4th Sunday in Epiphany
Micah 6.1-8
Tim Sean Youmans, Postulant to the Priesthood, Diocese of Oklahoma
American newspaperman H.L. Menken once said "There is always an easy solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong."[1] I suspect most of us believe that to basically be true. The older I get, I find myself saying that things are “complicated.” If you are on Facebook then you know that is how many people describe their relationships. They say, “It’s complicated.”
But I don’t think we like it that way. You and I have a tendency to want to frame things in our lives in such a way as to make them more manageable. “Give me the bottom line.” We want solutions to be simple. Politicians are forced to talk about policy and legislation in small sound bites because our attentions spans are so short. Wait, what was I saying?
We have more than one teenager in our church family who is struggling with the discipline of academics. And you would think all they need to do is schedule time for homework and then hand it in. Schedule regular study time, and then take the test. Simple.
Our son Noah has a favorite comedian who remembers what it was like to wake up in the morning only to realize that the science project that was assigned at the beginning of the year had come due. “Your head pops of your pillow and the first thought that comes to mind is, “Oh no. That’s due today. I had nine months to work on it and I did nothing.” There are a myriad of forces, personal and cultural that work their way into the tangle of the decisions we make. And now with the onslaught of Attention Deficit Disorder, issues with the long term effects of poor diet, the culture of video gaming, the effects that Television has had on our cognitive processing abilities, all of these make it complicated.
Everything we do, we do in a complex system. And yet, our inclination is to try and narrow it down to something simple. There are a few places within the Christian scriptures where God seems to do that very thing. The prophet Micah:
What does God require of you, O human being. Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. Give us the bottom line.
But, if you are like me, you almost immediately start asking the next question, and the next question, questions for clarification. Which is why, to be quite honest, I would have made a terrible apostle. There was a time in the Gospels when Jesus lined up everyone who was following him and he chose twelve to be his disciples (quite like a Kick-Ball Game at recess). And Jesus would not have chosen me. He says in the Gospel text this morning, “Blessed are the poor in Spirit, for they shall in inherit the earth.” And I probably would have said something to Jesus like, “Well Rabbi, that is very poetic sounding and all, but it is also insufficiently vague.” He definitely would have sent me packing.
And so also to the prophet Micah:
So exactly is justice? What do you mean by loving mercy? And what exactly is humility in relationship to God?
It is not that I do not care what God means. It is, rather, because I do care precisely what God means that I make it more complicated than perhaps it needs to be.
Jesus had a couple of encounters where folks around him wanted him to give them the bottom line. Religious leaders asked him, “What is the greatest commandment?”. That is a kind of “bottom line” question. And do you recall his answer? “Love the Lord with all your heart, all your soul and all your mind. And the second is like it.
Wait. Second commandment? We asked that you give us one.
And the second is like it, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Loving your neighbor as yourself is the same thing as loving God with your whole being.
Well then, what does it mean to love yourself? And who exactly is my neighbor? Someone actually asked for clarification on that one.
It just got complicated again.
A young man, who was very wealthy, approached Jesus and asked him a very bottom line sort of question. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” His question is not that different from one that is commonly used in evangelical conversion methods. (If you grew up evangelical then you’ll recognize the question). “If you were to die tonight, and you stood before God, and God asked you, why should I let you into heaven, what would you say?” And it is a bottom line kind of question.
Which makes Christ’s answer all the more interesting. He did not say “Accept me as your personal lord and savior and invite me into your heart?” And I have no problem with the truth of such words. But no, Jesus made it more complicated than that. Obey the commandments, he said. And the young man replied, “All these I have kept from my childhood.“ And Jesus, knowing that was SIMPLY not true, COMPLICATED things for him, “There is one thing more that you lack. Go, sell everything you own, give it to the poor, and come follow me.”
These three encounters and a couple others in the epistles, in the long arc of our scripture, are the only places that feign to give us a simple and straightforward answer to a complex question: What is the main thing I need to know in relationship to God? What is the bottom line?
And the bad news for those of us who might want these kinds of answers is that the “bottom line” does not make things simpler, it does not boil things down for us. These answers, rather, open up our searching to a world of cultural textures, personal motivations, and discovery about each other and ourselves.
It does not mean there are not any answers. In fact it means quite the opposite. It means there are multiplicities of them.
The prophet Micah is not trying to make it simple. When a Hebrew heard the word justice they understood it to be a transformative word associated with the agenda of God. Deacon Doyal writes to us in this month’s TeDeum about different kinds of justice that are by no means easy. Communicative Justice, which focuses on mutual respect, Distributive Justice, which tries to ensure that both the burden and the reward in society are shared equally. AND it is Micah’s qualification of “loving” MERCY that I think is the most intriguing. It suggests that doing the right thing is a good start, but we must go further and fall in love with doing the right thing--develop affection for it. Does this kind of affection foster humility? I think that must.
This was not a warm and fuzzy axiom that Micah was sharing. The specific audience in Jerusalem, the folks he was addressing, were in many ways not too unlike Emmanuel Episcopal in Shawnee. Their budget was good and pledges were paid in full. Their worship was well executed and beautiful. Their vestments were stunning. But Micah reminds them that the sort of precision that God desires is not opulent and extravagant liturgy, but a love affair with justice, mercy, humility. What we do in here during worship, ought to compel us toward justice, mercy and humility out there in the Parish Hall and in our daily lives. And showing justice, loving mercy and walking humbly in our there in the world is the only thing that legitimizes our worship in here.
We all want to know the bottom line, the minimum required to be considered in good standing with our Creator. But even in those moments when God seems to accommodate us in THIS anxiety, the closer look reveals that there are no easy answers, and that it is only through spending our Spirit that Jesus says we will gain the world.
In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1] It appeared in the essay "The Divine Afflatus," originally published in 1917, and reprinted in 1920 and 1949.
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