‘With what shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt-offerings,
with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with tens of thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?’
He 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?
It seems to me that one of the great temptations of life is to be able to do whatever we want whenever we want—there’s some mystique out there that doing whatever and whenever is the peak of human achievement, its how you know when you’ve arrived, its how you know you’ve really achieved something, it’s really what life is meant for, what life is all all about. Think here of a teenager—perhaps you, though I certainly wouldn’t want to assume anything—sitting in their room with their recently slammed door, texting a friend “I just can’t wait to do what I want, when I want.” Imagine an office staff grumpy with their boss who just imposed a different time for work to start with clear requirements on showing up on the first day when the boss is out of town for vacation. Recall the days of being a student in school on the days when you had a sub —thinking that for that day the rules would be lifted or at the very least relaxed. It’s kind of nice to not have rules and restrictions and requirements isn’t it? Well, it is until it isn’t.
This feeling of being free and unbounded only last so long. It is one of the great temptations of life because we think we want it but we really don’t. Human beings—in a school or in an organization and in all of life—actually thrive more when we know the boundaries. I keep imagining taking my kid for the first time to the bowling alley when he was pretty little, maybe 2 or 3. The only way for him to achieve success in that sense is to have the bumpers up down the alley. I shouldn’t attribute that to his age, I suppose, many adults are like that too. Requirements provide clarity, rules help us discern the unknown, guidelines helps us to navigate a path that on which the next steps aren’t known. It would be mass chaos to drive with no speed limits or lane markers.
The passage from the prophet Micah that I read at the beginning of this reflection is one of those well-known bits of scripture that many have memorized. And, if you do, it is likely that you have memorized “Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly”—those simple, clear, almost rhythmic phrases act as sort of a mantra, easily repeated to ourselves or to the world. Or, easily put on a bumper sticker, a poster, or an image for social media. Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly. What perhaps you do not have memorized or what we rarely see emphasized or depicted on any sign or art is exactly what those three directions are and where they come from. The question that brings them about is a a sort of question that Micah answers himself: what does the Lord require of you? What does the Lord require of you? Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly are not just mantras to be repeated to help us feel good or pretty images to post and quote and re-use whenever we can—though that isn’t of course a bad thing. Instead, though, these are requirements, requirements for people who seek to follow the way of God more fully. And the great paradox of it all is that in living these requirements in a big, deep way—we find that we are not bound up and held down and prevented form life. instead, we find a full, rich, abundant life in God.
I have been reminded a good deal of that paradox in these last months as we’ve watched how the United States as dealt with—or not dealt with—the COVID pandemic, when we’ve failed to examine our own consciences and privileges for racial prejudice, when we’ve not considered how we impact the environment, when we’ve failed to bother to care to look at how policies and practices we support and enable reject the poor and forgotten. We have done all of this, as individuals and as a whole, in the name of our individual freedoms—basically, because we can. It is precisely that approach that has been upheld as the true marker of success and achievement and value in the United States in these past months and certainly much longer. Personal freedom has been the guiding light of all that we are to do in these days and that is a treacherous road.
But, as the Presbyterian pastor Alan Brehm says, “when we live for ourselves and our own selfish desires, when we treat others as a means to attain only what we want from them, and when we place ourselves on the throne of our lives, we become slaves to our selfishness, and lose the chance for true freedom and happiness in life.” You see, to live guided by the idea of personal freedom rejects the existence, the humanity, the thriving of any other person around. We do not live in silos, we do not walk this earth alone.
That seems like an obvious statement and yet unless and until we begin to see all of the ways that we live and move and have our being in this world as bound up in one another, in all of our neighbors we will not fully live into Micah’s call and God’s vision for this world. Unless and until we examine the prejudices and privileges we carry (known and unknown), the ways our actions and choices enact violence and injustice most often against the poor and forgotten, and consider the myriad other ways all that we do and have and are is bound up in each other, we cannot fully know the abundant life God has in mind for all of God’s people. Though it seems counterintuitive or paradoxical and certainly antithetical to the values of our world we are not truly free, we do not experience perfect freedom until our neighbors do too. The very idea of personal freedoms holds no water. In fact, I’d argue, from a Christian perspective there is no such thing as personal freedom, for freedom is only freedom if it enables the thriving and fullness of life for each and everyone one of God’s beloved.
And so, the requirements that God has that Micah lays out—do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with God—aren’t means by which we are held back or bound up or tied down. They are the exact prescription for how each of us is set free—and how each of our neighbors are too. In this, they become not just a nice thing to do but they very task of each and every person of faith in each and every moment of life. Because it is enacting and enabling justice and kindness and humility that we join God’s project of redeeming, healing, renewing this earth.
The English poet William Blake wrote this: “I sought my soul, but my soul, I could not see. I sought my God, but my God alluded me. I sought my neighbor and found all three.”
Dear friends, beloved in Christ: these next days—these next hours, really—feel particularly rife with anxiety and worry. Uncertainty for the future is higher than usual and it seems as though the next step on our path is not known. In these days and in that kind of a world, it is all too tempting and all too easy to run to pettiness and oneupmanship and spite. I invite you to a different way and I believe it is the way that God invites each of us to. Seek your neighbor—for there you will find not only them but God and your own soul too. There you will find a free you’ve not known.
It seems to me that knowing what the Lord requires of us does not make it any easier to actually do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly. In fact, any effort we might want to put into that in these days sometimes feels down right futile. Why bother, our cynical minds might start to say—the backwards ways of our world will win anyway. I want to leave you on this day with an exhortation to dig deep. Deep in your soul is a hope and a love and a mercy beyond measure grounded in your identity as God’s beloved. The writer Marilynne Robinson talks about, “that reservoir of goodness, beyond, and of another kind, that we are able to do each other in the ordinary cause of things.”
To continue to hope, to continue to dig deep, to continue to seek to tap into that reservoir of goodness in each of our souls is a profound act of revolution, of doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly in these days. It is tough work my friends and some days it doesn’t seem worth it but you and I are exactly who God has called in this moment to do this work. We are the ones in your corner of the Kingdom wherever you are who are sent forth in this very moment to this. It need not be a big and marvelous act, after all Robinson says we can do this “in the ordinary cause of things.”
My prayer for you in these days is that you are able to find that well of goodness and hope and justice and mercy in you, that you might share that with your neighbors, and that you might live more and more of your life from this place. My prayer for you is that you might know yourself, even as the changes and chances of this life seem innumerable, that you might know yourself to be more beloved of God that you can possibly ask or even imagine. And, my prayer for you is that you might give yourself to a new kind of freedom, true freedom found in following God’s own requirements for God’s people, and a way of life that does justice, loves mercy, and walks humbly with God that this creation and each one in it might know of a love that believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, and never ends.