Roger Ray, Pastor
Jan. 30, 2011 Epiphany 4
Micah 6:6-8
6 '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? 7 Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with tens of thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?' 8 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?
Matthew 5:1-12
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. 2Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:
3 'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
4 'Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
5 'Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
6 'Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
7 'Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
8 'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
9 'Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
10 'Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
11 'Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you on my account. 12Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
The unending popularity of courtroom dramas from Perry Mason to Law and Order speaks to our inability to turn away from the intensity of a pitched battle for justice. We watch these dramas, in part for the suspense and in part because we cannot but take sides and hope for justice to prevail.
This was not lost on even ancient societies as we see courtroom dramas creeping into literature, even in Plato and Shakespeare, as well as in scripture. A lot of the most dramatic pronouncements in prophetic material are set in a courtroom trial, often between God and the nation of Israel.
The trial begins, in this case, a few verses prior to the reading we just heard from Dr. Hedrick. In verses 1 and 2 of Micah chapter 6, we read:
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.The accused is Israel and God calls upon the mountains to be the jury. What is the charge? Israel is on trial for being faithless. Just like in a good Law and Order, before you ever get to trial, you already have seen scenes from the crime. You know about the victim and you are pretty sure about the perpetrator. When God accuses Israel of faithlessness you can be safe in assuming that God has the case pretty well made.
But as God, in the role of the prosecuting attorney, approaches the trembling defendant who knows just how guilty he is, the first question out of the prosecutor's mouth sounds more like a stereotypic Jewish mother's complaint. In verse three, God asks Israel:
"O my people, what have I done to you? In what have I wearied you? Answer me!"Like a woman asking an unfaithful husband, "When did you get tired of me? Why did you lose interest in me? What made you forget about our life, our children, our future?"
Or, like a Puritan mother taking the family on a guilt trip, God reminds the defendant of how much God has done for them, how God has protected them, saved them, provided for them: "For I brought you up from the land of Egypt, and redeemed you from the house of slavery"
The defendant has nothing to say in this trial. Guilt is both obvious and assumed. So what do you do? What does the jilted wife expect now? Jewelry? Roses? Dinner out every night for a month, six months, a year? What can the children of a wearied mother do to show contrition for their indifference.... Take out the garbage every day, run the vacuum, do the dishes? What, indeed, do you do to appease an angry God?
In the ancient world, the usual fine for misconduct was sacrifice..... some lamb or dove spills its blood for your sins. You make a cash offering, burn some incense and bow your face to the floor of the temple.
I overheard two business people talking at breakfast this week. They were attending a conference that was going to run over the weekend with sessions on both Saturday night and Sunday morning. They were discussing the fact that they didn't want to miss going to church because, as one said to the other, "I can't afford to have God mad at me." They were checking their iPhones for a Saturday night mass or a Sunday morning early mass which would allow them to both be seen at the conference by their peers and be seen in a pew by God.
Micah mocks the people's desire to appease God with offerings..... Olive oil, which is precious in their society.... Used for cooking, to light lamps, to make soap and for grooming, to pour out a small flask of oil on the altar is considered a real sacrifice but Micah says, "do you think God will be impressed if you pour out a river of oil..... ten thousand rivers of oil?"
God is not interested in seeing you spill the blood of some lamb from your flock or a bird you caught in a net and wouldn't be impressed if you were even willing to sacrifice your first-born child.
And when you read that you need to recognize what an indictment that was of the whole temple sacrifice system, a total repudiation of what we would call organized religion. In the Abrahamic covenant, there is an understanding that when you mess up you make a sacrifice and everything is cool between you and God. God wants obedience and that is no different from the majority of what we see in organized religion all over the world today.
But that kind of sacrifice/obedience covenant isn't the only way to think about having a religious life. Among the tales of the Hassidim we have a comment from a prominent rabbi who said that God gives us each a shirt with two pockets. In one is the message, "I am dust and ashes." In the other is, "For me the universe was made."
And in defense of traditional religion, it can be said on the positive side that guilt and fear has been used to help create a civil, stable and decent society in which murder, theft, dishonesty and infidelity have been threateningly discouraged, and that is not all bad. But, just as our justice system was put in place to protect the weak from the abuses of the powerful and to make everyone equal in the eyes of the law, the real truth is that our justice system has been perverted to give the powerful even more power over the weak and the search for justice in the justice system is like looking for a black cat in a dark room that might not be there at all.
Though there is something to be said for imposing a sense of civility and responsibility on society through organized religion, what we have seen, all too often, is the loss of human dignity through abusive manipulation and control.
In that other pocket, the one with the message that says, "For you the universe was made," there is a sense of self worth, of self-respect, of character. If I were married, I would not want my wife to be faithful to me because she feared being caught and punished but rather I would want her to be faithful out of respect for both me and for herself. I am not interested in a relationship based on either legalism or obedience. What we would all want is a relationship based on affection and a personal desire to be a good person.
Micah emphatically says that is the only kind of relationship with God that makes sense. We do not impress God with church attendance, Bible study, prayer or offerings. We do not bribe God, appease God or pay a fine to God.
Our corporate worship, prayer and study are to enhance a love relationship with our Creator and to inspire one another to greater lives of charity and justice.
And so, Micah says:
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with tens of thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?' 8 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?We regularly find ourselves in a rather ironic position within the progressive movement. Most of us have found ourselves fairly despising organized religion but not willing to give up on having a meaningful relationship with God. We have been nervous about every step we have made in forming a worshipping community. We have anguished about buying a building and forming a board and committees because we do not want to fall back into the symbolic spirituality of organized religion from which we have escaped.
We have not sought to associate ourselves with any church structures or denominations and I spend as much time with reflective advisors in private conversation as we spend here in corporate worship, meticulously asking ourselves, "Are we doing the right things? Are we going about this in the right ways?"
Our progressive church is certainly a part of a modern reformation in Christianity but it is not really anything new. From time to time, throughout the centuries, spiritual communities have had to put the message of fear and guilt back in their pockets and take a look at the message in the other pocket. What does God really expect of us? To live lives in pursuit of justice, to deliberately show kindness and mercy and to have the kind of humility which calls us to live not as the strong and the weak, masters and slaves, rich and poor but rather as brothers and sisters.
Micah wrote, calling people from a covenant based on obedience and appeasement to a living relationship of genuine character expressed in social justice and in radical compassion. That same correction seems to be the prevailing theme of the preaching of Jesus in the early first century.
You can point to many of the best known of the saints through the centuries whose names become synonymous with attempts at calling the church away from symbolic religions of ritual and manipulation into genuine and living faith which is expressed in mercy and love.
St. Francis of Assisi, St. Teresa of Avila, Martin Luther, Soren Kierkegaard, and certainly many of our most familiar modern spiritual leaders, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, and Mother Theresa were all calling us from symbolic religion into the light of an honest and loving relationship with God which expresses itself in doing justice and loving kindness.
In that sense, we are really just plowing old ground. But, the fact is that reform movements have a nasty history of slowing down, responding to the pressure to be mediocre, to fit in, to go back into the safety of a symbolic faith and the security of organized religion.
To stay honest, we are committed to continuing to ask ourselves the hard questions, eschewing any dogmatic or doctrinal answers to the complicated issues in life. We are committed to maintaining a close relationship of compassion with the poorest people we can find. And we are devoted to the idea of building a genuine community among ourselves, caring for the sick, supporting those who grieve, and giving safety and healing to the broken.
It takes kindness and humility to build a spiritual community, both of which are symbolized in the joining together of a diversity of hands in this banner.... And it takes a commitment to social justice to make sure our faith is relevant, and that is symbolized in our second banner that bears the commitment that we will never again stand idly by in the face of injustice.
We do not meet in fear and we are not defined by guilt. I would remind you to rummage around in your pocket now and read again that message which tells you that it was for you that this universe was made. You are not ashes and dust, created to cower before an angry God.... You are treasured, esteemed, valuable in the eyes of God and so we lovingly return to God the favor of imitating God's values of justice and mercy in the way we live our lives.
