- Micah 6:6-8
- Matthew 25:31-45
Early Thoughts: How should we live? It is the quintessential ethical question. How should we live? How should we make decisions? How should we act?
Micah tells us to love kindness, do justice, walk humbly with God. Great. Now what exactly does that mean?
Micah 6:8 has a prominent place in a lot of United Church discourse. It forms the base of our Minutes for Mission this year. It gives the structure for a recent video about the work of the Mission & Service fund. But what does it MEAN?
How do we do justice? How do we love kindness? How do we walk humbly with God?
I think it is not about acts. I think it is about attitude. Especially in the last two. And that attitude leads us to act in different ways. A while back I read a book called Switch. And the authors suggested that real change is not made by an ongoing act of will. Because we get tired and the will fails. Real change happens when the underlying patterns/systems/attitudes have been adjusted. We can, in the short term will ourselves to act in a certain way. But if we have a different attitude then the acts we want to make are automatic, not an act of will.
Which leads me to Matthew. I love that passage, it is one of my favourite passages in Scripture.
It gives us a list of concrete actions that we could/should do. But I think it also pushes us to see the world differently. Not to see the "least of these" as those in need of charity but to see them as brothers and sisters deserving of our love and support. When we see everybody in that way then how can we help but live as Micah (and Christ) challenge us?
It also strikes me that to live in this way is actually the path to peace as well. Maybe this is what we need to hear on Remembrance Day--change how we see each other, change our priorities, change how we act.
--Gord
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