Honorable
Micah 6:1-8; Matthew 5:1-12
Emmanuel Baptist Church
February 9, 2020; Rev. Kathy Donley
Image: Migrant Mother photo by Dorothea Lange 1936
The book of Micah is 6 chapters long and it is almost entirely about the coming destruction of Jerusalem which God is allowing because of corrupt leadership. If someone required me to recite Micah from memory, I might be able to stammer through the passage about turning swords into plowshares, which is virtually identical in the book of Isaiah, or the verse we hear at Christmas that says “But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel,” or Micah 6:8 which many of you could say with me “What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice and love kindness and walk humbly with your God.”
Some of you would claim Micah 6:8 as a summary of your faith. It’s a good one, for sure. I find it interesting that such a significant verse comes to us from a book of the Bible we rarely read the rest of.
Walter Brueggemann says “It is now agreed among a growing number of scholars that Micah is the voice of the village peasant against the rapacious power of the state. . .. the peasants watched carefully the growing and shameless power of the Jerusalem government. That urban-scientific-military-industrial establishment had usurped the well-being of the little people . . . So, Micah raises the justice question with reference to that social development, the growing power of the urban state.” Brueggemann continues, “It is worth noting here as always, the justice question is raised from below, not from above. It is implausible that anyone in the Jerusalem circles would raise the justice question, because they are preoccupied with questions of prosperity and security. And they do not notice the cost of prosperity and security imposed on the voiceless peasants.”[1]
Micah is the voice of the village peasant, Brueggemann says, the voice raised from below. The voice that was largely unheeded at the time, but the voice which somehow still speaks to us from across almost 3 centuries.
The reading from Micah 6 probably gets paired with the reading of the Beatitudes because of the common themes of justice and kindness and humility. But the two texts, separated by 800 years, also share a focus on the voice from below.
“Much of the power of the Beatitudes depends on where you are sitting when you hear them.”[2] Barbara Brown Taylor says, “They sound different from on top than they do from underneath. They sound different up front than they do in the back. Up front with the religious satisfied and self-assured, they sound pretty confrontational. Where is your hunger and thirst, you well-fed Christians? Where is your spiritual poverty? Where are bones of your soul showing through your clothes, and why aren’t your handkerchiefs soaked with tears?”
“But,” she continues “way in the back, with the victims, the dreamers, the pushovers and the fools, the Beatitudes sound completely different. Shh, they say, dry your tears, little ones. The whole earth belongs to you, though someone else still holds the keys. It won’t be long now. Heaven’s gates are opening wide for you, and the first face you see shall be the face of God.”[3]
The Beatitudes are the very first part of Jesus’ first recorded public teaching in Matthew’s gospel. And so, we might see these verses as a kind of introduction or preamble, in which Jesus is laying out his foundational understanding of who God is and who God’s people are.
The Sermon on the Mount is our label for Matthew chapters 5-7. It is probably some of the most familiar of Jesus’ teaching for Christians and non-Christians. Being familiar with something doesn’t always mean understanding it. Sometimes when something is very familiar, we think we understand more of it than we do. I think the Beatitudes often get dropped into a mental box called “Bible poetry” which is stuff that sounds nice, but maybe not as strong as it should to our ears.
The Beatitudes come from a foreign culture, a culture that has a different foundation from ours. The foundation of our culture is equal rights, equal worth for all human beings. I realize that we often do not live up to our ideals. I am well aware that people are treated differently in our legal system, in our public square, even in the shopping mall, because of the way they dress or talk, because of their professional status or relative wealth or poverty, because of the color of their skin. That may be how it is, but it is not how we think it should be.
On the other hand, people in Jesus’ culture did think it should be like that. His was an honor-shame culture. In this kind of culture, you were born into a certain status, with its level of honor or shame. Honor was a fundamental value. There was a limited amount of honor in the world and the only way you could get more honor, was by gaining it from someone else who then experienced an increase in shame. There was no concept that everyone started out with equal worth. Rather, you started with the amount of honor ascribed to your family at birth and there was no expectation that you could do much to change that.
Those with honor were born into good families. They had a good reputation in the town square. The honorable were those who owned large estates, the elected officials who made the rules, those who spoke and required others to listen, those who could enforce their will. So, honor belonged to and was used by those who were already powerful, important and wealthy. Shame belonged to the powerless, the unimportant, the poor and those who lose status. Since honor started at birth, and God determined which family you are born into, there was a perception that those with honor were pleasing to God while those with shame were not.
If we can begin to understand that context, then we will take the beatitudes out of the box of pretty Bible poetry and understand them as radically counter-cultural. In our translations, the beatitudes say “blessed are those who . . .” but a better translation is “honored are those. . .”
What Jesus does in this sermon is to turn everything upside down. “You think that the world turns on honor,” he says. “You think that God is pleased with the important and powerful. Not so. God is, in fact, most pleased with, the poor, the downtrodden, the ridiculed.” Jesus is speaking to those who inhabit the bottom of the honor-shame hierarchy and he blesses them with honor, freely bestowed by God. The radical idea is that they don’t have to earn more honor. They don’t have to do something to shame someone else and thereby gain honor for themselves. God’s blessing is already given to them. It is already all over the place, just not where they expect it to be.
The power of the Beatitudes depends on where you sit when you hear them. I wonder how we hear them this week after witnessing our political celebrities in the impeachment trial. The closest thing we get to honor-shame in our culture are celebrities. They seem to have an extra portion of honor just for their roles as politicians or athletes or entertainers. And currently, it seems very hard for any sense of shame to diminish their status.
Republicans and Democrats both thought the impeachment process was a sham, although for different reasons. So, I suggest that this week, all of us might be in a place to hear the beatitudes more like the crowd around Jesus, as besieged and bewildered people, people who wonder what they have done to deserve the oppression that they are living under, people who wonder where God is.
I wonder if we can hear Jesus, like Micah before him, as the voice of the peasant against injustice. The voice proclaiming that we non-celebrities matter to God, that justice matters to God, that we are honorable when we seek justice and love kindness and walk humbly with God. Isn’t it amazing that these words are still radically counter-cultural?
The Rev. William Willimon, now retired, was for many years the Campus pastor at Duke University. The campus fraternities didn’t have great reputations. The University required each one to have a certain number of programs each year to give them at least some semblance of respectability, (what we might also call “honor”) and, in the hope that someone might learn something.
One of the fraternities invited Willimon, the campus pastor, to do a program. He was to come to the frat-house and give a lecture on “Moral Character and College.” Willimon thought to himself, “I can’t believe these guys are dumb enough to invite an old guy like me to talk to young men like them on character.” Willimon has been described as brilliant, articulate, with a powerful personality, and when he wants to be, can be very blunt and intimidating. Those boys had probably never been to chapel service and did not know what they were in for.
On the appointed evening, Willimon went to their house and knocked on the door. The door opened and he was greeted by a young boy about nine or ten years old. “What is a kid doing over here at this time of night?” Willimon wondered. Surely, he thought, there should be rules against children even being at a place like that at any time of day.
“They are waiting for you in the common room,” the boy said politely. They went back to the common room and there all the young men were gathered, glumly waiting for the presentation.
Willimon says he then hammered away at the boys for an hour about the failures of their generation. He talked about morality and character and responsibility and faith, and how fraternity houses like that one gave little evidence of any of those things. When he finished his talk, he asked if there were any questions. There was dead silence. So, he thanked them for the honor of inviting him there, and headed out. As one young man walked him to the door, Willimon overhead him say to the little boy, “You go and get ready for bed. I’ll be back to tuck you in and read you a story.”
When they got outside, the fraternity boy lit a cigarette, took a long drag on it, and thanked the pastor for coming out. “Let me ask you,” Willimon said, “Who is that kid and what is he doing here?”
“Oh, that’s Donny,” said the young man. “Our fraternity is part of the Big Brother program in Durham. We met Donny that way. His mom is on cocaine and having a tough time. Sometimes it gets so bad that she can’t care for him. So, we told Donny to call us up when he needs us. Then we go over, pick him up, and he stays with us until it’s okay to go home. We take him to school, and we buy him his clothes, books, and stuff like that.”
Willimon stood there dumbfounded. He said, “That’s amazing. I take back everything I said in there about you guys being bad and irresponsible.”
“I tell you what’s amazing,” said the college boy as he took another drag on his cigarette, “what’s amazing is that God would pick a guy like me to do something this good for somebody else.”[4]
The peasants of ancient Jerusalem,
Micah the obscure prophet,
Jesus the beloved,
Duke frat boys . . . and you . . . and me,
doing justice,
loving kindness,
honored by God.
It is kind of amazing.
Thanks be to God.
[1] Walter Brueggemann, Sharon Park &Thomas H. Groom To Act Justly, Love Tenderly, Walk Humbly, (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), p. 7.
[2] Barbara Brown Taylor, Gospel Medicine (Lanham, Maryland: Cowley Publications, 1995), p, 147.
[3] Taylor, pp. 147-148.
[4] William Willimon, Pulpit Resource, Jan 2006, p.19