— A Sermon by Robert W. Prim —
~~~ 4th Sunday after Epiphany ~~~
Micah 6:1-8
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Hear what the Lord says: Rise, plead your case before the mountains, and let the hills hear your voice. Hear, you mountains, the controversy of the Lord, and you enduring foundations of the earth; for the Lord has a controversy with his people, and he will contend with Israel. “O my people, what have I done to you? In what have I wearied you? Answer me! For I brought you up from the land of Egypt, and redeemed you from the house of slavery; and I sent before you Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. O my people, remember now what King Balak of Moab devised, what Balaam son of Beor answered him, and what happened from Shittim to Gilgal, that you may know the saving acts of the Lord.”
“With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” 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?
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The context for this passage was God’s deep disappointed with the people of God. This notable and quotable passage was spoken in the midst of a trial. God had dragged God’s people into court. God wanted to know why the people were acting like they were acting. The people were playing at piety while living with avarice and greed toward neighbors, particularly the poor.
Some of the charges God levied against the people were these:
“coveting fields and seizing them,
coveting houses and taking them away” (2:2);
“sending violence on the poor” (3:5);
“political leaders taking bribes
and religious leaders selling out for money” (3:11).
Israel, the people of God, were served an indictment of utmost seriousness.
And the saddest part of the whole affair was that Israel, the people of God, knew better. The people of God had been taught what to do. To be sure the wrong thing to do might have be easier and it might have fulfilled a warped sense of success – namely ease and acquisition – but the right things to do were clear and, in the end, led to wholeness and peace.
Micah lays it out in simple and profound terms –
God has told you, O mortal, what is good:
and what does the LORD require of you
but to do justice,
and love kindness,
and to walk humbly with God?
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What does the LORD require of you but to do justice.
In honor of what we are doing today – collecting can goods and other packaged foods and money for hunger ministry in our community – I’d like to tell you about the work of a chemist named Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley who was born in the 1844 in Indiana. Dr. Wiley was the son of an itinerant preacher and farmer who believed fervently in social justice and was a conductor on the Underground Railroad in the mid-1800s. When this preacher’s son, Harvey went to college and then medical school and then for another degree in chemistry at Harvard, he was committed to use his degrees for a higher calling. What he did was to use his learning and his passions to address the abuses being perpetrated upon an unsuspecting population by industrial food manufacturers. In the late 1800s and early 1900s there were no regulations of food products and food manufacturers could get away with anything.
Here are a few examples of what he was found. His first study was on honey and maple syrup. What he discovered was that 90% of the products labeled honey or maple syrup were actually corn syrup. The honey bottles would have a strip of a honeycomb in them to top off the deception. Milk was a another example of what Dr. Wiley found. Dairymen, seeking to stretch their profits would thin milk with water. It wasn’t always clean water. At one point, there was actually a case in Indiana where pond water was used…it was noticed when the family found worms wiggling in the bottom. Furthermore, once you had thinned the milk, you had to reconstitute it. Producers would put chalk dust in it or plaster dust in it. Dairy producers put weird coal tar dyes and sometimes toxic dyes, like yellow lead, to kind of make it more golden again instead of kind of grayish or bluish. And then, because milk was prone to rot – this is before pasteurization and before refrigeration – they would dump preservatives in it. And the most popular one was formaldehyde, which is an embalming compound.
The meat producing industry was selling meats that were preserved by formaldehyde and borax. Dr. Wiley worked passionately for decades facing all manner of personal attacks and push back from the large food manufacturers on passing any regulations. The tide changes when the women’s suffrage movement started to get behind the pure food legislation Dr. Wiley was pushing. They and Dr. Wiley got through to President Teddy Roosevelt and finally on June 30, 1906 the Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act were passed. Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley died in 1930 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery and on his tombstone are the words “Father of the Pure Food Act.” Dr. Wiley’s legacy is that the food that we will give away and purchase this day should be clean and safe.
All Things Considered (1/28/2020) with Deborah Blum talking about her book “The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade For Food Safety At The Turn Of The Twentieth Century.” I also watched the powerful documentary that aired on PBS on the series American Experience…
What does the LORD require of you but to do justice.
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What does the LORD require of you but to love kindness.
A story from Stephen Carter, a law professor at Yale and best selling author…
Back when I was starting seventh grade the year was 1966 and my family moved from the integrated neighborhood where we had lived to what was an all-white neighborhood … in northwest Washington. And my keenest memory of that neighborhood is our moving day when there were five of us kids and we all sat on the front step of our new house as the movers carried in the furniture…All of our new white neighbors passed by on the street, some driving, some walking, looking at us, some of them stopping and staring for a while, and walking on, not saying hello or greeting us. And we sat there in utter despair, thinking this was going to be a miserable experience.
And then all of a sudden from across the street came this booming voice of welcome. It was a woman – a Jewish woman – who happened to live across the street from our new home. Her name was Sara Kestenbaum and she had just come home from work and she saw these five strangers. She knew nothing about us but she welcomed us with this booming voice and then disappeared into her house. We thought that was the end of it, but it turned out she was back five or ten minutes later with a huge tray of cream cheese and jelly sandwiches to welcome us to the neighborhood. We became fast friends with her family, and, Yale Professor, world traveler, and famous author Stephen Carter, says, those were the finest sandwiches I ever tasted in my life (taken from an interview on Online Newshour, August 5, 1998, and from To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, pp. 44-45).
What does the LORD require of you but to love kindness.
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What does the LORD require of you
but to walk humbly with God.
The following appeared not long after Pope Francis became the Pope. It is a small portion of an article entitled “Who Am I to Judge? A radical Pope’s first year” by James Carroll.
St. Francis is said to have declared, “Preach the Gospel, and if necessary use words.” A couple of weeks after his election, the new Pope went to the Casal del Marmo jail, a juvenile detention center on Rome’s outskirts. On Holy Thursday, Jesus’ washing of the feet of the twelve apostles is reenacted in Catholic churches all over the world. Popes typically perform the rite at St Peter’s or at the magnificent Basilica of St. John Lateran, about four miles from the Vatican. The Pope usually bends for a token swipe at the feet of twelve selected priests. But at Casal del Marmo, Francis knelt on the cold stone floor and put his white skull-cap aside. He washed, dried, and kissed the feet of twelve young inmates, some of them bearing tattoos. Two were Muslim. More pointed, in violation of Church tradition, two of the apostolic stand-ins were women. When one of the inmates asked the Pope why he had come to them, he said, “Things of the heart don’t have an explanation” (The New Yorker, December 23&30, 2013, by James Carroll).
The Pope’s heart, it seems, has been inscribed with the words of Micah:
What does the LORD require of you
but to walk humbly with God.
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God has told (us) what is good:
and what does the LORD require of (us)
but to do justice,
and love kindness,
and to walk humbly with God?
May it be so for us all.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.