Friends, this morning our teaching scripture is from Micah
Chapter 2 as we continue in our series of the Minor Prophets.
Alas for those who devise wickedness and evil deeds on
their beds, when the morning dawns, they perform it because
it is in their power. They covet fields and seize them
houses and take them away. They oppress householder and
house people in their inheritance.
Therefore thus says the Lord, Now I am devising against this
family an evil from which you cannot remove your necks, and
you shall not walk haughtily, for it will be an evil time on
that day. They shall take up a taunt song
against you, and will wear whale with bitter lamentation, and say
We are utterly ruined. The Lord alters the inheritance
of my people, how He removes it from me Among our captors He
parcels out our fields. Therefore you will have no one
to cast the line by lot in the assembly of the Lord.
Arise and go, for this is no place to rest because of
uncleanliness that destroys with grievous destruction.
If anyone were to go about utterly emptying falsehoods,
saying I will preach to you of wine and strong drink, such a
one would be the preacher for this people.
I will surely gather all of you, O Jacob, I will gather the
survivors of Israel. I will set them together like
sheep in a fold, like a flock in its pasture.
It will resound with people. The one who breaks out will go
up before them. They will breakthrough and pass
the gate, going out by it. Their king will pass before
them, the Lord at their head. This is the word of the Lord.
When I was in seminary, I enrolled in a class called
Prophetic Preaching. The goal of the class was
twofold, learning how to preach the prophetic literature, which
we've been spending a lot of time in.
It's that section of the Bible of individuals willing to take
the time to believe that they are speaking for God when they
look out on the world. But this class also aimed to
learn how to embody the prophets, to kind of live into
that role. And as the syllabus said, to
speak truth in love in ways that are faithful, relevant, and
transformative for local communities of faith, which is a
great thing. Too often the church has allied
itself with the powerful, with the oppressor, with those who
seek their own gain and enrichment at the expense of the
poor and the oppressed. Who God throughout the Bible
shows a preferential option for. The text of the Bible is clear.
God allies God self with the down and out the least in the
world who cry out to God for mercy and justice.
And if that's not part of our life and witness as the church,
then we've missed something important of the heart of God.
But for me, the danger in a prophetic preaching class,
particularly at 24 years old, was that I was really focused on
the part where I got to tell everyone what they were doing
wrong. In preparation for this sermon,
I read back through some of the short sermons I wrote for that
class. And while I tried to gesture
towards pastoral realities and care when reading them, I can
see through them the image of myself that I was trying to
craft. I was going to be the one who
would change a congregation, who would rouse people up from their
complacency, who would speak with clarity, the message that
no one wanted to hear. And there's a part of me that
still wants to do that. But when I read those short
sermons, it feels like there's something missing.
And that's something missing is what we're going to talk about
from the Book of Micah this morning.
So we've been in this series called the Gospel and the Minor
Prophets for the last several weeks, and it's going to
continue through Easter. In this series, we've been
taking a close look at the prophetic literature, the book
of the 12, which is a collection of short prophetic writings.
There's also much longer prophetic writings in the Bible,
but those would be even more difficult to compress into a
sermon series. So we've been exploring it and
this truth telling and this book of the Twelves called to return
to the Lord. And so this week we turn to the
prophet Micah. Micah was a prophet from the
village of Morisheth, which was a small village just outside of
Jerusalem. It was this small village kind
of outside of the major power structures of the Kingdom of
Judah, but it was impacted by these powerful people around
them. Micah likely saw the
implications of these policies being decided far away and how
they impacted the small, poor farmers that he lived with.
He saw the impact of this growing government power that
cared more for its own needs than for justice or for the life
of the people who needed care, Micah wrote.
At a time when Israel was surrounded by war, caught
between these big competing powers of Assyria on one side
and Babylon on the other, and always in danger of getting
crashed in the middle, he and his people knew what it was like
to be worried about something beyond their control.
To worry about the impact that the world might have on them and
their children who are just trying to eke out a meager
existence as farmers. If you're interested in history,
Micah was likely writing around the same time as the much more
popular prophet Isaiah. Maybe he was feeling like he was
in the shadow of this popular one who has preserved texts and
texts and texts in the Bible. And the book of Micah, like most
of the prophets we've been looking at in this series, is a
collection of oracles and judgments that Micah preached
throughout the Kingdom of Judah. But a striking piece of this
book is how little biographical information the book has.
The only story in the book is the very first verse, the word
of the Lord that came to Micah of Morisheth in the days of King
Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah of Judah, which he saw concerning
Samaria and Jerusalem. The entire rest of the book is
just the words that Micah heard from the Lord and spoke to the
people of God. We don't get to hear how anyone
responded. We don't get to hear about any
opposition that Micah faced. We don't get to see these weird
prophetic acts that some of the other prophets did.
Instead, we just have words. Words described as the word of
the Lord, endued with divine power, transmitting to us
through the person of this mysterious prophet Micah, the
words of God for his people in his place.
But I think as you read it, these might be some of the words
of God for us too. Because while Micah is concerned
with these particular events going on in his own context,
much of the book is about these broader visions.
He has a bracingly clear look at how the world actually is, but
alongside that, he has an equally and surprisingly clear
account of how the world could be.
Because the book of Micah oscillates between judgement and
hope. So this movement between
judgement and hope is pretty common in prophetic literature.
The prophet speak this judgement of God, and then they show the
way God will restore people after the judgement.
But in Micah, it's really particularly stark.
It's a repeated pattern that you can't get away from.
He speaks words of doom and words of judgement, and then he
speaks words of hope over and over again, like there are two
pieces of the same pendulum alternating back and forth.
Judgment, hope, judgment, hope. I'd encourage you to read the
whole book to get some of this. I can't do all of that on a
Sunday morning, but that's the movement that I think I was
missing in that prophetic preaching class in seminary.
It was really easy for me to major on this move towards
judgement. It's not hard for me to imagine
God's sadness and anger regarding injustice in the world
because I find that same sadness and anger in my own heart.
What I found harder was to make that move towards hope.
I lacked the imagination to see God is holding out something
even better than truth telling. Instead of truth telling, God in
alignment with God's character is always holding out hope
grounded in his love. And so that's what I want to
talk about this morning is the hope of Micah.
A hope that doesn't shy away from the truth, but a hope that
speaks with clarity and specificity and beauty.
But when you read it, you can't really ignore.
So let's dig a bit into that passage that Tori read this
morning because I think it's emblematic of the book as a
whole is a longer reading. But I was trying to capture some
of this oscillation between judgement and hope.
So at the beginning of the passage, Micah picks up a theme
of judgement. He begins, alas, for those who
devise wickedness and evil deeds on their beds.
So what I'd first call your attention here to is that it
starts with the word alas. Alas is a word of regret, of
sadness. I think it's important to note
about Micah and about the prophets more generally.
Micah doesn't start from this place on high looking down on
the people. Instead, he starts with a broken
heart, with sadness. So Abraham Joshua Heschel, who
was a rabbi and who was involved in the civil rights movement and
his book on the prophets, writes that to be a prophet is to be in
communion with the feelings of God, to be in communion with the
feelings of God. And I think that's really the
key to understanding what Micah is getting at in these oracles
of judgement. He doesn't begin from a place of
anger, but from a place of sadness, a place of regret.
I think that what Micah and Heschel are showing us is that
there's something about the character of God, that God's
first response to sinfulness or brokenness or injustice isn't
anger. Though I think if you read the
prophets, you get a healthy dose of God's anger about the ways
that people trample on God's Beautiful Creatures.
But instead of anger, where Micah and God's start is
sadness. Micah begins this passage with
alas, because he sees the way in which human wickedness and
wicked thoughts have deformed the people of Israel, but
they've also deformed the leaders who are thinking them.
He sees the way in which their participation and injustice has
taken away their humanity. They're trapped by injustice as
they engage in oppression rather than laying in their bed and
enjoying their I'll gotten wealth and thinking of how
blessed they are. Micah mourns because they spend
their nights thinking of ways to increase their power and
worrying about what they will do next.
What is it that they are daydreaming about?
Micah tells us. When the morning dawns, they
perform it because it is in their power.
They covet fields and seize them houses and take them away.
They oppress householder and house people and their
inheritance. So throughout Micah, his big
concern is about this economic injustice.
He's utterly caught up in God's vision of the world, God's
vision of a creation where everyone is able to flourish,
God's vision in which through the mutuality of sharing
together, everyone is provided for.
Micah speaks harshly against the leaders of the community who
don't focus on the needs of the community as a whole, but rather
their own personal enrichment. His condemnation is about this
power that they are allowed to possess that makes all the
fantasies they dream about reality as they wake up and do
what they had been dreaming about.
And I wonder where we see that in our world today.
Seems like the news all the time has stories of people who are
destroying the livelihoods of others in order to enrich
themselves. God through Micah speaks very
harshly against them, saying I am devising against this family
and evil from which you cannot remove your necks and you shall
not walk haughtily, for it will be an evil time.
Now I recognize it's sometimes difficult to read texts like
these in the Bible, these condemnations.
It's hard to imagine God devising and evil.
Isn't that out of the character of God?
I don't want to sidestep this question.
Throughout the prophets, there's like statements like this all
the time that it's really much easier to kind of ignore.
But I think what's actually going on here depends on the
perspective from where you see the situation.
God seems to be devising this radical rethinking and collapse
of the economic order of Israel, which is bad news if you're on
the top of it. But maybe it's the beginning of
justice if you're on the bottom. God's judgement, this evil he's
devising, isn't about condemning particular people.
It's about condemning the system that keeps the people on the
bottom, that reinforces over and over again these social
hierarchies. Rather, what Micah is aiming at
is liberation, a new thing that feels like evil if you're the
one who is at the top doing the oppression.
And I also want to push back against when we read Micah is
always seeing us on the side of Micah and these oppressed
farmers. Some of us are there and we
should rightly hear God's condemnation of a society that
seeks to disenfranchise you. But for some of us, I think we
find ourselves more at the top doing the oppressing.
Or maybe we're somewhere in the middle.
We're not the oppressor. We're not the oppressed.
I had to guess that's where most of us fall.
We might not think that we lay on our beds devising evil at
night, but I do wonder, what is it that's keeping you awake at
night? Do you way awake thinking about
God's response to injustice? Or do you think of the way you
can protect ourselves and our family?
Do we dream of the liberation of humanity into just
relationships? Do we just think about the new
material goods we want to possess?
Do we ponder our complicity and injustice?
Or do we distract ourselves with doom scrolling, just letting
media flow in front of our eyes until we can't feel anything
anymore? Because Micah seems to be as
bothered by distraction as he is by those who are actively
oppressing the householders in the house.
So at the end of this Oracle of judgement, he speaks really
sarcastically, saying if someone were to go about uttering empty
falsehoods, saying I will preach to you of wine and strong drink,
such a one would be a preacher for this people.
Seems that Micah's message wasn't really well received.
Instead, he condemns the people who would rather hear about
parties, about the wine and the strong drink that dulls the
senses and dulls their connection with reality.
He condemns those people who would rather do that than the
plight of his neighbors that he calls attention to.
And I know that sounds true for me.
Maybe not the wine and strong drink per SE, I have my own
vices. But the distraction and
unwillingness to face what is true about the world.
Micah speaks with clarity about injustice.
He clearly lays out the way that God sees the world.
And I think this vision has reality and purchase in our
world as well. But I think what's perhaps even
more life giving for me when I look at this book, what I was
missing in my early attempts to be prophetic is the visions of
Micah's hope and God's hope that dot throughout the book.
Because on the whole, I think that CV is a church that has
been deeply involved in the work of mercy and justice.
There are so many stories to tell of individuals in Columbus
and children throughout the world that have been impacted by
C VS witness to God's radical welcome and care.
But at least for me, sometimes when I wake up in the morning
and power up my iPad to read the paper, I don't feel very
hopeful. These visions of hope don't seem
true for me a lot of the time when I'm not distracting myself
and I am paying attention. Instead of the world getting
better and improving and moving towards God's Kingdom, it just
feels like we're sinking into more depravity.
We're sinking into new forms of oppression.
More of a rot that's at the center of our life together is
being revealed over and over and over again.
How will we ever get out of this mess?
Of course, of course we should keep working for justice, but
sometimes it just gets tiring. I was talking to my spiritual
director and she said that maybe the question of evil in the
world was hard for me because at my work I have a front seat
every day. I'm a chaplain at a Children's
Hospital, and I see really awful things that happen to children
throughout Ohio all the time. But I think that that's not only
me here. I think there's a lot of us who
have a front row seat to injustice, whether that
injustice is being perpetrated against us or against those who
you love and know and care about.
Maybe we're a bit like Micah in that way, when he was living in
this small farming community, watching the powerful
dispossessed others of their land and livelihood.
And yet right after this clear condemnation of the elite, which
I can definitely get behind, Micah has this beautiful passage
that feels out of place and doesn't resonate with me in
quite the same way. He no longer writes in this
descriptive mode of what's happening.
Instead, he turns to address the people of Israel directly in the
voice of God. And he says, I will surely
gather all of you. Oh, Jacob.
I will gather the survivors of Israel, I will set them together
like sheep and a fold like a flock in its pasture, and it
will resound with people. Then jumping down a few verses,
their king will pass on before them the Lord at their head.
So Micah isn't only gloom and doom.
Rather, he digs down into this reservoir of hope, of longing
for this future restoration of God.
Micah, despite seeing so clearly the injustice of the world, it's
being so caught up in the feelings of God, and God's
sadness about that doesn't lose his hope for this time of
redemption. There are a few things I want
you to notice about them. Hope that Micah cultivates here
1st. It's not like this Pollyanna
hope, a refusal to acknowledge the brokenness of the world.
The people that God is gathering in this passage are the
survivors of Israel. Like the breakdown of everything
is still coming. This hope is on the other side
of the judgement that Micah talks about.
The hope for Micah is for those who are oppressed to come and to
see the world being made right. The second the restoration that
Micah's talking about here isn't just this general hope that
things are going to go right in the future.
He's not just an optimistic person who always sees the
bright side of life. Rather, in this redemption, God
is the one who is enacting justice.
I think people think sometimes about the quote from Doctor King
that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends
towards justice. But what is true about that is
that God is bending the arc towards justice.
It's not just that the world is going in that direction.
God is bringing about God's Kingdom, his rule for the way
the world will work, the way that God aims for it too.
And this is the ground of Micah's hope, the character of
God who will not abandon God's people and God's creation
forever. That's how Micah maintains hope.
It's not about ignoring the reality of the world, of looking
away from injustice. But at the same time, it's not
about giving into a cynicism that feels like realism when
it's actually just despair. Instead, Micah finds the space
to look for the future world that God promises.
I wonder what it is that makes it hard for me to keep that hope
in mind. And I wonder what it is for you.
What is it that grounds Micah's hopeful vision of the world?
A vision of the world where God is restoring all things because
Micah is able to push back against despair, and despair is
something that the tradition, Christian tradition, has
historically had a lot to say about.
When I think about despair, the first thing that comes to mind
is this line from Macbeth that we would use to warm up when I
was a high school theater kid. And the line is tomorrow and
tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day-to-day
to the last syllable of recorded time.
And there's something about despair that I think that image
captures, this image of tomorrow's just reaching out
over and over and over again, this repetition of tomorrow not
finding hope, but only more of the same place that we're in
now. So when we read the prophets, we
get stuck on these passages of judgement.
We can become cynics. We can see the brokenness of the
world just stretching out forever, tomorrow and tomorrow
and tomorrow. But what happens for Micah is
that the tomorrow's have an interruption.
Suddenly God will act on the remnant.
A truly new tomorrow, a new thing will come.
And that's the ground of our hope, the gracious action of God
moving and interrupting the way in which we lay out the world.
The hope of Micah gets deepened as it's picked up in the New
Testament, as we think about God's full revelation of God's
character in the person of Jesus.
The later passage of hope. And Micah, after a few more
oracles of judgement, Micah picks up an Oracle of Bethlehem.
And he writes, But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, for one
of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for
me, one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from old
of ancient days. And he shall stand and feed his
flock in the strength of the Lord, and the majesty of the
name of the Lord his God, and they shall live secure.
For now he shall be great to the ends of the earth, and he shall
be the one of peace. So when Micah wrote these words,
there are expressions of hope for desire for a godly king, a
Messiah who's going to come and interrupt this list of
tomorrow's with the redemption that God promises.
And this very line is picked up in the Gospel of Matthew and
quoted verbatim in the story of the wise men coming to visit
Jesus. The Gospel See, this hope that
is promised in Micah is finding its ultimate reality in the
person of Jesus. And I think that's our answer to
despair this morning, to find ourselves in touch with this
person of Jesus who reveals to us what God is like.
The passage of hope and Micah is the promise towards which the
moral arc of the universe bends. What we hope for is the time
when Jesus will stand and feed his flock and the strength of
the Lord Jesus is the one of peace for which we long.
And this is the final end of the judgement and hope pendulum and
Micah. As the book goes on, the
explorations of hope become longer and longer until you get
to the end. And it feels like hope is all
that's there remaining because it was Jesus who was at the
beginning of everything, who will also be there standing at
the end. And that's how we maintain hope,
by coming to know Jesus and to know his character.
And when I think of Jesus transforming our hope, I think
of the work of some friends that I had when I lived in Waco, TX.
So Janet and Jimmy, there's a picture of them.
They met when they were in College in the late 1970s, and
after graduating, they bought these tickets on Pan Am that you
can't buy anymore, where they were like your rail passes for
the world, where they could go for six months and as long as
they kept going, that was fine. They spent a year traveling
around the world and they would just stop as they felt the
spirit leading them. They spent a particularly
impactful time with Mother Teresa in Calcutta, caring for
some of the world's most abandoned people.
While they were there, what they were struck by wasn't only the
intense poverty they saw, but they also saw the love and
dignity and hope that the Hospice in Calcutta was able to
give people, revealing God's heart of love.
And when they were there, rather than continuing their world
travels and finding this place where they could emulate Mother
Teresa, Jimmy and Janet were instead struck by the place they
came from, the down and out streets of North Waco, where
people were similarly missing hope for a future.
Their lack of hope and despair looked different, but it was
still there. So they began to imagine what
the heart of Jesus might be for their own home, not just the
faraway places in the world. They moved into one of the
roughest neighborhoods and engaged in an incarnation
ministry that, through decades of prophetic witness, has
changed the approach of the city of Waco to some of its poorest
neighborhoods. But when you meet Jimmy, you
don't meet this angry prophet who's just always trying to say,
like, look at how broken everything is.
Instead, you meet someone who tells you about table tennis and
playing basketball with kids in his backyard.
And we meet Janet. She doesn't talk about the
brokenness that she sees as she continues to travel the world.
You hear about her pottery studio and her frustrations with
the people in the neighborhood who keep sitting in her hammock
when she wants to sit at it. But most of all, what they tell
you are the stories of the people they know, who have seen
the heart of Jesus and found their hope transformed.
They'll tell you about their unhoused friends who've come
together to pay school tuition for four children in Haiti.
They'll tell you about the neighborhood kid who started
acting in one of their after school programs and in 2023 was
nominated for a Tony Award. In short, they will tell you
stories of hope, Hope inspired by their deep knowing of the
heart and character of Jesus. And even when they live in a
place where despair would be really easy, they tell you not
of the judgement of God, but of the hopeful Kingdom of God that
is breaking in and even the most unexpected ways.
So this morning, if this deep hearted knowing of God isn't
something that feels true for you, in a little while we'll
have time to pray for you. I get a sense that some people
here, we're on kind of a last step on the road to despair.
And I want to reassure you that there is hope.
There is space for the renewal of your heart and its capacity
to hope. And that space is found in
encounter with Jesus. And we just love to welcome you
into that. This morning, before we get to
prayer, I think that Micah leaves us with just a little bit
more. But I don't feel like I can end
this sermon without at least gesturing towards.
So where does this leave us? Where does this reflection on
hope mean for us at Central Vineyard today?
I think that Micah reveals to us in the passage that's maybe the
most famous in the book that I felt like I had to include from
the 6th chapter of Micah. This is Micah 68.
So he's told you, O mortal, what is good?
What does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to
love kindness, to walk humbly with your God?
So when Micah looks out throughout the world, he's
holding judgement and he's holding hope together.
This is his conclusion about what that means.
I think it's the conclusion for us as well.
When we look out at the brokenness of the world, our job
isn't to style ourselves as a prophet who's standing above and
looking down on everyone else. Instead, we're encouraged to
roll up our sleeves to begin doing justice, to begin
partnering with the God who's already at work and bringing
about right relationships between people.
And our job is to love kindness. Or in other translations you may
have heard, Love Mercy. Notice that where Micah lands,
isn't this like resignation to the brokenness of the world?
It's a transformation of his heart to love as God loves.
And how do we do that? How do we nurture in ourselves
the kind of hope that Micah holds up so clearly?
We do the end of the verse there.
We walk humbly with our God. So what does that mean in the
face of injustice? What does it mean to walk humbly
with our God? It means to be the kind of
person that I talked about the prophet being earlier, one who
is in communion with the feelings of God.
Though I've been taking this time to look at the minor
prophets, the promise of the outpouring of the Spirit in the
New Testament is that all of God's people, that is, all of us
might become prophets, become people who are caught up in the
feelings of God. We might caught up in the
feelings of God as we walk faithfully with him.
So that's where I want to leave us this morning as our worship
team comes back up. And if you're on our prayer
team, make your way to the sides.
I just invite you to take a second and think about where do
you feel an invitation of your heart stirring in communion with
the feelings of God? Where is your heart stirring
with sadness and passion that God displays towards brokenness
in the world? Being the people who are
following the way of Jesus the King who was, is, and will be
the one of peace walking alongside him.
Getting caught up in Jesus's emotions and love for the world.
But maybe that's been hard for you recently.
That's OK too. Maybe you've given in to despair
this morning. If that feels true for you, I'd
invite you to receive hope again.
Hope that comes not through working really hard to be
optimistic, but hope that comes through walking in step with the
way of Jesus. We'd love to welcome you into
that. She received prayer this
morning.