Micah 6:1-8; Matthew 5:1-12                                                       

January 29, 2023

  • Finding God’s blessing in changing times

 

Back in 2016 and 2017, there was a series of matches in Asia between top players of an ancient Chinese game called Go and an artificial intelligence (AI) created by Google called AlphaGo.  This computer AI was designed and built purely to play this one game that is rumored to have more possible moves than the number of atoms in the universe.  It seems simple: a wooden board covered in checkered boxes (like a big checkers board) and a bunch of white and black beads called stones.  You try to capture your opponent’s stones by encircling them with yours.  Even though it sounds simple, it is very complex in the number of different possible moves.  It leaves chess in the dust.  Anyway, in those matches between top human players and the computer artificial intelligence, the computer won.  It had watched millions of matches and processed all the possible moves.  It had also played itself, so it’s learning went beyond what it had seen before.  It ended up winning against the best player in the world by making a move that no one had ever thought of before.  I cannot tell you the move because I don’t understand the game, but it was something no one had ever considered.  In other words, human players would all have made either move “A” or “B”, but AlphaGo’s move was well into “C”.  Now here is the thing, the computer AI does not know more than the humans.  It is not smarter than the humans.  It won because of the opposite, actually.  It won because it did not grow up learning to play under great teachers.  Its training did not give it all the moves.  It was not trying to emulate how people are supposed to play.  It had not spent years and years being conditioned by typical play.  Instead, it was freed to make any and all moves that it could legally make.  It did not have tradition, habit, or culture conditioning its responses.  No one told the machine, “But this is the way we have always done it.”

When Micah was making his case to the people, there was no computer AI.  The game Go probably did exist then, but no one would have been playing it in Israel – still a little early for that cultural overlap, but the problem was the same.  For years and years and generations and generations of people, there was a certain idea of how you kept God or any god happy.  Religions were devoted to appeasing the gods, making willing to share rains or growing seasons or whatever you needed from the gods.  People had all the tricks and formulas laid out.  Even in the Jewish religion, there is a formula of what to give for what problems or sins.  That is the entire book of Leviticus.  To make sure you stayed in God’s good graces, you had to follow the rules, even if they did not make as much sense as some things.  After all, why would God want any sacrificed animal?  How does it benefit God that you kill and burn a sheep?  Nevertheless, this was the tradition, the teaching, and the practice… until everything started going sideways.

That is Micah’s time.  Everything is going sideways.  Enemy armies are invading.  The king is not protecting the folk outside the city of Jerusalem (which is where Micah was – outside).  They were being ravaged and laid waste.  Things were horrible and no one seemed to care.  Where was God in this?  How could they get God’s ear and bring God’s sympathy back to them?  That is what is going on when Micah is offering this profound, shocking teaching that we have today.  It is painful and blunt.  This is not a happy book of the Bible.  It is not a happy time in their history.  This is where God meets them, though.  In courtroom fashion, God appeals to the witness of the mountains and hills.  God lays out the case, “I have been good to you in so many ways and saved you from calamity.  Now, you want to try to lead me along with offerings?”  God plays the trump card with Micah’s words building up to bigger and bigger offerings until he hits the biggest one – the human sacrifice of the firstborn child.  “Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression?”  Wow.  NOWHERE in the Bible does God ever condone or invite that sacrifice except for in one place, and we can safely say Abraham was never going to have to go through with the sacrifice of Isaac.  That was never really the plan, and God would not have allowed it.  Human sacrifice is abhorrent to God.  Plenty of other cultures, however, did practice child sacrifice on a regular basis, and the Jews copied because that’s what other people were doing to gain the favor of any god they could interest.  When the fields are dry and you need water and it’s life or death, you might be willing to do things you would not normally do.  We cannot imagine until we’ve been there.

But these were all the old ways of trying to win God’s approval as Micah describes.  This is the old way of thinking, and it is all worthless.  What God truly desires from us more than our stuff is to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God.  Try being more like God and in step with God.  This is one of the best passages in the Bible because it gives in a beautiful nutshell just what we should be doing.  All that the people had been raised to do, all that they had been practicing for generations, all that they thought they knew about how to please God was gone, done, out the window.  Now, they had to change their behaviors, their hearts and minds, and take seriously how they lived with God and each other if they wanted to be in good standing with their God.  No amount of burning oxen would ever satisfy.

It’s like walking up to that ticket center to get those tickets to your most favorite musical act, and when they tell you it will be $100 dollars, you pull out your giant sack of paperclips.  The agent suspiciously questions your train of thought.  You assure her that this is your life’s collection of paper clips, and there are some very valuable ones in there: the paper clip that FDR used on the New Deal, the paper clip that Reagan gave to Gorbachev after the Berlin Wall came down, the paper clip that Aldrin and Armstrong took with them to the moon’s surface to keep their papers together, and even the paper clips that Moses used for the Ten Commandments (it was a big clip).  The agent is not impressed.  They are still paper clips.  You cannot use them to get your tickets.  What you thought was valuable turns out to be pretty worthless.

The old ways of trying to find God’s blessing were finished.  They needed new ways, new hearts, new commitment.

As Jesus walked the hills around Galilee, he felt something new, too.  The people flocked to him because they desperately wanted to know that God was still with them.  They were hurting, frustrated, and desperate for something better.  Jesus saw them burning for God’s love, and he gave them a blessing they had never received before.

These verses called the Beatitudes are not the kinds of blessings that anyone would reasonably expect.  These are not the blessings that people are looking to receive.  Who wants to mourn or to be poor in spirit?  Who grows up thinking that they really want to be meek or persecuted or desperate for righteousness?  Maybe being a peacemaker or being pure in heart but even those are tough in a world where so much is about conflict and self-love.

Well, Jesus is not giving us the goals.  He is not laying out our aspirations.  He is not telling us we should try to be poor in spirit or starving for righteousness or in mourning.  He is giving these blessings to people who were already feeling these ways.  He sees in their souls the poverty, the hunger, the persecution, the meekness, the mourning, and those who love mercy, purity, and peace but don’t see it very often.  These are the last people who would see blessing by the world’s standards.  These are the victims of mindless violence and brutality and hate in our world, the last people you would expect to be blessed.  Those suffering poverty, ignorance, and neglect are Jesus’ audience then and now.  And Jesus tells them that they are exactly the people who will be blessed.  He takes the whole notion of blessing and turns it on its head.

When was the last time you called yourself blessed?  I would not be surprised if it was pretty recently.  We certainly think of ourselves as very blessed, but our blessings seem to be on a different level of finding God’s blessing in our true struggle.  That is where we need to seek God in new ways.  In fact, I would go so far as to say it is in new ways that we will find God’s blessing as we look to a future in which things must change.  It is so tempting to stay with the familiar and comfortable, the ways we have always done it, but we need people willing to look for God’s help, God’s direction, and God’s strength in new times.

Our opportunity is precisely because Farmville needs something different.  In response to the division and hurt that became our history, there is new ground to walk as God’s children.  Working together with our sisters and brothers beyond these walls is a key to finding our tomorrow in Jesus.  Our openness to do what is truly more just, to love what is truly more kind, and to walk with God in truly more humble ways will show us greater blessing than we have ever known as a faith community.  Blessed are those wrestling with the old for they will find something new.  To God be the glory.  Amen.