Back to Basics: Thy Will Be Done

When I was in seminary, we frequently sang as a round a hymn based on Micah 6:8. “What does the Lord require of you? What does the Lord require of you?” “To do justice, and love kindness and walk humbly with your God.” I served on the Worship Committee for Chapel, and this hymn was offered up as a “good fit” for service after service by student preachers as they prepared to preach God’s Word and really hammer home the importance of being Christ’s body in the world. It was often paired with Teresa of Avila’s prayer: “Christ has no body but yours, No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes with which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ has no body now but yours.” The hymn has the added benefit that the tune is simple and catchy, and once you sing it, you find yourself humming it all day long – an ongoing reminder of the message of Chapel. It is, in the words of one of the Old Testament Professors at my seminary, William P. Brown, “convicting yet benedictive.” It is challenging and blessing. Somehow, I don’t think Micah would recognize the ways we have domesticated his prophecy. The Israelites didn’t like Micah’s message. He, like Amos 50 years or so earlier, was a peasant farmer, sheepherder. Amos and Micah didn’t belong to the prophetic guild. And if events hadn’t proved them right, their prophecies would not have been preserved – we would have never heard of them.

When Amos spoke these words of warning, Israel was strong and stable with long-reigning kings and a great economy with guaranteed income from the tolls on trading caravans. But the caravans brought wealth, prosperity came to a land that had mostly been farm to table. Life moved from an agrarian culture to city-life, and cities need goods, so a merchant class emerged resulting in more wealth. But not everyone was wealthy. In fact, most weren’t. Instead of everyone living farm to table, many were left scrapping for crumbs under the table.

Temple sacrifices were regularly being offered. People were worshiping. There were systems in place for those who had a little harder time to be able to scrape together enough for a small bird to offer.

And then Amos says God has spoken to him and said, “I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies stink. Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Away with the noise of your songs! I’m not listening to your pretty music.” But let justice roll like an rushing river overflowing its banks after a torrential rainfall, righteousness like a churning, surging, cleansing stream!

The establishment didn’t like Amos much. But 40 years later, Jerusalem fell. Israel, God’s mighty, chosen people, set upon a hill, fell. And so, Amos’s words were remembered. And this is why one of the 6 great ends, the foundational purposes, of the church is the promotion of social righteousness.

The church lives in tension between life as a community that supports and nurtures and grows together and as a community that is sent forth into the world. The promotion of social righteousness is the work we are given to do in the world when we pray “Thy Will Be Done.” One of the purposes of the church is to equip and send God’s people into the world to foster God’s ways being done instead of the ways of the world.

The promotion of social righteousness doesn’t let us domesticate Amos’s rivers of justice and streams of righteousness or Micah’s “To do justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with your God” because at the beginning of this section of Amos, he is singing a mourning song, and the audience asks, “Who died?” to which the answer comes back, “You have.”

When the hungry go hungry, the thirsty aren’t offered clean water, the stranger, the immigrant refugee, isn’t welcomed into a safe haven, naked go unclothed, the sick are not provided medical care, when relationships of rehabilitation aren’t established with those who have hardened into criminals, you have died. Here’s the thing, we like Matthew 25 that MaryShelley read when we are passing out soup, when we are building a cistern, when we are helping a homeless person pick out clothes. When I do it to the least of these, I am doing it to Jesus. But when we hear the rest…when we realize that when we don’t…when we consider that Jesus wasn’t talking to us as individuals each doing our little part…Amos and Micah were warning the nation.

What does the Lord require of you? It’s not that everyone goes to church. It’s not that stores are closed one day a week. It’s not that you hold up the concept of justice as an ideal. The Lord REQUIRES that we DO justice, that we set out on a quest for things to be set right, for God’s people to topple systems that take advantage of the powerless.

In the summer of 2018 on a hot day in St. Louis, a group of hundreds of Presbyterians gathered at the Convention Center to head out into the street. We were going to march – clergy, lay people – to the steps of the Justice Center – with our offering. Thousands of dollars to bail out people who were in un-air-conditioned work houses in St. Louis essentially because they were poor. We marched and yelled, “End Cash Bail.” It was great – Kirsten was there, and Bonnie, and we marched together with other members of our Presbytery. And then this last Monday, in a PC(USA) webinar, Rev. Ashley DeTar Birt, pastoral fellow for Youth and Families at Rutgers Presbyterian Church in New York City, said this, “the PC(USA) received high marks, she said, for a march and fundraiser to end the cash bail system during the 223rd General Assembly (2018) in St. Louis. “That’s excellent,” she said. “But even better is to dismantle that system as a whole, of the over-policing of Black and brown neighborhoods. We need to be proactive and reactive if we are going to work in our current systems and dismantle systems in a way that brings liberty and justice for all.”

Justice is about more than bringing attention to a problem. It is about more than taking up a collection and bailing out a few of those who are being oppressed. It is about righting wrong systems and being advocates for the powerless.

When you really listen to Micah, that first requirement is not so appealing. Perhaps the second one – love kindness – we like that better. It’s like a supersized commission to perform random acts of kindness, right? Here’s the thing, the word here is hesed. It is the word used to describe God’s love for us: protective, steadfast. It is the love of grace – unearned, unwarranted, undeserved forgiveness. God requires that we show the kind of love for others that we have had shown to us in Jesus, not because they deserve it any more than we deserved it, but because none of us deserve it.

God, who walks beside us, walks beside them, whoever you picture in your mind as “other” as “dangerous” as “hostile” as “different” as “less than” and it is easier for God to walk close to them, than it is for God to walk close to you. Wow – I know, I don’t usually say things like that! It’s true, though, because you and I tend to walk strong, hold our heads up high, shoulders up, eyes unwavering, confident. When we hear Micah say walk humbly with your God, we tend to hear “In the Garden” in the background and picture the dew still on the roses. Micah isn’t trying to reassure us of God’s love for us. Micah is trying to remind us that God is God and we are NOT God. We are to be humble and not put ourselves in God’s place.

And yet, we are invited to walk with God, to establish a world where “Thy Will Be Done” is not just four hopeful words for some time in the unforeseeable future. In her book, Claiming the Kingdom: The Basis of Social Righteousness, Cynthia Rigby writes, “we have succumbed to the burdened, hopeless theology of ‘doing our best’ and ‘letting God take care of the rest.’ Grace insists that God will take care of all of it and that we will be fully included in what God is up to.” “When our work is founded in the promises of a grace-full and loving God, our focus is not on what we can and can’t do, but on what God intends to do and on how God desires to work with us.”
Karl Barth, the great 20th Century Reformed theologian, reassures that the will of God is never done when we think it is up to us. We are not called to figure it all out. We are called to be faithful. We are not called to do what appears to be necessary to keep the operation flowing. We are called to do what is right. We are not called to offer performances of our piety. We are called to do justice, love mercy, and walk with humility with our God, which means we are required to imagine a world where God’s Will is done on earth as it is being done in heaven. We are required to imagine justice, to envision a world where everyone has enough, and make the changes that are required to bring that to fruition.

In this season of political bantering, we hear a lot about differing ideologies for how our nation is best run. An old adage may even get paraded back out, “If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach him to fish, he eats for a lifetime.” But, God doesn’t call us to give or to teach, God calls us to know the man, to sit down and fish beside him, to recognize that there may be reasons that he is hungry that have nothing to do with whether or not he knows how to fish, to recognize that he may actually be better at fishing than we are. What does the Lord require of you? To do justice, to ensure that there is not a power differential that results in some being taken advantage of. And love kindness, to extend grace to those who are not deserving of grace. And walk humbly with your God, and as you sit there on that pier fishing, you just might see his face. Amen.