Home Page > Sermon Index > September 9, 2007

“Good Expectations”

Wilton Presbyterian Church

September 9, 2007

People have been trying to get a calendar right for centuries. In 45 BC, Julius Caesar began what we know as the Julian calendar to align the months and days with the sun rather than with people, beginning the new year on January 1. Some 15 centuries later, because the Julian calendar was messing up the date of Easter, Pope Gregory XIII issued the Gregorian calendar, now the most widely used calendar in the world. But regardless of what the Julian/Gregorian calendar may dictate, there’s something in the human spirit that celebrates New Year’s in September. “Thirty days hath September,” the first named month in that little ditty. The Sunday after Labor Day. A Sunday after the harvest is gathered in. The Sunday after school starts…or at least used to start. Maybe the Hebrews have it right in celebrating Rosh Hashanah in the fall. Simply because there is something about fall which gets the blood pulsing once again the lull of summer. (Did I say lull of summer?)

Following Hebrew year or the school year or the agricultural year, I’d like to take a few minutes this morning to begin this new year with the question of Micah because one of the things that marks the truth and honesty of a Biblical prophet is that he speaks not only to his generation and time, but to ours. During this new year, “with what shall we come before the Lord, and bow ourselves before God on high?”

Micah asks this question of Israel and its leaders, including its clergy, as a reminder that the offerings we bring that matter most to God are not material, but spiritual. Not burnt offerings, not rivers of oil, not child sacrifice (I sure am glad he mentioned that one…most days!). So, “He has told you, O mortal, what is good: and what the does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”

It is well for us to pay close attention to what Micah trying to say. At least one of the things this prophet aches for us to hear is that for us to be aligned with the purposes of the Almighty we need to dream dreams and to see visions of goodness. And goodness defined by fundamentally by the soul. “He has told you, O mortal, what is good: and what does the Lord require of us but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6.8) What God expects of us this year is to bring before God goodness—doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly before God.

A first thing, though, for us to recognize is how difficult it is to get our arms around the goodness in justice, kindness, and humility. All three--justice, kindness, and humility—are full of mystery. They are rough, elusive, and often the subject not only of close discussion but of fierce dispute, sometimes war even. Still, through the fog and conflict of all human attempts to define them, there is something in us—something we cannot easily explain to ourselves, let alone others—that says “Ah ha!” when we see or experience them. Something that says, “Yes. That’s it. That’s justice. That’s kindness. That’s humility.”

Take justice, for example. One of the definitions of justice I like is that of Walter Brueggeman: “Justice is to sort out what belongs to whom and to return it to them.” “To sort out what belongs to whom and to return it to them.” Nice definition, but this sorting out and this returning--this justice—like everything else on this earth East of Eden is really hard, always approximate, never pure, and often hurts. Justice is tough work. Not that we should shy away from this work of justice: of sorting out what belongs to whom and to return it to them. Quite the contrary, it is the very sacrifice of doing justice that brings out the highest, the noblest, and best in those who lead us and those of us who know whereof they speak. But neither should we be naïve about how tough…and costly the work of doing justice can be.

Let me illustrate through the voice of just one secular statesman who, akin to Micah, spoke once not only to his generation and time but to ours as well.

One hundred and forty-five years ago this month (September 22, 1863) President Abraham Lincoln issued The Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that all persons held as slaves within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.” This Proclamation came as our nation approached its third year of a bloody civil war. And while it did not immediately free a single slave, it fundamentally transformed the character of the war from a war for the Union to a war for freedom, from a war for some worldly success to a war for moral and spiritual justice before God. In this single declaration Lincoln began redescribing the world in terms of freedom and justice for all. Not so much because he was giving freedom to slaves but that he was returning to them the freedom of which they never should have been deprived.

Something he would address again some 11 months later on another battlefield—at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Listen to these words you already know—perhaps in your memory, for certain in your heart:

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation; conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war…testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated…can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.

We have come to dedicate a portion of this field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate….we cannot consecrate…we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us…that from there honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion…that we highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain…that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom…and that government of the people…by the people…for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

This just world Lincoln described he knew would not come easy. It didn’t then. It doesn’t now. He knew it would not come cheap. It didn’t then. Nor does it now. But such a world of freedom and justice for all people, once dreamt, once declared, and once lived—however imperfectly and haltingly—simply will not die. Not so much because of material strength or power or anything else material but because of that goodness reflected in people engaged, often at great cost and sacrifice, in doing justice for others.

What goodness does the Lord expect of us in this new year? Sometime this year—at work or school, in your home or church or community, you will have an opportunity offer goodness to the Lord in doing justice: in saying something, in doing something, in standing up somewhere before others for what you morally believe is true before God and what you spiritually believe is your offering to God. Something that will fit the voice of prophets, the voice of Mary in her Magnificat, the voice of Jesus in parables of justice that meet us on every page of his life. And when that time comes, the justice you are to do for others will be clear and bright and you will pray to God for divine help in doing it.

To do justice: That is the first goodness you will bring to the Lord. But justice is not the only goodness to offer the Lord. To love kindness is the second goodness to offer the Lord. Or, as the Jerusalem Bible translates it, “to love tenderly.” Kindness, tenderness is the flip side of justice. As a matter of human experience, justice without kindness becomes hard and narrow, self-righteous, even vengeful. Justice without tenderness leaves minds fixed, hearts hard, souls shriveled and lives dead. Witness the consequences of virtually every revolution, every movement, every insurgency based on justice alone. If justice is the pitch of the roof and the structure of the walls, kindness is the patter of rain on the roof and the lives sheltered by the walls. If justice is the grammar of things, kindness is the poetry of things. To whatever extent justice involves the sword, kindness is its balm.

Again, Abraham Lincoln: this time from his Second Inaugural Address in March of l865, following four long years of civil war, with its enormous cost of human life on all sides. Lincoln acknowledged: “the progress of our arms…is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all.” And he continued, without offering any prediction, that he believed the war coming to a close and that the purposes of the Almighty would prevail.

At such a time one might imagine a leader offering proud, bold words about the certainty of his convictions and songs about the righteousness of the Lord at his side, the justice of the Lord rolling like mighty waters to avenge the enemies of his cause. Not so with this leader. Rather than concluding his speech with sweeping rhetoric focusing on the justice of his side’s victory, he concludes with words of kindness and tenderness:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

The work of goodness in doing justice is incomplete without the work of goodness in loving kindness to all (whatever “side” they might have been on), in loving tenderly literally any who have borne the battle and for their families. Only then is there any hope of achieving and cherishing a just and lasting peace.

What goodness does the Lord expect of us but “to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God.”

When you stop to think about it, that’s the only way to walk with God. Humbly is how God has chosen to walk with us, in the person of Jesus Christ.

In his time on earth Jesus stood tall, but never by making others cringe. He had power, but used solely to empower others. He healed, but with no strings attached. He competed with none, loved all, even when we were least loveable, event to the point of dying for us on the cross.

The cross says something about the justice of things on a scale so full of mystery that it is hard to grasp. It represents what in one way or another human beings are always doing to each other, the death of the innocent man convicts us as a race and we deserve the grim world that we make for ourselves. We deserve the very godlessness we have brought down on our own heads. That is the justice of things.

But the Cross also represents the presence of goodness even in grimness and God even in godlessness. That is why the cross has become the symbol not of our darkest hopelessness but of our brightest hope. That is the kindness and mercy of things.

If it is with humility that God-in-Christ has walked among us, carrying his cross, if it with humility that the Almighty continues to inspire hope in us through the leaders of our time, who cannot but be humbled before the knowledge of such a God who humbles himself to still walk and talk with us? And who cannot but kneel humbly before the purposes of such a God who one day will cause nations to beat their swords into plowshares and return to people a peace that only God could give and no nation could forever take away.

What goodness does the Lord expect of us this year? “He has shown 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.?”