“What Does God Want?”
Micah 6:1-8
18 years ago I was an Associate Pastor at a big church in Macon, Georgia and also going to seminary at the same time.
I felt God calling me to reach out to a community of folks I had just recently heard about.
It was a homeless shelter for indigent people living with HIV and AIDS.
And the place was an old hotel.
It was called the “Rainbow Center.”
This was back when there was still a really BIG stigma attached to HIV and AIDS.
I suppose there still is, but I pray it’s not as bad as it was then.
In any event, I called the person who ran the Rainbow Center, introduced myself and asked if I could get involved in ministry there.
He wasn’t too thrilled to be hearing from me.
“What do you want to do,” he asked hesitantly.
“Well,” I said, “I’d like to get to know you and the folks living there and perhaps I can learn from you and you can help me and perhaps I can help you.”
He opened up to that.
He told me that the residents eat a common meal in a common room every Friday afternoon.
He invited me to come.
I went, and continued to go until I finished seminary and no longer worked for that church.
I was later told by the director, who became a dear friend, that the reason he was leery of me at first was because the only Christian Pastors who had ever called him in the past had wanted to come over and beat the people over the head with the Bible.
The people at the Rainbow Center already felt judgement and condemnation.
They’d felt it most of their lives.
No one had ever wanted to build relationships, become part of the community, make friendships, love and help in other ways.
It was one of the most rewarding ministries I have ever been involved in.
Soon, some other members of the church decided to join me for lunch on Fridays.
And the people living at the Rainbow Center started to become friends.
They started to trust me and the other folks from the church who would just hang out with them on Friday afternoons.
Soon, a group of about 15 residents decided they wanted to come to church.
I didn’t have to ask them—they asked me.
So, every Sunday, a church member named Wally would drive one of the church vans to the Rainbow Center and pick up this wonderful motley crew of people—black and white, male and female, prostitutes, homosexuals, drug addicts and former drug addicts—who had contracted HIV and AIDS and were now homeless and whose families no longer claimed them as their own—and bring them to this big, middle to upper middle class white church where I was Associate Pastor.
They went to Sunday school classes that eventually “sort of” adopted them.
The church started collecting toiletries and food goods for the center.
Residents would call me up at all hours of the day and night needing rides and money…
…and since I was a bit younger then and didn’t have a young family like I do now—it worked out pretty well.
One member of the church, basically adopted a young man named John.
And one time, John became very sick.
He was put in the hospital and eventually slipped into a coma.
The doctors—everyone—thought that John would never wake up.
But this wonderful Christian woman would go to John’s hospital room every day—spending the entire day there.
She would talk to him, pray for him, read to him.
It seems like yesterday when she called me up one afternoon with tears of joy: “Pastor Ken, John just woke up. He just opened his eyes!!!”
I am convinced that John had given up on living, but God’s love working through this woman saved his life.
Before I left that church all 15 or so folks who had started coming to the church had joined.
I remember one time, when my parents came to visit, one of the men came up to my dad and told him: “Your son is my best friend.”
I’ve never received a better compliment.
Seven hundred years before Jesus Christ was born, Israel was in the middle of a sort of revival.
The temple was crowded.
Giving was overbudget for the first time in years.
What could be better?
The people must have thought that God was really pleased with what was going on.
I mean, numbers and money, noses and nickels—that’s what it’s all about in the religion business—right?
The ones with the biggest buildings win.
Apparently that is not how God sees things.
Because although lots of people were paying lip service to God and their religion—something big was missing—the biggest and most important stuff of all—goodness, mercy, humility and walking with God.
Israel had become arrogant and uncaring.
The urban elites of Jerusalem were “talking the talk” but not “walking the walk.”
Sure offerings were being made.
People were showing up.
They were practicing the outward motions or rituals of their religion.
At the same time, they were being aggressive in their land deals.
They were using exploitive policies that got the rich even richer at the expense of the most vulnerable members of society.
In Chapter 2:2 Micah says that these Temple going folks “covet fields and seize them, and houses, and take them.”
They defraud and steal peoples’ inheritances.
In Chapter 3 Micah cries: “Listen, you leaders of Jacob, you rulers of the house of Israel.
Should you not know justice, you who hate good and love evil; who tear the skin from my people and the flesh from their bones…”
Later in Chapter 3 Micah goes on: “Hear this, you leaders of the house of Jacob, you rulers of the house of Israel, who despise justice and distort all that is right; who build Zion with bloodshed, and Jerusalem with wickedness.
Her rulers judge for a bribe, her priests teach for a price, and her prophets tell fortunes for money.
Yet they lean upon the Lord and say, ‘Is not the Lord among us?’”
They are blind guides.
They are lost leaders.
They have forgotten their story.
They have fallen out of a right relationship with God and they don’t even realize it.
How many times has this happened in the church or in church history?
Where is this happening now?
In what ways or where have we ourselves forgotten what “is good. And what the Lord require[s] of [us]?”
Has Christianity become too tied up in politics?
Have we lost our way?
Have we become more concerned with light shows, special effects, stadium seating, big crowds and big donors rather than mercy, justice, and love?
Are we more focused on “hot button issues” than we are on loving people where they are at?
This is the kind of thing that was happening in Jesus’ day.
In Matthew Chapter 23 Jesus had some very harsh words for the religious leaders of the time.
Of them, He said: “Do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach.
They tie up heavy loads and put them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.”
He goes on: “Everything they do is for [people] to see…”
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites!” Jesus says, “You shut the kingdom of heaven in [people’s] faces.
You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.”
“Woe to you teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites!
You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are…”
… “You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness.
You should have practiced the latter without neglecting the former.
You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.”
This is what was happening seven centuries earlier when Micah was written, and many times and in many places we see it happening still today.
We people are good at “talking the talk” but not as good at “walking the walk.”
And so in Chapter 6 of Micah, God pleads His case with the people once again.
And He calls upon them to remember who they are, whose they are and what God is really about.
He reminds them of the intimate relationship that He desires.
We might expect, given the degree to which the people have strayed for God to really lay it on the people hard.
Instead, He calls out like a heartbroken parent: “My people what have I done to you? How have I burdened you?
Answer me.”
He speaks as if He is bewildered by their forgetfulness and lack of love.
And so He calls on them to remember once again.
And this remembering will be their starting point back to a right relationship.
God says, “I brought you up out of Egypt and redeemed you from the land of slavery.
I sent Moses to lead you…
…remember your journey.”
Have you ever gotten really off course on your walk with God?
Of course you have.
We all have.
We are prone to wander, after all.
We are easily distracted.
I’ve had times where I’ve wandered so far away, that I’ve nearly forgotten what it is that God wants me to do.
And then, God calls me back.
God searches me out.
God says, “Ken, remember.
Remember where you were when you first gave your life to me?
Remember all the events that led to that point?
Remember how I was working in your life, nudging you all along the way?
Remember how it felt to know how much I love you?
Remember what it was like to walk in my light?
Remember the confidence it gave you?
Remember the peace?
Remember the joy?”
That is what God is saying to the Israelites in Micah Chapter 6 and that is what God says to us continually.
And often, in our desperation we may demand: “Lord what do you want from me?”
And the Lord may say: “Are you becoming more loving?
How are you treating your neighbor?
What are you doing for the stranger, the foreigner, the outcaste, the homeless, the widows, the orphans, the marginalized, the least and the last?
Are you putting your faith into practice or are you just doing a bunch of empty religious rituals?
Are you caring for minorities?
Are you seeking to make this a more just community?
Are you fighting for the rights of the handicapped, the elderly, poor persons, and every person who is treated as less than?
Are you walking humbly with Me?
Are you listening for my voice wherever I can be heard?
Do you respect the rights of others…
…the thoughts and perspectives of others?”
The American Church has never been in a more precarious position than it is today.
Judgements are being made.
Divisions are tearing us apart.
Love is turning cold.
The Law is taking the place of mercy.
We are straining gnats and swallowing camels.
And humility?
Let’s remember the journey that brought us here.
Let’s remember the humility we had when we wept at the foot of the Cross for the first time.
And then, let’s repent and weep again.
Lord, “with what should I come before you?
What do you want?
Should I make an even bigger show of my Christianity?
Shall I slap another Jesus sticker on the back of my pick-up?
Shall I put a copy of the Ten Commandments in my front yard?
Should I try to please you with nationalism, bravado, and in your face tactics?”
“Oh…
…No…
…Micah says.”
“He has showed you, O man, O woman, what is good.
And what does the Lord require from you?
What does God want?
He wants you to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with Him.”
