Like the Romans in the eponymous Monty Python sketch, it’s
sometimes only when a question is asked that answers start to pop into your
head. I admit this question is not very likely to pop into many heads. After
all, the Micah in question came from a fairly obscure and long-forgotten village/hamlet/probably-not-as-big-as-a-town
in ancient Israel, and lived an awful long time ago (born around 740BC). And of
course his book is tucked away in a corner of a bigger book many would
consider, for all practical purposes, to be entirely irrelevant to life in the
21st century. To be honest the question only occurred to me because Micah
is the subject of the morning Bible readings here at Keswick. Shame on me it
turns out. Yes, Micah was written a long way away and a long time ago, yet front
and centre there are themes that resonate.
Just a couple to mention. The first is the silencing of
preachers. My view is that what Micah had to say is of lasting, global
significance. Many take a different view. That’s fair enough. But in Micah’s
day, Micah was told to shut up. He was told that what he was saying was not a
suitable subject for preachers. In the immediate context, he was warning of
disaster because it turned out that God was not indifferent to what was going
on in Israel and Judah. But many in Micah’s day were comfortable. At least the
comfortable were comfortable, and they didn’t want their comfort being
disturbed by some shaggy preacher, who originated from a nothing family, in a
nothing part of the country. It wasn’t that they necessarily had no time for religion
and indeed preachers. But they had to be the right sort of religion and the
right sort of preachers. Preachers that preached about nice things were particularly
welcome.
My observation, for what it’s worth, is that both tendencies
are among us today. On the one hand when preachers take up what the Bible has
to say about issues that cut across and challenge the culture, they are told to
shut up. If not quite literally silenced, moves are made at least to drive them
from the public sphere. Perhaps the consequences are currently not that dire in
the scheme of things – yet. But maybe a time is coming, when livelihoods and
then liberty and finally even life will be on the line. On the other hand, the
flip side is that preachers who preach “nice things”, may well do very nicely. In
our time there’s the prosperity peddlers of course. God wants only good things
for us; believe hard enough, give plenty (to the preacher usually), and all
will be well. This despite the fact that
Micah and others from Jeremiah to Paul and indeed Jesus Himself, all seem to
have experienced something very different to health, wealth and prosperity. Then
there are those who are just generally “nice” (remember the Royal wedding?).
That seems to be fairly acceptable. Nice, preferably short and quick homilies, so
general and vague as to be interpretable as meaning almost anything, that will do
very nicely thank you. And finally, just go with the culture, reinterpreting
the Bible for our times so it’s “relevant”. The bits that are clearly unacceptable
to the postmodern post-Christian mind just ignore. Then we’ll be able to preach
what the culture at large considers acceptable. Tell them what they want to
hear. The result? Well in Micah’s day (or shortly thereafter – he was a prophet
after all) first Israel (the ten northern tribes) and then Judah sleepwalk into
disaster.
The other thing that sticks out is the way the powerful exploited
those without power simply (so it seems) because they could. There were
apparently no internal restraints on their behaviour, and because they were
powerful there were obviously no external constraints on them. Exploitation was
all they thought about. They went to sleep at night scheming and this was what
gave them a spring in their step come the morning. The consequences for those
they exploited was of no concern to them. And it looked like they got away with
it. Except of course they didn’t. Their success was illusory. Kind of raises
the question as to what really counts as success and what matters.
So, not very far in to Micah, and it looks like there are
connections to be made between Micah’s world and mine. I accept it might not be about roads, education, viaducts
and, erm, the wine, but Micah’s may well do me some good.
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