Agents of Mercy and Justice
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Holy Covenant UMC
Rev. Matthew Johnson, preaching
Micah 6:1-8
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Requirements are all around us. Requirements of age say that you must be at least 16 to drive, 17 to enlist in the military, 18 to vote, 21 to drink, 25 to rent a car, 35 to be president, 67 to retire. Certain courses are required for college, a minimum GPA is required for graduate school, certain experience is required for employment. Citizenship places requirements on your place of birth, skill and aptitude. If you don’t meet the requirements, you don’t get the call back, you don’t get accepted and you could even find yourself in court, jail, or deported.
Travel out of the country requires a passport, flying the plane out of the country carrying that traveler requires a license, guiding the plane from the tower requires rigorous testing, and standing in line at airport security … well, that requires humility, patience and a slight bend toward being insane. If you want to be on a team or part of an orchestra or band, there are requirements. Your coach won’t play you if you miss the practices. The conductor won’t let you play in the concert if you miss the rehearsals. There are requirements.
So it is only natural that when it comes to claiming membership in Christian community … and speaking about the mission of that community … the issue of requirements comes up. Now, this is a challenge for those of us who practice with the faith of Jesus, because the requirements of the world and the requirements of God are derived from different languages, living in different realities, and aiming to different futures. The world says that the fulfillment of a requirement equals entitlement.
But what does God require of us? Every week as we gather, we lift up our common mission to SEEK GOD, LOVE ALL PEOPLE. and CHANGE THE WORLD. Even in my short time here, I know that those eight words are an embodiment of what we believe this community is required to do. We’re trying to live by that great summary of the law … the requirement Jesus said was most important … to love God with our everything and to love our neighbors as ourselves. And in living that way … in living in this radical kind of love … we will be so transformed that the world will change because we have been changed. Everything we do should be done intentionally because of this love. Everything we program and plan hopes for this change. We work towards the fulfillment of this requirement because we have already been given everything we could possibly imagine.
In the scripture we heard earlier, prophet Micah articulated the requirements with different words, but they are much the same: Seek Justice, Love Mercy and walk humbly with God. These, like our mission and the great commandment, these are requirements that cannot be completed so we can move on. They are things that take a lifetime of commitment. They take a community of support. They take a submission of self. They take the embodiment of the many. They take living.
Now Micah was a different kind of prophet … at least a different time of prophet. Unlike those who preached in times of occupation and despair (like Jeremiah, Ezekiel and even Jesus), Micah was preaching a message of repentance and transformation at the latter part of what had been forty years of prosperity and peace.
It wasn’t all great, though. Assumptions were made about the future using the small sample of half a generation. Requirement had given way to entitlement. The people were not terribly concerned about those less than them. They had become complacent about their neighbors. They had become self-absorbed. They had stopped resembling a people set apart to point to the great God who made them.
And Micah saw what was coming. Complacent people sometimes miss the obvious that lurks in the periphery. The gathering strength in the east. The corruption at the center. The end of an era.
To draw them near to God again … to spark a renewal among them, he could have called them to dogmatic and legalistic living. He could have called them to live as required by the dietary and communal laws. But the problems God allowed him to see ran deeper than self-preservation and lip-service to Leviticus.
“I freed you to be a changing force,” God tells them in the charges that proceed the question of what the LORD required of them. “I liberated you so that you could be different and show what my kingdom looks like,” God tells them. “But you are concerned about yourselves. You are concerned about where you live and what is in your oven.”
Their covenant required them to be fundamentally different so that their fundamentally different God could be made known through their living. A living that sought justice, loved mercy and walked humbly with God. Their covenant required them to both care for the poor and the widow AND change the way they behaved that made them poor and without a family to care for them. Their covenant required them to stop saying they believed in jubilee, but always said “maybe next year.” Their covenant required them to stop worrying about sacrificing animals, but instead worry about how their behavior was actually sacrificing people.
Well, Micah’s call didn’t work as far as we can tell. The downhill slide continued for Israel and Judah. And
eventually they fell into the hands of the Babylonians. Yet while Micah’s call to his people may have fallen on deaf ears, it still calls to us … we who are not unlike Micah’s generation … the prosperous and plentiful … the recipients of a generation of amazing advance, wealth and self.
This church is a proving ground where all of us are prepared again and again to live into these requirements … where we are prepped with the gumption and support to be world changers. Because, frankly, it isn’t easily done. Today, like Micah, we have to strain to see concentrated pockets of justice and mercy. I think if we speak about them outside these walls … asking for ways that people are living into those requirements … we’d end up with more examples of the antithesis than evidence of their embodiment.
You don’t have to travel far to become disenchanted with the way these tandem forces of grace have failed to be lived. The west side of our fair city, South of 8 Mile Road in Detroit, East St. Louis, and large sections of Memphis all stand as monuments to God’s justice and mercy that still needs fulfilled. And if those aren’t enough, there’s Haiti. If our cities are monuments to justice and mercy unfulfilled, then that nation could be the holy land of this frightening truth. It is a wasteland, torn apart by another storm and still waiting for the international aid it was promised.
But as a people, we know these are distortions of God’s reality. As a congregation, we place our hope in God not giving up on us. We place our hope in the grace that will fulfill our efforts and make us more open to escalating them. And while it may seem easier to give up on changing the world through acts of mercy and justice, the God who abides with us on our journey will not give up on them. And armed with justice and mercy … the great leveling of all creation that will bring the lowly up and tend to their wounds on the way … We are called to bring light to the shadows; light to warm the locked-out; light to expel the brokenness; light to expose the crookedness.
Because while Jesus said we will always have the poor, he did not say that we should give in to the forces, institutions and people that create that reality. While wars continues to wage in an endless string, they should not discourage us from living in peace. Because, bigotry still — to this day — leads to racially-motivated killings in Mississippi and Alabama, we cannot stand by idly and say to ourselves “they are anomalies because we solved racism in the sixties.”
Because, while the average CEO makes 300 times more than the average worker (and works six weeks fewer), and the gap between the wealthy and the poor continues to grow wider and deeper, we should not be discouraged from speaking up and stepping out for a people abused by corruption and greed. Because there are still those who use God to justify the subservience of women, we cannot give up on sharing liberation with all our sisters. And, while we may have a history of being open and affirming to all people inside these walls, we should not be satisfied with what we have accomplished and maintained while there are so many others who sit outside other walls awaiting welcome in their own homes and communities.
We shouldn’t and can’t to any of these things because we know the requirements. We are to partner with God to change the world.
As a people who repeat each week that our mission is leading to a world changed, we will not give up. And we will not give up because we don’t believe that the ways of the unmerciful and unjust will continue forever. We don’t believe they have conquered and shattered all hope. If we did, we wouldn’t be here today. If we did, we wouldn’t keep opening these doors and walking with each other into the world. If the tyranny of selfishness and scarcity had the last word, would we baptize our children at this font and offer them into a life that has been defeated?
We would spend a great deal of energy giving these graduates a framework for life if we believed all was lost? Would we send them into the adult world if we truly believed that redemption wasn’t possible?
No, all is not lost. Although we have yet to see it completed, the kingdom victory is firmly in the hands of God’s mercy and justice. The future is encased in the grace of Jesus. And we know it, friends.
We know it, because we support ministry that sends teams of people to rebuild homes and lives that are likely to be destroyed by another storm. We support the education and health of the orphaned because we know they will inherit a world redeemed. Through our apportionment giving, we support the Methodist church in places where it is a tiny minority because we believe the message they have to share with the majority bring transformation to their communities. We house the homeless because we believe there are homes that will soon await them. We feed the hungry because they we believe they need to be ready to receive the better tomorrow. We sit with the lonely because we know God will not leave them alone. We speak for the voiceless because we know God already has.
Seek Justice, Love Mercy and Walk Humbly with God. There is no limit placed on scope, or time. There is no geographic boundary. There is no addendum that says “take care of your own first.” This is a requirement that knows no end and has no limit. Which is only fitting, because neither does our God. Praise God for blessing us with these requirements, Praise Jesus for liberating us to make them our life, and Praise the Spirit for filling this place where we live them out together. Amen.
Tags: Matthew
