Micah 6:1-8
First Reading for the Fourth Sunday After Epiphany
Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with your God.
The prophet Micah describes what God asks of us in the most straightforward way possible. Three steps with little room for interpretation. Though I imagine as a prophet, Micah had a decent amount of experience with people trying to shoehorn interpretation into any crack of daylight. Yet at the end of the day, it is all very simple: Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with God.
Pastors frequently go to the well of Micah 6:8. I have quoted this verse to my students more times than I can count. Steven Curtis Chapman wrote a song using this verse that I absolutely could sing the chorus to right now despite having not heard it in like two and a half decades (with a Kentucky twang, “You can run with the big dogs…”).. Do justice. Love kindness, Walk humbly with God. What is so hard about that?
Well…apparently everything?
Being simple does not automatically make something easy. Often we make the simplest tasks some of the most difficult to pull off. Ask any kid who has to simply do a one page worksheet to finish their homework. The very fact that Micah had to remind people of these three things or how frequently we have to quote Jesus’ greatest commandment is a good indication of how difficult it is to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.
Micah runs through a list of all sorts of things that people think God requires of them. Burnt offerings? All the burnt offerings? Thousands of rivers of oil? Sacrifice my first born child? We flinch at the extremity of the image, but there are modern versions of these actions. Give all the money, make whatever religious display you can, pouring your life into religious devotion at the expense of children, friend, family, or neighbor. How often have we witnessed someone wound others because they thought that is what their faith demanded?
I wonder if we jump through those hoops because we think that God must want more than simply justice, kindness, and humble following. We’re worried that there is some sort of catch and we want to make sure that we’re covered. And yet I also wonder if we jump through all those hoops because we find it preferable to actually doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God. I think we definitely find those hoops easier.
Doing justice is hard. It requires sacrifice and looking at for more than just those closest to you. Justice is especially difficult if you come from a position of privilege and thus power (this white male sheepishly points at himself). If you want to witness how difficult justice is, watch how some will tie themselves up in knots talking about Tyre Nichols’s tragic death while also trying to fully support the system that led to that death. Justice is complicated, it demands of more of us, and it takes a long, long time.
Loving kindness is hard because it requires you to play the game by rules that you know other people won’t honor. To be kind, to forgive, to be merciful in a world where people are not kind, forgiving, or merciful means that you know that you are going to lose. Or at the very least, you are going to look like a loser to some. We live in a world where kindness is often unfortunately equated with weakness (even though true kindness might be the most punk rock thing out there). We don’t want be seen as weak. We don’t want to lose.
And walking humbly with God? Well, I think that’s the only place from which we can fully do justice and love kindness. We walk humbly with God because we recognize that it is freaking hard to do those things in our own power. Admitting that is difficult in a world where it is tough to confess that we can’t do it on our own. Then if we actually have the humility to say we need help, we then have to make a concentrated day by day effort to walk with God through the stumbles of knowing that justice and kindness are not the easiest disciplines to learn.
All of that sounds like a downer and I don’t mean for it to come off that way. I just don’t want us to toss off Micah 6:8 like it’s an easy thing to do. It’s not. I know from just being a human being that it is really, really difficult. So let us not say, “Oh all you need to do to follow God is to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.” Rather let’s take that seriously and commit our hearts, minds, and spirits to this simple yet profoundly difficult calling.