to have the unfortunate habit of seeing the Law as this very legalistic, moralistic list of prerequisites to be met. It is either this thing that absolutely must be kept exactly as written in order for God to accept us, or it is so impossible as to be completely ignored, Christ died for me, so I get to live however I want and you have to live how I say. This is true today—whoever you’re considering voting for in the next election, democrat or republican, liberal, moderate, or conservative, has certainly told you that God is on their side—and has been true throughout our history. Arguing about whether and how the law applies to us is like the favorite theological struggle of the Christian movement. So it’s important to remember as we’re hearing these words from Moses that our Israelite forebears did not have the same fraught relationship with the law that we have. For them, the commandments of God were not seen as burdensome or impossible, rather they were spiritual practices to be followed as best one could. They were ways to remain faithful, to mark their identity of people of God, and to respond to the gift of God’s claiming them as God’s chosen people. I’m sure I’ve shared before that my Old Testament professor in seminary referred to the Ten Commandments not as the regulations which decided who was in, but the rules of the playpen to help the people of God, those who were already in, live well together.
Which gets us to our Gospel reading for this morning and this next chunk of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. After grounding us in our identity as blessed, salty, light-bearers, Jesus now digs in to what that identity looks like in practice. “You have heard it said” Jesus starts, listing off various commandments, “do not murder, do not commit adultery, get divorced in this way, do not swear falsely. But I say to you,” this much harder thing. It is not enough to just not murder people, if you so much as are at odds with someone, you must seek reconciliation. It is not enough to not commit adultery, if you even look at someone with lust, you must cut off your hand or pluck out your eye. It is not enough to get divorced legally. It is not enough to not swear falsely, you must not swear at all. What Jesus did here wasn’t about replacing the law with something harder, what he was doing was intensifying the law, drilling down into the heart of why it had existed in the first place. Remember what Moses said to the Israelites so many years back, “See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity…Choose life that you and your descendants may live.” Let’s think about this command to not murder. My first thought on reflection is this is a ridiculously low bar. But I started drafting this sermon on Lincoln’s Birthday and I thought about the Civil War and the hundreds of thousands of people who died, and killed, defending our freedom and fighting for freedom for all people. Certainly we don’t consider that murder, but lives were taken. What does it mean to choose life on the field of battle? Can the choice of and for life at times require taking life? My friend Pastor Chris is an army chaplain and I give thanks every day that he helps the young men and women of our military sit with the results of those questions every day, a choice often made for them by leaders far away from the actual places and people where those choices play out. Or I was walking through St. Philip the other day, and I noticed they have a suicide prevention bench in the hallway. The idea being if someone is feeling alone or depressed they can sit on that bench as a signal that they need a friend. Are you choosing life if you walk past someone seated on that bench? Yes, you are not murdering anyone, but certainly someone is being left in need.
“You shall not commit adultery” is a seemingly low bar, but what about the harmless banter, locker-room talk, and the effects of our Instagram happy society on the self-perception of both men and women? Are Snapchat filters choosing life? Which side of the Super Bowl halftime show debate was choosing life, the side that said it was a disgusting objectification of women’s bodies or the side that saw a powerful display of strength, and a call for justice and inclusion? How should we consider divorce now that marriage is a decision between two consenting adults rather than, as it was in the time of Moses, a land contract between two men often involving the sale of a woman in exchange for camels. How is choosing life different now than it was then, when a divorced woman was a pariah to society? What does it mean to not just swear falsely, but to not swear at all? Our Pledge of Allegiance, only since 1954 I might add, has included the phrase “one nation, under God,” before “with liberty and justice for all.” Does God belong in our national allegiance? To be clear, I’m not arguing yes or no, I’m merely raising the question of what God are we pledging to, and who decides the ideas and beliefs that allegiance to that God contains.
These are hard questions, dear people of God. Hard questions with no easy answers. And do I wish some days that ours was a God who just spelled out for us how we have to live in with a very clearly delineated list of rules and requirements, yeah, some days I do. But I also know that the world is not that simple, there is too much complexity for any rule to work perfectly one hundred percent of the time. And the good news for us in this text is we have a God who knows that. We have a God who gets that no law can just work perfectly every time, in every case. And so instead of a list of hard and fast dos and don’ts, ours is a God who gives us the tools to make good choices. And a God who knows that the choices we make, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally, will not always be good choices. And when we fail at this. When we get caught up in our own doubts, fears, egos, or idealism, and we do not make good choices, ours is a God who meets us again and again at the font and at the table, with this unending promise of forgiveness, grace, and love. So choose life, dear people of God. Choose life, because you have already been chosen. God has chosen you. Amen.
The extraordinary can look so ordinary
Monday, February 17, 2020
Monday, February 10, 2020
Shine On - A Sermon on Matthew 5.13-20 and Isaiah 58.1-12
We’re in a section of readings for the next couple weeks that has us working our way through Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. So before we get to today’s reading, let’s really quick recap what we heard Jesus say last week.
The Sermon on the Mount starts with the Beatitudes, this list of unexpected people whom Jesus calls blessed. Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek. Blessed are those who hunger for righteousness, who are merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers. Blessed are those who are persecuted. And blessed are you, when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely.
Wait, what? It was one thing when Jesus was blessing all those unfortunate people, the poor, the meek, the mourning, but now it’s getting personal. Blessed are you, Jesus said, when people revile you. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m not a huge fan of being reviled. Being reviled, persecuted, having falsehoods uttered about me, none of this feels like blessing to me.
And yet, Jesus said, we are blessed. We are blessed, as are the poor, the meek, the mourning, the hungry, the merciful, the pure, the peacemakers, we are blessed because people do not define our identity, and our identity is salt and light.
That’s what Jesus declared in the first section of the reading we heard today. You are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world. You. I noticed something new this week, which is the clarifiers Jesus put on these declarations are kind of ridiculous. Salt can’t have its saltiness restored because salt can’t lose its saltiness. Saltiness is in its chemical makeup; it is the defining characteristic of salt. And light shines, that’s what it does. Notice you turn on a light, but you cannot turn on dark. Dark only exists in the absence of light, it has no definition outside of that relationship. And actually, verse fifteen gets even more extreme than that. The verse says, “No one after lighting a lamp puts it under a bushel basket…” On first read we think, of course no one would do that, that would entirely defeat the purpose of having lit the lamp. But, think about what a lamp was in the first century, a lamp was something that was on fire. And if you put a bushel basket over a flame, you’re eventually going to have a flaming bushel basket. Which would produce more light than just leaving the lamp lit in the first place. So when Jesus said, let your light shine, that isn’t so much a command as it is an inevitability. You are light. Light shines. That’s what it does.
Now, that’s not to say that there isn’t work to be done. That’s not to say that we can just sit around and do nothing, or worse, catch things on fire. It’s just to say that the starting point, the jumping off point for all that we do, is this solid, grounded, unshakable identity as ones who are blessed by God, and who use that blessedness to bring light to the world.
So how do we do that? What does that look like? For that, we need Isaiah. Isaiah fifty-eight, like most of the other Isaiah readings we’ve heard recently, comes from the final section of Isaiah after the people of Israel have returned from exile and are trying to learn to live again. This Isaiah passage is a little tricky at first because it starts with God announcing the rebellion of a people who “seek [God] and delight to know [God’s] ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness.” In other words, they think they’re doing everything right. They’re fasting, they’re humbling themselves, they’re knocking each other over in their shows of piety. To which God responds, that in and of itself is the problem. The problem is their piety is selfish, it’s self-centered. They are not fasting to please God or to serve their neighbor, they are fasting to make themselves look good, to draw attention to how great they are. Yes their light is shining, but not like a lamp on a lampstand, or even a flaming bushel basket burning out of control, their light is shining like a spotlight, illuminating only themselves. And so God calls them to a different kind of fast. A fast to ‘”remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil…[to] offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted.” If you do these things, if you fast in this way, God says, “then your light shall rise from the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.”
As Lutherans we, rightly, get a little concerned with this if/then language of faith. It is dangerously easy to read these words as requirements for salvation, the work necessary to get God to love us. But remember the identity we heard God declare to us in Matthew, the promise given to us at baptism, that we are blessed, we are salt, we are light. This ultimate conviction that we are God’s, that through Christ’s death and resurrection we are children of God, and nothing can change that. As Paul wrote in his letter to the Corinthians, our faith rests “not on human wisdom but on the power of God.” With this identity of blessedness firmly in our hearts, we can hear this fast for justice for what it is, not the entry fee to heaven, but a call to partnership with the God of the universe. Friends, that is faith, God’s faith in us. God is not asking us to sit back and watch as God makes things good, God is inviting us into the work. God is inviting us to walk alongside God, to be God’s hands and feet, heart and voice. To be “repairers of the breach, restorers of the streets to live in.”
Dear friends in Christ, the work that we do in the world is the work of God. When we speak out against injustice, when we pray for those in need. When we put food in the wagon for the pantry, or listen to the story of the Co-op members, or offer a smile to someone who is hurting, these actions may feel small and insignificant, but this passage tells us that these actions are the very work of God. So let your light shine, dear people of God. Shine on. Amen.
The Sermon on the Mount starts with the Beatitudes, this list of unexpected people whom Jesus calls blessed. Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek. Blessed are those who hunger for righteousness, who are merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers. Blessed are those who are persecuted. And blessed are you, when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely.
Wait, what? It was one thing when Jesus was blessing all those unfortunate people, the poor, the meek, the mourning, but now it’s getting personal. Blessed are you, Jesus said, when people revile you. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m not a huge fan of being reviled. Being reviled, persecuted, having falsehoods uttered about me, none of this feels like blessing to me.
And yet, Jesus said, we are blessed. We are blessed, as are the poor, the meek, the mourning, the hungry, the merciful, the pure, the peacemakers, we are blessed because people do not define our identity, and our identity is salt and light.
That’s what Jesus declared in the first section of the reading we heard today. You are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world. You. I noticed something new this week, which is the clarifiers Jesus put on these declarations are kind of ridiculous. Salt can’t have its saltiness restored because salt can’t lose its saltiness. Saltiness is in its chemical makeup; it is the defining characteristic of salt. And light shines, that’s what it does. Notice you turn on a light, but you cannot turn on dark. Dark only exists in the absence of light, it has no definition outside of that relationship. And actually, verse fifteen gets even more extreme than that. The verse says, “No one after lighting a lamp puts it under a bushel basket…” On first read we think, of course no one would do that, that would entirely defeat the purpose of having lit the lamp. But, think about what a lamp was in the first century, a lamp was something that was on fire. And if you put a bushel basket over a flame, you’re eventually going to have a flaming bushel basket. Which would produce more light than just leaving the lamp lit in the first place. So when Jesus said, let your light shine, that isn’t so much a command as it is an inevitability. You are light. Light shines. That’s what it does.
Now, that’s not to say that there isn’t work to be done. That’s not to say that we can just sit around and do nothing, or worse, catch things on fire. It’s just to say that the starting point, the jumping off point for all that we do, is this solid, grounded, unshakable identity as ones who are blessed by God, and who use that blessedness to bring light to the world.
So how do we do that? What does that look like? For that, we need Isaiah. Isaiah fifty-eight, like most of the other Isaiah readings we’ve heard recently, comes from the final section of Isaiah after the people of Israel have returned from exile and are trying to learn to live again. This Isaiah passage is a little tricky at first because it starts with God announcing the rebellion of a people who “seek [God] and delight to know [God’s] ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness.” In other words, they think they’re doing everything right. They’re fasting, they’re humbling themselves, they’re knocking each other over in their shows of piety. To which God responds, that in and of itself is the problem. The problem is their piety is selfish, it’s self-centered. They are not fasting to please God or to serve their neighbor, they are fasting to make themselves look good, to draw attention to how great they are. Yes their light is shining, but not like a lamp on a lampstand, or even a flaming bushel basket burning out of control, their light is shining like a spotlight, illuminating only themselves. And so God calls them to a different kind of fast. A fast to ‘”remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil…[to] offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted.” If you do these things, if you fast in this way, God says, “then your light shall rise from the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.”
As Lutherans we, rightly, get a little concerned with this if/then language of faith. It is dangerously easy to read these words as requirements for salvation, the work necessary to get God to love us. But remember the identity we heard God declare to us in Matthew, the promise given to us at baptism, that we are blessed, we are salt, we are light. This ultimate conviction that we are God’s, that through Christ’s death and resurrection we are children of God, and nothing can change that. As Paul wrote in his letter to the Corinthians, our faith rests “not on human wisdom but on the power of God.” With this identity of blessedness firmly in our hearts, we can hear this fast for justice for what it is, not the entry fee to heaven, but a call to partnership with the God of the universe. Friends, that is faith, God’s faith in us. God is not asking us to sit back and watch as God makes things good, God is inviting us into the work. God is inviting us to walk alongside God, to be God’s hands and feet, heart and voice. To be “repairers of the breach, restorers of the streets to live in.”
Dear friends in Christ, the work that we do in the world is the work of God. When we speak out against injustice, when we pray for those in need. When we put food in the wagon for the pantry, or listen to the story of the Co-op members, or offer a smile to someone who is hurting, these actions may feel small and insignificant, but this passage tells us that these actions are the very work of God. So let your light shine, dear people of God. Shine on. Amen.
Monday, February 3, 2020
Justice, Kindness, and Humility - A Sermon on Micah 6:1-8 and Matthew 5:1-12
I think I’ve shared before that part of my sermon prep process includes listening to a lectionary podcast that comes out of Luther seminary. This week when they got to the Micah reading, theologian Rolf Jacobson quipped, “Micah, that’s a nice verse.”
Micah, of course, is not a verse, but a seven-chapter long book of the prophetic teachings of the eighth century prophet Micah, a contemporary of Isaiah, Amos, and Hosea. But that mostly gets lost in the popular familiarity of that basis of so many camp songs and wall hangings, “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?” Now that is, undeniably, a great verse. We pulled from it to describe our Core Value of Social Justice, where we declare that at Trinity “we take seriously God’s mandate in Micah to ‘do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.’”
So yeah, I’m all for Micah 6:8. But Dr. Jacobson’s quip about Micah being a “nice verse” challenged me to do what I always encourage the bible study group to do and think about the context from which the verse came. So I just want to read for you how my Harper Collins Study Bible described the historical situation at the time of Micah. Because I read this and I thought, well now, that sounds uncomfortably familiar.
The start of the book locates Micah as having been a prophet during “the days of Kings Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah of Judah.” Here’s what Harper Collins had to say about Hezekiah: “A vigorous ruler, Hezekiah initiated several religious reforms. He took many precautions to safeguard Judah against the threat of an Assyrian invasion, including forming a coalition with Phoenicia and Philistia against Sennacherib, Assyria’s king…” OK, that was a bunch of names, but listen now, here’s where it gets interesting. “Under Hezekiah, Judah experienced an economic revolution. Wealth, invested in the land, led to the growth of vast estates and the collapse of small holdings. Wealthy landowners thrived at the expense of small peasant farmers. This shift from a bartering to a monetary, mercantile economy increased the gap between the rich and the poor. Furthermore, many priests and prophets viewed their ministry as a business rather than a vocation and acted accordingly.” And here’s the clinching summary for me, “Thus, Micah preached during a time when Judah was experiencing radical internal change while living under the threat of a foreign military invasion.”
I don’t know about you, but for me, “a time… [of] radical internal change while living under the threat of a foreign military invasion” sounded achingly familiar. To pull from a completely different source, it reminded me of a line from a Nadia Bolz-Weber sermon that I love where she remarked about the relationship between Mary and Elizabeth “guess what… Elizabeth has also conceived a weird Holy Spirit baby. Is it exactly what’s happening with you? No but close enough…go hang out with her.” Is Micah’s situation exactly our situation? No, but close enough, here is a friend who can also be prophet for our time.
We could meander through all of Micah, but the section the lectionary gave us this morning starts with God challenging Israel to explain what went wrong with their relationship that so much pain has taken place. Which, if you think about it, that in and of itself is a pretty remarkable act of love. Because what this says is we have a God who rather than demanding our blind loyalty is willing, even eager, to be in conversation with us, to take our thoughts and feelings into account, to hear our side of the story. When we talk about God wanting a relationship with us, that’s what relationship means. Relationship isn’t “I’m God and you’re not, worship me.” Relationship is, “ok, this isn’t working, let’s be in this together, let’s figure this out.”
God moves from there into a remembering of God’s saving acts throughout history. Essentially God does for Israel, what God is using Micah to do for us. Remember when things were bad before. Remember when you were enslaved in Egypt, and I led you to freedom. Remember when you were threatened by Moab. Remember how I was with you then; remember how I am with you now.
Then in verse six the speaker shifts from God to Israel. “With what shall I come before the Lord… Shall I come with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? …with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn?” This classic all-or-nothing way that we humans so often respond says so much about us, and what went wrong in the first place. To respond to God’s greatness, God’s goodness, with excess demonstrates how we see this relationship with God not as relationship, but as a transaction. So often we find ourselves treating God as a vending machine, if I put in this very particular set of prayers, worship practices, beliefs, ideas, etc. then I will get back salvation. But God is not a bean-counter, withholding grace until we put in the right amount of worship. And so, verse eight: “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.” Friends, this call to justice, kindness, and humility is not a new set of requirements for salvation. It is the response of those who have already been saved. This isn’t a call to earn God’s goodness, it is a reminder that we already have it. That we are already changed, valued, transformed by God, that we are already free to live into this new reality. It’s also a reminder that the thing which God wants for us, what God wants from us, is not impossibly hard, it is almost aching simple. Achingly simple, and yet entirely transformative.
Which brings us to Matthew, and Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. The Gospel started with Jesus seeing the crowds and going up the mountain. Matthew’s Jesus goes up mountains a lot, as a way to get away, gather himself, and prepare to move forward. We saw that just last week when after John’s arrest, Jesus withdrew to Galilee. However, I heard this week another layer that could be in this mountaintop location. Palestine is flat, which means that mountains are excellent locations for gaining perspective. From a mountain, Jesus could see the whole of his mission field stretched out before him. The text doesn’t specify which mountain he went up, if it was near the Sea of Galilee, he might have been able to see the Roman city of Tiberius rising on the shoreline, if it was more inland, maybe the struggles of the people in the harsh, arid climate.
Whatever struggles Jesus saw as he looked out over that rush of humanity, what Jesus then did was describe for his disciples a new and different reality. A world in which the poor dwell in the kingdom of heaven, where those who mourn are comforted, where the meek inherit, where the hungry are filled and the merciful receive mercy. If this vision sounds familiar, maybe not in words but in ideas, that’s because this radical new vision is not unique to Jesus or even all that new. It is rooted in God’s ancient promise to God’s people. It is Micah’s call for justice, it is Isaiah’s walking in light. It is what happened “from Shittim to Gilgal... the saving acts of the Lord.” It is the burning bush for Moses, it is the covenant with Abram. It is the voice of the Lord, moving across the waters, calling forth light and declaring it good.
And so the question again, dear people of God, is the question not of what will we do to earn this new vision, but how would we live if we truly believed in it’s promise? How will we live, who will we be, what will this relationship with God look like in this world that is already unfolding. Dwell in the wonder of this possibility, dear people of God, that the promises God made are promises God keeps, and that what looks like despair is nothing more than the canvas on which God is painting the future. What does it mean if you, we, and this whole world, is blessed? Amen.
Micah, of course, is not a verse, but a seven-chapter long book of the prophetic teachings of the eighth century prophet Micah, a contemporary of Isaiah, Amos, and Hosea. But that mostly gets lost in the popular familiarity of that basis of so many camp songs and wall hangings, “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?” Now that is, undeniably, a great verse. We pulled from it to describe our Core Value of Social Justice, where we declare that at Trinity “we take seriously God’s mandate in Micah to ‘do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.’”
So yeah, I’m all for Micah 6:8. But Dr. Jacobson’s quip about Micah being a “nice verse” challenged me to do what I always encourage the bible study group to do and think about the context from which the verse came. So I just want to read for you how my Harper Collins Study Bible described the historical situation at the time of Micah. Because I read this and I thought, well now, that sounds uncomfortably familiar.
The start of the book locates Micah as having been a prophet during “the days of Kings Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah of Judah.” Here’s what Harper Collins had to say about Hezekiah: “A vigorous ruler, Hezekiah initiated several religious reforms. He took many precautions to safeguard Judah against the threat of an Assyrian invasion, including forming a coalition with Phoenicia and Philistia against Sennacherib, Assyria’s king…” OK, that was a bunch of names, but listen now, here’s where it gets interesting. “Under Hezekiah, Judah experienced an economic revolution. Wealth, invested in the land, led to the growth of vast estates and the collapse of small holdings. Wealthy landowners thrived at the expense of small peasant farmers. This shift from a bartering to a monetary, mercantile economy increased the gap between the rich and the poor. Furthermore, many priests and prophets viewed their ministry as a business rather than a vocation and acted accordingly.” And here’s the clinching summary for me, “Thus, Micah preached during a time when Judah was experiencing radical internal change while living under the threat of a foreign military invasion.”
I don’t know about you, but for me, “a time… [of] radical internal change while living under the threat of a foreign military invasion” sounded achingly familiar. To pull from a completely different source, it reminded me of a line from a Nadia Bolz-Weber sermon that I love where she remarked about the relationship between Mary and Elizabeth “guess what… Elizabeth has also conceived a weird Holy Spirit baby. Is it exactly what’s happening with you? No but close enough…go hang out with her.” Is Micah’s situation exactly our situation? No, but close enough, here is a friend who can also be prophet for our time.
We could meander through all of Micah, but the section the lectionary gave us this morning starts with God challenging Israel to explain what went wrong with their relationship that so much pain has taken place. Which, if you think about it, that in and of itself is a pretty remarkable act of love. Because what this says is we have a God who rather than demanding our blind loyalty is willing, even eager, to be in conversation with us, to take our thoughts and feelings into account, to hear our side of the story. When we talk about God wanting a relationship with us, that’s what relationship means. Relationship isn’t “I’m God and you’re not, worship me.” Relationship is, “ok, this isn’t working, let’s be in this together, let’s figure this out.”
God moves from there into a remembering of God’s saving acts throughout history. Essentially God does for Israel, what God is using Micah to do for us. Remember when things were bad before. Remember when you were enslaved in Egypt, and I led you to freedom. Remember when you were threatened by Moab. Remember how I was with you then; remember how I am with you now.
Then in verse six the speaker shifts from God to Israel. “With what shall I come before the Lord… Shall I come with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? …with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn?” This classic all-or-nothing way that we humans so often respond says so much about us, and what went wrong in the first place. To respond to God’s greatness, God’s goodness, with excess demonstrates how we see this relationship with God not as relationship, but as a transaction. So often we find ourselves treating God as a vending machine, if I put in this very particular set of prayers, worship practices, beliefs, ideas, etc. then I will get back salvation. But God is not a bean-counter, withholding grace until we put in the right amount of worship. And so, verse eight: “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.” Friends, this call to justice, kindness, and humility is not a new set of requirements for salvation. It is the response of those who have already been saved. This isn’t a call to earn God’s goodness, it is a reminder that we already have it. That we are already changed, valued, transformed by God, that we are already free to live into this new reality. It’s also a reminder that the thing which God wants for us, what God wants from us, is not impossibly hard, it is almost aching simple. Achingly simple, and yet entirely transformative.
Which brings us to Matthew, and Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. The Gospel started with Jesus seeing the crowds and going up the mountain. Matthew’s Jesus goes up mountains a lot, as a way to get away, gather himself, and prepare to move forward. We saw that just last week when after John’s arrest, Jesus withdrew to Galilee. However, I heard this week another layer that could be in this mountaintop location. Palestine is flat, which means that mountains are excellent locations for gaining perspective. From a mountain, Jesus could see the whole of his mission field stretched out before him. The text doesn’t specify which mountain he went up, if it was near the Sea of Galilee, he might have been able to see the Roman city of Tiberius rising on the shoreline, if it was more inland, maybe the struggles of the people in the harsh, arid climate.
Whatever struggles Jesus saw as he looked out over that rush of humanity, what Jesus then did was describe for his disciples a new and different reality. A world in which the poor dwell in the kingdom of heaven, where those who mourn are comforted, where the meek inherit, where the hungry are filled and the merciful receive mercy. If this vision sounds familiar, maybe not in words but in ideas, that’s because this radical new vision is not unique to Jesus or even all that new. It is rooted in God’s ancient promise to God’s people. It is Micah’s call for justice, it is Isaiah’s walking in light. It is what happened “from Shittim to Gilgal... the saving acts of the Lord.” It is the burning bush for Moses, it is the covenant with Abram. It is the voice of the Lord, moving across the waters, calling forth light and declaring it good.
And so the question again, dear people of God, is the question not of what will we do to earn this new vision, but how would we live if we truly believed in it’s promise? How will we live, who will we be, what will this relationship with God look like in this world that is already unfolding. Dwell in the wonder of this possibility, dear people of God, that the promises God made are promises God keeps, and that what looks like despair is nothing more than the canvas on which God is painting the future. What does it mean if you, we, and this whole world, is blessed? Amen.
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