Doing Justice, Loving Kindness, Walking Humbly

Lay preacher, Will Harron (he/him)

by lay preacher, Will Harron

​God has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the LORD require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
Good morning Saints!
​
What a banquet of biblical texts to feast on this morning! We have Matthew’s beatitudes in the Gospel, a barn-burning passage from Micah, and sandwiched between is a passage from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians that I think is particularly applicable to our times.

What does it mean to walk humbly with God? What does it mean for God to thwart the wisdom of the wise? What does it mean for the meek to inherit the Earth? 

I think this morning’s set of readings is a gift. We can hear the various voices that make up our Scriptures, written and redacted across centuries and coming down to us through millenia of tradition, resonate in common themes. In each age that these scriptures were composed, they were written to a community that existed amidst great, world-spanning empires that claimed a religious mandate and that upheld a hierarchy of power, privilege, and wealth by virtue of overawing military and police power. 

Matthew’s Gospel and Paul’s Epistles are composed in the midst of the dominating Roman empire, while Micah is writing in a Biblical context where ever-larger empires are swallowing up smaller communities and turning them towards new and shocking hierarchies and oppressions.

In each of those ages, the communities that first received these scriptures heard a message that said, “imperial power, domineering wealth, and implacable state violence are not how God calls us to engage in community with one another. Those templates of our societies do not reflect the image of God; the people and ways of being that our society treats as dishonorable and contemptible are in fact the places where God is and where God meets us.

This is a revolutionary message in every age – revolutionary in that it inverts, rotates, the ordering of society, so that what was previously on the bottom is instead elevated and honored. 

And I think this message remains especially relevant to us now. 
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I want dig into Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, our second reading today. This is a letter written by Paul to a community of Christ-followers in Greece. This community, like many communities, is facing conflict and division. Among other issues, it turns out that the social division between wealthy members and poorer members has grown to the point that their Communion - for these Christ-followers, a full meal - has been impaired. Paul has baptized several members of this community, and he is writing to help them to work their way through these conflicts. This isn’t his first letter to them, although it is the first of two that were later shared widely.

In his letter he gives instructions on how to be a community following Jesus, he develops a theology of love and spiritual gifts, and he gives us some of our earliest descriptions of the Holy Eucharist as it was practiced in the decades after Jesus’s ascension. And today’s passage from the first chapter introduces a framing that Paul will develop throughout the letter.

This letter was so well beloved by the communities of Christ-followers that they shared it among themselves, and it was variously copied, redacted, and read and prayed over until it made its way into the scriptural canon, our Bible. 

A sidenote that is relevant - While there were some politics involved in the formation of the canon of scripture, for the very most part what has passed down to us passed down not because it was the will of emperors and kings, but because it was the spiritual food of the vast majority of Christ-followers in the Mediterranean world. Frankly, the kings and emperors would have removed passages like today’s if they could have. The fact that these anti-imperial passages have pride of place in the text is a sign that Paul’s words struck a chord with his hearers - with his congregations - and the powers that be had to follow the crowds.

And our passage today highlights just how countercultural our scriptures can be. I find it hard sometimes to read and fully digest how world-changing these words can be. Centuries of Christian hegemony can make these feel like dead words. But imagine hearing this for the first time: 
But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.

Imagine you are part of a community where there are powerful people, acting with impunity, declaring that people with less political, social, and economic power have no standing; that they can be taken away from their homes, killed, tortured, their families broken up, and all at the whims of those in power. 

Imagine you are a part of a society where great intellectual, legal, and philosophical apparatuses are put to the service of such powers, to justify the exceptional goodness and beauty and inevitability of those powers. 
Imagine you are part of a society where wealth and status and privilege are used to boast, to create a culture that says some people are valuable and others are low and despised.

Imagine. Ancient Corinth, and the ancient Roman empire, was one such society. Paul is telling the Corinthians that no matter how much the Empire says “this is how the world is, ought to be, and always will be, and this is how God wants it,” that is not true. 

Instead - in the Corinthian church, no matter whether one entered a rich person or poor person, a wise person or a foolish person, a person with power and privilege or a person without, they are all made equal before God, and all receive new life - together- through Christ. Rich and poor, free and slave, men, women, everyone alike. 
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I don’t think I have to underscore that we are engaged in trying times as a local, regional, national and world community. The polycrises of authoritarian governance, environmental degradation, racial and gendered and sexuality-based oppression, and hypercapitalism are braided together to create an apparatus that says some people are more worthy than others, some people have dignity while others do not, some people can be kidnapped on the streets while others can kidnap with impunity; some people can be killed while others can kill, and that this is the natural outcome of the unfolding of the universe, this is good, this is right.

Woe to that.

Amidst that demonic babel that says might is right, Paul points instead to the weak; Paul points to the foolish, Paul points to the low and despised, and says this is what God chooses. 

In the context of his letter, Paul is doing a rhetorical trick to say, despite your differences, Corinthians, you are one together; being one together does not erase your distinctiveness but puts it level within Christ. 

In the context of the wider Scriptural canon, Paul is echoing the voices of prophets, poets, and evangelists. 

The gift of today’s readings is that we can hear Paul proclaim God choosing the weak, the foolish, and the low and despised just as we hear Jesus proclaim that the meek will inherit the world, the poor will receive the kingdom of Heaven, and those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will get their fill of it. 

And the gift of today’s readings is that we can also hear the Prophet Micah remind his hearers that they were once slaves in Egypt, delivered by God and yet they have grown rich from oppression - but what God demands is not an awesome sacrifice but to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God. Or, to quote Leviticus, chapter 19 verse 18, to love your neighbor as yourself. 

Our scriptures rhyme, echoing across centuries, book by book, because in every age the prophets and poets who listen to God hear God telling us that the ways of power, of empire, of oppression, are not where God is; that these powers and principalities are not God and are not eternal; and that what God demands is justice, is love, is that humility that recognizes that we are all equally made in the image of God and that our fundamental dignity cannot be elevated greater than that.
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Every time that word is preached, it gathers people, it opens up new possibilities, and it changes the world, because God is in it. United in our love, united in God, we are a witness and a challenge. Doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly, our presence proves that the way of empire is not the only way, despite the wise and powerful who declare otherwise, and in the presence of our witness, in the presence of God, the thrones of the powerful will tremble.          
         
    Amen.

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