Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
February 3, 2002
Micah 6:1-8
It’s an old story. A man was on his deathbed. He had lived a happy, if at times morally ambiguous life and he knew the end was near. As he lay there, his minister came and sat next to him. “Well, Mike, are you now ready to denounce the devil and all his evil works? You don’t have much time you know.” Mike, who had not exactly been a faithful church-attendee during his life, thought about the question for a few moments, then replied, “If it’s all the same to you, Reverend, in my condition I don’t think I should antagonize anybody.”
That’s one approach to faith. Here is another – a true story told by Harry Chase, a Presbyterian minister in New Jersey. “I will always remember a couple in our church who said to me, ‘Harry, early in our marriage we said we will never spend more for recreation than we will give to the church.’ For a long time they followed that guideline with no trouble. For a long time they could only afford to go to a movie once a month. That was about the extent of their personal recreation and they could afford to give that much to the church.
“But then the husband made it big. They talked with me about it. By then, they were attending New York plays once a month, usually with dinner beforehand. Twice a year they went on vacation. They went to the Pocono’s in the summer and the Caribbean in the winter. They had joined the local country club and played golf at least once a week. They said to me, ‘You know, Harry, that all mounts up to a lot of money in the course of a year. We were talking about it and together wondered if we can really afford to give that much to the church. But then we said to each other, ‘We are not going to give any less. This has always been our commitment. We will not give less to the church than we spend on personal recreation.’ And they didn’t. They really didn’t.”
“God 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?” Well, you might ask, what do these two stories possibly have to do with this text from the prophet, Micah. Let’s take a closer look at it. As I said, it is a courtroom setting. And it would seem that God is the plaintiff and Israel the defendant. There is a difference of opinion between the two, a serious difference of opinion. So serious, in fact, that God has called in no less than the mountains and the hills to help settle the case. They have been around since the beginning of creation and have witnessed all that has transpired between God and the people. What exactly is the problem? What has brought the two parties to court?
Basically, as God sees it, the people have been unfaithful. They have broken their covenant with God. In chapter three of the Book of Micah, we read that the rulers do not know justice, but rather, hate the good and love the evil. We read that the religious leaders are corrupt, pandering to the rich but ignoring the poor – “You declare war against those who put nothing into your mouth.” If they cannot help you financially, if they cannot help put bread on your table, you ignore them. Guess Washington is not the only place that has been true over the years. Influence could even be bought in the Temple in Jerusalem. And God can’t seem to understand how this has happened. If anything, God seem thoroughly perplexed. God asks, “What have I done to you? In what have I wearied you?” Then God makes a case - reminds the people of their own history and of all the many ways God has blessed them and intervened in their lives over the years.
The court is then silent. It is the people’s turn to speak. God waits. The mountains and the hills wait. Finally, the people respond. And what do they say? They want to know what they can do to make things right with God. What sacrifices can we make? What offerings can we give? Provide us with a list of things to do and we will see that they done. They want to cut right to the bottom line here. Tell us exactly what you need from us – exactly where we stand. Again, what do we have to do?
Bottom line religion. It’s the religion of Mike in his final hours. He has the sense that there are some religious requirements he has not fulfilled, some “do’s” he has not done and plenty of “don’ts” that he probably has. He is feeling in a precarious position, in the words of that great theologian, Kris Kristoferson, “Hoping for Heaven, heading for Hell.” So he decides it is best not to antagonize anybody, maybe he’s earned just enough points to sneak into heaven.
Bottom line religion. Doing what needs to be done. That way we can feel good without necessarily having to be good. The bottom line. That is where the answer is to be found, where we will get the information we need to take the next step, make the proper response. Trouble is, it doesn’t always work that way. “C’mon honey, don’t slam the door. I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t have said it, but c’mon, let’s still go out…we’ll have a good time. Tell me what I can do to make things right, to make you feel better. I’ll do anything!” But, in that moment, the door doesn’t open. And in that moment, there is nothing we can do. A loving relationship involves so much more than simply finding the bottom line: doing what needs to be done. That’s fine for business, but it doesn’t always work so well in a relationship.
And the people discover, maybe it doesn’t work so well in the life of faith either, in their relationship with God. For there is no bottom line, no magic set of beliefs, no magic set of things to do – complete eight out of ten and everything will be fine! They discover that God isn’t interested in their rituals, their sacrifices, God isn’t even interested their offerings. I hate to say that, but it’s true! God is interested in community. God is interested in relationship. God is interested in people who are willing to allow God to shape who they are and who they are becoming.
As C. S. Lewis said, “We might think that God simply wants obedience to a set of rules, where as God really wants people of a particular sort.” I think that couple we met in the beginning understood this. Finally, it was not all that difficult for them to give to the church the same amount they spent on recreation, even when that became quite a tidy sum. Because their life of faith, their life with God was not based on a set of do’s and don’ts – give this much or else. It was based on a relationship, on trust, on the desire to make a response to God’s great love, to allow God more deeply into their lives.
A story is told about the great violinist Fritz Krisler. After one of his moving performances a woman came back stage, just gushing over with enthusiasm, “Oh, Maestro”, she said, “I would give my life to play as you do!” To which he simply responded, “Madam, I did.”
I think that is precisely the point of the prophet. God isn’t interested in what rules we are following, what rituals we are observing. What God wants to know is, to whom or what have we given our lives? And how does that commitment shape our lives, our priorities, the way we treat one another each and every day - even the homeless drunk with no socks.
The theologian, James Whitehead, got close to the heart of this text when he wrote that faith is the enduring ability to imagine life in a certain way, indeed to participate in God’s own imagination – to see ourselves, our neighbors, our church, our world though God’s eyes, full of possibility, full of promise, full of life and hope, ready to be transformed at any moment. Relationship, trust, not dos and don’ts; a relationship which inevitably will lead us to new patterns of social relations; relations in which privilege will have to attend to poverty, in which power will have to submit to pain, in which advantage will have to be recruited for compassion, in which old priorities will have to be repositioned in order to let in people who have so long been kept out. In other words, justice, kindness, and faith.
One of my mentors in ministry, Dr. Culver Nelson (no relation), once said, “I find life a mystery. I see pain I cannot explain. I am angered by things that happen. But, for all my angers and fears and follies, I believe that in the end, there will be God. And I believe God is like what I have seen in Jesus. These are beliefs. They become faith when I live my life every day trusting in the God whom those beliefs dimly describe. They become faith when I open myself to a relationship with God. They become faith when they are the breath and blood and marrow of my very being. In the deepest sense, then, faith is trust and faith is life.” To which the prophet would say, “AMEN!”
Return to Sermon Table of Contents