[Oe List ...] 1/15/09, Spong: The Origins of the Bible, Part XX: Micah, The Prophet Who Turned Liturgy Into Life

Thu Jan 15 12:09:46 EST 2009

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Thursday January 15, 2009 

The Origins of the Bible, Part XX: 
Micah, the Prophet Who Turned Liturgy Into Life

In my career as a bishop I have known churches that spent great time and effort on liturgy and worship. It was clearly the focus, the reason for being, of those congregations and their budgets reflected this priority. Altar hangings, clergy vestments and the garb of the supporting cast of liturgical characters were always coordinated. Sacristies, where the vestments and sanctuary coverings were stored, were orderly and reflected care and devotion. These churches also tended to invest heavily in music. A grand organ was generally an essential and, of course, one must have a grand organist to make the grand organ functional. Then there must be a professional choir since an all-volunteer choir might dissipate the beauty of both the organ and organist. Next, there must be a printed bulletin to guide the worshipers, for whom the liturgy was designed, through the Sunday process.
I do not mean to be critical of this. Liturgy that is well done does invite the congregation into the symbols of transcendence. It transforms worship from being the town meeting that it has become in many congregations. Town meeting liturgy is immediately recognized for it is dominated by announcements of coming events a
nd a public listing of the sick, the recently deceased, the soon-to-be married, those celebrating birthdays and anniversaries. Sometimes these announcements are overt, while at other times they are camouflaged under the guise of prayer. These public displays serve to remind people that they are not forgotten and to massage delicate egos. I wonder, however, if either the liturgies of grand proportions or those of a town meeting understand worship, which means the act of investing infinite worth in God as well as in those who are gathered and in those that this worship will lead them to serve. Liturgy is not an end, but a means to an end. There was one prophetic figure in the biblical tradition who understood this better than anyone else. His name was Micah and to his story we turn this week. 

If people have any conscious awareness of the content of the book of Micah, it is probably a vague recollection of his suggestion that the messiah must be born in Bethlehem, because part of the Jewish expectation was that messiah would be heir to the throne of David. This idea found its way into the birth stories of Jesus in both Matthew and Luke and thus gained familiarity by being repeated in Christmas pageants. Matthew, the scripture quoter par excellence, refers directly to this text in Micah when King Herod asks his scribes to search the scriptures to locate the place where messiah is to be born so that he can redirect the Magi's quest to find him. Luke uses this Micah text indirectly to demonstrate
 the relationship of lineal descent between David and Jesus, when he states that it was by order of the Emperor, Caesar Augustus, that all the descendants of King David had to return to their ancestral home to be enrolled. While this is probably the best known quote from Micah, the power of this book is not found here, but is located in the drama he describes later in the sixth chapter of his small work. 

Micah thought of himself as an expert in the law or the Torah. One gets the sense that he yearned to demonstrate his legal skill before the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, but that opportunity had never come to him. In chapter six, however, he fantasizes about a trial that was designed to be even more dramatic and universal than one that might have occurred in Jerusalem. It had to do with the proper role of liturgy. Under the skill of Micah's pen he envisioned this trial as being conducted before the throne of God, who served as the ultimate judge. For Micah the mountains and the hills must serve as the jury. Israel was called to stand before this judge and jury as the accused. Micah cast himself in the role of the prosecuting attorney. The trial opens as Micah says to the people of Israel: "Arise, plead your case before the mountains and let the hills hear your voice…. for the Lord has a controversy with God's people and God will now contend with Israel." Court is open and Micah's grand trial of the chosen people has begun. 

The charges are then read out. God dem
ands to be answered by the accused by asking, "What have I done to you? In what have I wearied you?" Why, God is demanding to know, do you not understand how to serve me? Then God recites the things that God has done for Israel throughout history: deliverance from bondage, raising up leaders like Moses, Aaron and Miriam, giving the Torah, the law, and protecting these chosen ones from their enemies. This significant list of divine benevolences has, however, clearly not gained for God the hearts of the people. 

Israel, hearing these charges, feels the pangs of guilt and seeks to make amends. The response of the people, however, is to recite their faithfulness in religious observances and proper liturgies. Trapped inside this misunderstanding of what it is that God seeks, Israel says, "With what shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before God with burnt offerings and with calves a year old?" 

>From God, however, comes only silence. The people respond to these charges as if God were interested primarily in religion or in worship. Wondering if their religious observances have been deemed by God to be inadequate, these people vow to enhance their sacrifices. If God is not pleased with the oil that burns the sacrifices or with the year-old calf that is their burnt offering, then maybe God would be pleased if they expanded their worship to new levels of magnanimity: "Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?" Sure
ly such heightened acts of worship would win for Israel the divine favor that they presumed God desired. God is still silent, however, and once again the people of Israel interpreted this silence to mean that their worship and their offerings were still inadequate and once again they sought to make their sacrificial liturgies more worthy of their disappointed God. 

God, do you want us to offer our children, our most precious possessions? Would the re-introduction of child sacrifice satisfy you? That is the meaning of the words that Micah now places on the lips of the people: "Shall I give my first born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?" This dramatic scene reaches a crescendo before God finally responds and this response forms in my opinion the most dramatic and powerful words recorded in the book of Micah: "God has shown you, people of Israel, what is good! And what does the Lord require of you?" It is not beautiful liturgical words, burnt offerings, animal sacrifices or even ten thousands rivers of oil. It is not even the sacrifice of your most cherished children. The only requirement God lays on God's people is "to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God."

The trial is over. The verdict has been rendered. One does not please God with acts of worship. The only sacrifice that God values is the offering of lives lived in justice, mercy and humility. The people of Israel must understand anew what the meaning of worship really is. Worshi
p is human justice being offered to God. Human justice is worship being lived out among men and women.

Micah then wrote down his words for the people and they were treasured by them at first simply as the inspired words of their prophet. In time, however, someone decided that in these words they were hearing the "Word of God," so his writings were ultimately added to the sacred scriptures of the Jewish people and in that capacity began to transcend their original setting and to be read not only across the centuries in Temple and synagogue worship services, but pored over also by the rabbis. It was through Micah that the people learned that God requires from them not beautiful liturgy and sacrifices, but "to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with God."

God was never a static concept among the Jews. On the pages of the Jewish Scriptures, God was always evolving, changing and growing. In the writings of Hosea, God was defined anew as love. In the writings of Amos, God was defined anew as justice. Now, in the writings of Micah, the people learned that worship is not about form and ceremony. It is not about wearing vestments in a particular style, about chanting the liturgy in effective ways. It is not about a sacred prayer book or a grand organ. It is not about where the altar is located, the style of the liturgy or the nature of one's sacrifices. Worship is always and foremost about living faithfully and ascribing ultimate worth to a God who is manifested in the fullness=2
0of human life. 

Throughout the national history of the Jews, it was the prophets, who stood outside the sacred traditions, and not the priests, who stood within it, who again and again caused the meaning of God to grow. It was the prophets who slowly, but surely, transformed the tribal God of the Jews into a set of universal principles. It was the prophets who made Jesus of Nazareth possible. He was clearly in the prophetic tradition when he proclaimed that the love of God was not to be compromised by religion and that God was to be found in the recognition that there is nothing any of us can do or be that can finally separate us from this divine love. This was demonstrated by Jesus in episode after episode when he set aside religious rules so that the ultimate principle of justice, that no life falls outside this love of God, could become operative. That is what Jesus' disciples saw in him and this insight drove them to assert that in the Christ experience, all human barriers fade. In Christ, said Paul, there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, gay nor straight, baptized nor unbaptized, bond nor free. To assert this as the ultimate meaning of God is the essence of worship. So worship is, therefore, not about liturgy, but about life. Worship leads us not to build ecclesiastical institutions, but to humanize our world. Micah thus becomes the biblical "Word of God" by which all liturgy must be judged.

–John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer 
With20John Shelby Spong

Susanna Shelton, CEO and College Principal, Bay of Plenty College of Homeopathy in New Zealand and Sydney College of Homeopathic Medicine in Australia, writes: 
I had the pleasure of shaking your hand during several book tours in New Zealand and Australia. I have always been moved and inspired by your sharing and teaching. I trained as a theologian before having "a road to Damascus" experience with homeopathic medicine while in Divinity School at St. Andrew's University in Scotland. I have devoted the last 25 years of my life to learning, practicing and teaching this marvelous approach to health and disease. My love of theology, however, never waned, though I counted myself as a believer in Exile for many years. In 2001, I returned to shared communal worship in the Anglican tradition in New Zealand (where I am lay representative to the General Synod from the Diocese of Waipu) and in the Balmain Uniting Church in Sydney (where I serve as an elder and occasional preacher). My professional and personal life is enjoyed in equal measure in Australia and New Zealand. I attended the Common Dreams Conference in Sydney in August 2007 and very much enjoyed your contributions. I am aware that you are engaged in a study about life beyond death. I hope you will continue this exploration and share your findings in a book! The biblical scholar in me was inspired to suggest to your particular consideration of the conclusion that the historical Jesus probably said, "Let the dead bury the dead!"20I remember first discussing this potentially troubling phrase in an undergraduate religion class at William and Mary led by visiting professor E. (Ed) P. Sanders, who had just finished his great work, Jesus and Judaism. As a class we had just read Albert Schweitzer's Quest for the Historical Jesus and were discussing the historical bombshell that it created and the continuing impact of modern biblical criticisms upon the "red letter" attributions to Jesus in the gospels. The "dead bury the dead" phrase seems to suggest that Jesus was perhaps disrespectful of the honoring of the dead required in the Jewish Law, but also the fact that such a radic al pronouncement meant that it was what Jesus had actually said. Maybe the gospel writers preserved one aspect of Jesus' radical insight. Perhaps it was a way of teaching us that death is not where our focus ought to be. Instead our focus is best placed on the "now" and, as you often say, to love wastefully. I support your inspiration to write a book on death and everlastingness! (I recently prepared a sermon that summarized some of the main points of process theology and re-visited Charles Hartshorne's ideas about immortality being not a subjunctive continuing presence of a single being but rather could be conceived of as an objective immortality in the all-encompassing/never lostness of the mind of God. So perhaps some food for thought there!) Yours with respect and gratitude. 

Dear Susanna,

Thank you for your letter and your thought. The book about wh
ich you write was submitted to my publisher, Harper-Collins, in late October of 2008. It will be published in the summer of 2009. I believe I have followed your advice, though I did not refer to Jesus' words, "Let the dead bury the dead."

I do think the focus can never be on death in such a study. It has to be on life. What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to be human? What path have we journeyed in our billions of years of evolutionary unfolding to get to this point? What is the barrier between consciousness and self-consciousness, and what does it do to human beings who alone have been forced to cross that boundary?

I will argue in the book that it is only by exploring life that we can make any sense out of death. When life is driven to its very depths, I believe it then opens into transcendence. I will try to make that case. Life beyond death has nothing to do with endless time, but with perceiving new meaning. I admire Charles Hartshorne, but I will not make my case in his categories. 

The hardest thing I had to do was to transcend the dimensions of time and space, to go beyond all religious systems including my own and to seek a new way to speak about God other than in the language of theism, which long ago lost its power for me. 

I am confident that this book, whose title will be Eternal Life: Pious Dream or Realistic Hope? (a subtitle will be added, but that has not yet been determined), will confound my critics and confuse my fr
iends. It was the hardest writing task I have ever undertaken. I worked with a science advisor, Dr. Daniel H. Gregory, because I wanted to go into the meaning of life from an evolutionary point of view as well as exploring the relationship of various parts of the brain to human behavior. I rewrote the book in its entirety three times. I have in my office 5000 rejected pages in my hand-written scrawl. Finally, however, it seemed to come together.

I will await the verdict of my readers when it appears on the bookstands late next summer. In the meantime, thank you for your interest, your encouragement and for taking the time to write.

– John Shelby Spong

Send your questions to support at johnshelbyspong.com 

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