Micah 6:6-8
June 2
David A. Davis
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The television series “The Bear” is an award-winning Hulu show set in Chicago. At a church meeting last week, one person pointed out that the show won an award for “best comedy” and that it didn’t really feel like a comedy. That “The Bear” won the category over “Ted Lasso” and “Abbott Elementary” is a bit strange. Last year one of the episodes was called “The Fishes”. That is short for “The Feast of the Seven Fishes”. It was a telling of Christmas Eve dinner attended by the main character and his extended Roman Catholic family. It was an incredibly intense show. When I say there was nothing funny about it, there was nothing funny about it. It was like being invited in a large family gathering where all the worst arguments come up, old wounds service, and broken relations break even more. I kept thinking this is Christmas Eve, certainly there will be a feel-good ending. There was not. Part of what made the episode so intense and hard to watch was the incredible acting. A handful of well known and really good actors make guest appearances as various family members the viewer has never met. Their ability to bring the dialogue to life with tone and delivery and emotive body language is what took that episode to a whole other uncomfortable, this feels all too real, level.
Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with your God. Act justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly with your God. Shout out kindness. Be fair. Shout out kindness. Think of God before you think of yourself. Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with your God. There is a certain plain sense to the prophet’s words. A kind of free-standing self-evidence. Because of that clarity of meaning, that easy take away, this last part of the 8th verse of the 6th chapter of Micah is in the hall of fame of memory verses.
Despite all the stand-aloneness of the quote from the prophet, the phrase does come with a context in chapter 6. A context that serves to make it all the more meaningful. Within the book of Micah and the verses I offered in your hearing, “do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God”, comes in a conversation between God, God’s people, and prophet. Biblical commentators describe it as courtroom drama with all of creation serving as the jury. “Hear you mountains, the controversy of the Lord” God has a controversy with God’s own people. A courtroom scene? Perhaps. But this morning as we gather at the Lord’s Table, I wonder if it can’t also be read as a really uncomfortable, difficult, heavy family dinner conversation.
God speaks first. “O my people, what have I done to you? In what have I wearied you? Answer me, please!” I brought you out of Egypt. I redeemed you from the house of slavery. I sent you Moses, Aaron and Miriam. Remember how Balaam had an answer for King Moab. Remember what happened as you crossed the Jordan from Shittim to Gilgal, how you crossed into the Promised Land. Do you remember any of that? Don’t you remember? Don’t you know all that I have done to save you?”
God asks for an answer from God’s people, as if God is yearning to understand, wanting to know where God went wrong. The challenge with this conversation in Micah is that, unlike that Christmas Eve dinner conversation on Hulu, the tone, the delivery, or any emotive non-verbal cues are left to our collective sacred imagination. The Lord sounds more disappointed than angry. God seems to be making more of a plea and less of an accusation. Elsewhere in the book the prophet describes violence, cheating, and lying among the people. Prophets, priests, and rulers being bought with a price. A whole people following the ways of evil earthly kings. Here in the family conversation, God describes the controversy of the people neglecting all God’s saving acts. The people turning away from all that God has done. God’s people not remembering salvation history. Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with your God. It comes in the context of the people not remembering.
God, not being able to hide the disappointment, the heartbreak, falls silent waiting for an answer. The people speak as one. “With what shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before God with burnt offerings, a calve a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I my firstborn for my transgressions, the fruit of my body for the sin of the soul?
No explanation. No apology. No seeking forgiveness. The response is an inquiry as to what to do, how to make it right. How to make all this tension at the table go away. “Tell us what you really want, God!” Those escalating, exponential amounts of sacrifice mentioned, some might hear it as appropriately reflecting the urgency of the conversation. Others might hear a bit of sarcasm and a bit of attitude. Either way, humanity’s response reflects the once and future and always present dynamic in the divine/human relationship. The speaker tries to bargain with God. Humans being human. Like when folks like you and me confuse asking for forgiveness with keeping score or reducing our walk with God to an attempt to act more religious. Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with your God. It is the prophet’s response to humanity’s timeless tendency to confuse God’s call on our lives with our own self-righteous piety.
At this point over dinner, someone else speaks. This time it is the prophet. “The Lord has told you, O mortal, what is good” with a gesture or a nod in the direction of God at the table. The Lord has already told you.”. “And what does the Lord require of you?” Is it yet another plea? Is it more exasperation and frustration? How many times to we have to tell you people? We being the prophets, the wisdom, the matriarchs, the patriarchs, the preachers and the whole choir angels. “God has told you what is good…What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with your God. It is the prophet’s ageless call to the people of God to a faithful, faith-filled life, walking in the Light of the Living God.
A family dinner table conversation that feels all too real. Dinner conversation and the heartbreak of God. Violence, cheating, and lying among the people. Prophets, priests, and rulers being bought with a price. People following the ways of evil earthly kings. God’s heartbreak…still. Through it all God’s people not remembering all that God has done. Not realizing their own unfaithfulness mocks what God has done. Humankind’s inability to do what seems doable, “do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with your God”. It doesn’t seem like that tall of an ask; a pretty low bar when it comes to what God expects. It is not “drop everything right now and come follow me.” It is not “sell all of your possessions, give it to the poor, and come follow me. No, it is “be fair, kind, and walk humbly with God”. And yet, God’s people then, now, and forever cause tears to flow down the face of God like an ever-flowing stream. God’s heartbreak.
God’s people failing to remembering, refusing to hear, that whether they know it or not, their lives, the lives of God’s people for good and for bad, in faithfulness and unfaithfulness, for better, for worse, our lives are part of something bigger. You and I are part of the very mission of God. Every time we do justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with God, we are making history. We are part of God’s salvation history. From Moses, Aaron and Miriam to the Risen Christ himself on the throne of the right hand of God, from the prophet’s proclamation of the kingdom of God to Jesus’ teaching, healing, welcoming, from God’s steadfast love and liberating power to the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, from God’s Spirit moving of the waters of creation to the Holy Spirit interceding with sighs too deep for words. Right there in the midst of all that comes you and me and our every effort, every step, every commitment, every act, every time we yearn to do what is just and fair, encourage what is kind and helpful and seek to walk humbly before God and alongside your neighbors, every time we are doing God’s work. We part of God’s mission in the world. Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with your God.
All the piety in the world can never measure up to a people who yearn to work for God’s justice. All the religiosity one can muster can never replace kindness. All the ritual sacrifice and the doctrinal perfection combined is nothing compared to a people who choose to try to walk with God rather than be right all the time. So come to the Table this morning. This dinner table conversation in the family of God begins with “Take, eat, this is by body.” It is our Savior’s invitation for you to come and feast on his grace. The only controversy is his dying love for you. Come to be forgiven, come to be nourished, come to be sent out again.
Sent out again to do justice. Love kindness. And walk humbly with your God.