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THE LORDS SHORT LIST Micah 6:6-8 Matthew 5:1-12 It is great to be with you for this joint celebration service today. I bring you warm greetings from the NY State Council of Churches. Ive been a minister for 43 years, but I have never before attended a joint service of six congregations on a Sunday morning. You FOCUS churches are ecumenical exemplars! The annual world-wide Week of Prayer for Christian Unity has just ended. The Scripture text for the week, chosen by Christians in India this year, is our text for today: What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God. It often helps to have a short list. If you need to hire someone, you pour over resumes and narrow the field to a top candidate or two. Since the 1950, a 12 step program has helped many to sobriety. The ancient Greeks cultivated four cardinal virtues: wisdom, courage, temperance and justice. Medieval theologians warned of seven deadly sins. You get up on a Saturday morning with a whole free day ahead. If youre married, your spouse may give you a to do list to save you from the sin of sloth. Yes, in the face of lifes endless options, a short list helps. Our Scriptures this morning are two of the most famous short lists in the Bible. The Beatitudes are Jesus prescription for a life that is blessed. That word means both happy and whole. The prophet Micah poses a crucial question: What does the Lord require of you? Of course, we have many options in church. Our individuality matters to God. The Holy Spirit gives many different gifts to Gods people. You may sing in the choir, lead a Bible study, care for the poor, cook in the kitchen, sit on a committee. Each of

us has many options. But some things are required of all of us who would walk in the way of the Lord. Doing justice is first on Gods short list. The Hebrew word is mishpat. Justice is a key word in the Old Testament, but what does it mean? We have a symbol of justice in our western culture. You see it atop court houses across the land including the Supreme Court building in Washington. Justice is a solitary figure in a flowing robe, blindfolded and holding an ancient weighing scale. Human justice is blind, balanced, poised and supposedly fair. In the name of human justice Black slaves were defined as three-fifths of a person in the US Constitution. Women were denied the right to vote here until 1920. Scores of third-world nations are so indebted to developed nations today that their people starve. And its all perfectly legalor was. Human justice may be blind, but often it is just not fair. How different in the Bible! Let justice roll down like a waterfall and fairness like an overflowing stream. Thats Amos, another prophet of the time crying out to the people of Israel. Biblical justice is a torrent, a powerful, passionate force, that washes clean and brings change. Justice is no mere human ideal or virtue. Justice is Gods urgent agenda in human historynot what the Peoples Court decides but what God is doing to make things right and set people free. Thats biblical justice and its radical stuff. The Roman historian Tacitus wrote, The gods are on the side of the stronger. That was the accepted view in the ancient world. The gods bless the rulers, the elites, the rich and powerful folk. Some still believe that today. Kings and pharaohs were viewed as gods, until the Hebrews, the people of Israel, had a new epiphany, a radical new experience of God where God wasnt supposed to beon the side of the weak and

the poor. The Lord hears the cry of hopeless brick-yard slaves, routs the Egyptian army and sets the captives free. The Exodus is a picture of Gods justice at work. Justice is Gods compassion for that trinity mentioned so often in the Old Testament: the widow, the orphan, and the alien, foreigner, undocumented worker. They had no power in Israel because they had no male relative to provide for and protect them in that ancient mans world. Time and again we read that the Lord, the God of Israel was on their side. How well are the weakest, the poorest, the most vulnerable doing in your community? Biblical justice is never blind or equal. It is Gods bias in favor of the poor and powerless. Human justice focuses on justice as retributionpunishing criminals. We need a clearer vision. Today we have a higher percentage of our citizens in prison and yet higher rates of crime than most other countries. The Bible knows of justice as retribution. Locking up violent sociopaths is necessary and just. But Gods justice is about distribution far more than retribution. Not building more prisons but leveling the playing field, distributing the resources of the worlds richest country fairly. Theres a direct correlation: where money, power and opportunity are fairly shared, Gods justice is a work and instances of crime are less. Where wealth and privilege are concentrated among some and denied to many, justice is flouted and society disintegrates. That is not the will of God. A thousand Bible verses say so. Hear just one from Psalm 82: You must stop judging unjustly; You must no longer be partial to the wicked: Defend the rights of the poor and the orphan; Be fair to the needy and the helpless. Rescue them from the power of the wicked.

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann writes: Biblical justice means to sort out what belongs to whom and return it to them. Fair distribution, you see. In the last generation, the number of American children living below the federal poverty level has increased from 8 to 24 percent, and the figure is 50 for the upstate cities of Rochester, Syracuse and Schenectady. What does the Lord require? Economists point out that the gap between rich and poor in this country today is greater today than at any time since the Great Gatsby. What does the Lord require? Well, youre doing it you FOCUS churches. On a Monday last November this sanctuary was quite full of faith leaders and faithful people and community organizations and the press. And you marched out of this church and down to the Capitol to demand an increase in the minimum wage. Just last week you did it again. Westminster church across the street filled up with people from all over the state, bus loads of them. We marched out of the church and down to the Capitol to demand an increase in the minimum wage. Thats the model. Faithful people moving from their place of worship to the centers of power to demand justice for all. The justice the Lord requires is all about politics and economics and just laws and the struggle to change the systems that are so unfair today. What does the Lord require of you? Justice and more! Justice is as close to love as society, government, the system can come. We must push for it. But the poet Auden said well: We dare not dream of systems so perfect that people dont have to be good. The government should be fair, but government cant do it all. People need to be caring. To do justice and to love kindnessthats what the Lord requires. When I retired from full-time ministry several years ago, I served part-time as Interfaith Chaplain at Bethesda House, a ministry to the chronically homeless and working

poor of Schenectady. I pastored the poor. I also helped to raise money and write grant requests to government agencies. Those agencies were quite generous. Several million dollars of public funds were given, a new building was built. Government served the cause of justice. But I knew it wasnt enough when I worked on the grant requests. How many cases do your case managers manage? How many clients did you house this year? Shortly before I left, the bureaucratic jargon hit a new low: How many consumers received food from your food pantry is an average month? Cases, clients, consumers! Those words were never heard or seen outside the office. We called the people we served Guests and our mission biblical hospitality. Some audio taped interviews of Martin Luther King, Jr. from 1961 were recently found and released around his birthday last month. One thing he said grasped me: What Black parents need to do for their children, despite all the obstacles, is to instill in them a sense of somebody-ness. I think thats the heart of loving kindness. To treat everyone we meet as somebody as special, especially those the system knows only as another case or consumer or social problem. To love kindness is required. This Hebrew verb is another key word in the Old Testament, used over and over again. In the New Testament it is translated grace. In both Testaments this verb about loving and kindness is used most often to talk about God. It is Gods love and grace that makes us a somebody, not a nobody. It is Gods grace that saves us and raises us to new life in Christ, despite our weakness, failure, sin and brokenness. God never stops treating us a somebody. Because were loved like that, we must leaven the system and love other people like that. To love kindness is to see the human face in those we serve. To not blame the victims. Not to assume that the poor deserve their plight but to be their patient helper, because

God is our helper every day. To love kindness is to do for others, not what we think they deserve, but what God has for us. Its required. To do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with God. This last requirement may be the most challenging. Humility is a slippery virtue. The minute I think Ive got it (Im sooo humble; isnt that great! Ive lost it. Humility is not low selfesteem. This Hebrew verb means to walk closely with God, to make our way in life not looking down on others or ourselves, but looking up, walking close to God in trust. Im convinced that much of the injustice and unfair distribution of resources in our world is not the result of greed but of fear. The greed of the few feeds on the fears of many. Most people want the hungry to be fed, the poor housed, the disabled treated with dignity and children to have hope. But at what costhigher taxes??? We must solve the epidemic of gun violence, but I need my semiautomatic and thirty-round clip. I dont know who might come to my door. We fear that improvements to someone elses security may come at the expense of our own. So, a closer walk with God is the key to social justice and personal compassion. To walk humbly with God is to have a higher security than wealth or weapons, a trust stronger than our trusts, a care that frees us to share. Jesus promised it: Blessed are the poor and the poor in spirit, for all the riches of Gods kingdom belong to you. You are busy people. You are vital churches. Remember your short list. To speak truth to power; to treat everybody as a somebody, and to walk close to your God. Those arent options. Theyre required.

7 Sermon by Robert A. White The FOCUS Churches of Albany February 3, 2013