What Does God Want? 2.2.20; ICCM; Pastor Rebecca Ellenson
One of my favorite classes in Seminary was called Old Testament Pericopes. A pericope is a selected passage of scripture assigned to be read on one of the Sundays of the church year. Dr. Frank Benz taught the class. We were assigned a passage of the Hebrew Scriptures to translate for each class. Dr. Benz taught us so much more than Hebrew verb forms. He taught us how to read the texts for preaching.
- He said, the first thing is always to pray for God to open the text to us, to guide our minds and to be with us as we study.
- Next, read the text, silently, then aloud, then in another translation or a bible story book.
- Then for those of us in Seminary the next step was to make a translation of the text from the Hebrew—paying special attention to the key words, any irregularities or unusual words.
- Context comes next—identify what time period it was written in—what was happening then, who wrote it, in what style—is it poetry, wisdom literature, prophecy, or is it a story?
- Only after that part of the study could we turn to what others wrote about the text.
- At last we were to reflect on it, what might God have been saying to the original writer, his audience, What about other hearers of the text? How would Jesus or Paul have understood a text by Micah from the 8th Century BC? What might God be saying to me now, to my congregation?
- And finally we were to pray again—thanking God for the opportunity to learn.
Today’s text from the prophet Micah was one of those pericopes in Dr. Benz’s class. The Old Testament is difficult for many people to study. It can be overwhelming to bridge the cultural gap of 2800 years. But, it’s worth the effort. Today’s text speaks a word of blessing to the people of Micah’s time even as he recounts the many blessings of God throughout their past. Long before the time that the prophet Micah lived, God made a covenant with the people –a sort of contract for a permanent relationship. Simply put it went like this– I will be your God and you will be my people. Or put another way– I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other God’s before me. God promised to provide all they needed and more. The role of the people was to worship God and accept God’s gifts.
God was faithful to the covenant– God brought them out of Egypt, freed them from slavery, sent leaders and prophets, blessed them when they deserved curses, gave them safe passage through deserts and against attacking enemies. “Remember all of that” God says through the prophet Micah, “and know the saving acts of the Lord.”
God is NOT saying…see all I have done for you…shame on you for forgetting…boy, oh, boy, do you ever owe me now!
With God there is no tallying up. Micah lists all the blessings granted to the people in order to show that God’s love knows no end. God’s love will never stop. God is saying–come back to me so I can love you some more!
Micah’s message is written in a specific pattern. It is a metaphor of sorts. This passage is staged as a sort of court case between God and the people. In this lawsuit God is the one who has been cheated on, wronged. Yet it is God who calls the partner back, not to get a payback or to punish but to love some more.
It is hard for anyone to imagine such love. We live under covenants of our own, even if we don’t call them covenants. Marriage is one of the best examples. On a wedding day promises are made to live in good relationship, to share and give and love through whatever comes. The promises reflect the ideal arrangement. Even in the best marriages though, the love is not perfect or pure.
The parent/child relationship is another sort of covenant. If we have children, we take on the responsibility of loving and caring for them. But, no matter how good the intentions, no parent can love perfectly. As children we are born into a relationship over which we have no control. We can accept the love given us. We can respond with our own love. But no child loves perfectly either. It is hard to imagine such unconditional love.
The imaginary defendant in today’s pericope cannot imagine the depth or length of God’s love. Instead of hearing God’s words as an invitation back into God’s loving care, as an offer of more free gifts, the defendant expects punishment and asks what penalty will be demanded for faithlessness.
The defendant starts modestly enough. How about a burnt offering, a calf, perhaps. No, it must be more? It’s kind of like—how badly did I screw up? Do I have to get flowers and chocolate? How about a thousand rams, or ten thousand rivers of oil? That would still not be enough? What about my firstborn child? In ancient times other nations offered child sacrifices. Is that what you require from your faithless covenant partner? All the questions hold the message: nothing I can offer will be enough so what do you want from me?
How easy it is to turn the marvelous grace of God into a list of dos and don’ts, the invitation to blessing into a challenge for good works. The response from the prophet, the one who brought this whole courtroom scene to order is to bang the gavel and say. “God has told you what is good, O mortal, and what God requires of you– do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God. Those are three ways of saying–keep the covenant–be God’s people–trust God’s love and live in that grace. Just open yourself to God’s love. That’s all. Live touched and transformed by grace day after day and let that lead you to live a life of blessing.
Today’s text is a recap of what God wants for us—It’s like one of those things we should be sure to focus on because it so beautifully summarizes the story of God and God’s people. God reaches out, calls us by name, invites us into covenant, and then fixes our messes when we fall away, over and over again… We don’t earn our way into God’s grace by sacrifices- we live in God’s grace by humbly aligning ourselves with justice, kindness.
Justice is one of the key words in this passage. It is a central theme of biblical life. Justice is identified with the very nature of God. It is a transformative virtue that restores community while balancing personal and common good. In our Modern Western Culture we tend to think of Justice more in terms of judgements, laws, punishment for wrongdoing, or vindication for victims. Justice in the conventional wisdom of the world is when people get what they’ve got coming to them. Fairness. But that’s just a tiny bit of what the Hebrew word means.
In the Old Testament there are three basic types of justice—Commutative justice—which focuses on the relationships of people within a community. The law wasn’t separated from the community—justice had to work for all the people. The second kind of justice is distributive justice—which ensured the equitable distribution of resources, goods, benefits and burdens. There is no justice without sharing—without equity, without mutual suffering and benefit. And finally, the third understanding is what we call social justice—the work of justice that means systems of oppression need to change.
What does the Lord require—that we do justice. It can seem daunting—How do we know where to start? Well, we can start by asking how Jesus did justice. What did he say in the gospel—he announces what it is to be blessed—to live in God’s kingdom. He’s not telling people to be blessed, he’s saying they are already. He pronounces a blessing to all the people who have come to hear him. His blessing invites them to think differently about the way the world works because of what he says.
This was a new teaching. In the ancient world, just like today, many people believed strongly in cause and effect. They believed that if they were good people who followed God’s commandments, worked hard, and tried to do their best in all circumstances, then God would reward them with good health, food to eat, stable jobs, happy families, and prosperity. Likewise, they believed that God punished the sinful with illness, poverty, imprisonment, blindness, divorce, and other personal tragedy. Many believed that God even punished entire sinful populations through war, famine, droughts, and other disasters.
If a man was sick, or mourning, or poor in spirit, or starving, or persecuted, it was his own fault for sinning. A woman who suffered did so as the consequence of her own bad behavior because suffering was understood as punishment for sin.
But Jesus flips things on their head. It doesn’t work like that in the kingdom of God. Jesus blesses everyone who had gathered, no matter who they were and no matter what they had done. God’s blessing in Christ is not just for the righteous ones. God’s blessing is not just for certain religious groups, or certain genders, or certain sexual orientations, or certain cultural or racial groups. God’s blessing is not just for those who are pure, who go to church and give to charities and treat people with kindness. And God’s blessing is not evidenced by a big bank account or a fancy title or a luxury home.
In this new kingdom that Jesus is showing us, God blesses the saints and sinners alike. Jesus offers a blessing on the poor in wallet and the poor in spirit. He blesses the blind, the lame, the imprisoned, the outcast. He blesses the leper and the prostitute. He blesses the murderer and the thief and the adulterer. He blesses the Jews and the Gentiles. Today who would he bless? the Muslims and the Hindus, the Buddhists and the Ba’hai, the Mexicans and the Canadians, the Syrians and the Russians, the people of Ghana and Brazil. In Christ, God’s blessing does not discriminate. God’s blessing is for all. God’s blessing is for you. God’s blessing is for me.
That’s good news, don’t you think? It’s commutative and distributive and social justice. It means that no matter who you are or what you have done, you are blessed and you are welcomed into God’s family, and there is nothing you can do, ever, to lose God’s love, affirmation, and blessing.
Blessed is our identity, blessed is our condition, blessed is who we are because of God’s saving love shown in Jesus Christ. So in this first teaching for his followers, his disciples, in his first teaching for you and for me, Jesus is telling us as clearly as he can that these people—”look around you,” he says to his disciples—these people in the crowd that gathered that day near the shores of the Galilean lake—these people who drive loud razors under your window at night, these people who whose political views differ from ours, these people who are in jail for dealing drugs, these people who got pregnant out of wedlock and now want an abortion, these people who are members of a gang, these people who are members of a white supremacist group, these people who sit in judgment, these people who carry guns, these people who are crazy feminists, these people who are pro-life, these people who are pro-choice. . .well, you get the idea. Jesus his telling his disciples that ALL THESE PEOPLE are blessed.
And we who call ourselves disciples, followers of Jesus Christ, get to not just understand this, but we get to live it out by our words and our actions. What does the Lord require—to do justice, to love kindness to walk humbly with God. We are blessed and we can be a blessing to others.