Lord Jesus, help us to walk humbly the way of your
cross. Amen.
What is God’s will? A simple question to ask, but a far more difficult one to answer. What is it that God wants for us, what does God expect from us, what does God intend for us? People spend their lives running either towards or from that question. I’m on the Commission on Ministry for the Diocese and one of the things we do is to discern with people who sense a call to ordination. Their stories are either about how they resisted the disruption of a call to ordination, or how their whole life has been leading them to this process.
For
some people, God’s will has been a bludgeoning instrument used against them for
their whole lives and they are no longer religious as a result of that trauma.
People are told that they don’t measure up, or they aren’t good enough, or
their past is too full of mistakes, or that they are nothing but a wretched
sinner, so they are no longer interested in God’s will. Or maybe we just tend
to think of God as an overbearing taskmaster, as someone who expects way too
much out of us. And still others approach God as if God manipulates and uses us
as tools to get what God wants out of the world instead of seeing God as
wanting us to share in the abundance of love and joy that fill creation.
To be clear – it’s always
about God’s grace: that abundant, unlimited, and unconditional love of God for each
of us and all of us together. God loves you not because you’ve earned it, but
because God is like a mother who cannot but love you. If you’ve ever been told that
you don’t measure up, that might be true, but that doesn’t change the fact that
you are a child of God who is loved and is worthy of dignity. However we
approach the question of God’s intention for us, it always begins and ends in
love.
Of
course, the question of God’s will is no small one. People can agonize over
this question, worrying that if they don’t get the right answer they’ve wasted
their life. And we fight with one another over the conclusions we reach – just think
about the debates around abortion, marriage, euthanasia, tax policy, national defense,
civil rights – it doesn’t take long in such debates before someone appeals to
what God would want us to do in these situations. It’s a big question – what does
the Lord require?
One
of the most popular answers to that question is found in the writing of the
prophet Micah: “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?” To be sure, it’s a wonderful
verse of Scripture. Some rabbis have said that one verse is a summary of the entirety
of the 613 laws of the Torah. This verse reminds us of the obvious – God’s will
is justice; and it prevents us from over-complicating things – walk humbly with
God. The problem with something so pithy is that it becomes trite. I have seen
this verse on bumper stickers, and anytime we reduce Scripture to being a
slogan – well, then we’ve prevented God from speaking through it because we’ve
already decided what it means.
So
instead of reading Micah 6:8 like a saying on the front of a greeting card, let’s
spend some time with it, and then consider how it is that the cross of Christ,
which St. Paul writes about in 1 Corinthians, is a helpful way of interpreting
what Micah is pointing us towards.
You
all remember the television show Law & Order? It always began with “dun-dun”
and that’s the sound that we should have in our ears when we consider this
section of Micah. This is a lawsuit. God says to the people “Rise, please your
case…the Lord has a controversy with
his people.” God has taken us to court over our gross negligence. The case is
presented – God has saved the people from slavery in Egypt, God has brought
them through the Red Sea into liberation, God has given them the Promised Land
and been with them in the battles against their enemies. Elsewhere in Micah,
the specifics are laid out – those in poverty are not lifted up, but rather
trampled on. The economy is rigged for the wealthy. Widows and orphans are not
cared for. God’s name is not praised, but rather people puff up themselves.
Though Micah prophesied nearly 2,800 years ago, the indictments against us are
the same.
And
it is of particular interest that God names the mountains and hills as the jury.
For one, this is a way of saying that our inequity is plain as day, but in our
context of global warming and environmental degradation, we can even understand
the earth to be a co-plaintiff with God. There is a class-action lawsuit
against us – God’s justice has not been done, the poor have been oppressed, the
earth has been abused; and we are guilty as charged.
Now
the people’s solution at the time was not to deny these crimes, but rather to
pay a fine and get off with community service. Sacrifices were offered as a way
of “paying off” God and attempting restitution. Some of the meat of the sacrifices
could then be consumed by the hungry. But God says, “No, I will not be placated
with bribes or paid off with oil or goats.” We miss the point when we think
that coming to church makes up for the fact that children go to bed hungry. We are
in error if we think that having “In God we trust” on our money excuses the fact
that we have underfunded public schools. We are wrong to think that giving a
few thousand dollars a year to church and charities is all God expects out of
us. No, God has told us what the will of God is, we know what is expected, we have
been told what is required of us: we are to do justice, to love kindness, and to
walk humbly with God.
Justice
has been defined as “sorting out what belongs to whom and getting it to them.”
And, as children of God, every person deserves affordable and dignified housing;
every person deserves the dignity of having a well-paying job; every person
deserves the dignity of having their medical needs taken care of without
crippling debt; every person deserves the dignity of not being discriminated
against because of their skin color, or their education level, or their
pronouns, or who they love; every person deserves the dignity of having clean
air, clean water, and fresh food; every person deserves the dignity of living
in a community that is safe, where no one has to worry about being the victim
of a mass shooting, where gang violence is not tolerated. And this isn’t me
speaking – it’s right here in Scripture. One day, when we come face to face
with our Maker, we can’t claim “But no one told me.” And it’s interesting that
justice here is a verb, not an adverb. We don’t consider an economic policy and
evaluate it to see how just it is or is not. No, justice is something we do, or
do not do. Are we in alignment with God’s will for justice or not?
And
we are told that God intends us to love-kindness. The idea here is related to
mercy and loyalty. Perhaps considering the opposite will help us to see what
God expects. We are to reject ruthlessness. We live in a ruthless world – we feel
better about ourselves by taking others down a rung, we climb over others because
we’ve been taught those are the rules to the game of life, we judge others as
if it were our job. We pray all the time “forgive us our trespasses as we
forgive those who trespass against us.” When Jesus told us to pray those words,
he didn’t just mean to merely say the words, he meant for us to treat each
other with kindness and mercy, to be loyal to the way of love.
The
other requirement is that we walk humbly with God. The word “walk” is a way of
saying “live;” so this isn’t a requirement to go on a walking pilgrimage, but
rather is saying that we are to recognize that our lives are lived on the
canvas of God’s grace, on the stage of God’s drama. The humbly part refers to
having a posture of reverence and openness to the sacredness which surrounds
us. Walking humbly with God means that we anticipate and expect to encounter
opportunities to love and serve God through others.
Justice,
mercy, and reverence – these are certainly three virtues to live by and are
what God requires. But, let’s be honest, this is easier said than done. Our
fears take away our courage, our ignorance blinds us, our selfishness distracts
us. It’s no different from the blessings that Jesus pronounces in the reading
from Matthew. Being meek, and righteous, and pure in heart, and peacemakers -
these are all good things that I hope we very much want to do. But wanting to
do something is not the same as actually doing it. And, even with the best of
intentions, we struggle to be the sort of people that we want to be. St. Paul
puts it so well in his letter to Rome, “I do not understand my own actions. For
I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate… I can will what is
right, but I cannot do it.” This is the human condition.
Hearing
that we are to do justice, love kindness, and walk with God can be a crushing
weight because a lot of us are struggling just to get through each day, and it
seems like even when we take a step towards justice, we end up finding some
unintended consequences have created an injustice elsewhere. In other words, if
we are going to be judged based on this metric of doing justice, loving kindness,
and walking with God, try as we might, we’re going to fall short. But, thanks be
to God, we are not judged by our inability to keep the law, but rather through
God’s gracious love.
The
prophet Micah hypothetically asks, “Shall I give my firstborn for my
transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” And though it is a
human question, in 1 Corinthians we see the divine response: “The message about
the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being
saved it is the power of God.” We are not justified, saved, or made worthy by
our ability to be poor in spirit or pure in heart, or how much justice we do,
but rather by God’s effusive and abundant grace.
We
heard in 1 Corinthias that God chose us and that is what saves us. We do not
need to earn God’s favor, but we have been gifted it. And because it comes from
God, we can have every confidence that the way of the cross is the way of love,
and the way of love is the way of life. This is how we can pursue justice, not
as a moral demand, but as a response to the fact that we have all we need in the
love of Jesus – so we can stop competing with one another and truly pursue
justice. We can be merciful not because we are such nice people, but because we
have received mercy that we did not deserve, and so we reflect this mercy to others.
We can walk with God because Jesus has shown us his most excellent way of love.
Faith
is not a to-do list, not a series of hoops to jump through. Rather, what we’re
all about inviting others to come and see, and to see more deeply ourselves, is
that, in the end, love is all that matters, love is the only thing worth living
for, the only thing worth dying for. We have been given the tremendous gift of
this truth and can enjoy life instead of enduring it. We are given the opportunities
to live in the light and joy of God’s grace.
This
way is opened by the cross, which, indeed, is foolishness to the world. That’s
the problem with the Church and Christians – we’ve tried too much to seem
reasonable, worked too hard to be seen as relevant, worried too much about
reputation. We need to be more foolish. Foolish enough to do justice, regardless
of the cost. Foolish enough to trust in the power of kindness and mercy, even
when people revile us, persecute us, and utter all kinds of evil against us. Foolish
enough to recognize that our lives are kept secure not because of our efforts,
but because of God’s love. Foolish enough to proclaim Christ crucified as our
way, our truth, and our life. Foolish enough as to live with love as what is required
of us.
