Hear what the Lord is saying:
Arise, lay out the lawsuit before the mountains;
let the hills hear your voice!
2 Hear, mountains, the lawsuit of the Lord!
Hear, eternal foundations of the earth!
The Lord has a lawsuit against his people;
with Israel he will argue.
3 “My people, what did I ever do to you?
How have I wearied you? Answer me!
4 I brought you up out of the land of Egypt;
I redeemed you from the house of slavery.
I sent Moses, Aaron, and Miriam before you.
5 My people, remember what Moab’s King Balak had planned,
and how Balaam, Beor’s son, answered him!
Remember everything[a] from Shittim to Gilgal,
that you might learn to recognize the righteous acts of the Lord!”
6 With what should I approach the Lord
and bow down before God on high?
Should I come before him with entirely burned offerings,
with year-old calves?
7 Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with many torrents of oil?
Should I give my oldest child for my crime;
the fruit of my body for the sin of my spirit?
8 He has told you, human one, what is good and
what the Lord requires from you:
to do justice, embrace faithful love, and walk humbly with your God. (Common English Bible)
“The Minor Leagues: The “Minor” Prophets of the Bible,” Week Seven
While we hear today from Micah with one of the most famous verses of all of Scripture, our story begins much, much earlier in the Bible, with Abraham and Isaac—specifically, when Abraham resolves to sacrifice Isaac.
The most gutting interpretation I have ever seen of that image is George Segal’s 1978 sculpture, which he created as a memorial to the students killed at Kent State in 1970. But the scene—with Isaac bound and on his knees before his father—was so incisive that Kent State refused the sculpture, and it ended up at Princeton instead.
Segal never originally intended that—as he put it, he tried to communicate “the eternal conflict between adherence to an abstract set of principles versus the love of your own child.” In that regard, I came to understand his sculpture as a commentary not only on Kent State but on the war in Vietnam itself, which forty years later we continue to fail and underserve the veterans of.
And that is where Micah does indeed step in.
Today’s message on Micah represents the midway point of the minor prophets, so this is not a *new* sermon series, but it is a series to take us all the way through the summer, from Memorial Day weekend up to Labor Day weekend, and truthfully, it is a series that I have wanted to give for a long time now, almost a decade. But it never quite fit into the arc of my ministry until now. After all the work that we as a team put into resuming in-person worship services after fourteen months of online-only worship, a few months of a relatively simple series has, I know, helped me get back in the rhythm of preaching to a sanctuary of people and not a computer screen of faces!
So, this sermon series was born. Each Sunday, we are hearing from one of the twelve (or thirteen) minor prophets of the Tanakh (Old Testament), so-called because the books attributed to them are much shorter in length than those of the three “major” prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. As a group, I have found the minor prophets especially dear and compelling, but I acknowledge for some, maybe many, of you they may seem unfamiliar or even intimidating, and this series is meant to help chip away at that. The sermons are designed to be standalone, so that if you do some traveling this summer and miss a Sunday or three, I do not want you to feel like you have fallen behind everyone else. So I hope by the end of this series come Labor Day, we have discovered newfound affinity for these so-called minor prophets, and elevated them closer to major status in our faith.
To best facilitate everyone following along, we will read the prophets in the order they appear in the Protestant versions of the Tanakh. So, we began with Daniel, and followed him up with Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, and the well-known Jonah. We remain in the realm of the well-known, at least as far as one verse in particular is concerned, with the prophet Micah.
Where some of the other prophets, especially Joel, have been a mystery to us as to when they were active and had written their books, there is no such suspense with Micah—his book begins with the notation that he prophesied during the reigns of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah in the southern kingdom of Judah. This makes Micah roughly a contemporary of the prophet Isaiah, whose famous vision of God calling him to the prophetic career came in the year that Jotham’s father Uzziah died.
This was also a time when Judah was mostly ruled by faithful and righteous kings—Uzziah, his son Jotham, and Jotham’s grandson Hezekiah are all judged favorably by Scripture for their devotion to YHWH. The exception to these decades of righteous kings is the one that falls in the middle here: Jotham’s son and Hezekiah’s father, Ahaz, whose unfaithfulness was so extreme that 2 Kings introduces us to him by way of the fact that he broke the Levitical ban on child sacrifice as a part of the worship of false gods. Meanwhile, Ahaz also refused to enjoin Judah against the growing danger of Assyria when Assyria violently conquers the northern kingdom of Israel.
I mention all of this ghastliness about Ahaz by way of saying that his kingship is probably the horrific backdrop of Micah’s famous pronouncement in 6:8. The first four chapters of Micah concern the destruction he sees on the horizon, and only in chapter five does he explicitly say that this is about the Assyrians. But more pressingly for our purposes, Ahaz is the one unfaithful king Micah prophesies to, and the lead up of Micah 6:1-7 reads very much like a rebuke of someone like Ahaz who is convinced he does not need God in his life. In fact, the second half of verse 7, the words immediately before the beloved 6:8, “Should I give my oldest child for my crime, the fruit of my body for the sin of my spirit?” reads as a head-on condemnation of Ahaz’s depraved practice child sacrifice.
It may be hard to know where to begin with a king as far gone as Ahaz. Where do you even start with a ruler who won’t protect their people and who sacrifices their own child? Yet as much as we may dislike it, Ahaz is our proxy in Micah 6. For before we even consider the three-fold answer to what God requires of us in Micah 6:8, we really need to consider why Micah would have seen it necessary to ask the rhetorical question to begin with.
And the answer to that question, in part, is supplied to us in 6:7—that Ahaz was perfectly willing, eager even, to give up his child for his own sins. And that is something I see all around me today, and which I confess is weighing heavily upon me.
We moved here to Birmingham to be with y’all from the Pacific Northwest, which just experienced record heat waves across Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. And while I may joke about their terrible, horrible, no-good notions of barbeque, the wrenching truth is that hundreds of people there just died from heat exposure and their deaths were entirely preventable if we had started taking the changing climate more seriously years ago, decades ago, as a culture of life issue. The Washington Post shared a study of how the changing climate made this heat wave something like one hundred and fifty times more likely, and more extreme weather is apt to occur in later years, including here.
Who will have to live with that new climate? Increasingly, it will be our children.
I am of a generation that has seen almost fifteen years now of earning potential and possible saving for retirement wiped out by two massive economic recessions. The gig-ification of jobs has led to an absence of benefits, including retirement savings. I am an increasingly rare breed: a millennial with a pension, much less a 401(k). As scary as the prospects of Social Security and Medicare may look in the short term, we are probably looking at a deep retirement crisis twenty-five years from now when millennials want to begin retiring and cannot.
Who will have to live with that new economy? Increasingly, it will be our children.
I know you want the pandemic to be over. I want it to be over too. I wanted it to be over this time a year ago, when we had cemented our relationship as congregation and new minister. But it is not yet over, especially for our children under twelve still too young to be vaccinated. Meanwhile, we are now the state with the lowest overall vaccination rate, giving our children the lowest chance at any sort of herd immunity to protect them from covid-19.
Who is having to live with the pandemic? Increasingly, it is our children.
On an individual and familial level, we love our children as though they were our own blood, because they are. But on a collective, societal level, we have sacrificed our children’s planet, financial security, and physical health on the altar of Ahaz. We have failed them.
And God responds to our failures with, “I have told you, human one, what is good and what I require,” before listing off loving justice, doing kindness, and walking humbly with God. We have chosen not to do those things, or at least chosen not to do those things frequently enough in history.
But our children are why it is so vital for us to learn from history. It is our fervent, deepest hope as parents and grandparents that the generations that come after us will live better lives than we did. And, on balance across human history, that has happened. We do not live in medieval or dark ages because that has happened.
Yet along the way, within that overall arc, are more moments of deep and profound injustice than we can probably count. And those injustices come from an abandonment of Micah’s principles to instead love justice, to instead do kindness, and to instead walk humbly with God.
Walking humbly with God means recognizing, acknowledging the fundamental reality that we have taken this creation from one another while borrowing it from all our children. It means questioning whether our acts of faith on our walk with God are done from a place of modesty or a place of ego.
Because it is pretty straightforward to see Abraham’s walk to the altar intending to sacrifice his son as him walking with God. But I think it is a lot harder to see it as him walking humbly with God. There is a certain hubris that comes from thinking that you are so important that only your son will satisfy the maker of heaven and earth and all that is seen and unseen.
I cannot think that about myself. I cannot think that about God. Walking humbly with God keeps me from that.
So as we, you and I, walk together in this chapter of our faith lives, I pray that we will find and share with each other the humbleness that makes the justice, the kindness, the goodness not only possible, but likely, and fulfilling, and lifegiving.
God has told us what God expects of us. The next move is ours.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
July 11, 2021