Holy

Priorities
Micah 6:1-8; Matthew 5:1-12
1-29-17
Bellingham First Christian Church
Rev. Gary Shoemaker

Micah 6 lets us know that

God doesn't need empty
expressions of praise or
exercises attempt to counter
our inadequacies in following
God. What does the Lord
require of you? In other
words, what does God want?
For us to do justice, love
kindness and walk humbly
with our God. I believe that
Micah, in those short few
verses reaches the pinnacle of
prophetic wisdom. God
wants us to treat one another
with justice and kindness and

to walk our spiritual path

with humility and integrity.
And then alongs comes Jesus
and through his life and
teachings is basically telling
us the same thing. It's not a
message that most of the
world wants to hear. It goes
against the grain of cultural
wisdom, and it always has.
Part of what makes the
Beatitudes so counterintuitive is that Jesus
pronounces Gods blessing on
those who expose our
vulnerability! Our typical
approach to life is that
success or wealth or power
equals happiness. The
problem with that is that the
more you succeed, the more
wealth and power you gain,
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the more you have to lose,

and therefore the more you
relate to life in fear and
competition. This way of life
leads us to think we can only
be happy in life by winning,
by beating someone else at
the game. But I think that
Micah 6 and Matthew 5 are
letting us in on a secret, in
fact it may very well be the
secret to happinessto open
yourself and accept life as it
is and then to live out of the
compassion and integrity of
that wholeness.
As those who seek to follow
Jesus Christ we are called to
embody a completely
different vision of life. We are
called to spend our lives
working to extend Gods
mercy to the left out and beat

down in this world, to seek to

establish Gods peace and
Gods justice for all the
dispossessed and
disenfranchised of this world.
We are called to align our
lives with those whom the
world despises and rejects
which means that we too will
be despised and rejected
because of our commitment
to Gods mercy and peace
and justice.
We may not like those words,
but we cannot avoid the truth
they confront us with. The
only way we can truly
embody Jesus vision of
Gods kingdom and Gods
justice and Gods peace is by
opening ourselves to accept
life as it is and our own
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vulnerability to the pains and

losses and disappointments of
life. It is only as we embrace
life in this way that we can
find true joy, and can open
ourselves enough to leave
competition behind and
instead relate to those around
us in compassion and
integrity.
And it goes beyond our
personal relationships and
how we conduct ourselves.
When we witness injustice
and inequality we have to do
something about it. We may
not be able to change much
of anything by ourselves, but
we have to make our voices
heard. Elie Wiesel in his
Nobel Lecture said "There
may be times when we are
powerless to prevent

injustice, but there must

never be a time when we fail
to protest."
We need to hunger and thirst
for righteousness because our
world actively works against
it, overrides it, sidelines it,
monetizes it, limits it, and
assumes that its overrated
and overstated.
The Gospel is a word of
protest. In this time and in
this place, we cannot forget
this. Jesus was a person who
stood up and said no.
The Beatitudes are not just
blessings but a call to action.
The Beatitudes point out who
Jesus really is. Perhaps not
the Jesus we want. Perhaps
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the Jesus who likely rubs us

the wrong way. Perhaps the
Jesus that tells us the truth
about ourselves. The Jesus
who reminds us, at the most
inconvenient times and
places, what the Kingdom of
Heaven is all about.
The Beatitudes are a call to
action to be church, a call to
action to make Jesus present
and visible and manifest
when the world tries
desperately to silence those
who speak the truth.
From his Letter from
Birmingham Jail, Rev. Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
writes, There was a time
when the church was very
powerful -- in the time when
the early Christians rejoiced

at being deemed worthy to

suffer for what they believed.
In those days, the church was
not merely a thermometer
that recorded the ideas and
principles of popular opinion;
it was a thermostat that
transformed the mores of
society... If today's church
does not recapture the
sacrificial spirit of the early
church, it will lose its
authenticity, forfeit the
loyalty of millions, and be
dismissed as an irrelevant
social club with no
meaning..."
The Beatitudes are a call to
action for the sake of creating
the world God imagines. And
these days, we need this
reminder -- when our
imagination may be limited.
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When our hope for the future

might have been dimmed.
When we think what we do
and what we say and what
we believe does not matter.
Our hunger and thirst for
righteousness matters. It
really does.

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