Monday, July 13, 2020
Scripture for the Day
I have wrestled with writing this devotional, perhaps more than I have wrestled with any of the previous devotionals that I have written over the last several weeks. I have wrestled because I didn’t resonate particularly well with any of the three selected texts for today’s daily lectionary. I have started writing on one passage, got about halfway in, and then scratched what I had written to start again. No joke. You can check the different versions in Google Docs.
Even when I decided to write on the passage from Micah, I have struggled with how to engage this passage or what to write. I have found myself writing what might make for a good essay but probably a crummy devotional.
Part of this struggle has to do with the selection from Micah. The daily lectionary selection only includes the first five verses of Micah 1, and I found it difficult to make sense of this selection without the context of the whole chapter. And so I took the liberty of changing the reading for our devotional to include the whole chapter. But you’ll forgive me, right?
The other part of the struggle has to do with the contents of Micah 1. It is what scholars call an oracle of judgment. As is true of the prophetic literature generally, the oracles contained in Micah alternate between words of judgment and words of hope. And this passage is a word of judgment. In verse 2, Micah warns the whole earth that the Lord God is a “witness against” it. In other words, God is taking the world to court for its shortcomings, and the world is unlikely to win the case. God, we learn, has been moved to action because of the transgression of Jacob and the sins of the house of Israel (verse 5). And the passage’s description of God’s movement toward the earth itself can seem troubling. God is vacating God’s holy temple, and God will tread on the high places. Mountains will melt, and valleys will burst open. God is presented here as an all-consuming fire melting away human sin and injustice like candle wax. The God imagined by Micah 1 is powerful and awe-inspiring, if not all together terrifying.
And this image of God makes some of us uncomfortable, especially for a morning devotional. We prefer images of God’s long-suffering love and commitment to the people of Israel and to the whole world. We prefer the humility and grace of Jesus Christ, the incarnation of God. So what do we do with this passage from Micah?
The first thing is that we resist the urge to select how one text imagines God over another. We are given the whole of Scripture for this reason. We do ourselves and our sacred texts a disfavor when we try to make them all say the same thing. So, we learn to live with the complexity of the biblical witness and what it says about God.
Second, instead of dismissing Micah’s view of God, we can use it to reflect on how we imagine God. One of the things suggested by God’s powerful disruption toward humanity in Micah 1 is that God is living. In comparison to the idols and fake gods, the Lord God is living. God is on the move. God is active. Above all, God cannot be limited or put into a nice box of our expectations or assumptions. The God of Micah, and much of Scripture for that matter, is living. This characteristic of God prompts important reflection: When you think of God, do you imagine a living God? Do you imagine a dynamic or static God? How do your prayers or your devotions limit or seek to control God? Do you think God’s activity continues in the present or has it been limited to past ages or generations? Do you think God’s activity is bound by specific guidelines or actions, many of which you or I have put in place?
Finally, we can read the view of God in Micah 1 in the context of God’s desire for justice and peace. The way Micah 1 describes God reminds me of that line from C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, when the children first see Aslan, a figure for God/Christ. One of them asks, “Is Aslan safe?,” to which their guide responds, “Oh no. Aslan is not safe. But he is good.” God’s activity in Micah 1 cannot be described as safe, but it is ultimately good. God’s disruptive activity is ultimately moving in the direction of justice. As I was wrestling with this text, one phrase from verse 6 stuck out to me: “Therefore I will make Samaria a heap in the open country, a place for planting vineyards.” A place for planting vineyards. Micah speaks of God’s disruptive presence that makes space for new creation, and vineyards at that.
Near the end of the Book of Revelation, God cries out: “See, I am making all things new.” This has become something of a rallying cry for me, both personally and when I think about the world around me. It is not a promise for the end of the world but a promise for how God engages the present. God is making all things news. But this passage from Micah 1 reminds us that God’s new creation is disruptive, even dangerous. The establishment of justice and equity disrupts corrupt and bankrupt systems. The practice of love of neighbor disrupts divisiveness and disdain for those who are different. God’s disrupting presence prepares the earth for God’s new things. And that’s something to hope in right now.
