Sermon Audio 

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Sermon Text

Holy One, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, amen.

“What does the Lord require for praise and offering?

What sacrifice, desire, or tribute bid you bring?

Do justly; love mercy; walk humbly with your God.”

You may have heard this hymn before; it’s #605 in our hymnal, and we’ll sing it during Communion. The main thing I noticed about it when I first encountered it years ago is that, while the words from Micah 6:8, on which it is based, are familiar, the tune, as you will discover, is not an easy one to navigate. It plays around with unpredictable intervals, and it ends on an unsettling up-note rather than settling down to a nice musical conclusion. It leaves you hanging. 

In other words, it’s perfect. 

It should be unsettling. Because this is a dangerous text.

Perhaps we’ve become so comfortable with it that we’ve forgotten. “Do justice, love kindness/mercy (depending on Bible translation), walk humbly with your God.” Several of us carried the text on signs at the No Kings rally last Fall. It’s on stickers, it’s on memes, it trips lightly off the tongue, and when someone in a group begins to quote, invariably others will immediately nod along or join in, “yes, yes, that’s a good one.” One commenter I read said that his church school teacher called it the “Golden Text of the Old Testament”, which is a fair description.

But how long has it been since we’ve really felt its claim on us? 

Because it’s dangerous. 

“Rulers of earth, give ear! Should you not justice show?

Will God your pleading hear, while crime and cruelty grow?

Do justly; love mercy; walk humbly with your God.”

Micah was an eighth century BC prophet in the southern Kingdom of Judah. His calling, writes commenter Andrew Foster Connors, was to declare “…God’s deep disappointment in the people, who have failed to fashion the kind of just community envisioned by the God who liberates people from political and economic bondage. The people of God have been put on trial…” 

In fact the passage is in the form of a legal complaint by God, witnessed by Creation itself: “Rise, plead your case before the mountains, and let the hills hear your voice.” This is obviously not a trivial matter. It is about the rupture of covenant relationship; about the ways in which greed and self-interest of large landowners, merchants and the legal system had usurped the common good, ignoring the poor and marginalized.

God had created, liberated, and blessed God’s people, and the people had forgotten who and whose they were.

And upon hearing God’s complaint, they completely missed the point. They thought that God simply wanted more and better worship: 

“Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with tens of thousands of rivers of oil?”

And hey! How about if we sacrificed our first-born children? 

Wow.

The hyperbole of this plea, in conversation with God’s immediate response, is what makes this passage so powerful and unnerving. God doesn’t want rivers of oil. God wants more. God wants transformation. 

People tended to become complacent. The people had siloed their lives into “religious” and “secular” activities, thinking that their actions in the Temple were all that was needed to make God happy, to fulfill Covenant. Then they could slack off on their civil and moral obligations, profiting as they liked from greed and injustice. They had forgotten that their obligations in the Temple extended into the neighborhood and community: indeed their obligations within the Temple would mean nothing without action outside of it. This was not God’s suggestion. It was God’s requirement for Covenant.

“Still, down the ages ring the prophet’s stern commands. To merchant, worker, king, he brings God’s high demands. Do justly; love mercy; walk humbly with your God.”

Micah 6:8, this “golden text”, is ancient and foundational. It is Micah’s vision of God’s urgent, insistent, transformative and risky call to God’s people to get it together, repent, and show that we love God by loving our neighbor. These are intertwined–not separate and siloed–vocations. And yet, it seems, we keep forgetting the connection.

To do justice is to defend and liberate the oppressed, or as Cornel West famously said, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” To love mercy is to actively build community through solidarity, even suffering with the marginalized, recognizing them as beloved children of God. To walk humbly is to de-center ourselves long enough to hear God calling us to listen; to companion the powerless in a world that would render them voiceless.

It’s challenging. In these days, it can even be dangerous.

And more and more the Body of Christ is hearing this call. 

Last week around one thousand clergy (the organizers had expected just six hundred) traveled to Minneapolis to train and to peacefully protest in freezing temperatures, witnessing to the violence and cruelty of ICE as well as to the courage of those who confronted ICE officers, videorecorded arrests, and provided food and protection for migrant neighbors who live in fear and don’t dare leave their homes. Clergy in their collars and stoles, standing with resisters were visible evidence that the actions of ICE are not okay with the Church. 

This is risky work. You may have heard that Episcopal Bishop Rob Hirschfeld of New Hampshire has told clergy to get their affairs in order, “…because it may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.”  No, he wasn’t instructing his clergy to seek martyrdom, but he was alerting them to the real dangers of these days; to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.

Do justice; love mercy; walk humbly.

Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe has written to the broader church, not just to clergy, that the Episcopal Church’s identity has become transformed from what it has been historically. Last July he wrote in an op-ed that the Episcopal Church, home to eleven presidents and 34 of 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, has been allied over the past two centuries with national policies that oppressed Black and Indigenous peoples. But now, he writes, “we are known less for the powerful people in our pews than for our resistance to the rising tide of authoritarianism and Christian nationalism emanating from Washington, D.C.”

In other words, the church that has been referred to tongue-in-cheek as “the Republican Party at prayer” has embraced a new identity, of resistance.

Rowe writes again, “We did not seek this predicament, but God calls us to place the most vulnerable and marginalized at the center of our common life, and we must follow that command regardless of the dictates of any political party or earthly power. We are now being faced with a series of choices between the demands of the federal government and the teachings of Jesus, and that is no choice at all.”

Do justice. Love mercy. Walk humbly with God. 

In a meeting of clergy of the Rhode Island State Council of Churches this past Wednesday morning we were told to expect that our little state will not be, indeed has not been, exempt from ICE attention. We are all called to join however we can in actively witnessing to what is happening and to care of our immigrant neighbors. And we must do so while firmly holding to the belief that all are beloved children of God, ICE officers and resisters alike. This is the foundation of nonviolent action; doing justice and loving mercy, by walking humbly.

Dangerous words.

St. Paul called it foolishness; that God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. Jesus blessed those who are reviled and persecuted for the sake of the Gospel. 

Anne Lamott says that courage is fear that has said its prayers. 

So let us pray:

“How shall my soul fulfill God’s law so hard and high? Let Christ endue our will with grace to fortify. Then justly, in mercy, we’ll humbly walk with God.” Amen.