The book of
Proverbs reminds us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Now,
that doesn’t get much play these days. I suspect most people would say that the
beginning of wisdom is found in college, or the beginning of wisdom is discovered
in the process of aging, or the beginning of wisdom is starting a career, or
having a family. Fear of the Lord may
be biblical but we rarely consider fear of a thing to be good—not today—and
certainly wisdom must start somewhere else. “Why should we be afraid of God?”
we might ask in our best modern voices. We love
God, or we have faith in God, but fearing God? No, no. That’s something
for less civilized folk.
We’ve done our
best to make God into the flavorless communion wafers that we serve as his
body. He can be loving, and powerful, and good, but fearful? Nope, no good. We
have become afraid to ascribe to God any attribute that we do not consider
proper in our fellow human beings, and the end result has been a kind of
arrogance in our understanding of who God is and what God does. We first decide
what it is that a good God will look like, then we decide which parts of our
God fit that description, and finally we only believe those things we have
already decided befit the God of our choice. In this way we make God in our
image. God has all the traits we like and likes the people we like.
Because this Old
Testament God doesn’t act like the God we have created in our image we make
this God out to be a different God that, because of Jesus, we can ignore. We do
this even though Jesus seemed perfectly happy to pray to this God whom he
called “Father” and even though our creeds confess this God to be one and the
same with the Son and the Holy Spirit.
This is important
when it comes to reading the prophets, like Micah, because our weakened images
of God mean that we are tempted to take shortcuts and find in the prophets what
we want to find. When Micah says, “What does the Lord require of you but to do
justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” we read that
as if it is a moral-ethical imperative. Do these things and you’ll be right in
the sight of God. Perfect. After all, that’s exactly what Jesus says when he’s
asked what a person has to do to inherit eternal life: “Be perfect like your
Father in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).
Yet, this can
hardly be good news. Being perfect sounds
both utterly impossible and unlike the focus on grace and salvation apart from
works that we find evident in Paul’s letters. A single Bible verse on its own
is always trouble (which is quite the ironic thing to say two weeks after asking
our confirmands to pick just one verse to sum up their faith). But it’s true:
it’s always trouble. And Micah is no exception. Do justice, love kindness, and
walk humbly with God… who can argue with
that? It’s like the political ads that ask, “Don’t you want your children
to grow up in a safe world?” or “Shouldn’t everybody have a chance at a good
education?” If you want a certain answer you frame the question how you want it
to be asked. We all do this. But doing this with the Bible is the surest way to
a shallow faith that doesn’t take seriously the depth and breadth of this God
we discover in our holy scriptures. If the summation of the Christian message
is only do justice, love kindness,
and walk humbly with God that isn’t bad, but it also doesn’t say much that
can’t be said by the Lions club or your friendly local Buddhist.
If those of us in
the so-called “mainline” Christian denominations are going to mock the
“evangelical” traditions for weakening God’s grace by suggesting that we can
choose Jesus, then we also have to admit that just as often we weaken God’s
saving power by suggesting that God isn’t worthy of being feared. You can’t
have a saving God without a God capable of causing havoc. Sometimes
our beliefs are only Micah 6:8
theology: Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God. We find the
verses to support our agenda, even though the larger picture is much more interesting.
In this case, if we obsess over doing justice, loving kindness, and walking
humbly with God, but do not care to understand the ultimate reason we do those
things, then we have no ground on which to stand when we fail because of our
own selfish ambitions, happenstance, or even a physical inability to do those
things any longer.
We don’t believe
in Micah 6:8. We believe in God, which is much tougher, because God refuses to
be pinned down. The very reason we arrive at Micah 6:8 is because the prophet has
already admitted a couple of verses earlier that nothing good will suffice when
we come before the Lord. Doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly
with God are simply the best ways we have left to show our gratitude to a God
who is worthy of fear. This also happens to be why Jesus gives that famous
remark: “Be perfect like your Father in heaven is perfect” (Mt 5:48). It’s
because we cannot be perfect that Jesus challenges us to be. If we could do it,
then we would not need him in the first place. It’s only because we can’t do it
that we are challenged to do so, just as it’s only because we can’t ever fully
do justice, or love kindness, or walk humbly with God that Micah leaves us with
that as the only offering befitting our God.
If we’re going to
call out the biblical fundamentalists as hypocrites for picking and choosing
the verses they want to follow, we have to do the same for ourselves, and too
often we have become a church that is about serving our neighbors without an
appreciation that we are doing this as the only offering befitting a God who is
worthy of fear. This is a significant problem for us when it comes to our
credibility in a world that loves to point out hypocrites. Justice on its own
is relative, kindness on its own is not lasting, and humility on its own is
admirable, but all of these traits beg for a first-cause. They require a God
worthy of fear and love to give them staying power.
If you like Micah
6:8, that’s great, but like it because it is the effect and not the cause. Like
it because your love of God so moves you to serve people who are in need. And,
lastly but most importantly of all, like it because fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and fear of
the Lord drives us to Jesus, because, as Peter so famously said, “Lord, to whom
can we go?” (John 6:68).
We live in a world
that leaves us out in the cold, ultimately asking, “Where can we go?” And sure
there are wonderful people out in the world who serve: they do justice, they
love kindness, they live humble lives, but do they do that for the joy of
justice, kindness, and humility alone? Or do they do it because they know
something else? Because this God brought them so far by faith that now they
have only one response that can begin to show their love in return: Do justice,
love kindness, walk humbly with God? Not because it will save us. Not because we
will do it perfectly or even appropriately. But because, at the end of the day,
we fear and love this God so much that it is all that is left for us to do. It
is the only offering we have left.
No comments:
Post a Comment