Micah 6:1-8
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.
“O my people, what have I done to you?
In what have I wearied you? Answer me!
For I brought you up from the land of Egypt,
and redeemed you from the house of slavery;
and I sent before you Moses,
Aaron, and Miriam.
O my people, remember now what King Balak of Moab devised,
what Balaam son of Beor answered him,
and what happened from Shittim to Gilgal,
that you may know the saving acts of the Lord.”
“With what shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
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?
This final verse of our passage today is one that many
Christians are familiar with.
This piece of Scripture seems to stand out as an especially important one, and I think part of the reason it stands out, is because it describes clearly how God wants us to live.
I saw a funny mock line graph about the book of Micah,
It showed the books and verses of Micah across the bottom axis,
and the amount of times people
preach on/talk about that passage on the vertical axis.
Micah has 7 books, and throughout the first 5 books, the line on
the chart measuring the amount of talk about that passage hovers around zero,
until it gets to Micah chapter
6, and not just chapter 6, but verse 8 in chapter 6.
Here, the line jumps to the
very top of the graph – the highest point possible
for the span of one verse,
then it drops back down to zero for the rest of the chart.
Micah 6 verse 8 seems to be the only part of the book of
Micah
that we want to talk about or
that we’re actually very interested in.
But if we narrow in our conversation, and just talk about the
6th chapter,
we can see a lot more about
the meaning of verse 8.
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| Like this...kind of. |
Verses 1 and 2 introduce the hypothetical situation for this
passage, and what we find is Micah
opening up what appears to be a courtroom
hearing.
Micah invites the Lord to plead a case,
because the Lord has a
controversy with the people – that’s us.
These first verses set up the
need for God to confront the people.
The Lord begins the testifying,
After asking a desperate, “What
have I done to you?”
we are reminded of all the good
things the Lord did for the people:
brought them out
of Egypt,
sent them Moses,
Aaron, and Miriam.
this instance we’re
pretty familiar with.
God asks us to remember King Balak and Balaam.
King Balak was a Cannonite
king who ruled near the promised land
when the wandering Israelites
came near.
King Balak wanted one of his
seers to come and curse the Israelites
so that they could
be defeated in battle.
So he called on Balaam to come
curse them,
but Balaam would
not curse them and only gave them blessings,
because the God of the
Israelites told him to.
So the Israelites were not
cursed, but blessed,
and King Balak was thwarted.
God asks us to remember Shittim and Gilgal,
when the Lord led Joshua and
the Israelites
over the Jordan into
the promised land.
And God finishes testifying by calling these the saving acts
of the Lord.
God is plaintiff – the one bringing an issue; the people are the defendants,
the ones being accused.
What are the people being accused
of?
They are being accused of
breaking their covenant with God.
The people have been greedy, they have been selfish,
they have not cared for the
lost and the least.
they have not remained true to
God’s call.
In this trial, the people now have an opportunity to defend themselves.
and Micah quotes an individual
– a stand in for the people of God.
She immediately asks what is it the Lord wants the people to do.
She starts off by naming burnt
offerings – which seems logical,
But then she quickly gets frustrated.
"Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams?"
"How about ten thousand rivers of oil?"
"For goodness sake, does God want me to give up my firstborn child!"
You can sense the desperation in the speaker’s voice.
I
picture the person bowed over,
in tears, begging to know what
the Lord wants,
saying, "I have
given so much already... I just don’t understand."
Then Micah responds to the pleas of the human,
and I imagine this still, soft
– maybe exasperated – voice
from Micah, who places his
hand on the person’s shoulder.
He says, "You poor,
misunderstanding human.
The Lord has already told you what to do.
The Lord has told you what is required from you in this covenant.
God doesn’t need just a bunch of worship practices,
God doesn’t need you to do the
right ceremony,
God doesn’t need you to
sacrifice your firstborn child,
God wants you to do justice.
God wants you to be loyal in your love,
God wants you walk with the Lord."
Micah says to the pitiful human, "It’s really that easy.
there’s no sentence, court is
adjourned."
The first thing that we as the people of God are called to
do,
as participants in the
covenant of God,
is justice, or mitzpah.
In Micah’s time, the injustices were exploitative land
practices,
a lack of caring
for widows and outcasts,
a desire for Jews
to focus solely on furthering themselves
and
their own interests.
The call for justice is just as powerful for us today.
We exist in a culture that is
all about furthering ourselves as individuals, that seems to value
relationships for what we are able
to gain from them.
To have God’s justices, God’s mitzpah,
we have to reconsider the way
we live our lives,
the way we spend our money and
our time,
and the way we treat others.
God wants us to do justice.
I love the simple verb in this part of the call.
God is not calling us to just cry out against injustice,
God is not calling us to just point out injustice,
God is not calling us to just seek justice
God is calling us to do justice.
To say that God wants us to love kindness
doesn’t quite encompass the
meaning behind these words.
The thing that God wants us to love - hesed
could be better translated as
a devoted love,
or an unconditional
compassion,
much like the
commitment that God has
in
relationship with us.
Eugene Peterson paraphrases this verse with, “be compassionate and loyal in your love,”
Not only does God want us to do the work of justice,
God wants us to be
in as close a relationship with our neighbor
as we are in with the Lord.
To have that much
unconditional devotion or hesed to
those around us.
Having this level of
compassion for those around us can be tough.
Sometimes loving the stranger
can be easier than loving the person
who sits in the
pew next to us.
But God’s call is to be loyal
to that person,
to see that person’s
life as an intrinsically valuable thing.
In Judaism, the word for ethics is halacha which means to walk.
The task of ethics is to
describe how one ought to walk in one’s daily life.
how we live in our daily
walking-around-and-doing-things lives.
So when Micah talks about walking with God, he’s talking
about walking constantly with God.
Making God a daily partner in
our walk of life.
This is the only way we can hope to live out these ideals
the only way we can hope to do
the work of mitzpah,
the only way we can live out
our covenantal relationship with God
and with each
other as hesed.
is to make our every-day
walking around – our halacah – a
partnership with God.
I’ve become really attached to this program that comes on NPR
sometimes
called Snap Judgment.
it’s a story-telling show, and
I love story telling.
The host of the show is Glen Washington, and he tells a story
about when he moved to rural
Michigan as a young boy.
The first day that he was to go to school he got on his school bus
and turned to go down the
aisle,
and noticed
something strange:
he was the only
African American student on the bus,
in
fact, he was one of the only African American students
in the
school.
So Glen went to sit next to
one of the boys in the first seat
only to witness
the boy spitting onto the spot where Glen
was
preparing to sit.
So Glen moved on to the next
seat, to discover the same thing happening.
Seat after seat this happened:
he would find an open spot
only for the
student sitting in the row to spit in that spot.
Finally, Glen came near the back of the bus
and found a little girl
sitting in one of the final rows
with her backpack next to her.
As the bus driver yelled at
Glen to find a spot and sit down,
the girl quietly
moved her bag out of the way
to offer Glen a saliva-free
seat on the bus.
Every day, Glen returned to the girl with the backpack
and sat next to her in the
row, never having conversation
but always
accepting this small sign of hospitality.
When we walk with God, our actions don’t have to be world –changing,
they don’t have to change the
fabric of our culture,
they just have to demonstrate
a desire to treat
another person
as God might treat
that person.
They have to be actions
that we might do,
if God was literally standing right next to us.
They have to be acts that do
justice
acts that show love.
The greatest gift of this Golden Nugget of the Old Testament
is that in order for us to
learn from the trial in Micah
and to live in covenant with
God,
we must be mindful about our relationships with each other.
In order for us to be in right relationship with God,
we have to be in right
relationship with those around us.
Doing justice
loving compassionately,
and walking with God
requires that we step away
from what society tells us about relationships
and we model our relationships after God’s.
Not because our salvation depends upon it, not because we’re threatened into
doing it,
but because that is what we do
as children of God,
as response to God’s love
as participants in God’s covenant. Amen.
The podcast is also on iTunes, so you should be able to subscribe to the channel there and download them. They are called Welcome Matt Sermons and the image attached to them is this Jerusalem cross.