[Outside the sanctuary] Justice, O God! Justice! We must have your justice! And righteousness! Without that we are lost! Oh, Lord God, the Temple and the city – what I see there sickens me. That ripe and rotten ritual, those empty gestures, those paid and padded priests! O God, righteousness! It must come; it must. Without righteousness we are lost!
[Entering the sanctuary, speaking toward the front as if to an elevated and distant God] Who is a God like you? Who indeed? You brought us out of slavery. You struck down Pharaoh’s oppressive hand. You took us through the deep waters. You led us through the wilderness. You gave us leaders with integrity. You brought us to this fair and pleasant land. O God, our God, who is a God like you?
The nations have their gods, but we have You, and we must walk in the name of Yahweh, your name, revealed to Moses and written on our hearts for generations. Who is a God like You, who chose us out of all the nations to be yours, who promised our father Abraham to make of us a people whose numbers are like the sands of the sea, who covenanted with us never to fail us or forsake us. Who is a God like you?
Ah, but there is the issue, isn’t it? You covenanted with us. You told us through your servants Moses and Joshua and Gideon and Samuel that we were to live in faithfulness to you. You gave us ten commanding words by which we were to live. You told us from the beginning that we were to have no other god but you. You warned us to stay far away from killing and from adultery and from theft and covetousness. You urged us to remember the Sabbath and to keep it separate. You gave us the conditions of the covenant. But what have we done with them? What have we done?!
Oh, who is a God like you? For now my eyes see your judgment coming on us. I have been to the frontier and have seen the Assyrian army camped and waiting to pounce, just as they have already swarmed over Tyre and Askelon, Ekron, even Egypt. Now my ears have heard your judgment, for the noise of the Assyrian camp rises as a murmur out of the valley, and the name of Sennacherib is whispered on every lip. O, Lord God, the Assyrians, the Assyrians! Are they to be your instruments of judgment on Judah as they were on Israel? Oh, who is a God like you, bringing destruction even on what you have made?!
[Pausing, turning toward the congregation]. People of God, hear me! Hear me before it is too late! For though the enemy is only a few miles away, we may yet turn and be saved. You must know – you and your king, Hezekiah, and all the leaders of Judah – you must know the heart of your God. You must understand His ways. And you must turn from the ripe ritual of rotten religion and must receive redemptive righteousness. Without this there is no hope. Hear me, people of God; hear me. Turn from the ripe ritual of rotten religion and receive redemptive righteousness. For that is the word that has come to me, Micah of Moresheth; that is the word I must preach to you today.
[Pausing, quizzical look]. Ah, you want to know who Micah is? Who is this aged bag of wind that he should invade the quiet of this place? How dare he mess with the satisfying system we have inherited? And why does he not just go preach about the usual things, like alcohol and drugs, things we already agree we are against? Who, you ask, is this preacher?
I
I am Micah. I come from the village of Moresheth, near the city of Gath. I am from that very region where the armies of Assyria have in recent months been so devastating. In my town we have heard of stealthy sentinels from Sennacherib’s legions, lurking in the corners to spy out our defenses. And in my town we have seen Hezekiah’s soldiers preparing for battle – ah, but what preparation they make! They gamble at the gates. They help themselves to ripe fruit from our marketplace. They push around the lame and the elderly who cannot defend themselves. And, worse than that, they line up outside certain houses, known to be the lairs of prostitutes. And if one of them is caught in a crime and is brought to the judge, well, no problem! A little bribe and the crime goes away. And then, when they have done all that, these soldiers of the King of Judah, these sons of the covenant made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – they offer little cakes to the image of Astarte and they run through a rippling ritual to Baal, the god of our ancient Philistine foes. Who do they think they are, that they can wipe away with arrogant hands all that God has said we must do? Who do they think they are, that they will risk the wrath of God after all that has happened?
For do you not know that twenty years ago, Sargon, then the Assyrian king, took down the Kingdom of Israel, our kinsmen, and captured Samaria, its capital? Do you not know that Israel, sharing with us in Judah the covenant of God, had wandered away from God in exactly the same way we have strayed? Israel’s kings came to the throne, one by one, in blood, and each died a horrible death. You might have supposed that Israel would learn and return, but she did not. You might have hoped that Israel would have listened to her powerful prophets, Amos and Hosea, who spoke so eloquently of God’s judgment; but she did not. And so today Israel is no more. Israel has disappeared from the map, and is merely an outpost of the Empire centered in Nineveh.
I do not know why Judah has not yet fallen. These Assyrians are so powerful. Even today their king says he has taken 46 of our towns and has deported more than 200,000 of our people. Sennacherib brags of having surrounded Jerusalem and of holding King Hezekiah like a caged bird. We should have been destroyed before now, but we are not yet gone. Perhaps it is only because our God promised to the line of David a special protection. Perhaps it is because our God loves the city of Jerusalem and the Temple built by Solomon above all other places on earth – and yet I know that we cannot last. I know that we must fall. And I know that when it happens, it will not be simply that the Assyrian host is too strong for us; it will be because we, the men and women of Judah, called together by the will of God, have abandoned the covenant and do not do what our God has commanded. When the end comes, as surely it must, we will have only ourselves to blame.
Hear me, people of God! Hear me! For who is a God like our God?!
II
You see, my parents must have felt that through me God would speak to you, for when I was born they gave me this name, Micah. It means, “Who is a God like Yahweh?” It suggests the shock and awe that attaches to the God of the covenant. May I tell you more of my story, that you may understand my words today?
I am a poor man, from a rural village. Moresheth, as I have said, is a little place near the ancient Philistine town of Gath. We farm there, and little else. But from time to time our family would trudge the twenty miles to the great city of Jerusalem and to the Temple there, bringing with us animals and grain for the sacrifices. Along with crowds of others, we would wend our way through jammed streets, seeing the great houses of the wealthy, smelling the animals being led to the altars, feeling the pulse of excitement.
But for me there was excitement in something else, or rather in someone else. For at the Temple there was a great preacher, an extraordinary man, the prophet Isaiah. A member of the royal court, a part of the establishment, and yet what a message Isaiah brought! I can still hear his thunderous voice describing what he saw back in the year that King Uzziah died, “Holy, holy, holy, cherubim and seraphim bowing down before Thee.” And, most of all, I heard this great prophet, on the very porch of the Temple, crying out, in the Lord’s name, “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices, says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings … trample my courts no more … cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” Isaiah cried out against everything going on in that Temple. He scorned its ripe and rotten rituals and called for righteousness. But Isaiah’s words were ignored by most of those who passed by into the Temple courts; he was just laughed off. As for me, for Micah of Moresheth, they rang true. There was power in those words. There was in them the very word of God Himself.
[Turning forward again] O, who is a God like you? Who will reach into the royal court and ask Isaiah to go and tell a people who do not want to hear what they must hear. And who will reach into a small village and ask me, Micah, a nobody, to speak that message and even to penetrate the heart of King Hezekiah. Who is a God like you, who calls on a poor penniless preacher to prophesy with power against the potentates and the plutocrats? But you have called, and I will preach.
III
A
[Turning back to the congregation] Men and women, God requires of us first that we do justice. That we DO justice, not just sing about it, not just mouth the words. God requires that we DO justice. The capital city is not far away. There officials take bribes and work out plans to defraud the public. There, as in your town, wealthy lenders set up poor people with loans they know they cannot pay, so that when their victims fail, as they always do, the rich can become richer and the powerful more powerful.
I have seen people actually plan – lying on their beds and scheming all night long – so that when the morning comes they can act swiftly and evict a poor family before they even have a chance to defend themselves. I have seen, right here in this town, those who name the name of the Lord, and who have only a few days before bowed their heads in worship, but who leave the sanctuary and lie to one another. They spout hostilities, they speak blasphemies about our God. I know that even among His own there is a hypocrisy that God will not tolerate. What does our God require? That we do justice.
Anything else is but a ripe ritual that will go rotten. Anything less than integrity is but meaningless religious irrelevance. If we do not do justice, we may as well make ourselves as bald as the eagle, grieving what we shall lose. For injustice God rejects. Injustice God judges.
And yet, in my heart, I also know that God wants to forgive and to restore. Somehow, I know that God will bring redemptive righteousness to us. I do not understand how it will be. I only know that indeed it will be. Redemptive righteousness, from God Himself.
B
There is something else. Not only does our God require that we do justice; He also requires that we love kindness, that we invest in mercy. Our God requires that we learn how to give and to forgive, even when we have been wronged.
Is it not true that we are a stiff-necked and stubborn people? We are quick to judge, quick to punish, quick to write off others who are not as we are. We troop to our Temple to offer sacrifices to the God who brought our ancestors out of Egypt, but forget that we who were once foreigners in that land are to care for the strangers in our midst. We hurry to Jerusalem to buy, so we think, the forgiveness of our God for all our missteps; but let someone get in our way, and we gloat over the chance to throw stones.
Friends, I am persuaded that when we bring our gifts to the altar and have not dealt with what we have against our brother, our gifts are nothing before God. I am convinced that when we sacrifice some poor innocent creature in an attempt to gain God’s favor, but have not let go of the anger we feel toward our sister, then our sacrifices are vain and empty. God requires mercy and kindness; anything else is a ripe ritual, ruined and rotten. Though they do not believe it they sing it in the Temple, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise.”
Again, in my heart of hearts, I know that the day will come when God will teach us the ways of peace and not of war. I do not yet fully see how or when this will happen, but I know that someday we will take our very swords from their scabbards and the smiths will turn them into plows. Someday we will lift the spear from its place of honor on a castle wall and give it to the gardener to prune the plants and grow food. Somehow, someday.
O, who is a God like you? Hear me, O my people!
C
And more, and more. God requires that we do justice; God insists that we be a people of mercy; and God asks one thing more, one simple thing – that we walk humbly with Him. That we turn our hearts toward Him, obeying Him, trusting Him, allowing Him to shape us and guide us. So simple a thing, and yet so troublesome.
For, my people, hear me. Hear me. I am but a humble prophet, who stands outside the religious establishment and who knows only one thing. I know that God loves us and wants the best for us. I know that God must judge sin; He is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity, and cannot overlook our wanderings. But He loves us, and He wants us to be in fellowship with Him.
Yet what have we done? What HAVE we done? We have not only broken His commandments for justice; we have not only ignored His care for the poor and the wandering; we have gone, each of us, into our own ways, like lost sheep. We have turned, everyone of us, into his own way. We have run after other gods, expecting power from sources where there is no power. We have hurried after wealth, forgetting that wealth evaporates overnight. We have decided to take control of our own lives, not acknowledging that He and He alone is Lord. It is He that has made us and not we ourselves, but we are prone to wander.
And so judgment. Judgment! Whether it will be Sennacherib’s Assyrians or some other empire, I know not. Whether it will be tomorrow or in a hundred years I cannot tell. But it will be painful! It will be shameful! So shameful! Tell it not in the streets of Tell-town; hide it in the dusty lanes of Dust-village. Gather this news in the shops of Gaithersburg and rock the heart of Rockville. For this is the word and the will of our God. Judgment! Who is a God like Him?
IV
[Turning to the front] And yet … and yet … Lord, is there more? Is there a word of hope? You have a controversy with your people, yes. You hate the ripe ritual that smells like rotting summer fruit. But is there anything more that we may hope for? What shall we do?
[Facing the people] Not far from my home in Moresheth there is another town, Bethlehem, the house of bread. The home of David when God chose him to be king. Just a little place, nothing really. “But you, Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel … and he shall feed his flock in the strength of the Lord … for he shall be the one of peace.” God has chosen and anointed someone to come and save us. You will see. You will see.
[On the way out]. O, who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over the transgression of the remnant of your possession? You will have compassion upon us … You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. You will show faithfulness and loyalty. Our ripe rituals you will replace with redemptive righteousness. Who is a God like you?
