This week a ninety year old Swiss man who lived in France passed away. He was known to people around the world as Brother Roger. In 1940 Brother Roger started a community in the town of Taizé, France where Christians could gather for prayer and worship, where Christians could flee the destruction of the war. Brother Roger founded this community as an Ecumenical prayer community and since it was founded people from around the world have flocked to it to experience a special time of peace and worship. Today there are about a hundred brothers who live in this community, but the Taizé community is much larger than these hundred brothers. Their worship gathers people from around the world together in peace and love and helps them to enter into God’s presence. Their worship style is unique. In our hymnal there are 10 Taizé songs. They are all short and repetitive, so that you can sing them over and over and enter into a place of prayer where you can commune with your God. Taizé is a place whose founder has passed into eternity, but his mission and ministry will live on. It is a place that Micah would like, for it understands very clearly the fact that our worship must be tied to our actions and our praise must be congruent with our lives.
I. Foundations
Over the last few weeks we have been looking at a couple of the minor prophets found at the end of the Old Testament. In them we see men of God who speak the word of God for the people of God. We also see that often the people of God don’t listen to them. We specifically looked at two particular messages that seem to crop up in all these prophetic writings. First there is the message that God desires justice. God wants his people to be faithful to him. He wants his people to care for those around them. He wants his people to live just and righteous lives. Many of the prophets predict doom for God’s people because they aren’t living just lives. These prophets speak out that there are consequences to your actions and if you don’t stay true, you will suffer. Today, as we look at Micah, we will again see this call for justice in our lives.
But there is another theme that runs through these minor prophets that is just as important. This second theme is the theme of God’s mercy and love. When we look at Hosea’s message in particular, we see a God whose love is so great that he will reach out again and again to a people who have not remained faithful to him and he will help them out. Again, in Micah we will see hints of promises of God’s mercy. Pain and suffering will come to the people of Judah, but it will be followed by blessing.
And so, in these prophets we see a call for justice and at the same time we see a promise of mercy. And when we look at these prophets we realize that you must have both of these for our faith, for our God to make sense.
I think there is something else that we need to look at to help us wrap our heads and our hearts around the message that Micah has for us today. And that is the definition of a prophet. Now normally when you think of a prophet you think of someone who predicts the future. I normally think of someone in robes with a long white beard who warns of coming disaster.
Now predicting the future is something that a prophet does, but that is not the key to being a prophet. Really, being a prophet is about speaking the word of God. In ancient Israel there was a dichotomy between prophets and priests. This is a separation that we don’t have as much today as our pastors take both roles to a certain degree. Both prophet and priest served God in certain ways. Both were trained in their arts at schools and seminaries. But they each filled different purposes in their ministries. Priests were about serving God in the temple. They were all about coming between God and his people and speaking to God on his people’s behalf. They were the ones that offered sacrifices. They were the ones who came before God in the holy of holies and lifted the people’s prayers before him. Priests entered God’s presence and spoke to God on behalf of his people. But prophets, they weren’t about speaking to God for his people, instead they were about speaking to God’s people for God. It was the prophets that brought the word. It was the prophets who spoke the truth that the people didn’t always want to hear. It was the prophets who were focused on making sure God’s people stayed true to God.
II. Micah
Micah, Like Amos, was not a professional prophet. He was called by God with a message and he shared this message with all those around him. He lived at the same time as Isaiah and his message was quite similar to that of Isaiah. But where Isaiah spoke with education and had the ear of the leadership of Judah, Micah came from a lower class and Micah spoke to the people.
Now, Micah had harsh words to share with the people of Judah. He talked about coming disaster and described weeping and mourning that will come to the people because of their decisions. Now when God accuses his people of turning from him he talks of it in one of two ways. Interestingly enough, these two ways both have to do with the great commandment. Either he accuses them of not loving God with their whole heart, mind, soul and spirit or he accuses them of not loving their neighbor as themselves. The first of these accusations is the accusation of idolatry. If you remember two weeks ago, that is what Hosea was accusing God’s people of. They were going off and worshipping other gods. They had idols in their households. They were not remaining faithful. Sometimes we as God’s people do not put God first, but let the things around us engulf us and take leadership in our lives. When this happens we are as guilty of idolatry as if we had a golden idol sitting in a place of honor in our living room. But Micah doesn’t really spend much time talking about idolatry. Oh, it is implied, but it is not the focus of his message. Instead he focuses on the second one. For God accuses his people of not loving their neighbors as themselves also, and this is Micah’s complaint. You have not cared for the poor. You have not fed the hungry. You have not visited the prisoner. You have lived lives focused on yourselves and your own desires and wants, and there are consequences to this. For Micah, our relationship with God is affected by our relationship with those around us. For Micah, worship is worthless without caring for those who need us. For Micah, praises are meaningless without justice.
III. Seek Justice
Micah 6:6-8 has become quite famous in its message, and for good reason. We really should hear these verses every time we gather as God’s people to worship God for they are all about worshipping God. And hopefully, they help us to have our minds in the right place when we come together to worship him. They begin with a question, one in the first person, one which we each should ask: “With what shall I come before the Lord and bow down before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” These questions ask two things: how do we worship and how do we make things right with God for our sins? Now we have answers to these questions. Not necessarily answers that we have verbalized, but answers nonetheless. First, we worship God by singing songs to him. We worship God by taking an hour a week (when we can) to come to church and sing and praise and hear pastor preach. Maybe if we really want to show God that we’re worshipping him we’ll come to Bible Study as well or maybe we’ll volunteer to help out at church in some way. But, no matter what we do, when we talk about worship we invariably are talking about what happens when we come together on Sunday morning. But Micah will show us that worship is more than a Sunday morning event.
The second question is even easier for us to answer. How do we make things right with God for our sins? The truth is that we can’t. That’s why God sent Jesus, and though God doesn’t ask for our firstborns to save us from our sins, God sent his firstborn to pay for each of us. And since we’ve accepted God’s Son as our savior we’re mostly off the hook, right? Well, not exactly. Lets look at Micah’s answer to these questions.
“He has shown all you people what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”
Yes, Jesus died for our sins. Yes, that is what brings salvation to us. But God still requires something from us. God requires for us to act with justice. God requires for us to live lives that are filled with a love for mercy. And God requires for us to walk humbly with him.
Justice is about being fair and impartial in our dealings with others. Justice is about not cheating on your taxes. Justice is about treating a stranger with the same care and love that you would treat a family member. Do we live lives of justice? Is justice a central factor in our decision making? I remember that it was high school where I first became aware of the concept of justice. My awareness of justice took center stage when I discovered that I wasn’t always being treated justly. I wasn’t treated as well by my friends because I was much more interested in reading and studying than sports. My sister who was two years younger than me got to do things two years earlier than I did. My friends had cooler cars and could stay out later than me. Life was unjust, especially for me. Now I was keenly aware of justice and I realized that I was on the losing end of justice issues again and again. Life just wasn’t fair. Unfortunately, this is not at all what Micah was talking about. You see, my sense of justice needed to grow outside myself. And this didn’t really happen for me until I made it to college, until I realized how well I had it, until I discovered that a true sense of justice doesn’t focus on what you are lacking, but rather focuses on what those around you are lacking. Justice is about sacrificing for those around you. It is about not worrying primarily about yourself and instead worrying about your neighbor. It is about loving your neighbor as yourself. All of a sudden my justice complaints were turned on their head. I was treated better by the teachers at school than students who were known as problems. I could do the same amount of work on a paper and just because I had done it, I would get a better grade. I got to try things out on my own growing up, but my sister had to do all this stuff with her bigger brother tagging along. And though I had friends with cooler cars, I also had friends who didn’t have the resources to have a car at all. And there were much more serious things to worry about than how life was being unfair to me.
Loving mercy can also be very difficult. Again, it is much easier when it is directed at you. It is much easier to be into mercy when you’ve just been pulled over for speeding. All of a sudden, mercy becomes a very good idea. But I’ve been on the road and watched cars swerve around other cars in such a crazy and dangerous way… then I’ve felt vindicated when ten minutes later I pass that car sitting on the side of the road having just been pulled over. In my head I know they deserve what they’ve received and the last thing I want is for them to receive mercy. Mercy is about getting something you don’t deserve, or even more, not getting something you do deserve. Traffic tickets are just one example. And mercy goes against a lot in our human nature. It fights against our human understanding of justice. And the question arises, do we really love mercy? Are we ready to forgive those around us for what they’ve done to us? Are we prepared to turn the other cheek? And we wonder how far mercy can really go. A love for mercy is not always something that you can act upon. But it does call for you to give up thoughts of revenge and anger. It does call for you to learn to forgive. And mercy brings you to a place of peace in your heart.
And then there is the humble journey that we are called to take with our Lord. Now we aren’t talking about our relationships with each other, instead we are talking about our relationship with God. And that relationship isn’t one where we know it all, it isn’t one where we have the upper hand. We aren’t traveling down the road with Jesus as our co-pilot. No, our journey with God must be a journey of humility. This isn’t only humility in relationship to God, this is humility in our relationship with others.
I think the arrogance of Christians is one of the biggest turn-offs to non-Christians. I’ve heard more people actually say, “If that’s what it means to be a Christian, I don’t want any part of that.” They see Christians as haughty and holier than thou. They see Christians as looking down on everybody around them as inferior. But that is not what our faith is called to be.
Being humble in our faith is about acknowledging that we don’t have all the answers. Being humble in our faith is reading the Bible looking for God to teach us instead of trying to prove our points. Being humble in our faith is listening to those around us and hearing correction when it is needed.
Micah’s greatest message for God’s people, for us, has nothing to do with predicting the future. At first, it doesn’t really even have much to do with our relationship with God. But it is an important message for us nonetheless. We are to act justly, we are to love mercy and we are to walk humbly with our God. This is what the Lord requires. This is the worship that God wants. We can sit and sing songs until we’re hoarse, if we aren’t living justly, loving mercy and walking humbly with God, it means nothing.
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