Post these

Post These

Texts: Micah 6:1-8; Matthew 5:1-9

(Gary W. Charles, Cove Presbyterian Church, Covesville, VA 1-29-2017)

Wherever I have lived, I have run into the same argument. One group insists that a large version of the Ten Commandments be displayed in the state Capitol. Meanwhile, another group rises up in a fury to oppose the idea as a clear violation of the constitutional separation of church and state.  

Over the years, I have engaged in plenty church-state arguments, but I have always felt that this was a bit misguided. I am a fan of the wisdom gleaned in the Ten Commandments, but if someone were to ask me what biblical texts need the most public display, I would recommend the two texts read today – the beatitudes of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel and the beatitudes of Micah 6:8. I would never fight to post them on the walls of a public building, but I would gladly insist that all who appeal to God in political and public discourse appeal to the God who is revealed in Micah 6 and Matthew 5.

The beatitudes of Micah and Jesus both address one of the world’s oldest questions:  “What does God expect of us?” The older I get, the more I am amazed at how many people seem dead certain that they know the exact answer to that profound question. God thinks this, some tell me. God thinks that, others say.

Just shy of 3,000 years ago, after noting an absurd listing of things that people confuse with God’s will, the young prophet Micah said, “Let me make it simple for you.” “God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”

Micah’s beatitudes – do justice, love mercy, walk in humility with God – along with Jesus’ beatitudes are blessings that still wear well in public and in private life today. About these beatitudes, Andrew Foster Connors says it well. They are where “faith finds its legs.”

Take care, though, because like any short, pithy sayings that would fit on a T-shirt or on a placard or inside a fortune cookie, Micah’s beatitudes and later, the beatitudes of Jesus, are easily subject to distortion. I can think of no greater distortion of Micah and Jesus’ beatific words than what happened at the Elmina Castle in Ghana in the 19^th century.

Built as a trading post by the Portuguese, merchants came from across the

globe to the Elmina Castle to buy and sell gold, silver, and cocoa. By far, the most valuable commodity to be traded, though, was slaves. Ironically and sadly, during the time when the castle was held by the Dutch, it was occupied not only by soldiers, a governor, and human chattel below, but also by a church above. A Dutch Reformed sanctuary was maintained on the upper floor of one part of the castle. 

On the bottom floor of this part of the castle were four slave dungeons. Imagine a classroom designed to hold fifty students, their desks, the teacher's desk, and other classroom materials. Instead of fifty students, packed into the room, one hundred and fifty women, barely clothed, if clothed at all, were forced to subsist in their own waste and fed only enough to keep them alive, so they would never gain the necessary strength to fight back.

Directly above this room, with only a single layer of construction between, was the room used by the Dutch as the sanctuary to worship God. I can imagine the preacher in the Dutch sanctuary above reading Micah 6:8 – “love justice, do mercy, walk in humility with God” – while below women were being shoved through the Door of No Return onto ships that would transport them into slavery in South America, the Caribbean, and North America.

Micah’s beatitudes were never intended to be pietistic platitudes to be spoken in worship and then ignored in our public life. These words are our ministry marching orders, where “faith finds its legs.” We do not help others because we hope that God might take note of our beneficence and shower down blessings upon us. We help, says Micah 6, because, though never deserving, you and I always walk in the beneficence of God.

As Jesus begins his beatitudes, he says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” In his book, Credo, William Sloane Coffin writes: “It is ironic to think of the number of people in this country who pray for the poor and needy on Sunday and spend the rest of the week complaining that the government is doing something to help them.”  For the last twelve years in Atlanta, I worked with poor families, many without shelter, who had to spend long hours to receive minimal public assistance. Meanwhile, they would listen to those with more than they need lament dollars being thrown at those who could help themselves, these well to do folks never once lamenting the countless and costly ways that the rich in our society can legally game the system. “The poor in spirit,” says Jesus, care for the poor with comment and without complaint.

When Jesus blesses peacemakers, he is not spinning language to suggest that those who have the most guns or the most drones and who torture the most often get to call themselves “peacemakers.” Jesus knows that most Roman emperors referred to themselves as “peacemakers.” No, “peacemakers,” for Jesus, are those who renounce violence as the weak deceiver and divider that it is, are those who eschew every form of violence within families and within the family of nations, who welcome refugees seeking asylum from any nation, who believe passionately that Micah was not fantasizing when he imagined and worked for the day when “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (Micah 4:3).       

 Carol Dempsey takes Micah’s beatitudes to a level not even anticipated by the ancient prophet when she writes:  “Given the scientific fact that all of creation is a part of one unified web of life, the practice of justice and love now needs to embrace both human and nonhuman life, and the humble walk with God is a walk of holy reverence and awe across the planet, with people being attuned to and learning from the divine Spirit that pulsates at the heart of all.” Just as I argued last week that words matter, so Carol would argue that “creation matters” and therefore “blessed are” those who tend to our fragile creation. Helping people and caring for creation, however it is done, by whomever it is done, and by whatever cost it takes, is at the heart of Micah’s and Matthew’s beatitudes.

Micah and Jesus are both realists. They warn that living into and out of the beatitudes will not likely win us gold stars, pats on the back, or great public approval ratings. Believers in God who insist on justice and mercy for all had better be willing to pay the price for such insistence. Tom Long writes, “Those who benefit from the weakness of others do not want the world to be compassionate. Much money and power are invested in maintaining injustice. If every wage were fair, if every person were honored as a child of God, if every human being were safe from exploitation, many would lose their grip on status, self-gratification, and affluence” (Tom Long, Matthew, Westminster Bible Companion).

When you and I live out Micah’s and Jesus’ beatitudes in and beyond the church, we not only avoid recreating the horrors of places like the Elmina Castle, we offer the world the most powerful public display of God’s just, merciful, and humble grace, a display that is far more powerful than any tablets ever posted in any public building.

The poet Mary Oliver opens a new collection of her poetry with “I Go Down to the Shore”:

I go down to the shore in the morning

and depending on the hour the waves

are rolling in or moving out, I say, oh, I am miserable,

what shall –

what should I do? And the sea says in its lovely voice:

Excuse me, I have work to do.

For those who follow Jesus and listen to Micah, the question is never “What shall/what should I do?” Those who would follow Jesus know the answer to that question. As followers of the Blessed One, we can tell the world in our own lovely voices:  “Excuse me, I have work to do.”

Excuse me, Cove Presbyterian Church, we have work to do – justice work, merciful work – and if you take Jesus seriously, all of it is blessed work, blessed work, indeed.

AMEN