Priorities Micah 6:1-8; Matthew 5:1-12 1-29-17 Bellingham First Christian Church Rev. Gary Shoemaker
Micah 6 lets us know that
God doesn't need empty expressions of praise or exercises attempt to counter our inadequacies in following God. What does the Lord require of you? In other words, what does God want? For us to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with our God. I believe that Micah, in those short few verses reaches the pinnacle of prophetic wisdom. God wants us to treat one another with justice and kindness and
to walk our spiritual path
with humility and integrity. And then alongs comes Jesus and through his life and teachings is basically telling us the same thing. It's not a message that most of the world wants to hear. It goes against the grain of cultural wisdom, and it always has. Part of what makes the Beatitudes so counterintuitive is that Jesus pronounces Gods blessing on those who expose our vulnerability! Our typical approach to life is that success or wealth or power equals happiness. The problem with that is that the more you succeed, the more wealth and power you gain, 1 of 5
the more you have to lose,
and therefore the more you relate to life in fear and competition. This way of life leads us to think we can only be happy in life by winning, by beating someone else at the game. But I think that Micah 6 and Matthew 5 are letting us in on a secret, in fact it may very well be the secret to happinessto open yourself and accept life as it is and then to live out of the compassion and integrity of that wholeness. As those who seek to follow Jesus Christ we are called to embody a completely different vision of life. We are called to spend our lives working to extend Gods mercy to the left out and beat
down in this world, to seek to
establish Gods peace and Gods justice for all the dispossessed and disenfranchised of this world. We are called to align our lives with those whom the world despises and rejects which means that we too will be despised and rejected because of our commitment to Gods mercy and peace and justice. We may not like those words, but we cannot avoid the truth they confront us with. The only way we can truly embody Jesus vision of Gods kingdom and Gods justice and Gods peace is by opening ourselves to accept life as it is and our own 2 of 5
vulnerability to the pains and
losses and disappointments of life. It is only as we embrace life in this way that we can find true joy, and can open ourselves enough to leave competition behind and instead relate to those around us in compassion and integrity. And it goes beyond our personal relationships and how we conduct ourselves. When we witness injustice and inequality we have to do something about it. We may not be able to change much of anything by ourselves, but we have to make our voices heard. Elie Wiesel in his Nobel Lecture said "There may be times when we are powerless to prevent
injustice, but there must
never be a time when we fail to protest." We need to hunger and thirst for righteousness because our world actively works against it, overrides it, sidelines it, monetizes it, limits it, and assumes that its overrated and overstated. The Gospel is a word of protest. In this time and in this place, we cannot forget this. Jesus was a person who stood up and said no. The Beatitudes are not just blessings but a call to action. The Beatitudes point out who Jesus really is. Perhaps not the Jesus we want. Perhaps 3 of 5
the Jesus who likely rubs us
the wrong way. Perhaps the Jesus that tells us the truth about ourselves. The Jesus who reminds us, at the most inconvenient times and places, what the Kingdom of Heaven is all about. The Beatitudes are a call to action to be church, a call to action to make Jesus present and visible and manifest when the world tries desperately to silence those who speak the truth. From his Letter from Birmingham Jail, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. writes, There was a time when the church was very powerful -- in the time when the early Christians rejoiced
at being deemed worthy to
suffer for what they believed. In those days, the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society... If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning..." The Beatitudes are a call to action for the sake of creating the world God imagines. And these days, we need this reminder -- when our imagination may be limited. 4 of 5
When our hope for the future
might have been dimmed. When we think what we do and what we say and what we believe does not matter. Our hunger and thirst for righteousness matters. It really does.