Having spent a while last week doing some digging into the Micah 1.1-5 text I finally preached the text yesterday morning. This isn't the text of that sermon. It is a reflection on why Micah speaks with continuing prophetic power into a world so different from eighth century BC Israel. One particular continuity with that world remains unbroken; our human predilection for power, conflict, violence and therefore war. Micah's vision of peace is as outrageous and outlandish today as it was then. Swords into ploughshares? Study war no more? National disputes settled by the principles of Torah? Don't think so. But let's see. What are we actually about in a Remembrance Day service?
Remembrance Sunday is a day of very mixed emotions for many people. Amongst the most powerful are sorrow at the loss and suffering war causes; grief and anger that war is often a failure of political moral imagination; gratitude to those who exemplified sacrifice and risked their everything to make the world better, safer, more free.
And across that wide minefield of memories of long burdened sorrow and regret, anger and grief, the preacher and minister has to make their way, hoping to avoid needless hurt, careful not to increase the weight of burdens by careless words, unthought out sentiments. Or' just as bad, indulge in banal wishful thinking that we are better, wiser, more mature than those earlier generations who, against their best intentions, found themselves caught up in historic events and social forces they couldn't control.
And yet. Such a service isn't a place for playing safe. Not if we are serious about remembering and honouring those who ventured their all; and not if we are serious about letting the weight of incalculable anguish and desolated hopes be truly felt, but not so as to crush. Into such unsafe emotional territory comes and eighth century BC prophet with his impossible promises and unimaginable reforgings of history. Because that's what Micah is about.
In the age of the great Empires he talks of a God who can make peace happen, and who forges peace out of conflict. Swords into ploughs, spears into pruning hooks, each person safe on their own farm, and military training faciilities rendered surplus to requirements in such improbable and politically impossible images, Micah, like Isaiah, looks at reality and asks "What if..." These prophets know about the darkness, and choose to be adventurers towards the light. They are not stupid, nor are they deluded by tragedy into baking up dreams that deny the in-your-face reality of life gone wrong. Instead, they look at history, their history and the futures that might be, and they refuse to exclude God from the equation.
What would the world of politics and military force, the same world riven by war and violence between peoples and nations look like, if the God of steadfast love and justice, the God of shalom and mercy, the God of faithfulness and holiness, were factored in as a decisive presence in our history? Amongst those who have tried that imaginative leap from reality with its determinisms and status quo, to an alternative worldview where radical reversals and transformative visions are not only possible but promised, is the apologist for agricultural and agrarian contentment, the prophet Micah.
What would it be like for farmers to keep their ploughs and mattocks and pruning hooks, and if instead of conscription of property and animals and tools, they were allowed to dwell under their own trees, on their own land, living the life of shalom? Micah argued against the elites and the military adventurers, and criticised the risks the powerful took with the lives of towns and villages, when they went to war in pursuit of territory or gains by military force. Supposing those who had power and resources gave up their fixations on political strategies towards power, and revised downwards economic grand plans towards oppression and profits, and closed the facilities where people rehearsed and resourced military tactics? And what if, instead, the politically powerful and economically ambitious and the lovers of military hardware heard and heeded what such a God as Israel's God requires?
He has shown you O Man what is good,
and what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly, and to love mercy,
and to walk humbly with your God.
What Micah said then, and still speaks now into our much changed world, are words forged from the weapons of despair into the tools of hope, the raw materials of violence hammered into the new shapes of peace. "In the lattter days..." No he isn't saying peace will just happen, or that justice has no cost, nor is he able to confirm that the powers that be won't still be harnessed to policies of oppression and fixation on power, safety and a first strike mentality. But this rural prophet has a powerful theological imagination, formed and informed by a faith in which words like covenant, faithfulness, mercy, judgement, holiness and justice are only meaningfully uttered of God, who has made a world where such moral holiness and eternal values have to be forged out of the human experience of those created in the divine image.
That divine image in each human being is the created gift of the God whose holy love will not be finally thwarted by sin. However we define that vast three lettered word 'sin', it includes as its essence the self-destructive drives which are the engines of hatred, fuelled by mistrust, lust for power, violence, greed, and an inherent over-againstness, which all taken together are the toxins of war. Micah's words in 4.1-5 are both vision for the future and antidote to all that threatens that good human future.
On Remembrance Sunday we choose to hope. Facing the calamitous costs of modern technological warfare, we hear the promised impossible. We look to darkening horizons being forced into recession by the presence and purposes of the God of Jacob, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
As Christians we are called to bear witness to hope, and to face the worst of the world as those whose faith is deeply rooted in the cross which stood on Mount Zion, and whose hope stands this side of a tomb made redundant by resurrection. We are heralds of hope, practitioners of neighbour love, ministers of reconciliation, a force for forgiveness, makers and builders and pursuers of peace.
Why? Because on Mount Zion God spoke finally, fully and faithfully – God commends his love towards us in that while we were still enemies Christ died for us. We are heralds and harbingers of hope in a fragmented, fractured, frightened and therefore hostile and divided world. Those words of Micah are now to be heard THIS side of Calvary where sin did its worst and failed, and THIS side of the empty tomb where death died and love won. The cross and the resurrection are the guarantee for Christians that God who promises the impossible, makes all things new, and new things possible.
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