The Next Level

Micah 6:1-8
Matthew 5:1-12

Advertisements for a new book started appearing this week in all the “trade” magazines churches and pastors get during the week. Westminster/John Knox, a Presbyterian-related publisher, released the new title, What’s the Least I Can Believe and Still be a Christian. Immediately upon seeing the title the hairs went up on the back of my neck. Really? What’s the least I can believe? Have we sunk that low that it’s assumed we’re trying find the bottom line on which we have to sign to make sure we’re in? Or we’re covered? Or we’re safe?

I did a little more research after hearing the title, and I discovered the title did exactly what the publishers probably hoped it would do. It overstated the content of the book and by doing so drew me in to learn more. The book itself, from what I can gather, is not as bad as the title sounds, and in fact may be a very interesting study for some or all of our churches to undertake. But that’s all beside the point. What drew me in, I think, is the age old question that the title essentially restates straight from Micah, “What does the Lord require of you?”

It came to the people of Israel during what was likely some pretty shocking judgment from the prophet. Shocking because even the judgment itself earlier in the prophecy points out that they were not unreligious people. They weren’t lacking in their practice of their faith, but actually the opposite was true. They were faithful with their sacrifices and activities in the temple. They knew all the right things to say to God and really were talking about their faithfulness pretty publically and pretty loudly. They truly believed they were doing everything just right. That a challenge or judgment or question was being posed to them was unbelievable.

I can just imagine how people of deep religious belief or practice today would take the kind of judgment Micah was bringing. Imagine if he walked into the Presbyterian Church General Assembly last summer, or the non-denominational Women of Faith Conference, or a Billy Graham-sponsored revival, or a meeting of the World Council of Churches and started calling us all to task about doing or NOT doing what God has asked us to do. Imagine if a prophet came through the doors of our church right in the middle of worship when we are doing the very thing we know God desires and told us that God has a case to lay out against us in the heavenly courts. I don’t think we’d take the news or the question so well.

No, the people of Judah never saw it coming. They THOUGHT they were doing everything just right. They THOUGHT they were being faithful. They were making sacrifices in the temple. They were waiting for the Messiah. They were speaking out loud, maybe too loudly, about what they do to worship God. They THOUGHT they were on the right track as religious people of God.

It’s an easy trap for anyone to fall into, turning the life of faith into a religious check list, and then on top of that broadcasting it to the world when we are proud of ourselves for marking off all the tasks on the list. Sing “Amazing Grace” and “How Great Thou Art?” Check. Read 2 chapters from the Old Testament and 3 from the New? Check. Attend Sunday worship? Check. Sign up to usher? Double check! Make it for a communion Sunday? Hat trick! Three checks! Put money in the offering plate? Check. Bow head and pray at every meal? Check. Say bedtime prayers? Check. Make it to “Amen” before falling asleep? Bonus check!

It’s an easy temptation to fall into, and it’s exactly this behavior against which Micah speaks. It’s exactly this bone that God has to pick with us. God calls us out on it turning the majestic landscape of creation in a divine courtroom. God calls us to step out before the bench of the mountains, the jury box created by the hills and answer a few questions. The gracious piece, though, is that it isn’t really with rage or fury that God comes to prosecute. Other prophets and even other parts of Micah can really be angry sometimes. Yet this time the tone of God’s controversy is different. Instead of anger, the tone is one of frustration, even pain. It sounds like everything is turned around and instead of creation crying out “How long, O Lord?” the creator is weeping, “O my people, where did I go wrong?” God is upset, but even more than anger it sounds like disappointment.

God is saddened when our faith is placed in the things that we do. God is saddened when we start to reduce our faith to a religious checklist. That’s not the whole point. It’s not supposed to be about trying to figure out what rituals we need to perform to get by or what doctrines we have to agree to in order to meet all the criteria. God is wearied when we try to rely on our rituals to save us instead of our relationship. God’s goal for all of this is not just to count the rear ends in the pews and check off all our names in the Book of Life, calling us good because bothered to show up week after week after week. Just making it to worship and even participating is just not the point.

Don’t get me wrong. Worship is good! The traditions and routines of our public and private faith practices are good! They aren’t only good; they are great. In the fall one Sunday we talked about how much God desires our worship. I’d say it’s even the first and most central thing to which we are called. In one of our historic Reformed catechisms the question is asked “What is the chief end of [humanity]?” The answer that generations since passed were able to answer in one strong voice is, “The chief end of [humanity] is to glorify God and enjoy [God] forever.” God wants us to worship together, to give praise and honor and glory to God, to hear God’s Word, to make offerings to God, to celebrate the sacraments as the body of Christ, to sing praise, and to offer our prayers for ourselves and others.

God LOVES when the community gathers for ritual. God LOVES when individuals are committed to their personal and private acts of faith and devotion… but not when they replace a living faith in God, a relationship with Christ. Not when they replace being an active disciple of Jesus. Worship is good! Traditions and practices of our faith are good! But not when they prevent us from going to the next level.

I have to pause here and give thanks to Lynne Hobson and Marie Bourget for the inspiration they gave me in last week’s children’s time. If you were here you may remember them talking to the kids about “going to the next level.” If not, they started by talking about video games and how players work hard to master the skills at one level to make it to the next, where the skill set changes a little and the challenges are somewhat harder, but the reward for mastering them is even higher. Then they talked about how being a disciple of Jesus can be thought of in a similar way. Knowing about Jesus is one thing, but following him is taking it to the next level. Hearing about Jesus is the warm up round, but believing in him and accepting the challenge to go with him is more difficult, but at the same time more rewarding. It’s taking it to the next level.

Take it to the next level, Micah reports for God. Do more than just honor God with the ritual bare minimum. Do more than just try to cover your bases with your worship, your public sacrifices, and your private prayer. Take it to the next level and really live this faith we proclaim; follow God’s lead, placing your footsteps right next to Christ’s, and move on to the harder challenges of justice, mercy, and humility.

God desires more, so much more, than our empty words and our mindless ritual. God desires more than our affirmation of memorized doctrine and the lowest common denominator of belief. God desires our relationship. God desires our actions. God desires that we submit ourselves to the divine will, that we humble ourselves by letting go of our emphasis on what we need to do to just get by or look good in front of others so that we can instead seek opportunities to enact God’s justice and to reveal God’s mercy to the world.

In presenting God’s case, Micah refers to particular acts of God, asking the people of Israel and us if we remember these saving acts of God. He brings to their mind and to ours these stories that aren’t just accounts of days gone by, but accounts of what God does even now, what God does for us. Remember how God brought us up from the land of Egypt? Remember how God stood up for us when we had no voice, no power, no strength? Remember how God is all about justice, freeing those who are bound up, releasing captives, lifting up the oppressed?

Next Micah reminds us of another story that is probably even farther back in our minds, if it was ever there are all. He prods our collective memory of the time when God got in the way of a foreign king who was trying to curse Israel. In fact, God even used the prophet for the enemy, a foreigner, to bless us to show us God’s redeeming love. Remember how God shows us mercy, using any available means to bring us into a deeper relationship with Christ?

Then he brings up the way Joshua led the people across the Jordan, FINALLY into the Promised Land. He recalls how after generation upon generation first of slavery in Egypt, then as a people wandering around in the desert wilderness, the promise of God was fulfilled. After walking faithfully and humbly with God, not always know why we were doing what we were doing, how we were going to make it where we were going, we were finally brought to the land of God’s blessing. Remember how God’s footsteps lead us right where we belong? Remember how God never left the our poor, questioning side?

Yes, one of our greatest callings and privileges as the body of Christ and individually members of it is to glorify God, worship God, give praise and honor and make sacrifices to God. But what God requires of us, what will take away God’s frustration and sadness over our personal attempts is when we take it to the next level. What does God require of each of us? That we enact God’s justice on behalf of the poor and the forgotten. That we show God’s mercy to those cast aside and left out. That we walking with faith and humility wherever God chooses to take us.

The blessings of God don’t come to us because we are completing the right checklist. That would be the way the world operates. God’s ways are not our ways. God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom. Instead God’s blessings are with those who are poor, those who mourn, those who are meek, those who are merciful, those who work for peace and righteousness and the unexpected ways of God. God asks us to take it to this next level. God asks us to step up to this greater challenge with this greater reward - - that in stepping up to the challenge we will be filled with Christ’s love enough to share.

The One of Peace

Micah 5:2-5a
Luke 1:46-55

Not all Christmas gift stories get remembered years later, but the year my friend didn’t get a bike that was a year to remember. She had been wishing for it for ages, or what seemed like ages to a 10 year old. It was a bright pink Beach Cruiser – a popular bike with thick framing and fat tires, all the kids were wishing for them in the late 1980’s Florida beach town where we lived.

My friend was pretty certain she was getting one. She had been to the store to be fitted with her parents. They wrote down all the measurements and made note of her favorite color paint. It seemed a done deal. Maybe she even spoke like it was certain to others, especially as she rounded out her Christmas list to other family members with all the matching accessories. The bike would be there Christmas morning; she was sure of it.

But maybe she shouldn’t have been. Christmas morning came, and she was ready to feign great surprise upon seeing the bike there in the living room, but it wasn’t. Old enough to know that she shouldn’t be disappointed about a present not received, but young enough to still be disappointed, she went through the rest of the morning with a little less enthusiasm than it might usually stir up. Things got a little harder, though, when she opened the present from her grandmother. It would have been the IDEAL present….

Inside the box was the perfect bike basket – white woven reeds were decorated with those absolutely, completely 1987 vinyl fluorescent flowers – neon green, neon pink, neon yellow. It would have been AWESOME on the front of her bright pink Beach Cruiser if she had, in fact, gotten that bright pink Beach Cruiser. But without the bike, the basket was, well, incomplete.

Up to this point in our Advent worship series the Scriptures we have shared have pointed out a gift of God at Christmas that I think is in contradiction to what we often ask for from God at Christmas, or anytime really. We wish for instant gratification and immediate solutions, but God gives hope, promises to be fulfilled in the future. We wish for nonjudgmental approval of all our actions, but God gives tough love, the refiner’s fire, a call to repentance. We wish for momentary happiness that hides our fears, but God gives lasting joy that comes from Christ’s presence in the midst of struggles.

This week, though, I don’t think our Christmas lists are in the same kind of contrast from God’s gift list. I think instead what we tend to mean by what is on our list is incomplete compared to what God promises to give. It’s like we’re asking for the bike basket, but have nothing to hang it on. How many Christmas cards have you received this year with some version of the message “Peace on earth” embossed inside or out in gilded script? It’s a message fit for the angels to sing, and I would be surprised to hear that any of us DON’T wish for it. Peace. It’s our wish for our lives, our wish for the world, and according to Micah, it’s definitely on God’s list to give.

Micah is the prophet toward whom the chief priests and scribes in Matthew’s gospel turn when telling King Herod that Bethlehem will be the birthplace of the Messiah. Bethlehem, Micah prophesies, will be the source of the new David as it was the birth place of the first David, the beloved king of Israel. Bethlehem, Micah prophesies will be the place from which God calls the new king, the Messiah, who will shepherd God’s people as David shepherded sheep, who will finish gathering them into one people, as David held the kingdom together united. Bethlehem will be the source of the Messiah, the new David, the new king, a new kind of king, who will bring them together, feed them and make them strong. He will make them secure against all their enemies. He will be the one of peace. It’s what God promises. It’s the gift God delights in giving. It is peace.

War was at hand. The horrors of battle and cities under siege were the common knowledge of the people of Bethlehem and throughout Israel. The thought of a king coming out of this battered land, and a king of peace, was absurd. Peace is not how you build a nation. Peace is not how you find strength against your enemies, how you display majesty to the kingdoms of the world, how you make a home for your people surrounded by nations that are different. Peace, the absence of fighting, the absence of aggression and destruction and devastation, won’t get you too far in rebuilding the glory days of old. Or so the common theory holds.

And I think that’s because the common theory holds a pretty limited view of peace – an incomplete view, you might say. “Peace on earth” - - what is it we’re asking for when we pray this along with the angels. What are wishing for when we send it in our greeting cards? What does it mean when we celebrate it’s coming in Jesus who was born in Bethlehem?

I had this similar conversation at a meeting in September, not at our church. The group I was with was trying to make a decision about a grant request for funds to be spent from a Peacemaking Offering. It was to be a challenge grant for an emergency shelter in a small town in central Nebraska. The shelter is operated by an ecumenical alliance in this small town and ministers to women and children who are fleeing homes where domestic violence is present. The request was not to completely bail the shelter out of its financial pit, but to offer funds that would only be given when matched by the other participating denominations.

In the course of our discussions the question was asked, “What does any of this have to do with Peacemaking?” At first our committee was silent. The one who asked the question wasn’t against the shelter. He didn’t desire for the women and children to have no place to go. His question was a legitimate one as one of the stewards of the gifts given by faithful Christians. What does this have to do with Peacemaking, the cause behind the offering?

His question was a legitimate one, but I think it also highlights our common thinking about peace. Peace, we tend to think, is the absence of war. Peace is a lack of fighting. That’s what we tend to think. That’s what we tend to be asking for when we ask for peace on earth, world peace, peace in our cities. But I think our definition, I think our hopes for what peace will look like, I think what we are used to asking for, is incomplete. Micah declares that the one of peace is coming, but Mary in singing her beautiful song of praise, tells us what that really means. She’s tells us what God’s complete gift of peace really looks like.

Now she never says the word “peace,” but the ability to sing that song in the midst of the life she’s living? Certainly, Mary knows what peace is as much as she knows what it means to need it. There have probably been more than a few battles for her to face in the last several months. A young girl, betrothed to be married, Mary has turned up pregnant, and even in a time and culture that was more open than ours to supernatural explanations for earthly affairs, the story of being visited by angel and conceiving a child by the spirit of God is more than just a little unbelievable. It could not have been a peaceful life for her, those early months of pregnancy – strife with her parents, the worry over what Joseph would think and do, the ridicule and shame from the neighbors, literally fearing for her life in a town where it was legal to KILL her because of the child she carried. Nothing in there sounds like peace even in the absence of an outright war.

Yet, even in the midst of all of that and more, Mary can sing, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” Even in the midst of the most traumatic time of her still short life, Mary can sing praises to God. In fact, over and over again, she seems to be the one in the birth narrative most at peace. She seems to know what peace, real peace, complete peace, is all about.

A young girl, from an unimportant backwater town, lifted up to be a blessed servant of God. As insignificant a girl in a world dominated by Roman occupation as Bethlehem had become in the time of Micah after a string of miserable kings had allowed foreign nations to rule the land, and she was the one being lifted up into service to God. She sings of a time coming with the gift of her child when the proud and arrogant are toppled down from the pedestals they occupy while the oppressed and the forgotten, the lowly in the eyes of the world, are raised to new importance. Those hungry for food are filled with what is usually only good enough for the wealthy, who hoard it away for themselves. The rich find out what it means to worry for a little bit. The world is reversed, but most importantly, the playing field is leveled. Everyone has a chance.

War is never mentioned in Mary’s beautiful song, but the conditions that lead to war, the conditions that lead to anxiety and violence, the conditions that lead to both offensive and defensive stances, they are all over her song, and ultimately, she sings they are eliminated by God who comes in the child she carries, by the one of peace. Pride and power abused, hunger and oppression, all these are promised to be removed by the one who is coming, the one of peace. Battlefields aren’t a part of the picture she paints, but the need for them is lost when peace comes completely.

The peace that is promised in the gift of God’s Son, complete peace – it’s about more than just the absence of war; it’s about the presence of justice. It’s the world that God displayed in choosing Mary to carry this gift. It’s the world that Jesus demonstrated by including the outcast, sharing meals with sinners, healing the broken and brokenhearted, loving the unlovable. It’s the world we’re called to bring about as his people, his disciples, the ones bearing his name, Christ, the Messiah – not just a world where fighting is silent, but a world where fighting isn’t even necessary.

May God’s gift of the peace of Christ be with us this Christmas. May the complete peace of Christ be with us and in us and showing through us this Christmas and always.