Do, Love, Walk

Micah 6:1-8
4th Sunday in Ordinary Time

The other day, one of my kids asked me what “karma” was.  It kind-of caught me off guard; not really a concept we talk much about at my house.  But I want to encourage their curiosity – I enjoy that they’re always learning about new things – so I wanted to give some sort of answer; but, because I’m me, I also wanted to mention that I also don’t really believe in it.  

I explained that it’s an idea found in Eastern religions that says everything balances out; that if you do bad things, bad things will happen to you; and if you do good things, good things will happen to you.  But then I added that things don’t seem to work out that way in the real world; I don’t want to discount someone’s faith just because I don’t understand it, but that’s not how I see the world working and it’s not what I believe about God.  I see really bad people doing bad things all the time getting away with it; and profiting from their bad deeds too.  I see really good people, who do good for others, suffering every day by no fault of their own.  So from my perspective, karma just doesn’t seem to be a reasonable way to explain the way the world works.  

And then he said, “Okay, so karma isn’t why the Broncos aren’t playing today?” 

From our perspective, we want there to be a connection between the good things we do – the faithfulness that we show to God – and the good things God brings us.  But in this life anyway, that connection doesn’t usually exist; which makes God a bit hard to gauge, right?  If the things that happen to you aren’t about how God feels about you, how do you know that you’re doing things that make God happy?  How do you know that the things you are doing aren’t making God mad?  

Well, as our Scripture lesson this morning reminds us, you already know those answers.  And as this Table reminds us, God hasn’t just told you what is expected of you; God has shown you.  God has shown us, over and over again – and especially through the gift of our Savior – that what is expected of us is to show the same love to others that we have received.  

The book of Micah may not be the most well-worn books of the Bible; you may have heard this passage before, but I doubt everyone here has read through the book cover-to-cover.  If you do decide to read through the book, it’s not a tough read; it’s only seven chapters long.  Micah is one of the twelve “Minor Prophets:” called “minor” because the amount that they wrote, not by their importance.  But if you do read Micah, you should know that it’s not a happy book; the message that God gives Micah to proclaim is a lot like the message God gave to other prophets of Micah’s time (like Hosea, Isaiah, and Amos).  The message was basically, “Things are going to get worse.”  

I mentioned that it sometimes seems tricky to know if God is happy with what you’re doing or not; and I suppose the obvious exception to that is if God just tells you, say through a prophet.  The setting to our lesson this morning seems to be a courtroom; God has had it with the people and God is filing a lawsuit.  There are charges being leveled and a judgment will follow.  

That’s really the point of prophetic messages like this: something awful is about to happen and this is one of those rare times when it is because of something people have done; it’s as close to karma as the Bible gets.  Something awful is about to happen so God sends the prophet to explain why.  So unlike the idea of karma, this is a lesson; it’s not really justice, it’s not really balance; God is mad and God wants you to learn why.  God wants the people, when this bad thing happens, to learn from it.  And better yet, because we also have the words of the prophets, we might learn it too without ever having to go through these bad things.  

So, what is this bad thing, anyway?  Well, like any prophet of doom, the message was basically “the end is near.”  There have been forty years of prosperity and peace that are now coming to an end.  And apparently, because everything was going so well, the people had forgotten to listen to God.  It’s this thing we do: when our lives are hard, when we are in the midst of life’s struggles, we are plenty-devout.  When we are lost, abandoned, wounded, and alone – when we know we need the power of God – we are on our knees!  But when things are great, that may not be such a priority.  

So for forty years the people of God have been caught up in the “good life” and they’ve stopped listening to God.  In fact, things have been so good that they’re actually surprised to find out that God is angry with them; that God is about to evict them from the Promised Land.  So what did they do that so upset God that they were about to be taught a tough lesson?  What was it that God is charging them with – more importantly, what is it that we should avoid doing?  

Well according to our text today, they had forgotten The Story.  Micah references various stories, including a rather obscure story from the Book of Numbers [chapters 22-24] (I recommend it, by the way; there’s a talking donkey).  But for our purposes, I think we can infer from these references the whole of the biblical story; from Genesis through Revelation. I think we can take from this that the people of God had forgotten to remember all that God had done for them; how many times God had saved them, and led them, and fed them, and nurtured them; and when things got easy, they forgot.  

But worse than that, when they forgot what God had done, they also forgot what God wanted them to do.  I’ve been reading through the Bible lately, cover to cover; it’s something I’ve been doing occasionally since I was a kid.  I’m not sure I’d recommend it, especially when you get to books like Leviticus.  I just finished Leviticus and it’s a horrible read: it’s tedious, it’s repetitive, and it makes Moses look insane.  And although I think there reasons why we need the book of Leviticus, it’s not fun to read.  When you look at all of the things that the Lord seems to require, you see that it’s just impossible.  Fortunately, in passages like the one before us today, the Bible also tells us that leading a life that is pleasing to God is a lot simpler than Leviticus: do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.  

Of course, Jesus put it in a similar way, but even simpler than that: love God with all you are and love your neighbor as yourself.  But to remember even these simple expectations of God – as our lesson today shows us – we first remember what God has done for us.  We remember the love of God, even when things are good, because that love helps us to remember to share it with those around us.  

It is a lesson we learn regularly here at this Table.  Here we remember once again the depth of God’s love; a God who would become one of us and give his life for us.  And as we remember that love, may we be renewed – with the guidance of his Spirit – as we share that same unconditional love, mercy, and self-sacrifice in all we do and say.