Today's Sermon

 

"Out of Love: Micah the Not so Minor Prophet 1"

 

Out of Love: Micah the Not so Minor Prophet 1

         We stood gathered round the old Celtic cross site in the early light of dawn on the Scottish Isle of Iona, a sacred site for centuries of Christians of various traditions and before of pre-Christian peoples, Druids, the “Oak-knowers.”  Iona is knows as a “thin place,” where the veil between heaven and earth is slight. We gathered that morning in quiet though many of us with open eyes, so we could take in the sights and sounds. At one point, across the colored sky streaked a single wild goose, honking with abandon, both flying and crying out with power and urgency.

         This was a moment from our Iona pilgrimage with Celtic teachers John Philip and Ali Newell, but it has stayed with me as a lasting image of prophetic wisdom. Today we begin a series on the prophet Micah, called a “Minor Prophet” only because of the work’s word count.  Micah is a short work, not a shallow one.

         What is a prophet?  First what it’s not.  It’s not someone who merely predicts the future.  It’s someone who tells the truth about the present, about the past, and about the future if the course does not change.  It’s someone who offers a critique of their own people, holding them to their own stated standards, pointing out where and how they have wandered astray.  In that sense, the work of the prophet is not just to call the people or powers out; it’s to call them home.  In that sense, while often fiery, it’s a work of love; else it’s just anger.

         You might imagine the prophet as that honking goose, racing across the sky, sounding an alarm.  The prophetic act displays both power and vulnerability, for it takes quite a strength and a willingness to risk, to stick one’s neck out for something worth pursuing.  If you know anything about geese, they tend not to fly alone.  Thus, this goose we saw that morning in prayer was flying in search of someone lost or its lost flock.  The prophet is trying to call back into righteous relationship a lost people. 

         With these things in mind, listen to this first section of the book Micah as we begin our several-week journey through the work.  Listen, not trying to keep track of all the particularities of places and names that seem foreign, maybe not even for the specifics, but for the tone of the pronouncement, the severity and the depth of the course correction required.  Listen, also knowing the totality of the critique. At this point in history, Israel is a divided kingdom between Samaria and Judah, and  Micah has a word for each.  We will accordingly read the passage in two voices:

Micah 1:2-7
(Judgment Pronounced against Samaria)

2 Hear, you peoples, all of you;
    listen, O earth, and all that is in it,
and let the Lord God be a witness against you,
    the Lord from his holy temple.
3 For the Lord is coming out of his place
    and will come down and tread upon the high places of the earth.
4 Then the mountains will melt under him,
    and the valleys will burst open
like wax near the fire,
    like waters poured down a slope.
5 All this is for the transgression of Jacob
    and for the sins of the house of Israel.
What is the transgression of Jacob?
    Is it not Samaria?
And what is the high place of Judah?
    Is it not Jerusalem?
6 Therefore I will make Samaria a heap in the open country,
    a place for planting vineyards.
I will pour down her stones into the valley
    and uncover her foundations.
7 All her images shall be beaten to pieces,
    all her wages shall be burned with fire,
    and all her idols I will lay waste;
for as the wages of a prostitute she gathered them,
    and as the wages of a prostitute they shall again be used.

And now hear the Second Reading - Micah 1:8-16
(The Doom of the Cities of Judah)

8 For this I will lament and wail;
    I will go barefoot and naked;
I will make lamentation like the jackals
    and mourning like the ostriches.
9 For her wound is incurable.
    It has come to Judah;
it has reached to the gate of my people,
    to Jerusalem.

10 Tell it not in Gath;
    weep not at all;
in Beth-leaphrah
    roll yourselves in the dust.
11 Pass on your way,
    inhabitants of Shaphir,
    in nakedness and shame;
the inhabitants of Zaanan
    do not come forth;
Beth-ezel is wailing
    and shall remove its support from you.
12 For the inhabitants of Maroth
    wait anxiously for good,
yet disaster has come down from the Lord
    to the gate of Jerusalem.
13 Harness the steeds to the chariots,
    inhabitants of Lachish;
it was the beginning of sin
    to daughter Zion,
for in you were found
    the transgressions of Israel.
14 Therefore you shall give parting gifts
    to Moresheth-gath;
the houses of Achzib shall be a deception
    to the kings of Israel.
15 I will again bring a conqueror upon you,
    inhabitants of Mareshah;
the glory of Israel
    shall come to Adullam.
16 Make yourselves bald and cut off your hair
    for your pampered children;
make yourselves as bald as the eagle,
    for they have gone from you into exile. 

         A couple of points about the passage, which may feel a little impenetrable:  The language of the prophet belongs to the genre of the poetic.  It’s rich with imagery and metaphor.  Some may be rendered as perfectly sensible, others out of reach or even out of bounds. We can sense the completeness of the judgment in the description of mountains melting as wax near fire, valleys bursting open, waters streaming.  This is the level of destruction that will come the people, the nation, for their forgetting their own way in God.  It’s not so much their pronouncements about God—for what are those worth?—but the way they live their collective life.  Samaria will be made a heap, everything burned, objects of worship toppled.  They have prostituted themselves to false allegiances.  This is language common to scripture.  As offensive as it may be, that is the intent, to reflect the offensiveness of what the nation has become.

         The second critique, offered to Judah, displays another common prophetic characteristic in which the prophet embodies the state of the people they’re critiquing. “I will lament and wail; I will go barefoot and naked.”  The prophet is stripped down bare as they expose the unfaithfulness of the people. To our ears, then, the prophet strangely tells the people to go bald!.  They, however, would have immediately recognized this as a mourning ritual. They should mourn their nation which is as good as dead. 

         The prophet’s critique of their own homeland is heavy-laden.  It is time to wake up, shape up, and reform in order to form a suitable future.

         Much of the material we wrestled with on Iona you could describe as prophetic critique of the dominant strains of Western Christianity.  It was a naming of how many of the forms of this religion of which we are a part have fallen short in taking the form of the one who is supposed to be at the heart of it, Jesus.  It’s no coincidence increasing numbers, including of those withinthe church are uncomfortable with the term “religion.”  This religion has too often forsaken the way and teachings of Jesus for something else, for power, hierarchy, and a comfortable bedfellow in the state.  It’s one thing to offer communal values to the wider society; it’s another to fall prey to the sin of religious nationalism. Christianity became a lifting up of one’s own way over and against the other, seeking to wipe out the other, rather than recognizing traditions as having something to offer one another and the world.  Religion ironically became another tool for domination rather than for service and protection for the weakest in the world, the outsider and the outcast.  It has lost touch with the actual Jesus.  We are now living with the ripples of that shaken way of practicing the faith.

         Believe it or not, this is where the good news of the prophetic word comes in, and prophecy is always good news, good news for everyone involved.  It’s good news for the oppressed or the put down because it promises their liberation, justice on their behalf.  It is good news for the oppressor, the misguided powerful, for it gives them a chance to see the error of their ways and to correct course. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do for someone is show them they are off course.  It is not pleasant, but it is necessary, and it is ultimately loving. You wouldn’t allow someone you love to continue to head toward a physical cliff, why would you allow them to do so toward a moral one?

         These days, to make your living in religion, you swim in a pool of angst about the death and decline of the church, which is real.  Once you see, however, that it is precisely in its weakness that it is primed to recover its prophetic edge, it’s authentic faithful core to the way of the prophets and Jesus, and its relevance for people hungry for spiritual companionship, instruction, and communal practice.  Now that we are losing power, we no longer feel obliged to protect it or those who have it.  As Newell put it during our time together, the way of Jesus isn’t going anywhere, even if the current forms of the institution are, and that grants great freedom for those of us who want to walk in this way.  What is true cannot be put down, for it will always rise again in new forms.

         The same is true for the state that the prophet Micah critiqued, for it was its essence to which he was speaking and preaching and trying to resurrect.  It is that spirit which is worth saving.  The prophetic energy is the energy of love.  Sometimes when the form fails, it is invitation for those who are paying attention to call it out, point it out, and speak and dream a new and better form into existence.  Most of all, the prophet envisions, through image and metaphor, what the world could be like reborn.

         Can you see what our world could be like?  It isn’t this.  This isn’t the best we can do.  Surely we don’t believe this, genocides in the 21^stcentury, political violence at home, simple run of the mill gun violence, corruption, military in our own streets, and not the reform but the abandonment of systems to support the most vulnerable.  We may not have erected literal idols in the town square, but our society is full of idolatry, of greed and deceit.  The Spirit is calling us, crying out to us, to wake up, shape up, and reshape the world as Jesus did.

         Speaking of Spirit, what I failed to mention at the outset is that in the Celtic world, the symbol of the Holy Spirit, is not the dove, beautiful and tender, graceful, even delicate as it is.  The Holy Spirit is depicted as the wild goose, noisy, and fierce, relentless, ready to defend the vulnerable, and to call out to the lost and the flock, trying to get everyone back together and on the journey.  This is the beautiful stole the group was so kind to gift me with on our trip, featuring the wild goose.  I didn’t feel I deserved it as a thank you gift, for trip was planned by Susan Berteleson and Bethany, but then, wisely one of the group members said, “It’s not a ‘thank you; it’s a charge.’ ”  Charge and challenge accepted.  

         We need doves, but we also need wild geese, not always peace and quiet, also peace and loudness, a resounding song of heaven and earth joining together.

         Amen.