Epiphany 4A, 29 Jan. 2023. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

• Micah 6:1-8.  “[God] 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?”
• 1 Corinthians 1:18-31. “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”
• Matthew 5:1-12. “Blessed…blessed…blessed.”

O God of the strangest blessings, grant us the strength, the wisdom,and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

When I sat down to write on Friday, I’d just received an alert from the Boston Police Commissioner about anticipating protests in response to the kidnapping and murder of Tyre Nichols by police officers in Memphis earlier this month, as the horrifying body-cam video was about to be released to the public. I’m grateful that the demonstrations have been peaceful in Boston and mostly peaceful around the country.

I thought immediately of a book that I’m in the middle of reading by Resmaa Menakem, called, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. [1] The book is gripping, but it is also very slow going because every chapter contains meditation exercises. Menakem presses the point that trauma is not an intellectual injury, but a body injury; and he urges the reader to not skip over the meditations because we all live in bodies that have been injured by trauma; and healing takes work. Reactions to trauma can influence people’s bodies for many generations because of how trauma affects gene expression. In this country, we all live in bodies that have been injured by racialized trauma (of course some much more than others). What makes Menakem’s book so remarkable is that he offers healing for Black  heart and bodies, for white, and for police hearts and bodies. Yes, Menakem singles out Police bodies, no matter what their race, for healing their trauma, too.

Menakem’s work focuses on practices that can help us be better prepared for the racial reckoning that we are currently undergoing in our country, not through strategies or political maneuvers, but through healing our personal and collective racialized traumas and by turning toward one another instead of turning on one another, by maintaining our sanity and stability in volatile situations, in which the parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge, to quote the Biblical proverb. Menakem’s work is about repairing the world. That’s what today’s lessons are about, too.

One of my smartest colleagues once advised staying close to the Bible during treacherous times. Because I came of age with Mel Brooks movies, that advice always reminds me of the scene from the 1974 movie, Young Frankenstein, in which Frau Blücher, carrying a candelabra with three unlit candles warns, “Stay close to the candles….The staircase can be treacherous!” But staying close to the sacred stories of the Bible doesn’t work so well without the illumination of wisdom and learning, without the illumination of engagement of diverse communities across space and time, and without the illumination of Love (capital L). 1) Wisdom and learning; 2) engagement of diverse communities; and 3) Love; if those three candles are lit, the staircase to the realm of God is not so treacherous. [2]

With those candles lit, what might we learn from the prophet Micah? Micah was a contemporary of First Isaiah toward the end of the 8th century before the Common Era. Unlike Isaiah, who was based in the city of Jerusalem, Micah was from a small town southwest of Jerusalem, called Moresheth. For Bostonians, think Franklin or Milford. (“Where’s that?” some of you say: exactly.) Micah starts with the announcement of God’s complaint that the leaders of the people plan wickedness and design evil at night and carry it out when morning dawns because they have power. They covet fields and houses, seize them, and defraud people of their homes and of their land. They make a big show of their religiosity, but they do not respond to the suffering and misery of others. The wealthy have made peace with oppression, and this is not the peace of God.

Micah charges them, on behalf of the Holy One, that they have forgotten Who brought them out of Egypt five centuries before. [3] They seem to have forgotten Who redeemed them from the house of slavery, Who gave them the leadership of Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. Micah charges that those in power seem to have forgotten that their own ancestors were once poor, enslaved refugees and aliens in the land. 

Micah insists that burnt offerings, thousands of rams, ten-thousand rivers of oil, or even the offering of a firstborn son are not what the Holy One desires as a sign of repentance from these people, who have strayed far, far from the teachings of the Torah. They are not to put on lavish liturgical displays. They are to love their neighbors as themselves. They already know what the Holy One desires, indeed requires, Micah says. It is to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with Love (also known as God). Justice (mishpat in Hebrew) has to do with right judgment, right relationship, redemption. In Hebrew, the verb to do and to make are the same word. To do justice in Biblical terms means to make relationships right: relationships with neighbors and relationship with God. Biblical justice is to be restorative. 

To love kindness (hesed in Hebrew) has to do with loving steadfast goodness, merciful solidarity, and the evidence of grace. To walk humbly is to behave modestly, full of care, without arrogance or haughtiness. In the margin of my study Bible there is a note that I wrote in class many years ago next to this verse. It’s in the form of an equation: Mishpat + hesed = covenant. The Biblical word for covenant (brit) is literally deal. Making restoration of right-relationship + loving evidence of grace is the deal that the Holy One is longing to make with the people. I think that one cannot help but walk humbly when trying to live into this deal, because it’s really hard, and the more power and wealth one has, the harder it generally is.

By the time Matthew was writing his account of the life and love of Jesus, some 800 years had passed since the prophet Micah had issued his prophetic warning to not make peace with oppression and his prophetic reminder of what repentance means. As I mentioned last week, Matthew describes the beginning of Jesus’ ministry this way: Jesus withdrew to the Galilee, to a relatively small town of Capernaum, and recruited some friends to help him with his healing work. Between the end of our Gospel portion last week and the beginning of this week’s portion some time has passed. Matthew writes that Jesus’ had fame spread throughout all Syria, and he had cured people who were afflicted with various diseases, pains, demoniacs, epilepsy, and paralysis; and so great crowds followed him from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and beyond the Jordan.

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain (just like Moses); and after he sat down (just like a rabbi), his disciples (in other words, those who were learning from him) came to him for some instruction. In this story he is speaking to his team, not to the crowds. Here’s what he told them: “You may feel cursed, but you’re not; you’re blessed. You may feel as if God has abandoned you, but God has not; God is right here. You may feel like you don’t have any luck except bad luck, but you do. Your exhaustion, grief, humility, hunger and thirst for right relationship, mercy, integrity, and rejection of violence are all signs of blessing; these are all signs of the nearness of God. Jesus was teaching, “You are blessed, so act like it. Be someone who steps up and steps out,” as someone put it in our Tuesday morning Bible study this week. 

If Micah was all about telling people with privilege what to do, Matthew is all about telling people without privilege how to be. My friend Gretchen Grimshaw is fond of pointing out that these are the Be-attitudes and not the Do-attitudes. Jesus is not pronouncing blessing on people who have done anything here; he is pronouncing blessing on people who are at the end of their ropes and don’t know what to do.

I’m sure you know that one of the significant debates in the history Christianity has had to do with whether salvation (that is, deliverance from sin) comes through faith or works: is it how you are or what you do? The debate is documented in the New Testament and continues to this day. I think it depends on how much power and wealth one has. With a lot of privilege, power, and wealth perhaps closeness with God has more to do with what we do (making right relationship; doing restorative justice; loving mercy, kindness, or grace; and humbling oneself). Perhaps without privilege, power, wealth, closeness with God, or deliverance from sin, it is more about how we are and not what we do. This is a scandalous idea, isn’t it? 

Perhaps in any given situation, salvation (that is, deliverance from sin) depends on your relative power and privilege. It’s always shifting, then, isn’t it? Depending on who else is here today, you might be the wealthiest person in the room or the poorest.  The rest of you are somewhere in the middle. You might be the most joyful person in the sanctuary or the most grief-struck. The rest of you are somewhere in the middle. You might be the healthiest or the most infirm, and so forth. For those in the middle, some have less privilege than others. For those who have more, there is an obligation to make restorative justice. For those who have more, there is an obligation to love mercy, to love kindness. For those who have most, there is an obligation to walk humbly with Love (that is, with God). For those who have least, there is blessing in just being; but Lord knows, you can’t stay there for long. Someone will come along who is in worse shape than you are, and then you’ll be the one with more of whatever it is – more money, joy, health, and so on; and you will be the one with the obligation to do something. So what I want to say to you is this: if you are at the end of your rope, know that you are blessed; and we are blessed that you are with us. If you have any rope to spare today, join in the work of repairing the world. Begin wherever you are. Your participation is desperately needed!

1.  Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press, 2017).
2. Yes, “Stairway to Heaven” was the theme of my senior prom.
3. Who is one of the names of God in Jewish mystical tradition.