We’re taking another slight detour this morning into the Old Testament. We’ve just heard the very beginning of Jesus’ sermon on the mount, the beatitudes – Jesus’ encouragement for a weary people, desperate for some hope.
But we’re also going to flip back a few pages in our Bibles to hear from one of the Old Testament prophets, Micah. The prophets are not known for being subtle, but I want to give us some context for what we’re about to hear, so that we can make some more sense of it.
What we now have in one short book (only 7 chapters long) are words from the prophet Micah that spanned decades and endured through the end of both the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. Micah is one of only a handful of prophets who speaks to both kings and both kingdoms.
Amidst the political turmoil of two crumbling kingdoms, Micah sees injustice take root in many forms. Wealthy landowners lie awake at night devising new schemes to take more and more land from small farmers. Widows and children are evicted from their homes. Courts that should have been sources of righteousness and justice are infested with corruption and bribery. One king apparently engages in building projects in Jerusalem that are only possible because he exploits the poor as cheap labor – and for some, it costs their lives. Alliances and shifting power dynamics bring foreign gods into the southern kingdom, who are worshipped alongside or instead of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
In the midst of it all, the prophet envisions God having a conversation, a back and forth, with God’s people. A mediation session, if you will, where both lay everything on the table.
Scripture: 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 case of the Lord,
and you enduring foundations of the earth,
for the Lord has a case against 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 thousand 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?
This is a conversation between the universe’s most patient parent and the world’s angstiest teenager.
God: we’re going to have a family meeting. Everybody come sit at the kitchen table so we can hash this out. We need to talk.
Israel: now what?? You said I can’t borrow money from my brother’s piggy bank. I can’t take all the clothes from the school lost & found every day and sell them back to the kids who lost them. I can’t take my sister’s car whenever I want. I can’t leave moldy dishes under my bed. I can’t do anything right and you never help me with anything!
God: really? Never? Did you forget that time I came to get you at 2am and beat up that sketchy guy who was trying to keep you in his apartment forever? What about the jobs I’ve set up, and the mentoring, and the counseling?
Israel: ugh, FINE. What do you want me to do then? Should I write “I won’t leave moldy dishes under my bed” a thousand times in a notebook? Should I paint the garage again? Should I give you $200 from my savings? What will make you stop talking?
God: I don’t want any of that! I want you to want to do the right thing. I want you to care about other people. I want us to have a conversation where we’re not yelling at each other.
We don’t get the angsty teen’s reply, but from the history, we know none of that happened overnight.
Has anybody here ever seen the TV show The Good Place?
Highly recommend it. It’s phenomenal. If you haven’t seen it, I’m going to spoil part of it, so sorry about that. But I’ll do my best not to reveal the big twists.
Long story short, there’s this group of friends who are all trying to get into The Good Place – aka ‘Heaven’ – and they find out that the decision about who goes where is all based on a points system. You do good things, you get points. You do bad things, you lose points. Except then they find out that no human in centuries has actually earned enough points to get into The Good Place. So they assume that the villains from The Bad Place must be tipping the scales somehow, messing with the point totals so they get everyone.
They wind up breaking into The Good Place to tell whoever’s in charge so they can fix it – and what they find is a committee. They explain all this to the committee, and the committee deliberates for a couple tense minutes before announcing their decision. They are going to take decisive action.
Relief floods through the room.
Then one of the committee members says: “we are going to form an elite investigative team to get to the bottom of this. And we’re fast-tracking the process, so it will take no more than 400 years. It’s aggressive, but yes, we’re only giving ourselves 400 years to select the members of this elite team. Upon formation, this team will then be charged with organizing an elite, blue-ribbon commission to investigate…themselves. To make sure there are no conflicts of interest. And that will take 1,000 years.”
The team’s fearless leader objects: “uh, I was thinking we could do something now-ish. Like, right now. You do realize that the entire time you’re doing this, The Bad Place is continuing to TORTURE everyone who winds up there, which is EVERYBODY.”
The committee replies: “and we are deeply concerned about that. Have you seen the memorandum we sent each other about how concerned we are? We’re taking this very seriously.”
I love a good committee, and the process of coming together to discern and make decisions together. I love words and statements and confessions and the ways they can form and shape us. And sometimes, we have to stop talking and just do the dang thing.
That’s the energy I see in this back-and-forth between God and God’s people. God does not want or need a thousand burnt offerings from us. Not goats or bulls or entire rivers of oil to say ‘sorry about that.’
God wants justice and kindness and humility. God wants action.
Make a casserole. Shovel someone else’s sidewalk. Go to a protest. Donate to a nonprofit. Demand justice from those with power and do not let them say ‘in a few hundred years.’ Pray. Sing. Shout the words of God’s prophets from the rooftops.
Do something.
One of my favorite quotes over the years has no definitive source, but it goes like this: you can do anything, but you cannot do everything.
Beloveds, there are a billion voices crying out for your attention, your time, your outrage. It is so easy to feel overwhelmed and over-stimulated and decide to ignore it all and go about our lives. It’s easy to believe that nothing we do matters, anyway.
But that is not true. Every bit of good, every moment of compassion, every humble prayer, every instance of integrity matters. Every teeny move of the needle toward justice and peace matters. It matters to God, and it matters here and now.
Together, we are doing something. I checked the mail on my way in this morning, and found this 2025 Giving Statement from Kid’s Food Basket.
Between Ruth Circle jewelry sales, concert donations, and your giving to Kids Food Basket through the church, we sent them $12,261.40 in 2025. More than $12,000 that goes directly into feeding hungry kids, providing nutrition education and life skills for entire classrooms, and advocating for policies that reduce hunger in West Michigan.
None of us is responsible for fixing the entire world on our own, but we are responsible for doing what we can with what we have.
And beloveds, here is the good news: the Holy Spirit feeds and strengthens us, in body and soul, for this work. That is precisely why we gather at this table, to be with God and one another, and to be reminded that when we don’t feel like we have a whole lot of good to offer, God’s goodness flows to us and through us.
Thanks be to God. Amen.