4th Sunday of Epiphany: Distractions from Obedience to the Lord
CONTENT
Introduction
Good morning dear friends. It is great to be back in person with you. I know this has been a really weird week with different routines, kids at home all week, and other challenges. All that to say I’m really glad to be back worshiping with you this morning.
Today’s reading from the book of Micah and I want to look at it this morning because I think there are some helpful things for us in it. Our passage today reminds us that sometimes we make following the Lord too complex, but the complexity is strategic; we create complexity to keep us from the simple, but difficult task, of doing what is truly right and good in the Lord’s sight. It is hard because we have to be honest about what we’ve done or left undone, or face those wounds we’ve walled off to keep safe, and we have to do what is right and good even when it is costly. Rather than do the hard work God calls Israel and us to do, we would rather fill our lives with distractions (even ministry distractions) that God has not asked us to do to keep us from addressing hard things. It is something we are all tempted to and this is why Micah 6 is a great reminder to us as well. As we look at this passage, let me pray for us: “In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight O Lord, our rock and redeemer. Amen.”
The case brought against the people (6:1-5)
The prophet Micah is prophesying in the first half of the 8th century and the beginning of the book puts this over the time period of the reigns of the vice-regents, Jotham and Ahaz, and then King Hezekiah. Tiglath Pileser III started a fresh campaign and pressure that would culminate in the fall of Samaria in the north in 722 BC where the northern kingdom of Israel was pretty much destroyed. This happened while Ahaz and Jotham were reigning over Judah in the south. Hezekiah, who would reign after them, would form an anti-Assyrian coalition with with the Palestinian and Syrian subject states. It would keep them safe for a time, but even the south would come to be taken later by the Babylonians in the 7th century.
This is a period of relative wealth and ease for Judah as they have successfully staved off the Assyrian threat. The surface-level peace and relative economic prosperity have become a double-edged sword spiritually. Micah is a covenant mediator and social and religious commentator on Jerusalem during this time where Sargon II takes the northern kingdom and as Judah forms alliances with foreign nations to ensure security.
Micah starts with a legal proceeding where God calls Israel to bring their case against God, “Rise, plead your case.” God asks Judah a question “O my people, what have I done to you? In what have I wearied you? Answer me!” God lays out his saving acts. He rescued them from Egypt, he gave them leaders, he did not allow foreign enemies to conquer them, he brought them across the Jordan river. This passage is used for us every year in our Good Friday service. The reproaches begin with this question “O my people, what have I done to you? How have I wearied you? Testify against me.” They end with, “I opened the rock and gave you drink from the water of life, and you have opened my side with a spear. I raised you on high with great power, and you have hanged me high upon the Cross. O my church, what have I done to you? How have I wearied you? Testify against me.”
God is inviting people back to covenant relationship. God is not sitting up somewhere stewing in anger or terrified by the anxiety about how bad a failing Judah will make him look. God confidently and mercifully invites them back while holding in tension the fact that he will not be mocked and he wants to make them into his covenant people. He has been seeking their good, but they have consistently walked away from the goodness God has for them and what he wants to make them into. We do this do. It is the very nature of sin and why it is both subtle and destructive. God has the same invitation to us to come and pay attention to all he has done for us. Look at his saving acts and ask what things, people, relationships, addictions, habits, patterns, and thoughts are drawing us away from knowing his love in Christ. Don’t paper over them with placebos and platitudes, spiritual bypassing, or even ministry opportunities. Do the simple work of being honest, no matter the cost.
The defense: Entering the Lord’s presence improperly (6:6-7)
Verses 6-7 change genre and form the peoples’ response. It’s like they are saying “God, how much is enough!?” They could bring a calf a year old. In other words, they’ve made an investment of time and money to rear this calf for a year in order to offer something costly to the Lord. Or should they offer God ten thousand rivers of oil? Would God be more pleased if they could offer him something greater and more expensive? If they could do big and great things for God would he then be pleased with them? Would that be enough? Or the most extreme example. The people ask if they should give their own firstborn for their transgressions. God had condemned human sacrifice, but this didn’t stop Judah or Israel from trying it. King Ahaz himself, during Micah’s ministry would offer his own son to the god Molech. It was an extreme and despicable rite that in this context is very ironic. They’ve gone so far their own way that they’ve now viewed apostasy as a pleasing offering. After all that God has done Judah is eager to sacrifice a lot of stuff to make sure that God gets the honor due his name. It’s almost like they’re saying, “Geez God, how many sacrifices does it take to make you happy?” It almost feels like a critique on any notion of “do great things for God and he will be pleased and bless your life.” And Micah is saying, that that is entirely the wrong question. There is no amount of zeal or sacrifice that will cover up a life of injustice, rebellion, misguided autonomy, and spiritual neglect.
The simplicity of pleasing the Lord (6:8)
There is no amount of work we can do for God or for the church or to try and make God look good that will atone for a life of injustice and moving away from God’s presence. It’s the age old lie of the garden where shame forced Adam and Eve to say “I am bad” and to move toward fixing their own problems themselves. Instead of turning away from them, God turns toward Adam and Even in invitation to ask where they have gone? The difference between guilt and shame is that guilt, within a securely attached relationship, invites someone into repair for the wrong they’ve done. It is useful. Shame, by contrast, tells someone that they are bad and it moves people into isolation. God does not shame his people, but here in Micah and elsewhere, he does account for the wrongs they’ve done so that they experience a sense of guilt that moves them to his kind invitation back into the goodness for which they were made.
Here’s my translation of vers 8: “He has told you, humanity, what is good, and what Yahweh requires of you: only to do justice, and to love covenant faithfulness, and to walk circumspectly with your God.” First they are called to do “justice” which often is used in Scripture as a call to our responsibility to take care of the weaker members of society: the poor and vulnerable, the immigrant and foreigner, the widow, and the orphan. It insists on the God-given rights of others because this is God’s very character and disposition toward his people. God’s people are to love covenant faithfulness. A lot of translations will say mercy, but this word is really about faithfulness to the covenant that God has established with his people. He has done everything to deliver his people, to bring about their well-being, and to make them a chosen nation, royal priesthood, and kingdom of priests. They are to love the process by which they become what God has called them to be; however it is often easier for them to rely on their own ways or the ways of the nations towards an inadequate vision of prosperity. The beatitudes are like a preamble of a new covenant. We are called to grow in love with Jesus’ words to us and following him to become more like him.
Finally, he says to walk circumspectly with your God. Humility is inferred but not explicit. The idea is that this person is taking great care in the small details of how they walk with God. There is humility in submitting yourself to the will of God and not doing things from your own reactions and proclivities. The call to walk circumspectly is an invitation to bring God’s will to bear on the entirety of our lives.
When we choose to see the image of God in all people, when we are patient in prayer and learning facts rather than being driven by addiction to scrolling and rage-bait, when we seek to discover healing and name wounds accurately, when we allow guilt to move us toward relationship rather than heaping shame on ourselves in isolation and allowing false narratives to drive us away from the love of God, then we will find ourselves in the state of counting ourselves fortunate that Jesus promises in the beatitudes. It is simple, but it is also difficult and costly. Judah had offered God everything except for what God actually asked for. We are tempted to do the same. Chuck DeGroat has a great little paragraph that illustrates the point: ““I’ve learned a thousand ways to cope,” a retreat participant once told me, “and they’re all easier than healing.”...That’s the lie, I thought to myself when I heard them. That’s the root of the ancient fallacy, one we’ve acted on for time immemorial. We’ve fallen for the lie that a bit of drink here and an hour of scrolling there will quell the deep ache of our hearts, the lie that keeps us from attending to what’s happening within, where our wounds fester. But it’s here, in our spaces of self-soothing and our places of pain management, that God once again meets us.”[1] I’d add to this, along with Micah, that even ministry, community service, and other good things can distract us from dealing with the simple and costly obedience that God asks of us.
Conclusion
The community of faith has preserved Micah’s prophetic works as a timeless treasure to call us to repentance and hope in the God who invites us to know him and his love for us. God has done everything to save us and he calls us to put down all the things we use to distract ourselves from healing our wounds and finding true peace in Christ. The work is simple, but it is hard, and it is costly. It begins in each of our hearts as we walk very carefully with Christ. God has turned his face towards us and invites us to be at home in his presence: to grow in our knowledge of his love for us and others, and in the hard work of addressing our wounds, to become the good image-bearers he has made us to be.
Let me close by praying again for us this collect for this Sunday: “O God, you know that we are set in the midst of many grave dangers, and because of the frailty of our nature we cannot always stand upright: Grant that your strength and protection may support us in all dangers and carry us through every temptation; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”
[1] Chuck DeGroat, Healing What’s Within, 155.
