Micah 6:1-8; Matthew 5:1-12
January 30, 2011
Israel’s relationship with God was fractured. The first five chapters of Micah are filled with a description of this state of affairs, and he was not telling the people anything they didn’t know…the world was broken, which for them was just the same thing as a broken relationship with Yahweh. And so the people were trying hard to bridge the chasm between themselves and their God; but they were – according to Micah – failing miserably in God’s eyes.
What were they trying? They were stepping up their worship – stepping up their religious practices – making their worship better because they thought that was a sign of their faith of their obedience to God. They were offering to God what they thought God wanted – they were exalting God with gifts. They were earnest – they were trying – they were doing what they knew to do…religious things, outward things, things that they thought made them look pious and devout. These are not bad people – these are our brothers and sisters…we are the newer versions of them. The equivalent today would be trying to have the most polished worship, the best music, the best preachers, the fanciest communion ware, giving the most money. Micah came to say, these things are not what matters to God.
Micah tells us God has a controversy with the people. There is a serious difference of opinion on what really matters in the life of faith, and God says it all boils down to this: The life of faith is doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with your God. That’s it, says God, that’s all I require. Everything else including worship and religious acts is empty if these three things are absent.
I have sympathy with the Israelites. I like concrete things to do in order to be “right with God.” Give me the assignment, and I’ll do it. Read the bible? Check. Pray every day? Check. Memorize John 3:16? Check. Go to church every week? Check. Take communion, be baptized, go to seminary, read Calvin, give money every month…check, check, check, check. I like religion because I get to feel like I’m a good person when I ‘practice’ religion. It’s a set of rules to follow and I’m a rule follower by nature. Surely, I think, when I follow the rules, I should be right with God.
Instead, God is weary of me; of my frantic attempts to do what I think is right. What God wants is nothing less than what God gives: justice, mercy, and humility. And these are much harder than following a bunch of religious rules. These are a way of life, a whole disposition toward the world and one another, a way of being human that includes attitudes as well as behaviors.
To understand what such a life looks like, with all due respect to Micah, I’m going to start by looking at the last of the three so called “requirements”: walking humbly with God. That is not an easy, clear, simple religious rule to follow. It is both an attitude and actions. It has to do with how we come before our God, and how we approach life and others, how we feel about ourselves, others. When the word “walking” is used in the bible, is about a way of life…it’s about a journey. This isn’t an instruction for what to do as a part of your religious check list; this is about who you are as a person in all of life.
So what does it mean to walk through this life as a humble person with our God? Interestingly – to me anyway - the word “humble” only occurs two times in the Hebrew bible. The other place we read about being humble is in Proverbs 11:2. It reads: “When pride comes, then comes disgrace; But wisdom comes to the humble.” This is kind of how proverbs works much of the time – there’s a two line, pithy saying it’s meant to contrast two things. Here the contrast is between pride and humility, and each comes with a predictable future. The positive claim is humbleness will yield wisdom. And to help us understand this further, the proverb gives us the antithesis: Pride will yield disgrace, or shame.
To walk humbly is the opposite of walking proudly, or – as one biblical scholar put it, “strutting.” Prideful strutting includes arrogance, self-sufficiency, autonomy, the need to occupy center stage. The one who struts sees the world in terms of him or herself. They are concerned with how others see them and treat them. In this way of being in the word, a lot of attention is paid to our self, to our appearance, to our presentation and our image. Walking humbly, in contrast to strutting, is to pay attention to the other.
Walking humbly means it doesn’t matter what people think of us, it matters how connected we are to others. It doesn’t matter if we are held in high esteem or seen as successful or good. It matters that we see and know and understand our fellow companions on the journey of life. Being humble means you have no expectations that you deserve more than another. It means seeing the world through the eyes of your neighbor, even the eyes of your enemy.
So proverbs helps us understand what it means to walk humbly – it means to not strut, it means to focus on the other. But that’s not all Micah says: Micah asks not just how we should walk, but with whom. We are to walk humbly with God. The imagery is that of direct and immediate companionship with God, who willingly walks with us on the path. The strutter has no companion. The humble one walks with others alongside God, who revealed divine humility by joining us on the journey as opposed to watching from afar. Or in Micah’s contrast, this is a divine being who chooses to care about others – about the poor, the outcast, the sinner, the imperfect, flawed, human beings – rather than demand from us extravagant exaltation. God does not sit back and wait for us to impress God, falling over ourselves to show how important and magnificent we think God is. Our God walks humbly with us, wanting only that we join along on the journey.
The surprise in all this is that what we find if we look closely at our traveling companion – God, who we know in the life of Jesus, this companion is not a holy God, “immortal, invisible, only wise.” Rather the one on the path with us takes the form of sister and brother, of widow and orphan, of sinner, of lame, leper, needy. In humbly walking with God and others, we are reminded of the linkage Jesus made about traveling with the least: Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me. Our companion is none other than Yahweh – who is the least.
When we walk with God, humbly on the journey, we walk with the poor, and the outcast, and that shapes our lives in powerful ways. It changes our desires and our understanding of what God yearns for for humanity. This God who is our companion in the walk as the least among us is, according to the first two elements in Micah’s statement, the God of justice and kindness, and as we walk with God our lives take on the shape of justice and kindness.
Justice is connecting with and caring for the least – walking with them, caring for them, is the same as walking humbly with our God – the one known in the lowly life of Jesus. Jesus was justice and mercy in motion. And here’s where it gets hard. The justice and mercy of Jesus is shocking, counter-cultural, and offensive. When we walk with God and do justice and love mercy, we will not always be loved by the world.
The author of the gospel of Matthew has Jesus make this point quite strongly in the beatitudes we read this morning. Jesus reminds people that it is not the world’s opinion that matters, but God’s. Jesus points out that God does not see things the way the world does – God’s values are not the world’s values. There is a difference; a big difference, a surprising difference. Blessed are the merciful. Blessed are the peacemakers and the ones who hunger and thirst for justice. These folks are not, to be sure, blessed or honored in the eyes of the world. Often these folks are seen as weak, naïve and misguided in a strutting world that relies on power and self interest in order to keep one’s identity in tact – in order to secure one’s place in the social system.
Think about just one parable that shows Jesus’ mercy and “justice”: The parable of the laborers in the vineyard. A landowner goes out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with them for the usual daily wage, he sends them off to work. The landowner goes out a bit later that morning and sees others standing there who haven’t found work yet that day. He says to them, you come work for me and I will pay you what is right. Then he goes out at noon and at 3 o’clock and does the same for those who are still standing there without work. Finally, right before quittin’ time time he goes out and finds there are still some who were not hired by anyone else. He tells them to go and work in his vineyard too.
When the end of the work day arrives, the owner instructs the manager to “call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and going to the first.” Everyone received a full day’s wage. Everyone. They were all paid exactly the same amount; Those who worked for less than an hour and those who worked all day long. And when the ones who worked all day long complained about this, the only explanation was, “you were paid a fair wage – and in my house the last will be first.” This is not justice by most people’s standards. It’s not fair. But because of mercy – compassion for the least; those who were going to go home empty handed - this is justice by God’s standards.
When we walk humbly, when we live “other focused lives”, when God as known in Jesus is our companion, our justice and mercy will look crazy to the world. Our actions will shock, they will confound, they will offend, they will even anger others. Will Willamon, a United Methodist preacher, writes, “In requiring us to love mercy, God is demanding something odd and unnatural of us. [The famous philosopher Friedrich] Nietzsche,” Willimon reminds us, “hated Christianity in part for its ethic of mercy, its enfeebling solicitude for the weak and outcast, the diseased and crippled.” Jesus saw the marginalized not only as those to be pitied, but also as those to be cherished, served, and adored, honored, blessed. It confounded Nietzsche – he thought Christians were weak.
There was a controversy between God and the people. They were using the values of the dominant culture to try to solidify their relationship with God. They were trying to impress, to exalt, to show that they knew how different they were from the God who created them. They were trying to appease God by treating God as if the divine one needs to be worshiped and adored just like we want to be worshiped and adored.. But God doesn’t strut – God doesn’t need to be lavished with the kind of attention the Israelites were giving. God is other focused and was telling the Israelites that loving and worshiping God meant being other-focused as well. It meant loving the least, serving the lowly, honoring those our world despises and views with disgust.
God humbled God’s self by becoming one of us and walking the path alongside us. God became the living, breathing, embodiment of justice and mercy, and wants us to live and breathe justice and mercy with our lives. God came with values that upset the social order, that undermined traditional values, the challenged what people held most important: status, position in the social hierarchy, and power. And God asks no less of us. That is how we best worship God. What does God require of us? Only this: To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God. Amen.
