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“One World”
Micah 3:5-4:5
A Sermon preached by the Rev. Douglas M. Donley
World Communion Sunday
This is world communion Sunday. It’s a day when we remember our interconnectedness in the world. It’s a day when we celebrate the work that American Baptist Missionaries do on behalf of the poor throughout the world. It is a time when we ask ourselves once again if our posture in the world is bringing us closer together as a world community or splintering it apart.
We only have one reference to Jesus ever reading. When he read, he read the prophets. You all know of the story of his very first sermon. It was short. He read from Prophet Isaiah 61: “The Spirit of God is upon me because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, recovery of sight to the blind, release to the captives and setting free those who are oppressed.” He sat down and said that “today this scripture has been fulfilled in your presence.” That nearly got him run out of town. But it defined his priorities and typified his ministry.
Jesus’ favorite literature must have been the prophets. He said the things that they did and got the results of most of them. Some were listened to during their time, most were listened to long after their time. Like Jesus, most of the prophets were wither run out of town or executed. I think Jesus liked the prophets because they told the truth regardless of the consequences. They also challenged people to live with intentionality and to help create a better world. Jesus was less interested in people following one religion or another. Like the prophets, he was interested in people treating each other with fairness and justice.
If the
supposed plurality of Christians in the
Today’s
scripture from Micah was so important that it was quoted a hundred and fifty
years later by both Jeremiah and Isaiah.
First listen to the Jeremiah part: “Hear this, you rulers of the house
of Jacob and chiefs of the house of
Like Jeremiah, Micah was interested restoring morality in the seat of the temple. There were politicians and religious leaders who used colorful language to disguise the truth of the world. Jeremiah called it “crying peace, peace when there is no peace.”
It’s kinda like saying the economy is doing just fine when there are millions of people out of work or underpaid.
It is like saying at one time that the reason to go to war was to root out weapons of mass destruction and now to say, it was to create democracy. Neither seem to be doing too well.
It’s also the idolatry of saying, Since God is on our side, anything we do is justified because it is sanctioned by God. We have heard this from many God, Jesus and Allah-fearing people in these past few years.
But what has this thinking wrought?
Sociologist Elise Boulding writes, “the tragedy of the twentieth century is that it began with the promise of bringing an end to war as an instrument of state diplomacy but is ending as the world’s bloodiest century, with 108 million war dead.” Jack Nelson Pallmeyer says that “the tragedy of the twenty-first century may be our failure to learn anything from the previous one.” (Is Religion Killing Us?, 2003:5)
Have we forgotten the prophetic scriptures of judgement? If we forget those, how can we embrace the scriptures of hope?
The answer is, we can’t. Not until we address the injustices in the world can we ever hope to put an end to war. Only then can we dream and realize the vision of one world. And yet that is what we long for and work for.
The Psalmist said that we need to do justice or the land will vomit us out. And it is more than just talking about justice, it is also about making justice happen.
As Christians, it is our duty to look beyond simply ourselves and look at how our actions might effect the rest of the world.
`Hear what a group of 100 Nobel Prize winners wrote in June 2002:
“The most powerful danger in the coming years will stem not from the irrational acts of states or individuals but from the legitimate demands of the world’s dispossessed. Of these poor and disenfranchised, the majority live a marginal existence in equatorial climates. Global warming, not of their making but originating with the wealthy few will affect their fragile ecologies most. Their situation will be desperate and manifestly unjust. It cannot be expected, therefore, that in all cases they will be content to await the beneficence of the rich. If then we permit the devastating power of modern weaponry to spread through this combustible human landscape, we invite a conflagration that can engulf both rich and poor. The only hope for the future lies in cooperative international action, legitimized by democracy. It is time to turn our backs on the unilateral search for security, in which we seek shelter behind walls. Instead, we must persist in the quest for united action to counter both global warming and a weaponized world.” (and editorial in World Watch Magazine, May/June 2002,2)
It would be so easy to see all of the bad news out there. We are barraged with it. And we are so good at tearing down leaders. But if we do it without a view toward the future, then we are truly doomed. We need to do more than simply get rid of the bad, we need to find a way to replace it with the good.
Hear the vision of Micah shared by Isaiah: “God shall judge between many peoples and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears in to pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nations, neither shall they study war anymore; but they shall all sit under their own vines and their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the God of Hosts has spoken.” (Micah 2:2-4, Isaiah 2:2-5)
That’s the hope we strive for. That’s the vision that Jesus embraced and it ought to be the goal of our affairs be they as large as global conflicts or as small as an interpersonal squabble. But it’s hard to do that, isn’t it?
The offense and the gift of Christianity is that we envision a world where the prophets’ words come true.
· Where nation does not lift up sword against nation.
· Where, as Jesus says, we “love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.”
· Where as Isaiah says we can see in our mind’s eye “the wolf lying down with the lamb and the fattling and the calf together.”
· Where as Revelation says, “death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”(Revelation 21:4)
It is offensive because it challenges the notion that violence saves us.
It is offensive because it challenges the popular rubric of retaliation as the sole means of survival.
It is offensive because it challenges us to take the log out of our collective eye and challenge the status quo.
But it is a gift because it shows a hope that might truly be possible. The writer of Proverbs said, “without a vision the people perish.” We do need to have a vision that is rooted in peace and in hope. That is the gift of this life of faith. It is what we can offer to the world. It is the vision that we can and should be one world.
We share this meal, remembering that the world is a difficult and challenging place. We remember the suffering of the world.
And yet, we commit ourselves anew to the way of Jesus who taught us in the prophetic tradition to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.
We remember that Jesus said, “go into all the world and preach my Gospel to every creature.”
This is not simply a call to make everyone Christian.
It is a call to make the world one.
To practice that ethic of loving enemies throughout the world.
It is the way that we can model what we believe and what we seek.
And it can start with you making a commitment to seeing the world as it is.
It can begin by you taking the words of the prophets and Jesus seriously.
It can begin with each of us choosing to resist the temptation to violence of the hand, tongue or heart.
It can begin when we commit to loving our enemies and praying for those who persecute us. That doesn’t mean let them off the hook, but it does mean love them and pray for the day that we can all sit down at a meal together under our own vines and fig trees as sisters and brothers.
When we can do that, then the world just got smaller and like the Grinch our hearts just got bigger.
And from just beyond our senses, yet close as our breath, Jesus and the prophets are smiling.