Micah 6.8 – what do I lack?

So I was reading Micah this morning and actually I’m just through chapter 1 this go-round… but whenever I hear Micah, of course Micah 6.8 comes to mind… its probably the most famous verse in Micah.

⁸ He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.

I think this verse encompasses simultaneously what is so interesting about the Christian faith… it encompasses so much.  Justice and mercy do not always go hand in hand.  In fact, God is a God of wrath (where justice might come from) and love (where mercy comes from).  But they don’t always fit, in fact, sometimes they clash.  But perhaps they don’t clash (though in practice sometimes they do).  But instead they make God complete.  Perfection in the bible is often not “lack of flaws” as we prefer to look at it today, but it is completeness.

When I look at my own life and this verse, I think the first part sticks out to me the most:  act justly.  This is of course, because of my own life and my own dissatisfaction with church that focused mostly on the mercy and love part most of my life (not just CBC, but the church in general).  Thus, I emphasize the act justly part.  This has done wonders and done harm to my own life.  For me, it opened up brand new possibilities in my faith.  The application became obvious, mission more clear.  I saw, like so many before me and after me, that God cared not just for the soul, but the human race as well.  It could not be ignored.

And I preached Micah 6.8… or at least Micah 6.8 up to the end of “justly”.  In reflecting, I think I tended to ignore the love mercy and walk humbly.  Not entirely of course, but it fell by the wayside.  And this became the danger.  My own bitterness towards those who were much more conservative and narrow in their doctrine, those who called me a heretic, those who told me to change, those who told me social justice was wrong… well, I began to hate them.  And there is a part of me that still does.  Their worship became empty in my eyes, echoing the Old Testament and the empty singing of the Israelites when God wanted them to shape up their lives in terms of loving their neighbor.  And I began to see that there was a great divide in Christianity.  I thought because I was upset about it I was in the middle (and theologically I am… which is great doctrine wise), but what I didn’t realize was that my own wounds caused me to take sides.  And I didn’t have mercy in my own heart and I didn’t have any humility… because of course, no one is right but me.

But in viewing that, I realized that I’ve lacked any one (or more or all) of these at one point… so I reflected on just having one, but not the others… in a sense, not being complete according to the scripture.

Just acting justly: The paragraph above describes acting justly, but without mercy or humility.  But I’ll go a bit deeper.  Justice without mercy and humility is simply activism.  Sure, God commands us to do it, but if we’re simply helping the poor because its the right thing to do, we’re just nice people.  If there is no true compassion and mercy, we will never communicate through ourselves the love that God’s given to us.  The message of God’s love won’t fully get there.  Additionally, our other relationships take a hit.  We become proud and obstinate and set in our ways (Social Justice Fundamentalism anyone?) thinking that all of other non-justice Christian friends are lesser believers.  And sure, if they lack it, they’re missing something, but it does not make us better Christians… because without the other, we lack something dear.  In missing humility, we place all other things below us.  Our hearts become hard and repentence…. for almost anything… becomes second priority.  We might think that we’re doing good in the world, so that’ll make up for repentence!  But that’s just following the law and trying to earn our way into heaven.  Atoning for ourselves while inside, we are hard, angry, bitter.

Just loving mercy:  This is the place where perhaps a lot of us come from.  We love the idea of God’s love.  We’re joyful and we love singing and praising.  God has saved us from our sins.  We find acceptance where there was rejection.  We find love where there was hate.  And that’s a good thing!  We need that.  If we manage humility in there, there can be some really good repentence!  But if we only see that, and we aren’t secure in the rest of scripture, we may start fearing other parts of God’s character.  This is exactly what happened in the 20th century with the Christian fundamentalist movement.  Seeing the modernists adopting social stances caused the Fundementalists to leave that world behind even though Christianity had a rich recent history of social reform.  The world could not be saved therefore we must withdraw, that was the attitude.  And thus Christianity for a good 50 years lacked the vital component of the renewal and redemption of the physical world.

This of course led to the emphasis on the soul and inner piety.  Nothing wrong with those, but as Micah 6.8 points out, it does not make us complete.  Inner piety and the mercy of God in our own life tied with American individualism creates a Christian life that is only focused on the self.  I think it ties into the damn American ideal of “you are special” and “you can do anything you want”.  God loves us just the way we are, but if we lack humility and the justice aspect that calls for life change, we simply see who we are and say “God loves me” (which he does!) but leave it at that.  We haven’t taken the next step.  Repentence lacks because we don’t have the humility to say that I’m screwed up and I want to change that.  Our lack of compassion for others (cause we’re focused on that touchy feely worshippy churchy feeling every sunday) causes not only to forget a vital part of the Christian life (ie activism, social justice, and compassion), but it makes us hate, fear, and/or question our brothers and sisters who are involved in those areas.  Oh, they’re not holy enough.  They don’t love church enough.  They aren’t joyful people.  They aren’t happy people.  And sometimes they’re not those things for the wrong reasons to be sure.  But each side, if not complete, lacks the other…  And forgiveness and reconciliation never come for either side.

Just walking humbly with God:  I’m honestly not sure what this looks like cause no one I know is ultimately that humble including myself.  But lacking mercy and justice just can’t be good.  I suppose if one does not accept God’s mercy and one does not do any good in one’s life (justly), than perhaps just having humility is really a lie that is that we have low self-esteem?  And I’ve been here.  So much so that I was proud that I was humble…. yeah…. you know where that leads…  And here, we can do one of two things.  Our false sense of humility causes us to despise anyone else who can never admit their faults.  We become bitter and resentful that no one is as good as us.  OR we are so “humble” that we never can accept God’s mercy… because we can never atone enough.  But the truth of the gospel is that God has atoned for us.  Yes, we still mess up and we have to be humble about that, but one is never beyond hope.  We need not think that God has forgotten about us (even when we can’t hear him or feel that He’s there).  Mercy ought to inspire us to move forward, rather than be stuck in our rut (slow process of course, but we can’t remain stagnant… if that’s the case, we are actually hard hearted and unwilling to let mercy into our lives…).  And justice is the perfect place to do good in the world and that honestly can give us a good feeling (well done good and faithful servant?).  Do what God loves, accept mercy, and give it, especially for oneself.

We must let God be God.  We too often just keep him in one of these boxes and how it affects our lives.  The Bible is clear that all of these parts are part of him and part of who we are called to be.  Have we limited God to one thing?  Have we limited ourselves to one thing.  The question that remains for us is which of these do I lack?  Do I have an untransformable and unrepentant and hard heart?  Do I think that I am above all other Christians (or… maybe even one or two)?  Do I strive to my own heart, but care little about others and their plights?  Maybe you lack two… or all 3?  Know that you are not beyond hope.  Know that God can transform us if we just open ourselves to him, to others, to forgiveness, to saying what we need to say, to apologizing, to making amends with others, to our own brokenness and hate…  I’ve got a lot of that boiling inside of me right now and it feels like crap…  today I just want to hide under my covers and go to sleep cause that’s where I can escape.  But I have to wake up sometime and follow Christ.  I need repentence in my own life from any one of these at any given time.  God have mercy.

Advertisement