Sermon by Claven Snow
The first time I ever heard this passage during worship, it was read aloud during a Christmas Eve service. There was stained glass and candles and mood lighting and everyone was all hushed and aglow and loved it. And it’s quite a lovable passage, really: all nations, going to the house of the Lord, that God may teach them his ways. Everyone beating their swords into plowshares. No war. What a wonderful, Christmasy thing to think about. It’s a favorite reading around Christmas. But while I’d read the passage and heard it read in service, I’d never heard it preached on, at any time of year. That never really occurred to me until I was asked to preach on it, but these past couple weeks I think I figured out why nearly no one does, and I’ll share the findings of that journey with you.
Now the beauty of this passage that we’re examining today, is that in a nutshell, it explains the system of the Glory of our Lord. And the beauty of our faith should be that our faith allows us to operate within the system that best displays that Glory. But as explained in the Bible, that Glory is illustrated, regardless of how we live, by the endless repetitions in which God offers his people a chance to be redeemed when we fail to live within that system. Let’s start with another example and we’ll bring it back to this passage.
Most of us are familiar with the story of the Jews being enslaved in Egypt. Long before Micah appeared on the scene, the Jews were enslaved by Pharaoh, but one of them had been taken in as an infant by Pharaoh’s daughter and grown up in his courts. So it’s a picture within a picture. Within the bigger picture, Moses himself was an image of redemption, coming down out of the Glory of Pharaoh’s court to serve a calling that he was ill-equipped for and had to rely on God to serve, for Moses was slow of speech and slow of tongue- not ideally the best man for the job, but his calling didn’t start with the glorious Epiphany. It started with him killing an Egyptian foreman for abusing a Hebrew slave.
And then we’ve got this big picture of all the Israelites crossing the Sea of Reeds, which has divided to give them dry land, God redeeming his people Israel. And drowning Pharaoh’s army behind them.
And throughout the 40 years of wandering the desert these people couldn’t get their act together. They grumbled for food, and God gave them Manna, they got tired of the Manna, and God gave them quail. They got restless waiting for Moses to come back down off of Mount Sinai, and his brother makes them a Golden calf.
And when Moses comes back down he’s so angry about the golden calf that he draws a line in the sand and has those who will stand with him slay those who betray Adonai. But we always see death and destruction on the other side of redemption. And it doesn’t take too long before a person just can’t help but start wondering–does it get any better?
But it doesn’t. The history of the Lord’s people- even the ones that are supposed to be the good guys, is a brutal and terrible history. And redemption always seems to have the terrible flip side. In the events I just recounted, Moses finds his calling with a murderous start. For the Israelites to escape, it costs the lives of Pharaoh’s foot soldiers- not to mention the horses. We already talked about Moses having people killed over the Golden calf, but lest you start thinking Moses was just a really volatile guy, we’ve got a whole slew of Kings from Israel and Judah that say the Lord gave such and such an army into their hand. Some of the most prominent “men after God’s own heart” also seemed to be the bloodiest. And were, without fail, hailed as heroes by their people for redeeming them. There’s also a record of many of them paying a mighty price for their sins. Moses never got to enter Canaan with the Israelites. David’s first son with Bathsheba died without receiving a name, and his house was fraught with rape, murder, rebellion and betrayal. And specifically because he was a man of blood, he wasn’t allowed to build a temple for the Lord. That was left to his son Solomon.
And this is all before Jesus, or Micah ever appear on the scene.
But his steadfast love endures forever.
And going back to our text for today, that’s what this prophecy proposes.
There’s a little bit of controversy in the world of theology surrounding when “the days to come” are, but for our purposes today, it doesn’t matter. What does matter here is that the Lord’s house is open for business on the temple Mount and people are willingly going to it to seek counsel. Now, this may seem simple and insignificant, but consider all the surrounding factors that Micah has the burden of pointing out and prophesying about. We’ve been listening to it all these past few weeks. Fraud, extortion, heresy, murder, not to mention the fall of Samaria and the prophesy he had to deliver that the same thing was going to happen to Jerusalem. And Micah toots a tired old horn in blaming the people for their own woes, claiming that if they’d followed the direction of the Lord this all wouldn’t be happening. So the fact that people are actually seeking the guidance of the Lord is a big deal, and perhaps the first encouraging thing we’ve heard in awhile.
Micah, however, did not win the heart of the people. He accused them of profaning the sacred, and gave them no special wish to own up to their faults, but he’s not without support in his claims. I specifically want to touch on Samaria, which Micah prophesied the fall of (and watched fall,) it says in 2nd Kings Chapter 17 that none of it would have happened if the people had been behaving. Beginning in v. 5 it says, “then the king of Assyria invaded all the land and came to Samaria; for three years he besieged it. 6 In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria captured Samaria; he carried the Israelites away to Assyria… 7 This occurred because the people of Israel sinned against the LORD their God, who had brought them up out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. They had worshiped other gods 8 and walked in the customs that the kings of Israel had introduced. So here we have support for Micah’s claims to this point- and Micah proposing an idea that is not exclusive to him.
He proposes that all this war, and all this bloodshed and all this discord and unhappiness around them occurred because the people of Adonai are not seeking his will and living in accordance with his mandates. And I don’t want to blow over that statement, because that’s really the point of the entire passage, and though Micah doesn’t state it at the beginning, he does lead up to it. The thesis of our entire passage for today is that the more closely we follow the whole of God’s instructions, and the more readily we receive God’s corrections, the nearer we are to Peace. Of course, it states in the passage from Kings exactly what the people had been doing that led to their downfall, and it’s a very common rebuke from Old Testament prophets. They had been worshiping other Gods and walking in the ways of the Pagans around them. It could be a common rebuke today, all you have to do is see what kind of storefronts get the most business on Mass st.
And the idea of turning away from such intrigue was no more popular in Israel and Judah than it is on Mass St. It may not have been significantly less popular, either, but the problem was that most aspects of civil and political life were concentrated around these temples and houses of worship. So places of worship were the primary centers of community life and frequented by those in power -up to and including priests and kings. So if they were into the pagan worship forms surrounding Israel, the temples ended up reflecting that. Nonetheless, Micah speaks the unpopular idea that things would have been fine if people had been seeking the Lord’s counsel and following it.
This theory wasn’t totally unheard of up to this point, but Micah won’t let it die, and what makes this more unpopular is that it seems to be such an open invitation. The idea that any nations would come and say ‘let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob’ would have really bothered a lot of the people Micah was prophesying to. They didn’t really want people of all nations usurping their God and co-opting their worship. Sure, they believed their God was the best, but the other nations had Ba’al and Ashera. The Jews were God’s chosen people and felt protective of that birthright. Everything and everyone else felt a little unclean, even if it was irresistible. I mean, in the U.S. here and now, we like this passage and we like the idea of Christians being God’s chosen people- and we are a people set apart. But so often we have this idea that if we are Christian (and seeking the Lord’s counsel,) and others are Christian (and seeking the Lord’s counsel) then they will inevitably come around to embracing our beliefs and lifestyles. And if they continue to live very differently from us, or believe very differently from us, we question their claim on Christianity. But the Goyim could embrace orthodoxy (right believing) and orthopraxy (right living) and still be seen as unclean, because this was something more unchangeable than a viewpoint. In a place where race tended to define religion, gentiles were seen as having been created defectively. It ran deeper than circumcision. It was in the DNA. They were inherently created defective, and there wasn’t really anything that could be done about it. Now, most of us aren’t racially Jewish, so that’s most of us, actually. But the Jews believed that the Goyim, the gentiles, were not heirs to the promise of a Messiah. There was no reason for all nations to say 斗et us go to the House of the God of Jacobbecause to the Jews, all nations didn’t belong there.
Now- Micah and Isaiah are contemporaries, and they share this prophecy. Almost verbatim. Another thing shared between them is this idea that all nations- both Jew and Gentile, can share in the Lord’s inheritance – though Micah softens the blow a little bit for Old Testament Jews in v. 4, and I’ll get to that in a minute.
In the meantime, what we’ve got is God judging us. That’s not usually what people take away from this passage, and that’s because to focus on judgment as we usually think of it in spiritual terms might miss the point. It’s stated as a kind of a “group judgment” in the terms of “nations” and “peoples,” and the record seems to indicate that the Lord is judging disputes between nations and peoples rather than simply judging them for their deeds. There’s no record of punishment of any type. As a matter of fact, the decree of the Lord seems to be that both sides lay down their arms. Using weapons not to hurt each other, but as tools for agriculture. A good modern parallel might be ammunitions plants being used for domestic production of something other than ammunition. But I can’t touch on this without harkening back to something said far earlier by the prophet Joel- which reads as follows:
“Prepare war, stir up the warriors. / Let all the soldiers draw near,/ let them come up./ Beat your plowshares into swords,/ and your pruning hooks into spears;/ let the weakling say, “I am a warrior.”
Do you remember in the very beginning how I said I hadn’t ever heard anyone preach on this before? I have very little doubt that it’s this tiny passage in Joel that restricts Micah’s loveliest prophecy to readings and makes it so hard to preach on- because I had no clue what to make of it. It was said long before Micah and Isaiah appeared on the scene, and while there’s a clear and obvious relationship between this statement and our text for today, our beloved prophecy about beating swords into plowshares may have felt like a blasphemous inversion of prophecy to the Jews.
Fortunately, when I hit this stump, Joanna was at the ready with a commentary series called Interpretation. Interpretation proposes that the prophecy in Joel is a battle cry. This may be overstating the obvious, but what it suggests is that this call had probably been passed down for centuries until it found written expression in Joel. So, Micah and Isaiah, in their shared prophecy, declare a vision of peace. They state that, for example, when Texas and Mexico go to the Lord to settle their dispute, they won’t “remember the Alamo”. When Japan and the U.S. go to the Lord, God will decree that we forgive each other for Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. And when the U.S. goes to the Lord with Afghanistan, and Iraq, and every other enemy we’ve made in this war on terror, the Lord will speak reconciliation and healing over 9-11 and all the atrocities that we have committed in the name of revenge. This theory in Interpretation isn’t totally watertight, and it doesn’t claim to be, so I’m still working on this, and encourage you to make your own investigation.
But forgetting Joel for a minute and getting back to our passage for today- this is absolutely glorious and lovely. And I think it strikes us that way because we’ve never seen anything like it. If one nation strikes, the other retaliates, they don’t go to a Temple for arbitration. We’re all affected by more than one war, and most of us more than the current ones. Micah’s preaching to a bunch of folks who are well acquainted with war, in a much more direct way than most of us will ever be, and as much as the birthright of being the chosen people was valued, maybe peace would be worth not forfeiting it, but sharing it. But the first thing in this prophecy isn’t peacemaking; the first thing is people seeking the Lord’s guidance. The peace-making was a product of heeding God’s instructions. And it would not come without the people accepting the responsibility of going to the Lord for his direction and then being obedient to his will.
Let’s move on. v. 4 is where Micah and Isaiah split and things start to look different. Isaiah moves on to a call to the house of Jacob to walk in the way of the Lord. That’s in the here and now, by the way, not some nebulous, future “days to come.”
But Micah doesn’t go there yet. There’s actually a really interesting maneuver here where Micah starts waxing nostalgic for the days of Solomon- which is why I say this softens the blow of declaring the Lord’s house open to all nations, because he implies something so exclusive to Judah and Israel. And it may have been necessary, just so the Old Testament Jews wouldn’t feel like they’d entirely lost all of their footing as God’s people. He says “They shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,/ and no one shall make them afraid;/ for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.” The Jews would have recognized this as Scripture from Kings, now known as 1st Kings 4:25 which states “During Solomon’s lifetime Judah and Israel lived in safety, from Dan even to Beer-sheba, all of them under their vines and fig trees.”
So although this prophecy is for all people, God- in his infinite grace, gave Micah a word of belonging to speak to the Jews in the midst of everything else that could have put them on edge about where they stood as his people and in this prophecy. This was God’s providence assuring the Jews that they were still his people, even if they would have to come to terms with a bunch of adopted siblings.
Verse 5 is the last verse in this passage, and it seems to me that Micah is drawing back and speaking to his present day for a moment, and to those around him, because the peoples in the prophecy are all going to the house of the Lord for instruction, and the peoples in verse 5 are walking in the names of lowercase g gods. But this verse, though subtle, is in a sense, a call to action, because it’s nothing a Jew could disagree with. Even if they weren’t really walking in the name of the LORD their God, they would never dare declare it. Micah has simply clarified the crux of their entire identity in a very simple way that no one could deny. If they identified with the Jewish faith, they would follow the Lord, and seek direction in God’s Law, and walk in the ways of that instruction. Micah had just painted a picture of what this will look like in days to come, but declares that we don’t have to wait until then to start. In fact, he argues that our entire identity as people of God hinges on living as people of the prophecy now. And he offers them, and us, a simple and concise statement by which to affirm both identity and faith: “For all the peoples walk, each in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of the LORD our God forever and ever.”
-Amen
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