LENT II, Year C: March 4 2007

What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6.8): the voice of the OT prophets
Preacher: Fr Andrew Greany

The aim of this second sermon in our Lent Sunday morning series was to address the ways in which the prophets of the Old Testament explore this question posed by the prophet Micah. I have to say that I have some sort of sense this morning that the Lord hasn't been dealing all that justly with me! For the second time in three weeks a visiting preacher has had to cry off; last time we had 6 days' notice, and Margaret Widdess kindly stood in. But this time I heard only on Friday evening that Keith Straughan wasn't well enough to come, so there seemed nothing for it but that I put something together (on my day off!). I might, I suppose, simply allow the prophets to speak for themselves; it is certainly instructive to string together a chain of texts relevant to the theme of justice: so let me do that first:

Amos, prophesying in the Northern Kingdom of Israel between 780 and 750 BC: 2.6: 'for three transgressions of Israel and for four, I will not revoke the punishment, because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes, they trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth. 8.4: hear this, you trample upon the needy, and bring the poor of the land to an end 5.6-7: seek the Lord and live, you who turn justice to wormwood, and cast down righteousness to the earth 5.24: let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.

Hosea: also in the Northern Kingdom, perhaps a few decades later than Amos: 12.7-8: the tribe of Ephraim: a trader in whose hands are false balances: he loves to oppress.

1st Isaiah: late 8th and early 7th c BC: 1.17: learn to do justice, seek justice, correct oppression, defend the fatherless, plead for the widow
3.14: The Lord enters into judgment with the elders and princes of his people; it is you who have devoured the vineyard, the spoil of the poor is in your houses.
5.7: he looked for justice, but behold bloodshed ... for righteousness, but behold, a cry.

Micah: contemporary of Hosea and 1st Isaiah: our text (6.6-8): but also the background to this: eg: 2.1-2: Woe to those who devise wickedness ... they covet fields and seize them, and houses and take them away; they oppress a man and his house, a man and his inheritance.

Jeremiah: in Jerusalem c 627-the exile 587: speaking to the great city of Jerusalem, whose destruction he foretells: 22.13: 'woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness, and his upper rooms by injustice, who makes his neighbour serve him for nothing, and does not give him his wages.'

3rd Isaiah following the return from exile 58.3: in the day of your fast you seek your own pleasure and oppress all your workers 58.6: is not this the fast that I choose, to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free ... is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house, when you see the naked to cover him? And v.9: if you take away from the midst of you the yoke, the pointing of the finger and the speaking wickedness, if you pour yourself out for the hungry, and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness.

I won't go on with these texts, lest I find myself identified with the Presbyterian preacher going through every one of the Minor Prophets until he said: Habakkuk, where shall we place him? 'He can have my place', calls out a member of the congregation, 'I'm away home.' But I hope I have quoted enough to re-inforce two points made to us in the very helpful reflection on 'Using the OT wisely' offered to us last Tuesday evening by Dr Andrew Mein in the first session of our Lent Course: the first, that to use the Bible wisely means first and foremost to read it (and that's what we're doing, in a way, by attending to these texts which we might have forgotten, or not realised, were there in the prophets): second, that the OT is not monolithic; just as to read the first 3 chapters of Genesis attentively, as we did last Tuesday evening, shows us fascinatingly varied characterisations of God: the allpowerful Creator of ch 1, and the much more immanent, human figure of ch 2), so we must not stereotype the prophets, as it appears the Church may sometimes have done, as 'foretellers of the things concerning Jesus'. The construction of a 9 Lessons and Carols service shows how effectively Christians have used the prophets retrospectively, but it is clear, even from the very limited selection of texts which I've quoted this morning, that the prophets were speaking out, and at times extremely forcefully, to their own contemporaries; they did much else, offering, for example, visions of hope and peace, but speak out they most certainly did against the injustice and oppression which they perceived in their societies ... and, as we have seen, this was so whether they lived before or after the bitter experience of exile.

And so I come to a third recollection of Dr Mein's talk on Tuesday, his invitation to us to discern in what ways the words of the prophets to the people of God in their generation have any relevance to us in our time. One preliminary point, in relation to the gospel which we've heard today: that Jesus, who would have lived and breathed the messages of the prophets, was almost certainly influenced by them (see esp the Jeremiah quotation above) in his laments and prophecies over Jerusalem. If Jesus was so influenced, why not ourselves today? But how are we to be influenced? Because it is probably true that the injustices and the inequalities and the exploitations of our day are more complex in their causes and their structures than was the case in Israel and Judah in the days of the prophets. The poor then were dependent on the rich, paying off their obligations to rich landlords in crops, land, personal service; but compared to our multinationals, it was a smallscale business, and if they were attentive to the law and the covenant which reminded them of their own servitude in Egypt, the rich would have been able to free the poor and give them back their land. In our day, it becomes a matter of G8 summits, international initiatives ... or not. And for the ordinary citizen, indulgence in intellectual and emotional worry about evils which we cannot cure ... attempts to deal with our own guilt and discomfort.

And yet perhaps there are ways for us to get some perspective on the message and challenge of the prophets for our own time. First: knowledge of God, and of His sovereignty. This was the basis of the prophets' message from start to finish, and to this they longed to recall their contemporaries; and this means prayer, prayer that we may recover and proclaim that sovereignty, at least in our own lives, and in the church, that the world may see a sign. Second: a sense of penitence and sorrow for the state of the people or the city (as with Jesus' lament over Jerusalem). Collusion with the evils of exploitation, with the apathy of leaving things as they are, is for us, as it was for the Israelites and the Judeans, the easier and safer option. Third: a practical commitment ... to find out more, for example about the work of the Church Urban Fund, the challenge to poverty of our Bishop's Lent appeal ... the giving of money, so long (Austin Farrer) as, however much we give, we don't think that that will do. To sum it up, a walking on this earth, humbly that is, a walking with the poor and the exploited and the disadvantaged, because this is a walking with our God, who in the person of Jesus, despised and rejected, walked, and walks with us.