Micah 6:6-8

These were the verses I was required to learn for Confirmation at First Congregational Church in 1967. I liked them.  I still do.  I learned it as "To do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God." I like the NIV better. But there is also to seek justice, and to love mercy, and I like that better still.

⁶ With what shall I come before the Lord

     and bow down before the exalted God?

 Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,

 with calves a year old?

 ⁷ Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,

 with ten thousand rivers of olive oil?

 Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,

 the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

 ⁸ He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.

 And what does the Lord require of you?

 To act justly and to love mercy

 and to walk humbly^[a] with your God. (NIV)

These have been used in suspicious circumstances, however, especially v. 8. Because they have been used politically in prominent ways, a lot of folks who have some church background, and who like some of the ideas without looking too hard at them, they have become adored and wielded like a club against their political enemies. They have been forced into service for meanings that are not fully in the text.  I don't think I am overreaching here, because I was working among the politically focused (that is, obsessed) among the line staff at a school for emotionally disturbed boys in 1976 when Jimmy Carter* used them in his inaugural. The die was then cast, if it not been before. It intensified when I went to work at the state hospital.The religious left reasserted itself, focused on kicking Jerry Falwell. I worked among a deeply secular people, and I saw this as an opportunity to bring discussions of Scripture and thus the faith at large into our conversations.  We called that "witnessing."

Yet what I learned is how even moderately educated people have only vague ideas about what Christianity actually is. Nor are their misconceptions uniform. Some think it is obvious directions on how to Be Nice. Others think it is a list of rules, focused on sex - which really torques them off. Still others think it is "really" a political program that people who call themselves Christians refuse to do or even acknowledge.  I can think of a half-dozen other theories that I have heard called "51% correct about one of various explanations that are each 10% comprehensive."

I think things are even worse now, but that's another story which I will not go into here. 

Whenever I could get into anything specific, and these verses are a good example, I would get to impasses like "Seek justice" - well, yeah, that's what we've been saying but those other bigoted bastards won't even follow their own Bible; and "love mercy," Same thing. The bastards. And to walk humbly with your God. See, God himself agrees with me. Such infuriating conversations were part of my gradual political transitions. 

Let me propose a different reading:  Seek justice. We are to try to create or effect some sort of equitableness, or fair play, or just desserts, or whatever adult version of our fifth-grade understanding we can muster before we even get to any question of mercy.  We don't start with mercy. Mercy is only meaningful when we have achieved as much justice as we can. It's not on the table.  The concept of mercy before justice is vacant.  It is just capitulating to evil. Mercy does not necessarily have to wait until justice has been administered, but it is not even a thing until Justice is Poised.

"...and to walk" not to lead but to accompany. To continue as a matter of course rather than just check in once. A lifestyle. "...humbly" Yeah we skipped right over that didn't we?  When I heard people address that word at all, which may have been only twice but may have been a few more, they instantly thought of how those other bastards weren't being humble.  No hint that "Oh right. I have to watch myself closely. I need to listen to other possibilities of what God is thinking here."

"With your God." Not "with the cool kids who say they are the moral ones." Not "with the general consensus of major religious figures (all of whom are strangely political, like Gandhi, MLK)." Not "with all those psychologists and sociologists who have really synthesised the moral aspects of the world religions and thrown the other stuff out," but with some sort of God who is larger than you and doesn't think your opinion is necessarily correct.

*I wanted to like Carter, who seemed to be a "real" Christian, which had heretofore been unknown in 20th C American politics. Most of my Christian friends voted for him in the end.  But I had heard Steven Ford, who was at Gordon College talk about his father and this made the discussion rather agonising.  But when he was president, I heard Carter increasing smile and be affable while he was saying sweetly vicious things about people who disagreed with him, all the while insisting that his way was the Christian one.  Recently, he taught middle school Sunday School again and spent the time talking about how dangerous Donald Trump is and how he's not a Christian.  My son shook his head: "In my class we talked about Jesus."