Takoma Park Baptist Church, Washington, DC August 24, 1986
Several years ago I went back to school for work on a graduate degree. Although I had been around schools and colleges and students all of my life, this was the first time in about a dozen years or so that I had actually enrolled in a course at a university. And, as they say, times had changed. I was not quite prepared for what I heard from the students, though, as I say, students had been my life's blood for some while. But still I had not seen them in the classroom itself.
“How many pages will we be required to read?” “How much of this book will we be responsible for?" "What will the final exam cover?" Mind you, this was the first day of class, and already somebody was wondering what would be on the final exam some three months down the line. “Are you going to require us to write papers? If so, how many papers and how many pages in each one?" Again, all this before the professor had even begun to describe the course and its objectives. I think the clincher, for me, was the question, uttered in complete disregard of the teacher's feelings, "Will you count off if we don't come to class?"
Well, times had indeed changed. Back in the late Middle Ages when I was a younger student we sat in class meekly and just took whatever was dished out. If there was a lot of work to do, well, that's the breaks. I'm not saying we liked it or we appreciated it, but we just assumed that teachers could require whatever they wanted to require, and most of us never even imagined for a moment that we could bargain or argue the price to be paid in blood, sweat, tears, and midnight oil. We just paid it; whatever the requirement was, we paid it.
But you know we are now in a consumer conscious age. Even students are consumer conscious. Are we getting what we paid for? How much is it going to cost us, in dollars and in work, to get these three credit hours? Tell me what you require and I will decide whether I want to pay out that much, and if I can, I'll whittle it down and do it for less. We do not, absolutely do not, want to pay the wrong price. Not for anything. We want bargains. We want to have without too much give, and we are not very interested in meeting steep requirements. For anything we receive, we do want to pay just as little as possible.
And where salvation is concerned, where our relationship to God is concerned, we are no different. If salvation can be obtained at little or no cost, well, that sounds good. If I can get a discount ticket to heaven, if by coming to church with some regularity I can get a frequent flyer’s discount ticket to salvation, well, that sounds just fine, doesn’t it? And of course there is much in our religious tradition that supports that expectation. There is much that we have said over the years that supports the hope that in fact we can get by without many requirements.
For example, haven't we said that salvation is free? One of our hymns says something about "Salvation full and free." One of the Scripture texts we use a lot says that we are to come and buy what God has to give without money and without price. Or again, we have learned that salvation comes with faith and not with works, that there is no way you can earn salvation. And so we have come to depend heavily on the idea of grace: grace, unmerited favor, the idea that God’s forgiveness is full and free. Salvation is the free gift of God, given as the outpouring of His grace. Isn't that right? Isn't that what we believe?
And so if salvation is free, I guess that means there is no price to be paid at all, right? If salvation is the outpouring of the sheer grace of God, then all we have to do is take it, no requirements, no demands, no expectations, right? If our relationship to God is not dependent on what we can pay or what we can do or on how many good deeds we can accumulate, well then, it's all grace and there are no requirements in this course, right, professor?
Wrong! Wrong, wrong, wrong! Our relationship to God is not a matter of grace versus requirements. Our relationship to God, our salvation, is not a matter of either or, either He gives it to us or we pay for it, we work for it. No, our relationship to God is one in which His gracious and loving gifts to us demand, require a response -- but our trouble is that we have misunderstood what the response is. We have misunderstood what the gracious and loving acts of God require of us, and either we think He requires nothing at all, or else we think we can buy him off too cheaply, we think we can get by on a shoestring. Bargain basement salvation, discount relationships.
One of my favorite posters is one I used to have hanging in my office. The poster showed a little tiny fish about to be consumed by a slightly larger fish, which in turn was going to be eaten by a medium-sized fish, which in turn had its tail swimming in the jaws of a pretty good sized fish, which in its own turn was about to become lunch for a big fish. And along the edge of the power you could see only the teeth of what must have been a monster fish. And the caption of the poster read, “There is no such thing as a free lunch.” Well, that’s true; there really is no such thing as a free lunch. Anything that’s worthwhile has some sort of price tag on it; somebody pays somewhere along the line. The question is what kind of payment, what sort of requirement is laid down? What sort of demand does God lay upon us for the salvation He offers us? And I say again, our problem is that even when we understand that grace does not have requirements built into it, we still try to get by on the cheap. We still try to satisfy our God with all the wrong things.
Now no one in all the Bible did a better job of laying this truth out for us than the prophet Micah. Micah, as I see him, was one of those incisive individuals who is able to cut through all of our religious rhetoric and say what has to be said. He was one of those perceptive souls who can see through all the fog of pious blather with which so much of our church life is filled and can see who we really are and what we area bout. And so Micah presents a scene in which God is acting like a prosecuting attorney, and he has a case against the defendant. I expect you know who the defendant is, don’t you? It's us, it's God's people. He has an indictment against us, he is bringing a charge against us, and essentially the charge is, you have not paid the appropriate price for what I have done for you. You have not fulfilled the requirements I have laid out.
In order for us to get the flavor of this charge, in order for us to appreciate more completely what on the one hand God says he requires of us, and, on the other hand, what we have tried to buy him off for, what we have said we would be willing to give, Jennifer and I are going to read some portions of the Scripture again, and I have taken the liberty of rearranging them so that you can see what Micah is doing. On the one side are the people and what they are doing -- very religious folks, by the way, just willing to do the religion game up in a big way. I'll read that part.
And on the other hand, what God requires, what God wants from his people, is laid out in contrast to what the people are wiling to do. What God requires as a response to His grace, Jennifer will read. Listen as we put these two things side by side and then maybe we will begin to see that what you and I are so often willing to give for our salvation is not at all what God requires.
READING
In effect, Micah begins by saying, “Folks, you should n 't have any doubts about what God wants, you shouldn’t even have to ask a question like, "With what shall I come before the Lord?" You ought to know the answer to that one blindfolded, "He has already showed you what goodness is." It reminds me of one of my old English professors, who would point a big finger at our class and would ask, "Which counts off more in this class, an ignorant error or a careless mistake?” (We used to argue that we did know the answers, we just made a careless mistake and wrote down something else, but we ought to get credit for those invisible right answers!) Well, carelessness is no excuse, says the prophet, no excuse at all, because God has showed you many, many times what is good and what he requires. But here it is again:
Do justice -- not just feel good, but do justice.
And love constancy, love loyalty, love mercy. It's not altogether easy to translate the Hebrew word chesedh. Maybe the best translation is "steadfast love," "Constant love." So God requires that you love constant, steadfast, loyal self-giving.
And walk humbly, relate to your God in ways that recognize who He is.
Let's spend a little time examining each of these requirements, over against what Micah saw that God's people were willing to do.
First, Micah says, God requires, God demands that you do justice. But, the people say, we say, Micah, you don’t understand. I've paid out a significant payment. I have made burnt offerings of year-old calves. Or, to put it in contemporary terms, hey, I gave at the office. I support a couple of charities. I take care of the poor and the needy. My old clothes go to the clothes closet and the nearly new shop; the junk from my shelves I turn over to the Good Will and the Salvation Army. I am concerned, I do something about the needy.
But I hear Micah saying, Ah, but you see, that was all at arm's length. That was all out here in the abstract. You gave to help the poor, but God says, work the works of justice, do justice. Change things. Create a just and right relationship in the world. That's what I want. I require not that you rehabilitate the already messed up so much as I require that you make this world one in which justice and fairness and integrity are the orders of the day.
You see, one of our problems as religious people is that we suppose that we've done all we need to do when we've taken the miserable of this world and we've cleaned them up and fed them and tried to put them on the right road. We think that's all there is to it. Now don't get me wrong. We should do those things, we do need to get involved with those who hurt. But God says, DO justice. Do justice. Work to make sure that none of my little ones get hurt like this again. It's not only a matter of being the Good Samaritan who stops along the Jericho Road to bind up the wounds of the bleeding; it's also a matter of controlling the thieves along that road, it's also a matter of laboring to create a world in which that no longer happens. Do justice.
Next, Micah says, God requires you to love constant, steadfast self-giving. Oh wait, we say, wait a minute. Constancy and steadfastness are my thing. You can depend on me. I have given in my time thousands of rams and rivers, ten thousand rivers of oil. I have been in Sunday School every Sunday since the year one; I have so many of those perfect attendance pins I could open a branch of the Baptist Book Store. I have worn a shiny spot on my favorite pew I've been there so often. I have been constant, I have been faithful, I'm right there. And I work, I am busy, busy Baptist. Why, I am the one they wrote the poem about, you know: Mary had a little lamb, It would have been a sheep. But Mary's lamb became a Baptist, and died for lack of sleep. Constancy and loyalty and steadfastness; these things we've done, Lord.
But I hear Micah saying, ah, but it is steadfastness in love that our God wants. It is constancy in self-giving that he requires. It is not pew-sitting or committee work or churchly exercises -- again, all these things are important in their own way, they have their place. But at rock bottom, what God demands of us, what grace demands as our response is this: how much of yourself do you open up to God and to others? How much of my life is marked by self-giving, and is it a hallmark, is it constant? Is it continuing? We so often want the shortcut, the cheap way out. And you know you can do church without loving anybody! But God says you must cherish continuing love, you mustn’t give up, you must not fall by the wayside. Love kindness, love mercy. Love continually.
And finally, at the climax of this litany of requirements, God says through his prophet, Walk humbly with me. Come along and be my companion.
But again, you see, we know we have to pay a price, but we want to pay the wrong price, we want to get by with something else. And so the people say to Micah, with a touch of sarcasm, well, maybe this God of yours would be satisfied if I were to sacrifice my first-born son. What does he want, this God of yours? Why don't I just pitch my son into the sacrificial fires, would that do it? Or maybe you and I would cry out, Great day, if I once get started in this Christianity business, there's no end to it. Why, somebody will think I should give some money. I gave last week! And somebody else will suggest that I teach a class. And they will push me here and push me there, and next thing y know they will persuade my son to be a missionary and my daughter to go to seminary. What next? Aren't you carrying this thing too far, Micah? Aren't you pushing us too hard?
But you missed it. You missed it, says Micah. You don't have to destroy your children in order to be a child of God. You don't have to sever your relationships wit others you love in order to have a relationship with God. All you have to do is walk with Him, all you need to do is go where he takes you, follow where he leads you. All you need to know is that you are his and he is yours, and everything else begins to fall into place. Walk humbly with your God. Don't pay the wrong price, don't think you'll have to give up somebody you care for in order to be saved; no, in fact you will add a relationship, you will add a companion, and he will be the companion of your eternity, he will be your constant contemporary. Walk with God.
I've been doing a lot of weddings lately, and have been counseling a lot of folks in preparation for marriage. One thing I've noticed over and over again: the ones who are truly ready for marriage are the ones who know that they are the recipients of something precious, that they do not deserve for someone else to agree to give himself or herself to them. That's sheer grace, and when you take a look at what some folks marry, it seems especially gracious! But those who are truly ready for marriage are not asking, "What is the least I can get by with? What are my rights? What do I get out of this?" No, those who are ready for this most intimate of all human ties are saying, "I want to do justice; that is, I want to make our home the best for my wife, my husband; and I will love him, I will cherish her, no matter what. I will love constantly, I will love mercy; and, most of all, I will walk humbly with him, with her. I will be her heart's companion, I will share his walk wherever it goes, and our chief delight will simply be in one another's company."
That’s what our God asks of us too. If you are ready for Him, if you are prepared for salvation, ask not, “Is it free? Is it cheap? How little must I do?” Ask instead, “How can I do justice and make this world more fully His? How can I love steadfastness and love Him without ceasing? And where will He lead me, where will He go with me, for there I will walk, humbly and gladly.
He has showed you what grace and gifts require: do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with Him.
