Love, Love, Love

Epiphany 4A-26

Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

“Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly.” Micah 6:8 has long been tattoo fodder for Christians. It shouldn’t be edgy. But it is. In fact, all our readings are “woke” enough to be banned in some parts of today’s America.

Micah tells us God called upon the mountains and hills to be the judge. “Hear, you mountains, the case of the Lord, and you enduring foundations of the earth, for the Lord has a case against his people, and he will contend with Israel” (Micah 6:2). God challenged Israel’s rampant injustice by taking the people to court. “O my people, what have I done to you?” God laments. “In what have I wearied you? Answer me!” (Micah 6:3). Like a prosecutor God systematical examines their actions, recounting the signs of mercy and loving kindness shown to them from generation to generation, searching for a sign that they are living up to who God called them to be.

Can mountains and hills bear witness? Does the very ground we stand on stand in judgement of us? The bible surely thinks so.  Rocks, like this small greenish Precambrian stone I plucked from the shores of Iona in Scotland, are among the oldest found anywhere in the world. It is more than 2 billion years old within it the planet has unintentionally kept a rich and idiosyncratic journal of its past.

God called out to the “enduring foundations of the earth” to hear the case against God’s people (Micah 6:2). God addresses these ancient beings and asks for their witness to things much smaller, younger, and more ephemeral than they are.

Psalm 89:2 declares “the world is built with loving-kindness.” Loving-kindness is the very foundation on which the world rests. Ancient Jewish teaching (the Pirkei Avot) identified loving-kindness as one of the three pillars on which the world stands. (Study of Torah and service to others are the other two.) The Torah mentions chesed — the Hebrew word roughly translated as loving-kindness—245 times. Chesed endures forever (Psalm 136). Chesed, Jeremiah tells us, is what God does (9:24). God built the earth with loving-kindness, and God sustains the earth through loving-kindness. Loving-kindness, the bible declares, is a cosmic constant.

The prophet Micah gets specific. Leaders, he wrote, “tear the skin from my people,” and “break their bones in pieces” (3:2–3). They despise justice, distort the right, take bribes as a matter of course, and are “skilled in doing evil with both hands.” Even worse, the religious leaders, who should have known better, approved and legitimized this unholy status quo, proclaiming that it was God’s will. The news was just too much even for God. “He 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?” (6:8). (Amy Frykholm, “From the Foundations of the Earth,” Journey with Jesus, 1/25/26)

This month, for the season of Epiphany, we have heard the evangelist Matthew tell how the evil powers and principalities of Empire tried to snuff out the light of Christmas — and of the ways in which God widened the circle of light, the manifestation of peace and mercy, in the face that opposition. Since January 6 (I’m referring here of course to the feast of Epiphany), we’ve read the horror story of King Herod and his massacre of Jewish infants, when we were invited to “go home by another way” with the Wise Men who visited the child Jesus, and attended Jesus’ baptism. In the past two weeks, we listened to Jesus, now all grown up, address us. What were his first words? ‘Come and see.’ His second? ‘Follow me.’

“In today’s gospel, he shared with his followers God’s vision of a just world where the poor, the grieving, the meek, the starving, the merciful, the innocent, the peaceable, and those who are persecuted and reviled for doing good are the “big shots,” the “blessed,” like the prophets and revered ancestors. It is his description of the Kingdom of God, where there is no “king” as we know kings, where the mighty have been cast from their thrones and the lowly lifted up — just like his mother had promised before his birth.” (Diana Butler Bass, Sunday Musings, 2/01/26).

The grace of Christ exposes the lie in the ways of the world.   We cannot be full while others are hungry.  We cannot become wealthy while we empty the land of resources.  The greatest power is not the power to control but the power to include. This was the reforming spirit by which people of Christ swam against the tide of greed and Empire in Roman times.  Over decades and centuries, including many failures and tragedies, the faith of God’s people inspired laws, institutions and cultural norms: hospitals, schools, and an equal regard for all life. That’s why we may be so bold to say the church was made for times like these because the church was born in times like these.

In October of 2016, Pope Francis said, “It’s hypocrisy to call yourself a Christian and chase away a refugee or someone seeking help, someone who is hungry or thirsty, toss out someone who is in need of my help… If I say I am Christian, but do these things, I’m a hypocrite.”  (Pope Francis, Catholic News Service, 10/13/16)

St. Paul too reminds us today that walking the way of true wisdom is foolishness in the eyes of the world.  “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18).

The cross, the beatitudes and the courtroom scene depicted by the prophet Micah makes foolish the wisdom of the world.  God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom.  God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.  The wisdom of God exposes the foolishness of human ways.

A Latin American prayer asks: “Lord, to those who hunger, give bread. And to those who have bread, give the hunger for justice.” As we pray at the eucharist, ‘The cry of the poor is God’s own cry; Our hunger and thirst for justice is God’s own desire.’ (Eucharistic prayer, ELW #VII)

The Beatitudes draw a character portrait of the face and will of God. We see the divine image reflected in lovingkindness woven in, with, and under the natural world.  Together, they provide the foundation for Christian nonviolent resistance. To live the Beatitudes is to live differently and to think differently. “Wherever there is injustice, discrimination, division, discord, violence, we should find peacemakers, God’s children.” Where the battle rages between the forces of light and [shadow], we should find the meek and merciful, God’s helpers. (Mary Lou Kownacki, O.S.B., Behold the Nonviolent One).

The prophet Micah imagined that God took people to trial, not merely to condemn them, but ultimately to become reconciled with them again.  Likewise, Jesus offers the beatitudes as steps toward a disarmed heart. In a world of wealth and war, says Jesus, blessed are the poor and the peacemakers. Instead of violence and vengeance, blessed are the mournful, the meek, and the merciful. The faithful hold in tension two truths, the first is, “I am dust and ashes;” the other is, “For me the universe was made” (Kownacki).