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January 29, 2017
Micah 6:1-8
1 Hear what the LORD says:
Rise,
plead your case before the mountains,
and
let the hills hear your voice.
2 Hear, you mountains, the controversy
of the LORD,
and
you enduring foundations of the earth;
for the LORD has a controversy
with his people,
and
he will contend with Israel.
3 “O my people, what have I done to you?
In
what have I wearied you? Answer me!
4 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.
5 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.”
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?
7 Will 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?”
8 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?
Sermon: The Controversy of
Memory
“Without memory, our
existence would be barren and opaque, like a prison cell into which no light
penetrates; like a tomb which rejects the living. If anything can, it is memory
that will save humanity.”
Elie Weisel, Holocaust survivor and writer, spoke these words in
his Nobel prize acceptance speech in Oslo in 1986. This person whose horrific
memories you’d think he would want to forget, reminds us that remembering is essential to salvation,
even if those memories are terrible.
It’s interesting how those who have suffered the most terrible
harm are fixated by memory. Miroslav Volf, a theologian whose father was
tortured for his peaceful Christian beliefs in Yugoslavia, has written a great
deal about memory. He echoes Wiesel’s idea that memory is linked to salvation,
and goes one to say that it’s not enough just to remember our history. We have
to remember it rightly, thoughtfully, without malice or re-victimization.
Hear,
you mountains, the controversy of the
LORD:
“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…
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.”
This
well-known passage of Micah is all about remembering. Though we like to say the
last half-verse of it, that part about what God wants us to do (namely justice, love kindness, walk
humbly with God), we can’t get there without first remembering.
There
is no justice without memory.
There
is no kindness without memory.
There
is no humility with our God without memory.
And
what was it they were to remember exactly? A couple of strange naming places:
Shittim and Gilgal, and a couple of fellas named Balaam and Balak. What
memories lived for these Jewish folk in those names?
Shittim
is, most obviously, the place where they crossed the Jordan to enter the
Promised Land. It was their last campsite before knowing home. But it had a
much more negative side: Shittim was where the people of Israel committed
idolatry through Balaam’s trickery. He “instructed Balak to put a stumbling block before
the people of Israel so they would eat food sacrificed to idols.”[1] The
result was the death of 24,000 people.
Gilgal
doesn’t exactly conjure up warm-fuzzy memories, either. Yes, this was were the wandering people of
Israel ceased their wandering, and celebrated their first Passover in a settled
land, where they ate the produce of that land instead of the manna of the
sojourner.
And
yet, even that place had a darker history to it: the prophets warn against it
strongly. Amos and Hosea both name Gilgal as the capital of great evil and
idolatry. Ultimately, it was a place of failure for those people who longed to
find home: “failure to consolidate the
conquest; failure of the monarchy; and more specifically the failure of the
northern political program.”[2]
So why is God insisting
that the prophet Micah, whose name means “who is like the LORD” and who was a
laborer from small-town Moresheth-gath twenty-five miles from busting
Jerusalem, urge these people to remember such painful things? Why not just
leave it at redemption from slavery, and Moses and Aaron and Miriam? Why did
God have to bring up all those uncomfortable places and people associated with
deception, idolatry and death? Why would anyone want to remember such things?
It seems time to bring back
Elie’s wise words: “It is memory that will
save humanity.”
God wants
them to remember, especially the painful parts of their history, so they will
be saved from repeating them. Because these now-settled people are getting
rather complacent with their political and religious corruption, letting
priests, prophets and judges oppress the poor. Micah, that country boy,
especially pointed out when farmers’ land was being taken by the rich.
Injustice reigned, especially among the so-called religious.
Micah’s
message was clear: worship without justice is meaningless. God doesn’t want thousands
of rams, ten thousands of rivers of oil, or, heaven forbid, a firstborn child
offered. God wants what God has wanted since the day Adam and Eve decided to
snack on self-indulgence and power: for people to do justice, to love kindness
and to walk humbly with their Creator.
Remembering
was the first step on that path, because sometimes the only way forward is to
look backwards. There’s a reason that Micah described this whole prophetic rant
as a “controversy” between God and these chosen people. There’s nothing more
controversial than memory.
What
we choose to remember, how we remember, and why we remember has everything to
do with how we understand the world and our faith. No two people remember the
same way, and that leads to contention and controversy.
I
witnessed this most acutely in the summer of 2005. I led a group of Protestant
and Catholic teenagers from Belfast, Northern Ireland to South Africa to build
peace between them, a peace that was deeply rooted in remembering rightly. One
day, we gave each teenager a lump of clay. Tell us your story, we said. No
other guidance was given.
The
first teen did something innocuous enough. Not the second: he angrily mashed
his clay into a stone. “This represents a stone like what was thrown at us on
Bloody Sunday by the Brits – no offense
to you Prods – when we were peacefully marching and got suddenly attacked
and killed.”
You
can imagine the reaction that got! Teenagers began shouting at each other over
who acted first on that terrible, violent day in Derry in 1972. Blame was cast,
inherited anger bubbled up, and we leaders feared our year-long peacebuilding
efforts were crumbling before our eyes. They weren’t, of course. The Spirit is
made of stouter stuff than a lump of clay.
But
here’s the thing: none of these kids were alive in 1972. These weren’t even
their memories, they had been handed down to them, distilled with greater blame
and hatred with each telling. There was no way for these young people to do
justice, or to love kindness or to walk with humility without facing these
bitter memories.
And
they did face them, with incredible courage. It was very painful, but
eventually their anger coalesced into one shared voice, angry at only being
told half-truths and biased histories. They found their way to reconciliation,
to salvation, and that path was paved with memory.
How,
I wonder, do we remember? What is our Shittim, and our Gilgal? Those complicated
parts of our history we struggle to understand still?
We
might call it Miami in June of 1939, when 937 mostly Jewish passengers on the
St. Louis ocean liner were turned away, sent back to Europe, resulting in more
than a quarter of them dying in the Holocaust.
We
might call it the horror of Pearl Harbor in 1941, and we might call it the
racist internment camps that followed.
We
might call it Memphis in 1968, when hatred tried to kill a movement by killing
a man, and failed.
We
might call it New York City in 2001, when something broke in our national sense
of security, and we’ve never quite recovered it.
And
in our own church and family histories, we all have a Shittim, and a Gilgal,
places where God is calling us to go, to remember, even if painfully, to find
what gives existence meaning, and what God uses to save this world, again and
again.
Do
we want to do justice?
Do
we want to love kindness?
Do
we want to walk humbly with our God?
Then
we have to remember, that the saving works of God for all people might not just
be dusty pages on an old history book, but realities we partner with God in
creating, every single day. Amen.
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