Tick, Tick, Done!

One of the congregations that I served we had a family that came to our church not because they were Christian, but because they wanted to have their child learn the morality of Christianity. I was really torn when I learned about this because on the one hand I thought it was great that they wanted to have their child be a morally upright person and felt that Christianity could offer that to them. On the other hand I was upset because what I also heard them say was that they didn’t really believe in God or Jesus, faith etc, and that Christianity was just a place where people learned how to be morally right people.

They wanted to boil Christianity to a set of rules or guidelines that could inform their child about right and wrong, good and evil. They could learn a set of rules to live by and the ones on the good column would be generally acceptable and helpful for society and the other side would be bad and generally disapproved of by society. Unfortunately that family is not the only family like that and there are people within Christianity that believe in a similar way as well. They feel that Christianity can be boiled down to a set of rules to follow that will tell them what they can and cannot do and as long as they stick to the can side and avoid the cannot side as much as possible then they will have been good enough to go to heaven. Or they have done enough of the ‘right’ things to go to heaven. It is as if Christianity has become for them a checklist of things to do in order to say that they are doing all the things that God has asked them to do. Again, if they have then they can feel good or confident that they are going to heaven, and if they haven’t then they have more work to do in order to get to that point.

This is the same kind of issue that Micah was noticing from his small village outside of Jerusalem. He looked at the capital of Judah and saw how people were focusing on the to-do’s of their faith and not much more. Obviously not everyone was that way but it had become a norm. What had also become an issue in Israelite society, faith and even among the kings and elites was worship of other gods. So for some people the checklists and to-do lists weren’t even for Yahweh, they were for some foreign god or gods. Oftentimes those checklists consisted of offering sacrifices to their gods or to God. In many other faiths it was believed that if you made an offering or sacrifice to a god that it would make that god happy and they would either grant you what you needed: rain, good harvest, plentiful flock, etc; or it would simply keep the god from being fickle with you in particular because that is how gods were.

This is the exact rhetorical question that Micah asks his listeners: Should I come with burned offerings? Should I come with tasty calves? Does the LORD want an outrageous offering of a thousand rams? Does God want a river of oil flowing into the sanctuary of the temple? Should I offer child sacrifice to please you? Child sacrifice was forbidden in Israel but not in other faiths back then, so it was both a outrageous gesture by Micah but also a condemnation of all the people who had faith in other gods, whether or not they did these kinds of sacrifices.

Here’s the tricky part. Micah isn’t outright forbidding or condemning these things, he is trying to give people a greater perspective on it. Faith in God, living in covenantal relationship (which we have talked a lot about these last two months) is more than going through the motions of what God has asked, what the law has stated. If you were here for the week we talked about Joshua and his famous line about how he and his house will follow the LORD, you might recall he also said that if the people wanted to commit themselves to living in covenantal relationship with God it would require their whole being. Simply going through the motions of a sin offering and seeking forgiveness, coming to worship and bringing in your tithe to the temple and then going home and doing life as usual was and is not covenantal relationship. God desires both offerings to God and living into that relationship with God and one another.

So what is that more than just the checklists God is looking for? God is looking for people who do justice. Justice for God typically comes in the form of caring for the least of these in the world. God is constantly protecting the poor, the widow, and the outcast and inviting us to do the same. Then we are called to embrace faithful love. Which has also been translated as mercy or lovingkindness. The Hebrew word for this has no real English translation and it is quite literally a sacrificial love in which we are invited to go above and beyond to care for and love one another. It can also mean living into the covenant with God and one another, like the 10 commandments which we talked about a few weeks ago. Finally we are invited to walk humbly with God. What is so difficult about this is that the Hebrew word here only occurs in this one instance, so we have no way to compare it to other uses of the word to give it a better context. That being said, it might be best understood as walking with intentionality and thoughtfulness with God. We hear of instances of walking with God without the humbly part and those people who walked with God are Noah and Abraham. This walking with God is a way of telling us that these figures of faith had a close and connected relationship with God. Where they went, what they did was always connected to their faith and relationship with their creator God.

And now I know that I am working backwards in our text, but to show even more so that it is not about checklists, we see that God has already promised the people a ruler that will come from Bethlehem and that his origin is from the ancient of days. He will stand as a shepherd and he will provide safety, security, and peace throughout the earth. God is already looking at the people and seeing their lack of faith, the ways that they are going through the motions and not living into the covenantal relationship, and even before God tells them what is most important God says that God has already planned to send a ruler to come and care for this royal priesthood of believers.

We typically hear this passage during Advent because that promised ruler, that shepherd of the flock is the one we call Christ Jesus our Lord. Jesus is the one who came to rescue us from the very things that we could not do ourselves. It is because we cannot do it ourselves, it is also because God doesn’t want checklists ticked, that God sent Jesus so that we are made righteous, not by our own doing, but by the very love of God. Does God want offerings, and good works? Absolutely, but more than that God wants us to live into a loving relationship with God and with one another. For our God who loves, who saves, and does more than we could ever give back we live lives of thanks and praise. Amen.

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