System Requirements

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

02.02.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Micah 6:1-6

[errata: In the below audio version of this sermon, I wandered off text for a moment or two when explaining Shittim and Gilgal.  While the section on this being shorthand for "entering the promised land" is correct as it appears in the written text, my additional discussion of Jacob and Esau is not.  That river is the Jabbok.  I realized this as I was saying it, and accuracy matters.]

In our kitchen, we have a drawer.  If you slide that drawer open, inside it you’ll find papers and knicknacks, the detritus of the fifteen years we’ve spent in our home.  We call it the “stuff” drawer, or words to that general effect.

In that drawer are things we apparently think might still be useful at some point, like phone directories from our kid’s preschool.  There are also electronic devices, the latest and greatest technological doodaddery from five or six years ago.  It’s an amazing array of Apple products, mostly, iPods and nanos and iPod Touches, and a couple of first gen iPhones.  There’s also an impossible tangle of chargers and dongles and mangled earbuds, all wound up together like a ball of hibernating albino garter snakes.  

Here and there around the house, there are little hidden corners, where ancient laptops and boxes of old three and a half floppy disks sit gathering dust.

It’s hard to let those things go, it is, because it’s kind of hard to believe that they don’t have any residual worth.  My motorcycle is a 2008, dagflabbit, and it still runs just fine if you change the oil now and again.  But that 3G iPhone you can find sitting in that drawer, made that very same year?  It’s worth less than nothing.  It’s still the same device, and able to do all of the things it once did.

Only that’s not quite enough any more.  As we rush forward in the ever sweeping march of progress , our expectations are always being pushed and stretched forward.

It can feel overwhelming at times, as the machines that surround us relentlessly require either new operating systems or upgrades or updates.  You’ll settle in, trying to do something, and the next thing you know your magic devil box is telling you that you need to install this thing, or that thing.

Or it will just sigh at you, and let you know that it doesn’t meet the requirements, and maybe you should just go drop it in that drawer.

That little computer brain in your pocket just won’t have any clue what to do with the new thing you’ve shown to it.  It’ll have absolutely no idea. To do that new thing, you’ll need to do it in a new way.  Real change is like that.

Which, honestly, is kind of the alert message that Micah is sending the people of Judah in the sharp little missive we find in today’s scripture reading.  Micah pitched out his message to the people about eight hundred years before Jesus showed up, meaning he was preaching at pretty much the same time as the prophet Isaiah and the prophet Amos.

There is, in the Bible, a kind of writing called “theodicy.”  This is when a faithful person stands on their relationship with God, and challenges God to hold up the divine end the bargain.  If you’ve ever read the book of Job, that’s a theodicy, a theological indictment.

This little section of Micah is exactly the opposite.  From the mouth of the prophet, we hear a challenge laid before the people of Judah.  “You expect me to be in relationship with you,” God asks.  “You really want to be in relationship with me?  I wanted that, too. I thought we had an understanding.  I thought we were on the same page.  But now, well, now I’ve got beef.  You’ve crossed a line, and you don’t even seem to know that you’ve crossed it.”

Though the mouth of the prophet, God is challenging the people to hold up their end of the arrangement.  “I’ve done what I can do,” God says, and then reminds them of what that means.

Remember Egypt, and the Pharoah, and how you were slaves?  Well, you’re not any more.  Remember Moses, and his brother Aaron, and his sister Miriam?  You’re free now.

“Remember what I did with King Balak of Moab, and Balaam, son of Beor?”  

To which we, now, say...um...not really.  Um.  Was Beor..uh...that big hairy bear guy in the second Hobbit movie?

But this story would have been more familiar to the people of Judah, a total favorite for the kids at bedtime.  We can read it in Numbers chapter 22.  On their journey through the wilderness to the promised, land, the people of Israel passed through the land of the Moabites.  King Balak summoned the prophet Balaam, and asked him to curse the people of Israel as they trucked on through, but three times Balaam tried, and three times Balaam found that he was unable to say anything other than a blessing.  Great bedtime stuff, huh?  Um.  Did I mention there’s a talking donkey in the story?  I’m not sure if Eddie Murphy voiced it, but still.  A Talking Donkey in the Torah.  You remember that story.

God then reminds them what happened between Shittim and Gilgal, which, again, we’re not quite so clear on these days, beyond noting that this is one of those verses you need to remind lay readers to pronounce very carefully when reading it in worship.

Here, it helps to know your geography.  Shittim is on one side of the river Jordan, and Gilgal is on the other.  What happened between those two places?  You came to the land of promise, that’s what happened.  

So in this passage, God is saying: I delivered you.  I blessed you.  I named you.  And in return, what do I expect?  I expect you to hold up your end of the arrangement, and that means something rather different than you seem to think it does.

What the people had come to think was simple. Their worship needed to be nothing more or less than the ritual sacrifice of the temple.  All they needed to do was to show up, do their thing, and they had fulfilled their responsibility.  You make the sacrifice, you reap the blessings.  The exchange was basic.  It was a nice and easy transaction, a simple process that couldn’t have been more straightforward.

So they did those things, and then trucked on through life as if God couldn’t have cared less how they lived.

Micah challenged the people of Israel to understand their relationship to their Maker in different terms.  To really live into that relationship, they were going to need to do things in a new way.

What mattered to their Creator was not the volume of their sacrifices, but the way they lived.  What mattered to their God was that they attended to the injustices in their society, not allowing the poor to struggle without hope and not allowing the wealthy and powerful to prey on the weak.  What mattered to their God was that they valued kindness in their exchanges with others, and that they stood humbly with their God.

If they wanted to really be engaged with their God, wanted that relationship to change and transform their existence, then they needed to understand what the requirements were, and understand those requirements clearly.

And as easy as it is for us to scoff at those silly Judeans, we may also have something of a struggle with approaching our God in the way that Micah asked.  Our expectation, as a culture, is that most of our exchanges can be approached as a transaction.  We assume that there’s really very little that cannot be dealt with as an exchange, little that can’t be managed as a this-for-that.

But that way of approaching life isn’t how our Creator means us to live.  If we approach God in that way, we’re not quite getting it.  The life we’re trying to live does not quite mesh with the one that God seeks to bless and inhabit.

What God seems to require of us is that our lives mesh with the purpose he’s laid out. To experience that relationship, to actually be engaged with our Creator in the ways that matter, we need to have structured our days in such a way that our doing makes space for God’s work.  It isn’t complicated.  Pray.  Make space and time for acts of kindness, and works that heal the broken.

But it also means no longer viewing those actions as an exchange, but instead a thing you do with your whole being.

That means living out that self that God knows, and is calling us to be.

So as you hope for that sense of grace and purpose in your life, remember what it is that is required.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.