What Does God Expect of Me?

I was born a cynic, I guess.  Seven decades of observing and working with the human condition haven’t improved my outlook a bit.  I’d like to trust society to be that perfect place of God’s imagination, but wars & rumors of wars abound.  I fantasize about picket fences and birdhouses, about rainbows day after day.  My poesy drifts toward the “alabaster cities undimmed by human tears”.  Tell that to the grizzled and aged guy who shelters in the doorway of the Post Office and asks for money.  Tell that to the crippled guy who got suckered into military service in Afghanistan to “protect” the investments of oil investors.  ‘Nuf complaining:  what does God expect of ME?

By the time the prophet Micah gets to the day’s text (6:1-8), he’s previously spoken eloquently about God’s indictment of the prevailing culture.  The powerful have coveted fields and houses and have seized them, violence–police dogs & water cannon?–has been sent to control the masses,  and leaders sell allegiance to the highest bidder.  Many worshipers have called for a religious revival:  longer prayers and more expensive sacrifices.  To this, God replies through Micah, “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?”  Three demanding expectations which remind us that we need to polish our ethics.

Paul comments to the Corinthian community of believers that all that glitters is not gold (I,1:18-31).  Wisdom and enlightenment don’t cut it, in the long run.  The rewards of the culturally elite look pretty good, but they won’t last.  Again, the alternative to the status quo is presented as valuable to the Church: “God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing the things that are.”(v.28)  To me, this is walking humbly with my God.

Charles James Cook asks, “Who can survive in attempting to live into the spirit of the Beatitudes?…we are struck with their poetic beauty and, at the same time, overwhelmed by their perceived impracticality….We admire the instruction, but we fear the implications of putting the words into actual practice…To be pure in spirit, peaceful, merciful, and meek will get you nowhere in a culture grounded in competition and fear.” (FEASTING on the WORD, A 1:308)  Some have translated the word ‘Blessed’ as being happy.  I also like the word ‘content’.  At any rate, the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:1-12) takes away a lot of pressure to fly faster and higher, to collect trophies and to count scalps.

You won’t be surprised to know that from now until Lent we’ll be examining (and be examined by) the ethics of the God-fearing.  Joan Chittister, the British contemplative, asks, “What needs to be changed in us?  Anything that makes us the sole center of ourselves.  Anything that deludes us into thinking that we are not simply a work in progress….We must begin to do life, to be with people, to accept circumstances, to bring good to evil in ways that speak of the presence of God in every moment.”

God Bless Us, Every One                   Horace Brown King

My commentary on passages assigned by the Revised Standard Lectionary for the upcoming weekend can be found every Tuesday at this space on Facebook; or at horacebrownking.com