The Roaring Twenties

 

Proper 26A
Micah 3:5-12
November 1, 2020

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
Church of the Redeemer Episcopalian
Morristown, NJ

The Roaring Twenties

Our Scripture reading is set in the little kingdom of Judah during in the Roaring Twenties, not the 1920s but the 720s BCE. The Assyrian Empire had been the regional superpower for about three hundred years (with about another one hundred to go). They had just recently overrun the Kingdom of Israel to Judah’s north, capturing its capital Samaria in 722. A flood of refugees washed up on the outskirts of Jerusalem. The people of Judah were anxious both because of the refugees themselves who came in large numbers and because of the Assyrian armies who could easily menace Judah next, as in fact they did just a few years later.

Ordinary people were anxious, but the rich and powerful saw an opportunity: They stole ancestral land from the people to sell to the newcomers. They made sure that the court system was sufficiently corrupt not to have to answer for their crimes. They bought the silence of the Jerusalem prophets.

With the financial and real estate sectors, the judiciary, and the official religion under their control, they could act without fear.

The one percent and their enablers had a lock on the system and there was nothing that could be done about it. They committed one outrage after another. They broke laws with impunity. They had purchased God’s silence, convinced God to look the other way, and persuaded themselves that God’s silence meant God’s approval. With Samaria and Israel destroyed, but with Judah safe and Jerusalem bigger, richer, and more glorious than ever, they concluded, “Surely God is on our side!”

Self-congratulations led to contempt for anyone else. As far as they were concerned the peasants who kept the city in wine, mutton, and barley, and even the men who drafted to keep watch on the walls of Jerusalem were “losers and suckers.” The elite had created an all-encompassing narrative in which they themselves were the only legitimate holders of power. There was no way to break into that narrative.

Those who had been dispossessed, contrary to Judah’s covenant with the land and with their God, needed to be restored to what belonged to them. Those whose labor had been stolen to defend the city where the stolen wealth of the land had been moved needed God’s justice to be done. They needed God’s judgment. Their very lives depended on it.

But there was nothing in the narrative offered by their rulers, their judges, their priests, or their royal prophets to suggest that God was anything other than indifferent, that God cared about the outrages they were experiencing,or that God would or even could bring justice and judgment for them.

Enter Micah. Micah was a wild card. He was a prophet who was not on the Temple payroll. He took no money from the king. He was a prophet in private practice. He could say anything, do anything, and what he did was to speak on God’s behalf. Not on behalf of the domesticated God who lived boxed-in in the Temple. Not on behalf of the God whose reputation was tied to Judah’s geo-political success.

No, Micah spoke on behalf of Yahweh who was still free and wild, a God of barren open spaces and windblown mountaintops. Yahweh was loving-kindness itself toward the people who longed to live in the community of peace that was possible within Yahweh’s covenant with the people and with their land. But Yahweh when roused in defense of her cubs was a mama bear toward those who threatened to undo Judah’s covenantal justice.

Micah spoke: Yahweh had had more than enough of prophets who sold their gift to the highest bidder. Yahweh was tired of the rich buying and selling the poor. Yahweh was done with priests who used the commandments to keep the poor in line. Justice was coming. Judgment was coming.

And it was about the land. It’s always about the land. Since Judah’s corruption was centered in Jerusalem, judgment would take this form: Jerusalem would be ruined. The trees would take over the land where the Temple once stood. The land would still be there, but Jerusalem would not.

Now, the word of the prophet is one thing. Audience response is another. Seldom are the judgments of a prophet unavoidable. More often than not there is a way out, if–and it’s a big if–their words are heeded. Micah spoke hyperbolic words against Jerusalem on God’s behalf. He wasn’t the only one. Isaiah of Jerusalem was also active. A group of priests were re-imagining life in God’s covenant. It came together under one of the kings, Hezekiah, who reformed Judah’s life. Assyria did not overrun Jerusalem. Judah enjoyed a period of peace that lasted more than a century.

Things being what they are, the crisis of the Roaring Twenties tends to be repeated. We are in the midst of one of those repetitions now. The rich and powerful control the regulatory process and the tax codes so that they become even richer and even more powerful, while the rest of us watch with anger and dismay as every norm is shattered. High offices are occupied by the self-serving. Self-serving religious leaders declare that all of this is the will of God and that anyone who disagrees will be judged by God. And it seems that there is no one to stop them, no one to offer a different narrative, no one to announce the coming justice of a God who is not bought, who is not captive, but who remains wild and free and every bit as passionately committed to justice as ever.

Micah doesn’t live among us, but his spirit does. And we are perfectly capable of being Micah in his place. We are perfectly able to say to the rich and the powerful:

This is what God says
to those who lead my people astray:
the pundits shall be disgraced,
and the press secretaries put to shame;
they shall all cover their lips,
for they have no insight into God’s reality.

This is what God says
to the Senators and Representatives
who say whatever the lobbyists demand
in exchange for money in their campaign war-chests,
This is what God says to the preachers who lie,
who say that God does not care about justice,
that God is not committed to peace,
but only to the freedom of the strong to be strong
at the expense of the weak:
Therefore because of you
the District of Columbia will be plowed as a field;
Washington shall become a heap of ruins,
and Capital Hill a wooded height.

Micah is not here, but we can say that to the rich and powerful. Many of us have already said it. More of us will say it on Tuesday. And if need be we will say it in the streets. Micah does not live among us, but his spirit does.