Sermons

Rewriting Micah

Gracious God may we act with righteousness. May we give everything for mercy. May we travel always along the road with you. Amen.

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When my mom died in 2019, there were two things of hers that I couldn’t find but I desperately wanted. One was a vintage “Votes for Women” pin from the women’s suffrage movement. It eventually turned up in her rather chaotic jewelry box. And the other was her Book of Common Prayer/1982 Hymnal, which I’m holding today. I think because the spine is black, it got lost on the bookshelf.

And I mention it because the front has been custom embroidered by our friend Shannon Conley. And on it is a passage from our Hebrew scripture today, one of the most profound verses in scripture, Micah 6:8. “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

It’s a popular verse so you may have a particular association with it. For me, I remember seeing this scripture on flags downtown during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. And just a few days ago, clergy and faith leaders who were arrested protesting ICE funding in the US Senate held up signs that referenced the verse. Our rector Michele Morgan often wears a stole with this verse on it, so you may think of that. But for me, the first thing I think of will always be this, the embroidery on the cover of my mom’s prayerbook. Of  the roughly 30,000 verses in the Bible, Micah 6:8 is the one she chose to look at every day.

There’s a lot in this one little verse from the prophet Micah. And the more I thought about this passage, the more I fell in love with the words themselves: do, love, walk. Justice, kindness, humility.

And so, in the interest of changing things up homiletically, I wanted to offer a meditation on the six words that anchor this verse. Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly.

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1. DO

Carry out, undertake, bring about. Get out there! Act! Micah tells us that the life of faith isn’t just about passively being acted upon. God calls on us to be the actors. We are to be active participants, to take responsibility for our faith and our lives. Yes, we must faithfully pray and listen, but then we must do. This is the same Hebrew word used in Genesis to describe “all the works that [God] has done” in creation. We are called to be co-creators with God, to take part in God’s good creation.

2. JUSTICE

Righteousness, goodness. We are called to do but don’t do just anything! Do what is good, what is righteous. Do justice. Create fairness, create equity.  To paraphrase Mary, the mother of Jesus, “bring down the powerful from their thrones and lift up the lowly.” Justice is hard because it’s so shaped by our human frame. Criminal justice, social justice, reparative justice, which justice are we talking about? We must discern what is God’s justice. That is what we are called to do. The word here is the same word used in Psalm 37 that says “for the Lord loves justice.” Our own Verna Dozier, theologian from this parish said, “It is not enough to heal the sick. Heal the systems that make them sick. It is not enough to visit the prisoners. Question the structures that imprison people.” Do justice.

3. LOVE

Devote yourself! Become obsessed, enthralled. Give your whole self over to. Love sounds easy. It’s certainly a word we overuse in low-stakes ways. But love is very often about taking actions that are hard. It’s showing up when you don’t want to. It’s pushing yourself to care more than you think you possibly can. It’s allowing yourself to be close enough to be badly hurt. Here love is the same Hebrew word that commands us in Deuteronomy to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, and all our minds, and all our strength.

4. KINDNESS

Here I have to quibble with the translation because there is no good English word for the Hebrew hesed which means “love in action.” Often you’ll hear this word translated as mercy. But even here if we said to love love in action. The love referenced here isn’t cheap. Verna Dozier said that “Love without justice is sentimentality.” The Hebrew word hesed captures the idea that love in action necessarily takes place as a part of justice. We are to devote ourselves to love in action.

5. WALK

To travel, to traverse. Go out, move! From Micah we learn that the way of faith is not a destination but a journey. We are meant to travel, to sojourn, to accompany. And on a journey you are necessarily changed. The landscape, the texture of the road, the seasons, all of these things change us. But also, we must remember that Micah here is not speaking to an individual. We are not meant to travel alone with God. Rather, we are traveling as a community, helping each other along the way. It is more akin to God leading the Hebrews in a pillar of fire after being saved from slavery in Egypt.

Finally, how are we to walk:

6. HUMBLY

Modestly, deferentially, with humility. Do not be overly confident. (As an aside, I feel like I have never walked more humbly than I have in the last week. Even my dog is falling on the ice and he has two more feet than I do.) It is too easy when you believe God is on your side to lose sight of any kind of accountability. Micah adds this modifier to remind us that we must never put ourselves at the center of our lives. Only with God at the center can we trust we are moving in the right direction.

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If this has sounded like a lot, that’s because it is a lot! But we can’t skip the beginning of the verse. “What does the Lord require of you.” This is not an optional path for some of us, the die hard, the most devoted, the clergy, the ones who aren’t too busy. This is the life we are all asked to live.

And so I wonder if you also are a lover of words, and of these words in particular, how you might say this verse in your own words, in a way that is true for you. For me it is this: act in a way that brings about God’s justice. Put God’s love into action. Travel together, following the One. Amen.