January 29, 2017

Micah 6:1-8
 Hear what the Lord says: Rise, plead your case before the mountains, and let the hills hear your voice. Hear, you mountains, the controversy of the Lord, and you enduring foundations of the earth; for the Lord has a controversy with his people, and he will contend with Israel. “O my people, what have I done to you? In what have I wearied you? Answer me! For I brought you up from the land of Egypt, and redeemed you from the house of slavery; and I sent before you Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. O my people, remember now what King Balak of Moab devised, what Balaam son of Beor answered him, and what happened from Shittim to Gilgal, that you may know the saving acts of the Lord.”

”With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

Matthew 5:1-12
 When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:
”Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
”Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
”Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
”Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
”Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
”Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
”Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
”Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
”Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

In 2001, business and leadership writer Jim Collins wrote the bestselling book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t.
Collins conducted research on 11 companies that had “made the leap” and chronicled why “good is the enemy of great.”

Business leaders and even church leaders gobbled up this book and had their organizations read it in order to move them toward “greatness.”

It’s no wonder the book was so popular. In the US we love greatness.
We have a president who’s motto is “Make America Great Again.”

We can tend to adopt that language in the church as well.
Do we as church seek to be: Great—bigger, faster, stronger, richer and more famous?

Lets turn to our Gospel reading.
The Beatitudes or blessings that open the Sermon on the Mount are all about challenging preconceptions.
They bring into question what we consider to be good or great.
They clearly declare that circumstances people naturally see as unfortunate are in fact genuinely fortunate in the truest sense.
Now I am not suggesting that experiencing poverty, mourning, hunger or persecution (vv. 3-4, 6, 10) are a sign of blessing, but people can count on God’s presence with them in those challenges.
In similar fashion, those who act with meekness, mercy, purity and a desire for peace (vv. 5-9) find themselves where God is already at work.

And even these blessings pronounced on those who are doing certain things don’t suggest that they’re showing mercy and working for peace in order to obtain God’s blessings.
Blessings come from being in God’s presence, not as a reward for either suffering or being good… or great.

Having hindsight we can also see that the greatness Collins referred to in his book isn’t easy to sustain.
Of the 11 “great” companies that Collins profiled, most are not so great a decade and a half later:
One went out of business, another was sold
5 companies have shown only modest market gains
+ Fannie Mae (the Federal National Mortgage Association) had to be bailed out by the government during the mortgage crisis, and may have been a cause of the crisis.
Another company is at half of what it had been
+ Only 2 of 11 Nucor (a steel producer) and Philip Morris (the tobacco producer) have remained “great” according to Collins’ criteria.

Is greatness really the best goal for an organization, a nation, a business or a church?
We’ve heard what Jesus said about being blessed and now onto the prophet Micah who didn’t seem to think that greatness is the best goal. Basically, when we turn to the Scriptures, one of the things we realize is that greatness is vastly overrated.
In fact, rather than the good being the enemy of the great,
biblically speaking, greatness is actually the enemy of goodness and being blessed.

Now I do hope you realize I am countering what has come to be called “the Prosperity Gospel”— the notion that one knows she or he is blessed by how great, rich and successful they are… not so much according to Jesus and Micah.

Micah wrote to the nation of Judah during a time when the nation was under the thumb of the Assyrian Empire.
The northern kingdom of Israel had already been swallowed up by the Assyrians in 722 B.C., and Jerusalem itself was saved only because its king, Hezekiah, paid off the invaders.
The people would have remembered when they were once a great nation, and may have wondered how to get that back again.

that’s one of the overarching themes of Micah.
It recalls when God promised Abraham that his offspring would become a “great” nation through whom all the nations of the world would be blessed. (Genesis 12)

Greatness is contingent upon consistency over time, and Israel showed that it could not sustain that greatness.
The kingdom that had reached its height of greatness during the days of David and Solomon, was at the time of Micah, a shadow of its former self, divided and conquered.

Micah chronicles how the nation had gone off the rails…(I believe we should listen carefully) how the nation had gone off the rails with oppression of the poor, corruption in its courts, dishonest economic practices, false prophets, greedy priests, loss of order and,
most tellingly, a rejection of God’s justice and God’s commandments.

Notice the first five verses of chapter 6. It’s a slide show of the past.
God brought them out of slavery in Egypt.
God delivered them from their enemies. Yet, they rejected the very One who saved them.
How could they possibly be blessed, let alone a blessing to the nations? They were no longer great and no longer good, either.

Through the prophet, God delivers judgment on the nation, but, as always with God in the prophetic literature, that judgment is also tempered with hope.
God tells the people that they will be restored. But how will it happen?
Well, we learn first that it won’t be because they achieve greatness in their religious practices.
“With what shall I come before the LORD and bow myself before God on high?” (v. 6).
“Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?
Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil? Should I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” (v. 7).

This is a list of ridiculously expensive sacrifices.
This was sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins on a grand scale.
But was that superior religious performance the thing that God really desired of them? Is it what God wants from us now?

As church and we might ask, “With what shall we come before the Lord? With our great buildings, our filled seats, our million-dollar endowments or budgets?
Will God be pleased if we show God that we’re successful?
Is bigger, better, faster and stronger the sign of the kind of church God blesses?
The kind of nation God blesses? Is greatness what God is after?”

Micah says no.
Notice what he says (v. 8): “He has told you, O mortal, what is good.”

What does the Lord desire? Goodness, not greatness.
It’s been God’s desire all along, from the very first moments of creation, when God saw everything and called it good.

What does such goodness look like? How do we measure it?
What are the principles of a blessed life?

Micah says that goodness begins with doing justice (v. 8).
The Hebrew word mishpat refers to God’s order for all of life.
To “do justice,” means that we order our lives, including our interactions with others, in accordance with God’s commands.
That we hunger and thirst for righteousness

We have no goodness of our own.
God is the one who sets the standard of goodness
When we “do justice” it’s a recognition that goodness is defined by what God requires and empowers, and not by what we want or desire.

Micah expands “justice” by saying that true goodness is also the result of loving “kindness” (v. 8).
The Hebrew word hesed is sometimes translated as “kindness” or “mercy,” but it is primarily a word connected to covenant faithfulness to God and to others.
This is the word used to convey God’s “steadfast,” faithful love for God’s people.
Being good means that we maintain faithfulness to God in all things and demonstrate that faithfulness by our steadfast love for God and for all God’s people.

Micah says, being good means walking humbly with our God (v. 8).
The Hebrew word hasenea means more than simple meekness, modesty and humility.
It implies attentiveness, paying attention to God.
We are to watch God for what is good and not do our own thing and call it good.

In our desire to be great, we often miss what is good.
We fail to pay attention to what God would have us do.
We fail to pray, to seek God’s face, to discern together what God might do through us.

But that is a formula for failure.
Granted, it’s tempting to go after greatness.
Greatness gets your name on the cover of the magazine.
But God doesn’t require greatness — only goodness.

Goodness is more sustainable, but it takes a long view to see that.

When we focus on being faithful to God’s covenant and being attentive to God’s leading, we have done all that we were meant to do — regardless of whether the results impress anyone else.

Are we doing justice, seeking God’s guidance in all we do?
Do we love faithfulness, living out the covenant with God we made in our baptism?
And are we walking humbly, paying attention to what God is doing in our lives and in the world around us?

doing justice, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, walking humbly with God, steadfast faithful love of God and all God’s children. peacemaking

That’s what the Lord requires of us. Amen

Resources: https://www.homileticsonline.com/subscriber/btl_display.asp?installment_id=93041013