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Sunday January 30, 2005 - Epiphany 4, Year A, 2005

There are some things
that stick in your mind
from childhood.
Things that open a window onto who you were
and how you came to grow up to be who you are now.
You look at an old class picture,
and suddenly you're filled with the emotions of your teenage years — the People you liked, the ones you wanted to impress,
the ones you hated or were scared of.
Go back to your childhood home
and somehow you expect
to see your parents, just as they always were,
and wonder where the kid next door finally ended up.
Look through a notebook your mother saved
and remember what you imagined you would be
when you grew up.
And the reality is
that who you are now
is related to all of that. The things that were important then
so often make us who we are now.
Whether its relatively trivial stuff — I still find myself drawn to dinosaur bones in museums, a relic of the period when I wanted to be a paleontologist,
and I still find refuge when I'm sick or overtired
in the world of story books.

And it's just as true with our faith. Experiences of church as children
or the things we heard adults around us saying
didn't just make us believe things then;
they shaped how we think about God
and where faith fits in our lives
even now.
Many of our memories are good,
the wonder of candle light at Christmas Eve,
the knowledge that we were precious and loved by our Sunday School teachers,
the bible verses that pop up in our minds
at crucial points in our lives.
Some of them
are not so good — images of a vengeful God
or a church that told us that we were
at the bottom of our souls
bad.
But good or bad,
they shape the faith we have today, and the reality is
most of us still
pretty much believe what we believed when we were kids.

The things about church that are most clearly imprinted in my mind
are the songs I learned. When I was 4, it was "Jesus bids us shine with a pure clear light, like a little candle burning in the night," and in fourth grade , "When the road is rough and steep, fix your eyes upon Jesus." But the strongest one, the one that comes into my mind unexpectedly
and that pulls me up short with a call to renew my faith
is the anthem I learned in choir as a teenager.
It came straight from the book of Micah:
"He has told you, O mortal, what is good"
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice
and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly
with your God?"

Our reading from Micah today
is set in an imaginary courtroom.
The way Micah describes it, it's kind of like a divorce hearing.
The question is,
who is at fault for the breakdown in a relationship,
a relationship that is not marriage, but something kind of similar,
the relationship between God
and the people of Israel, the chosen people
of God.
Time after time in the Old Testament, God meets with a representative of the people — Abraham and Moses and David — and makes a vow, that he will be their God and they will be his people. And as the people of God, God will bless them. Their side of the deal
is to worship God alone, and to pattern their lives in his image.
But now that relationship has broken down, and the question is
whose fault is it? And is there any way it can be fixed?

And so God begins to speak. "What have I done to you," he asks his people. Have I failed to keep my side of the bargain?
Have I broken
my promises?
I rescued you
from Egypt, I brought you out of slavery.
I sent you leaders — Moses, Aaron, Miriam — I saved you in battle after battle. Have you forgotten what I have done for you?"

All this
is God's side of it. Then comes the people's side. They rush to try to make things better. And while they don't say it outright, it seems like they agree with God: it's not God's fault. They are the ones
who have messed up
their side of the relationship.

"What can we do to make things better?" they say. Should we bow in front of God? Should we bring offerings, sacrifices, not just one but thousands? Sheep, oil, or oil, or even our oldest sons? Will that make God happy again? Will that make up for our sin?"

They had learned very well about religion, they had learned about it
from the people who surrounded them. It was traditional in much of the Middle East
to worship gods, symbolized by statues of clay or stone. Those gods demanded sacrifice, at the very least sheep and cattle and oil, but as the anger got greater, so did the sacrifice. Human sacrifice
was the only way
to truly
appease the gods.
And so the people of God, the people of Israel, thought that maybe their God
was just the same. Maybe,
maybe,
if they offered him enough
he would go away
and take his anger with them,
and they would be safe.

But that wasn't
what God required.
What God required
was summed up
in those three simple phrases:
To do justice. To love mercy.
To walk humbly
with God.
Because what God wanted
was not a whole lot of sacrifices, a bloody recompense
for the mistakes they'd made.
What God wanted
was people
who would take their side of the relationship
seriously.
Who would want to live
in the presence of God, who would want to live
in a way that pleased God,
who would want to live
lives that pointed other people to God.
Justice. Faithfulness. Humility.

And it's no different today.
If you're anything like me, you grew up thinking
that to keep God happy
there's a whole list of things you have to do.
Show up at church. Say your prayers. Don't lie. Don't be greedy. Be nice. Anything
to keep God happy.
But you know, from God's perspective
that's missing the point. From God's perspective, that's all about externals, all about appearances, all about trying to keep God happy.
What God wants
is people
who care about God on the inside. People who can't help but be like God,
because the things that matter to God
matter to them.
Justice. Faithfulness. Humility.

To do justice.
Justice
is most often used in our world
as a shorthand way of talking about people getting what they deserve.
And by that we mean, if they've done something wrong, getting punished; of they've done something right, getting rewarded.
And God's passion for justice, while it is about people getting what they deserve,
is about treating people as fully human. Recognizing
that each of us, all of us, are made in the image of God
and as bearers of the image of God
we deserve to be loved,
to be able to live
freely, and safely,
to have food and shelter, and all the things we need
to live as human beings.

From God's perspective, to do justice
is to care for those
who are least able
to care for themselves.
It's to privilege those
who are least privileged.
It's to look outside ourselves
to the people who are always outsiders,
and to care for them
as if they were our own families.
In biblical terms, it's to care for widows
and orphans, and people who have been cast out of society,
the people
no one
wants
to know.
At its heart, to do justice
is to love one another, even those who we find it difficult to love
because they are far away
or different from us
or are simply
difficult to love.
To love them, and provide for them not because of what we get back in return — the tax breaks, the respect — but because of who God is and who we are called to be.

To love kindness.
The word we read as kindness, written in Hebrew, isn't just about being nice. It's the word that's used to describe God's love for us. A passionate, powerful love, a love that is faithful even when we're not, which refuses to give up on us, the the love of God
that keeps loving us
when we wander off on our own ways,
when we mess things up,
even when we turn our backs
on God.
Probably the closes word we have for it in English
is faithfulness.
To be faithful. To stick with God
through thick and thin. And to stick with one another
even when times are tough, even when it hurts, even when it's costly.
Being willing to forgive, being willing to risk starting again, being willing to love.
Loving
like God
loves us.

And to walk humbly
with our God.
Humility. It's not something
that's particularly valued in our culture.
Being constantly aware
of who we truly are,
with all our faults and weaknesses.
Human, fallible, prone to act as if we control the world,
though if we're honest, we don't even control
our own thoughts.
And yet daring to journey
beside God.
Looking for God's guidance
in all we do and say.
Being our honest selves
with our God, no pretense, no fear.

Justice. Faithfulness. Humility.
That's what God wants of us,. That's what God
invites us to do
with God.
And in return, God promises yet again
to be with us. To be our God.

 

Sermon ©Raewynne J. Whiteley 2005