A Sermon preached by J. Stuart Taylor III
St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church
September 24, 2006
What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, to walk humbly with your God? For the last two weeks we have been reflecting together on Micah 6:8 which has been adopted by our congregation as our new mission statement. We have reflected on what it means to do justice, to love kindness. And so we come to the third of these great admonitions. What does the Lord require of you but to walk humbly with your God? I marvel at Micah's ability as a poet to capture in one line the essence of faith. Micah’s words point us to the interrelatedness of all three dimensions of his prophetic call. Micah did not believe that the first two doing justice and loving kindness have to do with our relationships with people and the last one pertains only to God. All three address our covenant relationship with people; all three address our covenant relationship to God. We recognize that when we live and act justly, when we love tenderly, we are already walking humbly with our God. It is daily companionship with the God who is humble enough to walk with us, step by step through each year, day, hour of our lives that empowers us to do justice and to love kindness.
How many of you think of yourselves as walkers? How many of you actually have a discipline of walking built into your day or week? I was recently reading Henry David Thoreau's essay on walking as he reflected on how few people in his generation really understood the art of walking. For Thoreau there was no more sacred and ancient order than the fellowship of walkers. If society looked upon him as a vagrant or vagabond for all of his walking, so be it. Thoreau believed that he could not preserve his health and spirit without a minimum of 4 hours a day of sauntering through the woods. We may think, "Well, if we only could". But is it not more amazing that we don't; that we could live our lives without walking. For Thoreau, the true vagrant was the one who stayed in house or office all day or in front of a desk. To not be walking is to waste time frivolously. We should all be walking more. Walking is a subject dear to my heart for many of you know that I am a passionate hiker. There is nothing more rejuvenating to me than a good hike is. What more could you ask for? Being out in God’s beautiful creation, the deep breathing of cool fresh air, good exercise that works out the tensions of your body and soul. Hiking is about finding your pace, your rhythm. Often, for the first half of the hike I am not yet in the groove. I am still in my head, thinking about this or that. My body is stiff and awkward. But at some point, I hit the groove. Mental activity calms down, I get quiet, and out of my head into my body into the moment, soaking up sensual input from my wilderness environment. With each step, I feel more grounded and rooted in the earth. There is something deeply healing about feeling the earth underneath your feet. There is something about the task of walking that establishes an essential balance or rhythm in our being between body and soul. Another thing I love about hiking is the sense of knowing where you are going and where you have been. The sense of following a good trail. Of course you can get lost hiking so smart hikers carry a trail map. And when you walk in wilderness you can not deny that there is an element of risk involved. You need to be prepared for a change of weather. You need to carry enough water. You need to be prepared for the surprises: a rattlesnake, a bear, a twisted ankle or fall. To walk in wilderness is to leave behind the domesticated and structured and to reenter the wildness of nature. But in doing that, you must always approach hiking in the wilderness with a great deal of humility, with respect and even awe.
You can see then for a passionate hiker like myself it is only a hop, skip and a jump from the experience of a good hike of walking itself to the Gospel story. When we read the Gospels we cannot escape the fact that walking is the most basic metaphor for the Discipleship journey. Gospel begins with a discussion about footwear; John the Baptist says of Christ: I am not worthy to untie his sandals. They are talking about footwear. Am I reaching here? Jesus invites the disciples to go on a walkabout. A foot journey from 'the far reaches of the wilderness in Galilee, eventually winding down south to the capital city, Jerusalem. And when Jesus sends out the apostles two by two, one of the few things they can take with them is a walking stick. What is it about walking that is so basic to the Christian faith? Whatever it is, Christians throughout the history of the church have responded literally by setting out on pilgrimages. Our spiritual ancestors, some of the Celtic monks, set out to wander across the face of Europe for a period of over 500 years. These Irish monks left homeland and family and all life's securities to set out as pilgrims into the unknown wherever Christ called them. What were they looking for? Their walking was neither aimless wandering nor traveling to a specific destination like Jerusalem or some other sacred site. And yet many described their pilgrimage as a search for their true homeland. Some of the great cathedrals of Europe provided a way to do a walking pilgrimage for those who could not leave their town. Have any of you heard about the labyrinth? Some of the ancient cathedrals of Europe have labyrinths, circular patterns on the ground that sometimes mirrors their rose windows. But they are maze configurations that invite the person of faith to make a walking meditation. Some of you have seen the labyrinth over at Grace St.Paul’s Episcopal Church. I recently got to walk the labyrinth at Ghost Ranch and it is always a meaningful experience.
What does it mean to walk humbly with God? There is a marvelous ambiguity to this phrase as Walter Bruggeman observes. Micah 6:8 could certainly be interpreted to mean that we walk humbly because God is magnificent, awe-inspiring, holy but you could also interpret this to mean that we walk humbly because God himself took on human flesh and walked humbly among us, and does so even now. To walk humbly with God means that at the deepest center, we see our lives as a sacred pilgrimage. Joseph Campbell says the true universal myth of all cultures and religions is the journey. This image of a walking journey, a quest, a search for the holy, answers a deep need inside of many people of faith. How about you and your own individual faith journey? Are we aware that we are on a journey? What kind of journey is it? Faith is being able to look back and make sense out of the past, to see a pattern, a connection to all these disparate events and a trail if you will. Hope is the ability to trust in that deep instinct, call it a sense of direction that allows us to believe that we will find our way, that the trail will continue. We all have trail maps in our head, images that help us to feel that our lives are moving in a meaningful direction. What I am suggesting to you is that for the Christian, the truest and best trail map we have is the Gospel story; the story of the discipleship journey. If we look back it is faith that allows us to make sense of the past, to see a pattern. If we look to the future, it is hope that allows us to believe that the trail leads to journey's end, our home. But it is love that allows us to enter the present, fully deeply. It is the awareness that each step of our journey is a gift of Love from the one who gave us life. And so we walk in love, as we take the next step in this discipleship journey. Walking is always this one step firmly grounded in the present. The next step. Not looking back too much. Not looking forward too much but taking this step. Living life in this moment. Going through whatever lesson it is that the journey is serving up to you at this bend in the road. Maybe this is part of what the prophet Micah meant with the phrase, "walk humbly with your God". Perhaps humble walking is to know that we are capable of only one step at a time.
To walk humbly with God means that the life of faith is not just a matter of faith, of what we believe but it is a matter practice. Not talking the talk but walking the walk. Discipleship is life lived out in the doing of it. Taking the next step. What is the next step in your journey? I don't know what that may be for you. It may be little or big. Profoundly consequential or seemingly inconsequential. But whatever that step is take it with awareness, with mindfulness. And if the way seems hard right now for you, if the trail carries you through a time of hardship or suffering, know that it is only this next step that you must face, that you must take. If it is a happy time, slow down enough to enjoy it. The pace of life can be quite overwhelming. But if we can learn to break life down into steps that we can face and take for ourselves then we are walking humbly with God. So we saunter toward the Holy Land. So we make our pilgrimage. And Paul tells us simply: Walk in love, as Christ has loved us. In humility, in the presence of God, walk in holiness. Walk as children of light. Walk wisely for the days are evil. Look carefully how you walk. Take each step in the sure and certain knowledge that God walks with us on the path of life. The Buddhist monk, Thich Nant Hanh has written: Our true home is in the present moment. “To live in the present moment is a miracle. The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth in the present moment – to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now. Peace is all around us – in the world and in nature- and within us- in our bodies and our spirits. Once we learn to touch this peace, we will be healed and transformed. It is not a matter of faith. It is a matter of practice.”
What does the Lord require of you? Micah's question, simply but powerfully cuts through all the unnecessary trappings of religious experience to the basic existential question that is at the core of human existence. What does the Lord require of you? And the answer? Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God. These three may embody all that we need to know in order to fulfill being human. They are not virtues per se. They are not three things to put on your to do list. Rather they are three inter-related dimensions of the life of faithfulness, each one depending on and reinforced by the others. For a community of faith to be genuinely and biblically prophetic, all three of these dimensions must remain interrelated and in balance. May the God of Micah enable every one of us in this community of faith, to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly our God. Let the people say" Amen".