A Ministry of Irritation (Micah 5:2-4; 6:6-8; Pentecost 22a; November 9, 2014)

A Ministry of Irritation

Micah 5:2-4; 6:6-8
Pentecost 22a
November 9, 2014

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

We are the heirs of a rich tradition.  We have a sacred text with roots that go back three and half millennia.  We have patterns of worship and time that shape our lives.  We have a line of heroes and heroines—like Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day, Teresa of Ávila, Francis of Assisi, Benedict of Nursia, and Agnes of Rome, among countless others—that stretch from present into the distant past.  We have the stories of God’s people in the Hebrew and Greek Testaments. 

If there were no churches, no stained glass, no organ music, no choirs, no vestments, no Sunday school rooms, no mission agencies, no pension funds or conference centers, we would still be rich.  We would have this legacy of God’s people.

A priceless part of that legacy is the tradition of the prophets.   We think of prophets as people who can see into the future.  That would be a handy talent to have.  Every culture has had its ways of trying to see what will happen.  The Chinese had their I Ching, the Babylonians their astrology, and the Romans their augury and auspices.  Today, of course, we have economists.

But biblical prophets were not mostly concerned with telling the future.  Biblical prophets experienced a relation with God that allowed them to understand what God was doing in the present situation.  They were social critics, poets, preachers, and performance artists.  Their gift was not so much foresight as it was insight. 

We’ve already met two of them this fall.  Three weeks ago we met Nathan who confronted David about “the thing that he had done.” Last week we met Elisha who told the Syrian general Naaman to go jump in a lake.  Seven times.  Or maybe it was a river.  Anyway.

This week we meet a new thing, a thing that is, as far as I know, unique in the history of religions: a literary prophet, a prophet whose prophecies have come to us in a written and literary form.  Amos and Hosea were the first and lived in the middle seven hundreds bce.  Micah came along a little later and lived in the late seven hundreds at about the same time as the prophet Isaiah.

The narrative lectionary assigns a reading made up of two separate passages in Micah.  The first is a promise of a king in the old style, in the pattern set by David, a text we’re used to hearing in Advent.  The second is the famous summary of covenant life: “The [Lord] God has told us what is right and what he demands: ‘See that justice is done, let mercy be your first concern, and humbly obey your God,’” more familiar to us, perhaps, as “He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

I wasn’t sure at first what to make of this.  But the more I’ve chewed on this the more sense it makes.  The two themes in these two passages run through all of the literary prophets. 

The first is the dream of a righteous king, a king who will use his power to protect the weak from the strong, a king who will safeguard the covenant and its people.  When Micah dreamed this dream he naturally enough thought of David, born in Bethlehem of Ephrathah of the least of the clans of Judah, who became the king of a united Israel.  It was a good dream, but every time they thought they had a king who came close, he ended up letting them down.

They should have known.  Another prophet, Samuel, had told them.  Israel had asked for a king “like other nations,” one who could lead and protect them.  Samuel saw that this request was a rejection of Yahweh’s rule and warned Israel of danger:

These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots.  He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers.  He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers.  He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers.  He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work.  He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves.  And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day.

And that’s what happened.  But the dream died hard.  It lived on in the imagination of the prophets, not so much as an expectation but as an indictment of the kings they had, kings that fell far short of the dream of a righteous king, kings that oppressed the poor and favored the rich, kings that exploited the widow, the orphan and the immigrant.

The real danger, even worse than bad kings who failed to remember the covenant, was the kings who would warp the dream into a nightmare.  They took God’s promise to defend Jerusalem and to uphold the king of David’s line as permission to do as they liked.  God would always put a king of David’s line on the throne in Jerusalem.  Jerusalem was the city on a hill.  It would never fall to an enemy.  God would protect it. 

This warped sense of entitlement infected Judah and its kings simply forgot the heart of the covenant.  And that’s where the second prophetic theme came in.  Prophets were not terribly impressed with what we call religion.  Rituals, sacrifices, ceremonies, seasons and holy days may be useful for us, but they can also be a danger.  There is a matter at the heart of the covenant |and Micah tells us what that is: “See that justice is done, let mercy be your first concern, and humbly obey your God.”  These are not really three different things, but three ways of saying the same thing, and it is one way of summing up the prophetic message.  God is, in Walter Brueggemann’s phrase, “passionately committed to justice.” 

When we talk about justice, we normally mean criminal justice, we mean that people who break the law will be punished.  We certainly have laws and we certainly punish the people who break them.  We jail more of our population than any other nation on earth.  But that’s not what God means by justice.

When we push a little, we might say that justice means that everyone plays the game by the same rules.  Justice is a level playing field.  Of course, the game has winners and losers because some are better at the game.  Those who lose the game are losers.  We wouldn’t dream of blaming the game itself.  The game is just the way the world is.  As long as the rules are the same for everyone, we call it just. 

But God doesn’t.  God isn’t a referee who cares only about the rules of the game.  God takes sides.  The passage goes on to define justice, mercy and humble obedience.  It comes in the form of an indictment, but God’s passionate commitment to justice is obvious:

Can I forget the treasures of wickedness in the house of the wicked, and the scant measure that is accursed?  Can I tolerate wicked scales and a bag of dishonest weights?  Your wealthy are full of violence; your inhabitants speak lies, with tongues of deceit in their mouths.  Therefore I have begun to strike you down, making you desolate because of your sins.  You shall eat, but not be satisfied, and there shall be a gnawing hunger within you; you shall put away, but not save, and what you save, I will hand over to the sword.  You shall sow, but not reap; you shall tread olives, but not anoint yourselves with oil; you shall tread grapes, but not drink wine.

When the game is rigged, God sides with the poor, the powerless, and the excluded, against the rich and powerful insiders.  This is the tradition of the prophets that came down through Samuel, Nathan, and Elisha to Amos, Hosea, and Micah, and on through Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, to John the Baptist and to Jesus.  And we who worship this God, who hear these stories week after week, who call ourselves Christians, are heirs to this tradition.

During the coming week, you’ll be making a decision about your church giving in 2015.  Maybe you’ve already done that.  There are many reasons that you can consider.  You can consider the programs of the church.  The Sunday school, the music program, the UMW circles, the fellowship groups are all good reasons for giving.  The work of the United Methodist connection in Iowa, the United States and around the world that combines the contributions of many to do things that we can hardly imagine, things like the end of malaria in Africa, is another.  The mere fact that the church as an organization allows for the mutual support and care that we experience here, is yet another. 

But for me, there is the matter of God’s passionate commitment to justice.  In a world of institutionalized violence and ruthless competition, a dream for some bought at the price of a nightmare for others, in a world system rigged to give more power and wealth to those with power and wealth, someone needs to take the side of the poor and powerless.  It certainly won’t be the governmental and financial institutions.  It falls to us, God’s people, the Church, to carry on the prophetic tradition.  That’s reason enough to give our time, and our energy, and our wealth, and our lives. 

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