Micah 6:1-8
March 28, 2010
Hear what the Lord says:
Rise, plead your case before the mountains,
and let the hills hear your voice.
Hear, you mountains, the controversy of the Lord,
and you enduring foundations of the earth;
for the Lord has a controversy with his people,
and he will contend with Israel.
‘O my people, what have I done to you?
I
n what have I wearied you? Answer me!
For I brought you up from the land of Egypt,
and redeemed you from the house of slavery;
and I sent before you Moses,
Aaron, and Miriam.
O my people, remember now what King Balak of Moab devised,
what Balaam son of Beor answered him,
and what happened from Shittim to Gilgal,
that you may know the saving acts of the Lord.’
‘With what shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt-offerings,
with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with tens of thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?’
He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
Micah is my man. Over the past number of weeks we’ve been focusing on many of the other minor prophets (fyi: minor prophets are called that only because their books tend to be so small—7-14 chapters—as opposed to the major prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah, whose books can go on for 67 chapters). Often they were speaking to people who had been engaging in the worship of Ba’al in order to appease the Assyrians, whose armies were ready to attack if the nations of Israel and Judah didn’t pay tributes to maintain their independence and worship the Assyrian gods. Micah, though, is different from many of those prophets. In many ways he is closer to Isaiah and Jeremiah because he wasn’t just worried about armies poised to attack. He was worried about people who said they were God’s chosen, but were acting like people who had abandoned God.
You know Micah much better than you think because you’ve heard him quoted before. For instance, you recognize this:
“they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
and their spears into pruning-hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.”
Also, Micah is responsible for a prophecy that is traditionally read on Christmas Eve:
“But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah,
who are one of the little clans of Judah,
from you shall come forth for me
one who is to rule in Israel,
whose origin is from of old,
from ancient days.
Therefore he shall give them up until the time
when she who is in labor has brought forth;
then the rest of his kindred shall return
to the people of Israel.
And he shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord,
in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God.
And they shall live secure, for now he shall be great
to the ends of the earth;
and he shall be the one of peace.”
Micah is certainly the most quoted of all the prophets, if you look at the ratio of quotes to a book. At least three chapters of Micah are quoted regularly by Christians and Jews, which isn’t bad considering that there are only seven chapters in his book. So who is this Micah, and why is he so remembered?
We only know a little bit about Micah. We know that he was from the small village of Moresheth, which is several miles from Jerusalem. He lived at about the same time as our prophet from last week, Hosea, meaning that he was a prophet in the last two decades of Israel’s existence. The difference was that Hosea was a prophet in the northern kingdom of Israel, while Micah was primarily in Judah, prophesying in Jerusalem, although he did periodically preach in Israel’s capitol city of Samaria. The southern kingdom of Judah would last another 180 years before the Babylonians destroyed it. Since Micah was not preaching to people about to be attacked by the Assyrians, his message was different. He still preached a message that the Assyrians would be God’s hand if the people didn’t keep their focus on God, but Micah was more concerned with something else. He was concerned with how the people of Judah applied their faith to life.
Micah looked at the nation of Judah, and he saw injustice all around. And there were three primary sources of injustice. First, he saw the wealthy as acting unjustly to the poor. A system had been growing in Judah in which wealthy landowners found ways to unjustly take more of their neighbor’s land illegally, but because of their wealth they could get away with it. They would find ways to obtain small pieces of land, throwing the poor owners off it, and often leaving them in poverty. The poor, having no land to make a living off of, were often reduced to becoming servants or slaves to the rich. Micah made himself very unpopular by speaking out against the rich, saying that they were going against God’s will by oppressing the poor in order to make their wealth.
Micah didn’t just go after the rich, but he went after the courts because they were working in conjunction with the rich. The courts had stopped being fair in their justice by siding with the rich because the rich would give them bribes, especially when it came to land being taken illegally. Also, in something that is reminiscent of our justice system today, the rich were not as accountable to the law as the poor. Today the rich get off because they can afford better attorneys, but back then they got off by offering bribes. Basically, Isaiah said the judges were hating what is good and loving what is evil.
Judges in ancient Israel and Judah were held to a much higher standard. The tradition of judges went back a seven-hundred years, while the tradition of kings only went back three-hundred years. Originally, judges governed the lands of Israel. People learned to naturally get along, and the judges were there to settle disputes. Judges were to be people of impeccable faith and integrity. It was only with the advent of King Saul that people turned to a king and his court to rule them. But judges were still to be people of faith and integrity who settled disputes as God’s hand in the world. The judges of Micah’s day, with some exceptions, had forgotten about God’s will and were focused on their own wallets.
Meanwhile, Micah also had devastating words for his fellow prophets. He complained that too many of them were prophesying for money, prophesying only what the wealthy wanted them to say. They pretended to be God’s prophets, but instead were only prophets for profit. For Micah, the rich were the problem because they were oppressing the poor and leading the people away from God.
This gets right to the heart of what I really love and respect about Micah—he was a prophet who spoke truth despite the political and economical beliefs of his time. What’s fascinating about Micah is that he managed to preach in such a way that he ticked off both the liberals and the conservatives of his day. How? By being irritatingly liberal and conservative both. In other words, his preaching wasn’t confined to a political ideology. It was faithful to God. He was very much like Jesus, who had a similar talent in ticking off liberals and conservatives.
Do you know who the conservatives and the liberals were in Jesus’ time? Take a guess before answering. The conservatives were the Sadducees. They were conservative because they were trying to preserve the old ways. For them, the center of all worship was the Temple in Jerusalem. Also, they were literalists when it came to scripture. They believed that there could be no interpretation of the law, only literal observance. The Pharisees were the liberals. What made them liberal? The fact that they believed in interpreting the law and applying it in new ways to fit life. The center of their worship wasn’t the Temple, but the synagogue. In fact, did you know that the Pharisees were the ancestors of all modern Jewish worship? The Sadducees lost their power and their raison d’etre when the Romans destroyed the Temple around 65 A.D. Since Temple worship and sacrifice was no longer possible, their influence was no longer needed, and they died as a movement. Jewish worship shifted to synagogue worship, which is also the grounding of Christian worship and serves as the template for the Christian worship service. Again, Jesus, during his time, managed to outrage both the Sadducees and the Pharisees so much that they agreed on one thing, which was the Jesus should be killed.
Micah had the same approach. His message was both liberal and conservative. If you listen to his basic message and applied it to today, you would find that he would appeal to both modern liberals and conservatives. Like modern-day evangelicals citing that we are a Christian nation, he had a message that Israel was a Jewish nation first, and that the people needed to be grounded in God. He also supported a message of personal morality and responsibility, much in the way that modern evangelicals do. Yet Micah also sounded very liberal when he preached against the wealthy and for the poor. Like modern-day progressives, he would have supported a very anti-poverty message, including doing anything to relieve the plight of the poor, including land redistribution. Sounds kind of socialist to me. Actually, sounds very much like God to me. Micah wasn’t the only prophet to sound this kind of message. Most of the other prophets spoke like this.
You can see Micah’s emphases in our passage for this morning, for Micah gives a basic message that cuts right to the core. He says,
He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
Micah makes three powerful points that we need to pay attention to. He makes his points by telling the people what God really wants. He tells them that God doesn’t want all the sacrifices of animals and oil that they had been offering for thousands of years as much as God wants a sacrifice of their hearts. He asks, “Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with tens of thousands of rivers of oil?” In other words, do we think that what God wants is for us to keep doing what is wrong and then offer animals and oil to pay for our sins? What God wants is for us to transform our hearts and our actions in three ways.
First, he says that we should do justice. This does not mean merely putting bad people into prison. When Micah speaks of justice, he’s talking about social justice. He’s talking about being a people who do what’s right for the poor. He’s talking about being a people who allow for the creation of wealth, but do so in a way that makes all people equal, giving everyone equal opportunity. He’s not against rich people, per se. He’s against poverty and policies of wealth that depend upon the poor for the rich to become richer. He is telling us today that we have to be about social justice in caring about the poor, the disadvantaged, and doing whatever we can to raise the poor up to the point at which they can live good lives.
He also tells us to love kindness. He’s not just saying that we should be nicey-nice. He’s talking about a fundamental way of living based on love in which we act in love even to our enemies. Jesus is more direct about this when he says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” This is the kind of kindness Micah is talking about. He is saying that we should not just be kind, but love it so much that it becomes foundational. I think that Micah would look at our culture today, at its’ way of discourse in which people who disagree political threaten each other and throw bricks through windows, and say that we have fallen far away from God. He would look at our culture and say, “Why do you call yourselves a Christian nation, and then hate to act like Christians?” Micah is advocating a way of living in which we treat each other with love and respect, no matter what.
Finally, he says that we should walk humbly. He does not mean that we should be weak. He means that we should walk in a way in which we seek God’s way and God’s will above all else. Humble people are strong people because they do what God wants regardless of the pressure they feel from others. They resist ideologies, and instead follow God’s will. Humble people have one goal in mind: to do and speak what God wants. Micah is telling us today that we have to get off our own beliefs so that we can follow God’s beliefs. That we need to get off of our own will to do what God’s will.
Micah was a powerful prophet in his time, but I also think that he is a powerful prophet in our time. The question is whether we are still listening.
Amen.
