This is WHAT the Lord Requires...and WHY
This is WHAT the Lord Requires…and WHY by Rev. L. John Gable
January 17, 2021
“And what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God.” These words of Micah represent the high water mark of the 8th century prophetic tradition. As one commentator noted, “In this single sentence the prophet sums up the legal, ethical and covenantal requirements of religion.”
Micah was a younger contemporary of the prophet Isaiah in the 8th century BC. He came from a small town in Judah, the southern Kingdom, rather than from the big capital city of Jerusalem, and he watched as the mighty Assyrian army, the world power of the day, made movement toward the northern Kingdom of Israel, eventually overtaking it. He foresaw the same fate for Judah so, standing with the likes of Isaiah and Amos and Hosea, he spoke a word of prophecy calling the people to a pure worship of God, rejecting any form of idolatry, carved or human, and to social justice, declaring both God’s judgment and His promise of divine forgiveness and hope for a new and restored future.
“What does the Lord require of us?” is a question for the ages and one many ask still. “Tell me what the Lord expects of me, give me the checklist, and I’ll do it!” Out of that mind set the God-given Ten Commandments morphed over time in to 613 separate laws and then into the minutia of literally thousands of little rules and regulations. Over time the checklist of what the Lord requires became a burden even the most devout could no longer carry.
Micah speaks to the ridiculousness of this religious burden using hyperbole. Does the Lord require the burnt offering of young calves? That was the practice of the day. Or the sacrifice of thousands of rams? Or ten thousand rivers of oil? He keeps upping the ante to its climax, “Shall I give my first born child for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” We can almost hear the cry, “What do I have to do to please God?”
The answer Micah gives is refreshing in its simplicity. He synthesizes the great commands of God down to only three, Jesus was able to further refine them to two, Love God and Love your neighbor, saying all the rest is just commentary, but we will pick up that teaching another time. Micah answers the question, “What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God.” Simple enough to put on a 3×5 card, albeit not quite so easy to put in to practice. So profoundly simple they are easily committed to memory, but expansive enough to challenge and change every aspect of our lives, which was exactly Micah’s intention.
Whenever there is a new idea, a new problem to be solved, a new venture to be undertaken there are two basic approaches to doing so. The first is to cast the grand vision, the broad brushstroke of the idea, without bothering much with the details, the how it is going to get done. President Kennedy cast the grand vision of putting a man on the moon within a decade, then left the working out of the details to the scientists at NASA…and they did it.
The other approach is to start with those things that are closest at hand, the practicalities you can do which then lead to the bigger challenges and changes which need to be made. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Business guru Jim Collins promotes making changes in an organization by starting with the little fly wheels in the great machine which then begin to turn the larger and larger gears until eventually the entire machine is up and running. Mother Theresa suggests this approach when she says, “If you can’t feed 100, then feed just one.”
There isn’t necessarily a right or wrong way to address a problem or change a culture, but I’ll admit I’ve always biased toward the latter approach, which may be one of the reasons I have at times had trouble putting my head around what Micah is suggesting, “to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God.” Who am I to correct the great prophet but my inclination is to turn that paradigm upside down and state them in the reverse order. What does the Lord require of you but to “walk humbly with God, love mercy and do justice”, so walk with me for a little while as I try to explain my way of thinking.
I believe that “walking humbly with God” is the starting point for our being able to “love kindness” and “do justice”. It is the “why” behind the “what”. To walk humbly with God is to know Him and to know in a meaningful and personal way His love, His grace, His forgiveness. It is to know for yourself that you are His beloved child, claimed by the love of Christ, forgiven and set free by His sacrificial death. This is who you are. This is who I am…a child of God, so our desire as children of God is to walk humbly, gratefully, faithfully, obediently with God.
That primary understanding of our relationship with God, based not on rules and regulations but on God’s mercy and grace, then shapes and informs everything else about the way we live our lives and respond to our neighbors. Walking humbly with God then naturally leads to extending mercy and love and kindness to others just as God has extended these to us. As we do these things we are being imitators of God, reflectors of His love and sharers of His grace and mercy which we have received in abundance, unconditionally. Our action toward others arises out of God’s first action toward us.
As I understand myself to be a beloved child of God I come to realize that God’s mercy is not for me alone or us alone, the select few, but for all, understanding that they too are beloved children of God. Loving kindness or doing mercy becomes the operating principle in our lives because mercy is foundational to our understanding of who God is. It is a characteristic of the God we worship.
So, once then we understand ourselves to be loved by God, individually and collectively, and that our neighbors are also loved by God, then the next step toward “doing justice” makes perfect sense. If I have care and concern for the neighbors I know there is a natural, or better God-given, progression toward caring about others I don’t know, be they near or far. That kind of caring requires us to consider how to put our heads around the much larger issues of our day that call not just for one-on-one acts of kindness, but radical and systemic change, actions that are not just transactional (between you and me) but transformational (changing whole systems). Doing justice is the grand vision of the Kingdom of God, the “shalom or peace of God” about which Oscar spoke two weeks ago.
Doing justice, simply put, means seeking for your neighbor what you want for yourself. It involves fairness and equity and equal access not just for myself, or for those I know, or those who look or act or think or believe as I do, but for all people, because they too are beloved children of God, just as I am. One of the foundational principles of our faith is that we have been created in the image of God, the Imago Dei; not just that I have been created in the image of God but that all people have been as well, which means that all people deserve access to the same freedoms and opportunities I enjoy. The call for justice is not merely a political or social principle; it arises out of a cornerstone understanding of our faith: that we are all children of God, despite our differences and diversity, each created in the image of God. That understanding leads us not merely to loving kindness but to doing justice.
Dr. King reminds us that “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it always bends toward justice.” In another of his writings he said, “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Even a superficial look at history reveals that no social advance rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals. Without persistent effort, time itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social destruction. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.” This is what the prophet meant when centuries before in response to the question “What does the Lord require of us?” he answered “Do justice”.
Now, I would imagine we could get in to a rather heated and in-depth discussion and debate, even among us reasonably minded Presbyterians, as to what the “doing” of justice actually entails, but can we agree together, looking at the society and world at large in which live, that there are some injustices at work among us, some inequities which must be addressed, that all is not as it should be?
Can we agree that there is something fundamentally wrong, unjust, when even during a pandemic the wealth gap between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, has gotten exponentially wider; when inner city schools year after year receive failing grades; where gun violence on our streets is at record highs; where people, primarily people of color, in the richest country on earth, are still struggling with issues of generational poverty, poor living conditions, and inadequate basic services? We could cite literacy rates, incarceration rates, eviction rates, even covid deaths, each of which may have very particular nuances but all of which reflect seeming systemic inequities and injustice. Add to these, the events of this past summer, and so much longer, which are reminders to us of the racial inequalities which have been woven into our society for generations and are existent still today, in us. These are problems that are so much larger than simply finding better ways for us to relate to one another one-on-one; these are systemic issues which affect whole groups of people, so acts of kindness must be amped up to works of advocacy. We who have a voice must speak for those who have no voice, or who are no longer capable of speaking for themselves, because those who bear the burden of injustice also bear the image of God.
I don’t pretend to have answers to so many of the systemic problems which face us as a nation and society, but can we at least agree that there are problems, injustices and inequalities which must be addressed? I recently heard someone say, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed without being faced.” Of course, I believe in the importance of individual responsibility and of building personal relationships and simply being better neighbors to one another, but I also hear in the words of Micah, which echo throughout all of Scripture, a call for us to “do justice”.
As I wrestled with Micah’s words, and this message, I was quickly reminded that they parallel the three legs of our own Vision Renewal statement. Greater Faith is the call to walk humbly with God; Deeper Relationships is the call to love kindness; and a Stronger Community is the call to do justice. Listen to the way our own writers explained that part of our vision: “Tab will be a congregation that partners with its Mapleton-Fall Creek neighbors to meet the physical and spiritual needs of the community outside our doors, working to equip people to overcome obstacles, collaborating with individuals and organizations to advocate for justice, and recognizing that our faith and obedience will be judged by the way we walk with those in need…we will advocate for justice and promote God’s shalom for all people.”
Year ago Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota made a statement which I clipped and saved. He said, “A nation will be judged on how it treats those in the dawn of life (its children), those who are in the twilight of life (the aged), and those in the shadows of life (the poor, the disabled, the disenfranchised, and the oppressed)”. I believe Micah would agree with him, as should we.
What does the Lord require of you and why? The list is not long, but the challenge and opportunity is great. You know what the Lord requires of you: to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God OR put another way: we who walk humbly with God are also called to love mercy and do justice. Amen.