These Difficult Days
Reflections on the Lectionary for February 1st
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how the Revised Common Lectionary sometimes fails to offer anything inspiring—how the texts for a given week don’t really connect with anything going in the community or the world, and I end up looking elsewhere for inspiration. This week’s lectionary offers the opposite problem. Even though they are a part of a much longer cycle of readings and they were not in any way selected to respond to current events, the lectionary readings for February 1st seem almost hand-picked to speak to the current moment in the United States. The world is bigger than the United States of course, and Christianity lives in many contexts beyond this one. But for those of us living in these difficult days in America, the lectionary this week has much to say to us.
First a word about these difficult days. It’s remarkable how many conversations I have these days that begin with me and the person I’m talking to checking in with each other. It’s not just an interpersonal kind of check-in, although it is sometimes that. Instead, it’s more of a is what I think is happening really happening kind of check-in—a way of trying to ground ourselves in the experience of someone else, to make sure what we are experiencing is real. It’s a bewildering time, because we are all going about our daily lives—going to work, caring for children, reading new novels and buying groceries and bingeing new shows. And at the same time, the world we know is coming apart at the seams. Masked and heavily armed federal agents abuse and kill people in the streets and in secret prisons. Our country’s most enduring and powerful alliances are crumbling—or, rather, we are taking a sledgehammer to their foundations. We kidnapped the president of a sovereign nation. In every official statement, the government tells us not to believe our own eyes, to believe that the bad guys are the good guys, and to pretend like the emperor is robed in glorious clothes. It seems inevitable that state and local law enforcement will end up in an armed conflict with federal agents, in Minneapolis or somewhere else. It seems inevitable that more protestors will die and more innocent people will be stolen from their homes and cars and thrown into an unaccountable and untraceable system of prisons.
One of the things I have been telling my own congregation is that we can take comfort in the idea that we are not the first people to pass this way. We are not the first ones to live under an authoritarian regime, and we are not the only ones to live at the mercy of an autocrat. It should dismay us that we have plenty of company here in this state of emergency, but it should also give us comfort that people in all times and places have lived with violence and fear and hatred. We are not the first to live these difficult days, and we won’t be the last.
The lectionary this week speaks to that. The reading from the Hebrew Bible is a famous one—or, at least the end of the passage is famous. The reading is from the prophet Micah, and the last verse of this passage—Micah 6:8—can be found on thousands of bumper stickers and t-shirts. 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? Even on its own, that verse is a moving summation of the life of faith—a call to simple virtues and discipleship. If I were the kind of person to get scripture tattooed on my body, this verse would be a candidate. But if we zoom out just a little bit, the verse takes on added meaning. The preceding verses read like a litany of religiosity—like a list of ways people might try to please God. It intensifies as it goes. Maybe I could make sacrifices, the prophet ponders rhetorically in 6:6: Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? The prophet keeps ramping it up. Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, he asks, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Here Micah is suggesting outlandish and grotesque expressions of faith—things that no one could actually even accomplish. And then Micah intensifies it one more time. Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? It’s hard to imagine a more intense—or alarming—expression of religious fervor. Micah is being intentionally outrageous here, suggesting extreme ways of getting God’s attention. But none of it is meaningful, the prophet says in that famous verse 8, because all God wants is justice, kindness, and humility.
The prophet Micah was one of those who went before us, through times of trouble and fear. He lived in the eighth century, when Jerusalem and Judah (and indeed the whole region) were under threat from the Assyrian Empire. Micah was living in times of fear and uncertainty and violence, which explains the increasingly frantic expressions of religious fervor. If you feel like you’re about to be crushed under the boots of a powerful empire, you’re probably going to search for ways to get God to protect you. But—Micah says—God isn’t interested in magical thinking or disingenuous expressions of religious devotion. Instead, God wants you to live ethically and to be a humble companion of God. Does that protect you from the Assyrians, or from ICE? No. But it does suggest that security can be found in basic decency shown to other people, rather than in extravagant genuflections to God. Be a good person, Micah is saying, be on the right side of justice, and stop trying to buy God’s protection and mercy. God isn’t interested in your burnt offerings and rivers of oil. God isn’t moved by displays of contrition. God wants you to be decent.
Matthew 5:1-12 has a lot to say about decency too. There, we find one of the two versions of the Beatitudes that are included in the canonical gospels. Many people have observed that Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes is decidedly less political than Luke’s version is. Matthew claims, for example, that blessed are the poor in spirit, while Luke says that blessed are the poor. Matthew says that blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, while Luke claims that hungry people are blessed—not spiritually hungry, but physically hungry. In every case in the Beatitudes, Matthew spiritualizes and Luke emphasizes the embodied human need. I do have a preference for Luke’s revolutionary version, but sometimes I think that the distinction does a disservice to Matthew. Matthew’s version, after all, still emphasizes all the same things that Micah was emphasizing in that passage we just saw: mercy, purity of heart, peace, righteousness. Matthew still emphasizes a baseline human decency, and his version of the Beatitudes still insists that people who exhibit that kind of decency will be the ones who will be comforted, who will inherit the earth, who will be filled, who will see God, who will receive mercy, and so forth.
Particularly relevant to the current moment, Matthew 5:10-12—the end of this section—imagines the status and position of people who are persecuted. People who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, or who are reviled and persecuted by people who utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account, are blessed especially, because they share an experience with the prophets before us, who were also persecuted falsely. As we think about the treatment of Renee Good (and her wife) and Alex Pretti, Matthew 5:10-12 would seem to have a lot to say. They were people who were trying to make their world better through civic engagement, and for their efforts they were murdered by their own country and mercilessly slandered on their way to the grave. Hundreds of others, whose stories don’t receive as much press, also find themselves hurt, taken captive, deported, and abused, and even killed, like Geraldo Lunas Campos just this past week. Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes might be less political than Luke’s, but they nevertheless imagine justice for people like Campos, Pretti, Good, and others who face abuse and death at the hands of tyrants.
I saved 1 Corinthians 1:18-31 for last, because I think it speaks to those of us who are everyday folks. Here in 1 Corinthians, like in Matthew and Micah, Paul is imagining circumstances of strife and turmoil. Specifically, Paul is drawing a contrast between the foolishness of the story of Jesus and the wisdom of the world. He’s pointing out how the logics of empire, commerce, naked power, and violence cannot accommodate themselves to someone like Jesus, who went and got himself killed by some of his world’s most unbothered brokers of violence. The kind of life Jesus lived, and the kind of resistance he offered with his death, looks like foolishness to the powers-that-be, Paul was saying. And he was right to say it.
But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, Paul wrote, and God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. Say what you will about Paul—and there is a lot to be said—but that is a word. All the apparent powers of the world are empty, Paul was claiming, and all their demonstrations of violence and strength are meaningless. Instead, God chose weakness and foolishness, and Jesus chose death, which is not so very far from Micah’s doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with your God.
My favorite part of this passage from 1 Corinthians is verse 1:26: not many of you were wise by human standards, it says, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. I like that passage because it locates Paul’s audience squarely within the humble people of the world. Maybe some were wise or powerful, but not many were. Most everybody Paul was talking to was normal.
As I watch the news rolling out of Minneapolis—and Tehran, and Gaza, and Myanmar, and everywhere else people fight for their freedom and dignity—I can’t help but notice how it’s the everyday folk who rise to the challenge. Not many of the people blowing whistles in Minneapolis are powerful people; not many of the ones offering field medicine to the victims of state violence in Iran have been trained for it. But they are doing it anyway, because it is the right thing to do.
Faced with a legacy of state violence and death—faced with the story of Jesus’ foolish death at the hands of a powerful empire—Paul noticed that Jesus’ death was not a failure but a victory, and that people like Jesus were not victims but victors. It’s an inversion that none of the powerful would ever be able to see—the way weakness always wins in the end. It’s counterintuitive, the way God chooses what is low and despised in the world to speak truth to the powerful. But it’s true anyway. And I find that a comfort for the living of these difficult days.
WSJ editorial board today characterized Pretti's actions as "foolish," and I immediately thought of this verse. I hadn't realized it was coming up this very week in the lectionary.