MICAH: “Keep It Simple, Saint"

A Sermon Based Upon Micah 6:1-8

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Sunday,   June 29, 2014

The name Ben Powers may not be familiar to you today.  But, several years ago, he made headlines around the world.

In 1987 the ill-fated Challenger blasted off for outer space.  This was a special mission which included six astronauts and one school teacher, Christa McAuliffe. The astronauts were to carry out scientific experiments and Christa was to teach some special science classes from the Challenger once they were in orbit.   As you know, 73 seconds into launch, an O-Ring failed. A startled world watched in shock as the Challenger exploded and seven astronauts died, including the young school teacher.

Ben Powers is a NASA expert in solid rocket design.  He risked the wrath of his supervisors and the scientific community at NASA when he gave his testimony before the Presidential Commission investigating the disaster.  Ben Powers was the only NASA engineer who had opposed the launch.  He was the only NASA engineer who had expressed concern about a launch in cold weather.  He was the only NASA engineer to appear before the Presidential Commission and say that the order to launch had been a bad decision.    Because of his testimony, several key supervisors have been replaced at NASA and Ben Powers is treated like a "leper" by those with whom he works.  He broke the code of silence, and former friends and colleagues now keep their distance.  

In an interview, Ben Powers was asked by a reporter if he thought he and his family had paid too high a price for his testimony.   Powers was silent for a moment and then he said, "My commitment to Jesus Christ is the most important factor in my life. I did what God expected me to do."

Have you ever asked yourself, "What does God expect of me?”  Micah 6:8 is one of the most important verses of the whole Bible because here the prophet Micah answers the question, "What does God expect of us?"   According to Micah, it’s not that complicated as he asks:  ... and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with thy God?   Here, God’s most basic standard of righteousness, goodness and morality, are broken down into just three simple, short Hebrew words:  Mihspat.  Hesed, and Hasnea.   These words are so important that I want you to learn to say them in Hebrew with me?  Mishpat!.... Hesed….!. Hasnea....!   Now, let’s think about what they mean, not just for Jews, or just for Christians, but for the whole world.

LIFE CAN GET TOO COMPLICATED

Before we examine these ‘simple’ words, let’s understand the prophet’s words still matter?   I begin with an observation in the form of a question:  Is your life getting more complicated these days?  Need I ask?  Carl Schenck says every he knows in Missouri lives a more complicated life.  It’s not just Missouri.  We live in a very complex world, and it grows more and more complex every day.  Regardless of what your work is, it is probably complicated.  Whether you work in an office or teach at a school or whether you rear children in a home or whatever your daily work is, it is probably full of complexity.  It does not matter if you are white collar or blue collar or no collar at all; work is obviously complicated.  Every form of work has its paperwork, its rules and regulations. Every situation of work has its relational difficulties with co-workers, bosses, employees, customers, clients and students.  Work is complicated, and it seems there is a new complexity that is introduced every week to our daily work sites.

Our families are also complicated. Families are, I suppose, busier now than perhaps they have ever been.  Most couples are made up of two working persons, arranging for two jobs, two careers, and the demands of those work responsibilities.  It gets very complicated. If there are teenagers in your home, then you know what complication really is all about. Their schedules and the demands on their time are every bit as great as those faced by adults. Transportation, boundaries and relationships in families can become very, very complicated.

We would like the church to be simple, and we all have, in our minds, an idealistic picture of a little brown church in the vale; but almost no one goes to the little brown church in the vale anymore.  Most people are going to larger and more complicated churches.   But even small churches are more complicated too.   Any church of any size at all is bound to have people with different priorities, different spiritual needs, different tastes and preferences. It gets complicated.  If you add to that the complexities of buildings and budgets and all of those things, the desire to have the little church in the vale like it used to be is just not possible in a complicated world.  Church is also complicated.

If those personal levels of our life-work, family, church are complicated,  it gets even worse when we begin to look at our society, as a whole.   There are a lot of very smart people in Washington, and they cannot figure out how to balance the budget, and it is not because they aren’t smart enough to do it.  It may at times have to do with their particular self-interests, but often it has to do with the complexities of the problem.  How do we, as a society, balance our generational obligations?  How do we, as a society, balance the obligation we have to the older generation for their care and at the same time seek to be faithful to the children that come along?  Think about what kind of society and what kind of national debt we pass on to our children. It is not simple.

In our own communities, even in our own largely rural counties of Yadkin and Iredell, there are growing issues of poverty, homelessness, drug addiction, racial tension, on-and-on they go, and they complicate our lives.   You could say that this complexity can easily become a form of darkness.  This does not mean that all complexity is evil,  but all the complexities, challenges and changes going on at once can put us into situations where we very frequently cannot see clearly which way we should to turn. Life goes out in so many different directions at once that if we wiggle over here, we may negatively affect someone over there.  It is tough to live in these days, and we certainly cannot see all the outcomes, all the effects, all the implications of a decision or an act or a direction in our lives.   When we cannot see or know which way to go, what to believe, who to trust or what we should do, we can quickly edge into darkness.  The complexities of our lives make it harder and harder and harder find the light so that we can walk and see in the dark.

THE GENUIS OF SIMPLICITY

When days were simple, but hard, it was the person able to invent something to make to make life easier, who was seen to be a genius.   Just think about Eli Whitney and the Cotton Gin.   Henry Ford and the Automobile.  What about Thomas Edison and the light bulb or Alexander Graham Bell and the Telephone?   In those simple, but hard times, these feats of invention were ‘complicated’ to accomplish, but these ingenious people made life easier  and made work more efficient.   That’s how it was in the good ‘ole days.  

Now ‘a days, as life has become complicated, almost too complicated for most of us, it is the person who can make something simple, who is seen to be the genius.   Think about Steve Jobs who created Apple Computers.  If you saw the recent movie about Jobs,  he wasn’t a very likable fellow, and he really didn’t created or make anything, but what he did was to take a simple idea of making a complicated computer easy to look at and to operate.  It was his marketing simplicity that made Steve Jobs such a respected creative genius.   Or also, think about Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, who took of the simple idea of ‘ecommerce’ and made it a reality with Amazon.com.   We all knew it would happen.  Amazon.com is nothing really new, expect that he combined computers, shopping, and mail order, so that he moved every department store to the click of a mouse and then to your own front step.  It made shopping just that easy.  Maybe, too easy.

Perhaps this is a great symbol of where religion and faith need to go, if they want to matter in a world that has gotten too complicated.     We need to realize again that the Christian faith was never intended to make faith in God more complicated, but it was to make it easier.  This is why Jesus reduced all the law and prophets down to two simple commandments: Love God with all your heart; and love your neighbor as yourself.    But before Jesus there was another religious Genius, the prophet Micah, who reduced everything God required of humanity into three simple actions:  Mishpat: Do Justice!   Hesed: Love Kindness, and Hasnea: Walk humbly with God!   

This is how is should always be when you have true faith!   True faith should always make religion and morality simple.  It should get it down to the “Nitti-gritty” or to the ‘brass tacks’ or where ‘the rubber meets the road’ as we say.  This is exactly where Micah wants to take us in this text.  Look closely.   The people of Israel, for some reason or other, made a very simple religious faith much too complicated.   Instead of being a faith of living in simple covenant and agreement with God, it became a complicated faith of “Don’t do this, or don’t do that” and it became a faith of ‘you must do it this way, or you must do it that way’, or you’re not doing it right.  That’s the kind of religion that was not only designed to keep others out, but it’s also the kind of religion that wants to make you it look you’re doing what you’re really not doing which is the thing you should be doing.  It’s like a big ‘smoke screen”, and I mean that literally.   Listen to how the prophet Micah describes a lot of ‘noise and smoke’ but very little substance: “With what shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before God on high?  Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?  Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil?  Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”  

Most of us will never worry about a ‘burnt offering with year old calves’ nor will be raising up “thousands of rams” or pouring out ‘ten thousand rivers of oil”, nor “giving our first born”, or sacrificing “our own body” to God, but the truth Israel wasn’t doing this either.  What Micah is saying is that there is no kind of ‘sacrifice’ that will make God happy.   A complex, complicated religion’ is just a cover up to keep us from doing the very simple things we are supposed to be doing all along.  Life should not be as complicated as we have made it and true religious faith should make better, not worse.

A RELIGION THAT ACTS AND DOES

So, what is an uncomplicated, simplified, true faith?   It’s not a faith that figures out what it believes about some nuanced matter (like which version of the Bible do you read, or which kind of End Time scenario is coming) and then tries to force that belief on everyone else.  True faith is not a faith that spends all it’s making sure others jump through the same hoops.   No, true faith, is a faith that does what is supposed to do.  Not only that, true faith is the kind faith that does what every human being is supposed to do, whether they are religious or not.   True faith is just as simple as these three words: Mishpat, Hesed, and Hasnea.   

Before I speak very briefly about what these three word mean, notice what they each are; they are verbs.  Do justly!  Do Kindness! And Do Humility with God!  Each word makes true religion something you do, not what you talk about, think about, or pray about.   A great example of making your life about being that is about doing comes from the life of a South Carolinian named  Dan Dyer.   Dan is a maintenance man for Roper Hospital in Charleston, SC. Until 1989 Dan had been responsible for the hospital heating and air conditioning for 8 years " and yet the hospital staff was oblivious to Dan's existence.”   Dan was usually out of sight in the boiler room or some such place, and his contribution to the healing of sick and hurting people just wasn't all that obvious.

In September of 1989, though, Hurricane Hugo hit Charleston.  Electricity went out all over town. Roper Hospital was reduced to a system of backup generators, and for some reason the diesel pump for the generators was not pumping the needed fuel to them. That threatened to leave a large hospital and its intensive care unit (The unit where patients are on life-support systems) with no electricity. It was in the midst of that crisis that Dan Dyer made 5 trips out into a hurricane to hand-pump diesel fuel back to the small tank that fueled the generator. Every trip through the high-velocity winds, water, and crashing debris was a risk of his life to safeguard the lives of the patients in the hospital. After that night, nurses, the hospital administrator, and even the governor of the state knew who Dan was. Dan Dyer became a bit of a celebrity and was recognized from that point on as the man who keeps Roper Hospital running.    It's ironic, isn't it?  For 8 years Dan Dyer faithfully performed functions vital to a large hospital, but until a crisis occurred, the other hospital personnel didn't have a clue as to who he was.   But all along, Dan is an example of true faith: Doing what matters when it doesn’t seem to matter and also doing what matters, even if it might kill you.  Just do it!  Do what?

Mishpat.  Do Justice!   So what is doing justice?   It is really simple; living your life in such a way that you seek out and try to live rightly each and every day.   It means playing fair.  It’s not judging what others do or don’t do, but it’s making sure that you are seeking, listening, learning, and trying to live the right kind of life that you already know to be right (and most everyone else does to).  It is also a life of being who you say you should be, not just being right for your own sake, but it is doing right for the sake of others who need your justiceyou’re your fairness, just as much as you need theirs.

And what is loving kindness?   Hesed: Loving Kindness is what happens when your view of what is ‘right’ and someone’s else’s view of ‘right’ is not exactly the same, but you are determined to be loving and kind to them anyway.   The problem with the smartest, brightest, best people is not that they fail, but they are often unkind in their ‘rightness’ and they don’t have a place in their lives for people who differ with them.   You show that you love kindness when you love people who are trying to be fair, and just, as you are trying to do what is fair, just and right.

Finally,  Hasnea: Walk Humbly with God!   This is what enables you to love kindness and do justly, even in a complicated, scary world.  When you walk humbly with ‘your’ God, you will have the humility even to walk with someone who’s view of God differs.  Do you trust God that much?   Since there is only one God, it is not God who gets things wrong, but it is our own human views of God that come up short of understanding how big of a mystery of love God is to each and every one of us.  We need to remember that being Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, Lutheran, or Presbyterian or whatever we are, is not because our forefather’s got it wrong, not because they got it right.   Of course, we need to know people who gave shape to religion and denominations meant well, but we humans still get it wrong, even when we try to get it right.  Our differences are proof that we make things too complicated.   The true mystery of God is only revealed to us through humility, loving kindness, and doing justice.  When we figure that out, if we ever do, there will be no religious difference, but only cultural differences, and these cultural differences will only matter if they all point to the same ultimate truth:  the God who has revealed himself as the one who reveals justice, shows loving kindness, and has ‘humbled’ himself to be ‘for us’ and not ‘against us’ in Jesus Christ.    

Are you able to humble yourself enough to simply trust that God is for us, and is never, ever against us, no matter what happens or we fear might happen?   This is what ‘faith’ always means, that we trust.  Only when we humbly trust in such a God will we love kindness and do justice.   Let me explain.  John Claypool tells of a missionary who went out years ago to teach in a school in China. She had begun the whole venture with a deep sense of God's calling. However, in the long voyage over the Pacific by boat, all kinds of fears began to crop up. Just like Peter, who had begun in confidence but then took his eyes off Christ and let the winds drive him to terror, she too was beset by anxieties: "How will I provide for myself? Will I be able to learn the language?  What will be the response of the people?" One night she went to sleep deeply troubled by all these uncertainties, and she had a vivid dream. It was as if she were standing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean all by herself with nothing but a two-by-four supporting her at the surface of the water. In that condition, a voice said to her, "Start walking to China." She answered back, "But I can't. I'm not able to walk on water. If I leave this secure standing place, I will surely drown." But the voice insisted, "I said walk. Start walking toward China." With fear and trembling, but in obedience, she lifted her foot and put it forward, and just at the moment that it was touching the surface of the water, another two-by-four, like the one on which she had been standing, appeared out of the depth. Every step she took was met by support emerging from the deep. She woke with a new sense of confidence and trust in God.

At times in our lives all of us will be in deep water.  Life can get complicated and frightening fast.  At such times can’t do justice or know kindness unless we humbly trust in God?  Like that missionary on the ship, we will want to turn back from doing what needs to be done, and showing the love we need to show, unless we humbly trust to keep walking with God. 

 How are humbling yourself to walk with God today?   Where will you put your trust?   Will you trust in your keen intellect?  Will you put your trust in your health? Will you put your trust in your stocks and bonds or in the equity of your home?  There may come a time when all of these will fail us.  If we only put our trust in ourselves, only in our accomplishments, in our possessions, in our investments,  there will come a time, regardless of how much we have accumulated, when we will stare into the darkness and feel the waters of defeat and death rise around us.   But if we humbly put our faith in God now, if we confess that our strength and our ability are inadequate but that God's strength and God's ability never fails, then we can stay focused on the simple truth of life,  that life is about doing justly, and life is about loving with kindness, and that is all life is about,  no matter how complicated it might seem.  Amen.