“Summing It Up”*
Micah 6:6-8 and John 13:34-35
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
6/23/24
6“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?
7Will the Lord be pleased
with thousands of rams,
with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
8He 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?
34I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. 35By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
Eugene Peterson was a Presbyterian pastor, seminary professor, and writer. While he wrote a number of books, he’s best remembered for his paraphrase of the Bible entitled The Message.
Peterson was also a dad, and he and his one of his sons, Leif, had a running joke. The joke was that, for all his years preaching and teaching, the elder Peterson had “only one real sermon.”1
“It’s almost laughable,” said Leif at his dad’s funeral in 2018, “how you fooled them, how for 30 years every week you made them think you were saying something new.
“They didn’t know how simple it all was. They were blind to your secret.” That secret, said Leif, was that he preached “same message over and over…‘God loves you.’”2
Leif said that his dad wanted him, and everyone, to trust that God is with us, loving us relentlessly. That was the bottom line. And that was Eugene Peterson’s sermon.
I’m not the scholar and author Eugene Peterson was, but I think that, like him, I have “only one real sermon.” And when preaching last Easter, I felt more acutely than ever that I was saying what I had said some 1200 times before. And my one sermon, which is similar to Eugene Peterson’s, is an attempt to restate what we just read in the passages from Micah and John.
God “has told you…what is good,” says Micah, “and what does the Lord require…but to do justice…love kindness and to walk humbly with your God.” And in John, Jesus tells his disciples, “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”
Do justice. Biblical justice demands far more of us than obeying commandments and punishing those who occasionally break them. The justice to which Micah and other prophets refer is restorative justice—the justice predicated on God’s redemptive and reconciling love. So, when people are hungry, to love justice means feeding them. When people are systemically exploited, abused, and ignored, doing justice means naming the problem and helping reshape human systems so that everyone has the opportunity to recognize and enjoy their own God-imaged humanity. And that’s something we cannot do individually. As a holy gift, our God-imaged is something we realize through relationship. So, the surest way to recognize and enjoy the image of God within ourselves, is to seek it in others, to honor it, and then to mirror it between and among us in community.
Learning kindness is foundational to doing justice. Far more challenging than “being nice,” biblical kindness involves compassion and empathy. Kindness recognizes not only that everyone struggles in this life, but the less obvious reality that when any of us struggle, we all struggle, because when even one part of the body suffers the whole body suffers.
Kindness recognizes our interconnectedness, our interdependence. Kindness, says one educator, requires incredible courage and strength, because it moves us “from me to we.”2
And how do we open ourselves to God’s kindness? I think Micah would say that we do that by practicing humility. And that means confessing that in God’s all-loving and all-redeeming eye, there’s not one of us who can claim superiority over another. And when we, nonetheless, try to live that way, we fragment ourselves into homogenous, fear-bound groups, and we almost always end up doing injustice, loving unkindness, and walking away from God in prideful arrogance.
When we pray the prayer of confession on Sunday mornings, that is the unfaithfulness we confess. That is the life Jesus calls us to lose so that we can embrace the life in which we love as we are loved.
Over the years, I’ve become convinced that the love Jesus teaches and demonstrates is predicated on Micah’s God-centered ethos that moves from humility, into kindness, and culminates in holy justice. In this movement—which beautifully parallels the beatitudes—justice actively seeks the well-being of all people, and of the whole. And justice-seekers recognize that working for the well-being of neighbors is to work for one’s own well-being.
In the 18th century, the Scottish economist Adam Smith said that a free-market system is, on the surface, an amalgamation of individuals seeking their own self-interest. That self-interest gets tempered by, what he called, an invisible hand which somehow makes everything work out just right for everyone. Frankly, I think that’s kind of suspicious logic. Almost inevitably, individuals seeking their own self-interest collude with others pursuing the same goal to create systems which always shift advantage and power toward those who hold increasingly disproportionate wealth. Those societies become consumed by injustice, cruelty, and pride. And whatever is loving or Christlike within those societies emerges as a prophetic voice calling for repentance—that is to say, calling for justice, kindness, and humility and the well-being of the whole.
It seems to me, then, what we often call “social justice” is God’s holy justice. It’s God acting through those who pursue justice—even through those who are not motivated by a biblical call to love. As Jesus says in Mark, “Whoever is not against us is for us.” (Mark 9:40)
So yes, I think Jesus lived and taught Micah’s ethos of justice, kindness, and humility. This ethos of prophetic love can be hindered momentarily, and when that happens, all will look and feel bleak. Throughout history there have been countless eras during which the clouds of injustice, cruelty, and pride have caught the thermals of greed, fear, and nationalism and risen to ascendance. In those crucial moments, God’s beloved community of grace is called to gather its courage, to speak, and to act. And the community doesn’t merely protest. It distinguishes itself as a voice of love, as a presence of welcome, inclusion, and reconciliation.
To some extent, every era is just such an era. Because of that, the Church is always called to be a place of prophetic grace. Our buildings, our policies and protocols, our investments and vestments may have their place, but when we care for them at the expense of our call to do justice, love kindness, and to walk humbly with God, isn’t that to abandon holiness and hope?
So, friends, this is my sermon: God, through Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit has graced us with God’s image and God’s trust. God has empowered us to be, not an invisible hand, but God’s intentionally visible hands and feet and hearts in the world, for the world—a world that God loves purely, personally, and relentlessly. And by loving as Jesus loves us, we are embraced by Resurrection, and we inhabit the eternal realm of God. Right here. Right now. In the midst of one another. In the midst of Creation’s most ordinary and yet most holy realities.
I’ve tried to say that in lots of ways. I hope it came through.
You’re probably ready for, and due, a new sermon. And whatever it may be, may we all continue to embody God’s love by doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God.
In God’s Beloved Community.
Thanks be to God.
2Ibid.
*This was my final sermon at Jonesborough Presbyterian Church. As of July 1, 2024, I will retire from congregational ministry and move on to whatever God may have in store for me. I do hope to continue this blog, though entries will no longer—or at least seldom—be sermons. May God’s peace be with you all. Allen
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