Readings: Psalm 15,
Micah
6: 1-8, Matthew 5:1-12
Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and
the understandings of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our rock
and our sustainer. Amen.
‘What is it that God requires of us?’ is a
question for all time. 2800 years ago
the prophet Micah asked just that and we today struggle with exactly the same
issue. This reading from the 8th
century BCE strikes at the very heart of how we live in right relationship with
God, with each other and with all other communities of life on the planet.
For all was not well, is not well. The wording of the Prophet as he seeks to
convince the people of God’s frustration with them is just enthralling ‘For the
Lord has a controversy with his people and he will contend with Israel’. This is a classic piece of writing that draws
out not just God’s dissatisfaction with the way the people of God are living
but uses rather effective if gentle sarcasm to make the point. We begin with
the fact that the Lord has a controversy with his people and is going to take
them up on it, then there is an almost bewilderment that it should be so ‘What
have I done to you that has caused you to treat me this way?’ It’s one of those questions we can hear
ourselves asking when life is chucking a bunch of rubbish our way. And then the tone gets a bit sterner –
remember what I have done for you, how can you do this in light of these
memories And no - I don’t want you to deposit burnt offerings,
gift rivers of oil, give your most precious possessions as a transaction for
your salvation. It is simple what you
have to do, laid out plain and clear, says Micah – do justice, love kindness
and walk humbly with your God.
The people have forgotten – forgotten God
and forgotten the memories of God’s grace – and so they are bumbling around
somewhere in a dark place, doing things that they think are reverential but are
nothing near where God wants them to be.
You might say they are talking the talk but not walking the walk. Their gifts are worthless, empty of meaning
without an adjoining obedience to walk in God’s way. One commentator used the example of the
funeral in church of a Senator in the States who, while he was alive, was known
to run racially charged campaigns, voted against civil rights and did not see
poverty as a genuine political concern.
In the homily he was applauded as someone who stood up for what he
believed in even when unpopular, as if being faithful to his erroneous hurtful
beliefs was more important than ethical living.
God doesn’t ask for blind obedience, as if it is a virtue in itself, but
rather cares enormously what that obedience looks like. And it is to look like
this: do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with your God.
I talked last week about needing to have a
knowledge of God to know when you were walking in God’s way and when you might
be being led astray. Today that same
knowledge is needed to remind ourselves what is God’s way as opposed to
what we might like to think it is.
Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount was all about
God’s way of living. The Beatitudes
clearly are a blueprint for living in right relationship with God. Just as simplicity and compassion and caring
for others is set against great gifts of wealth and possessions in the Hebrew
Scriptures, so it is that Jesus teaches the same unlooked for values and way of
living against the culture of violence and power and injustice in his
world.
The Beatitudes are interesting (as those of
you would have realised in our recent study series on them): some say that when
they read them they hear them as somewhat fantastical, meant only for the
occasional saints of the world such as Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King to
get near. Too hard, too countercultural,
too impractical! And sometimes we try to
over analyse them, try to figure out just what the minute detail of the
blueprint is so we can get it right. But
the reality is that they are very practical and they are meant for each one of
us to live to. And in some way looking
at them and their relationship to the concluding words of Micah in today’s
reading might just be helpful.
So how do they speak to us today, these
words that form our memory, our understanding of what it is to walk in right
relationship with God and therefore with each other.
Charles Cook[1]
suggests that we make a mistake when we try to read the Beatitudes as
individual instructions – rather, he says, look at the collection as a whole;
as threads woven together into a fabric that is a way of being in Christ. He suggests that each aspect is interwoven
and builds on each other to produce a living and open knowledge of the way of
God. Further we can see that there are
three main shades in the piece: those of simplicity, hopefulness and
compassion, not dissimilar to the humility, justice and kindness that Micah
speaks of.
Simplicity, says Cook, has little to do
with lack of sophistication. Rather it’s
about hearing the words of Jesus for what they are, not what we would prefer
them to be. Whenever we layer over such
teachings such as mercy and justice with our own prejudices and subjectivity,
including thinking that the task at hand is too difficult or that some are more
deserving of our gifts than others, we are avoiding words that are spoken
directly to us and opening ourselves to a wee bit of controversy from our God.
Hopefulness, like simplicity, is seen by
the world as a trifle unsophisticated, setting yourself up for a fall. We tend to the cynical and the unchanging
nature of the world when we allow hopelessness to rule – for we are basically
saying that we, the world, is never going to change and we just need to put up
with it as it is. But Christ comes to
offers hope to the hopeless, a hope that expects, anticipates that things can
be better, people can treat each other with mercy, love and peace. And that makes us stand tall for justice and
equality, knowing that there is a different, a better way for all.
And compassion: the third aspect of
Beatitude living. Not pity, not sympathy
but simply belonging as family with and to each other. Henri Nouwen has a brilliant definition of
Christian compassion – “[compassion] grows with the inner recognition that your
neighbour shares your humanity with you.
This partnership cuts through all walls which might have kept you
separate. Across all barriers of land
and language, wealth and poverty, knowledge and ignorance, we are one, created
from the same dust, subject to the same laws, destined for the same end.”[2] Walking in each other’s shoes, in other words.
And so Micah’s words that we are to do
justice, love kindness and walk humbly with our God are meant to guide and
shape us on the path. The Beatitudes are
written for you and me, telling us how to live in God’s way. We invite controversy with God when we lose
our memory of the deep love that is Christ Jesus’ for us and the love that is
our promise to the world through Christ.
I want to finish with us hearing Jesus
words simply spoken “You are blessed in this life whenever you demonstrate
humility, bring a peaceful presence, open your heart to others, and show mercy
on those who cry for it.” For that is
how we live in the way of Christ Jesus.
Thanks be to God.
Margaret Garland
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