You may be old enough to remember the song “We May Never Pass This Way Again” by Seals and Crofts. While it was not about Sunday School or the Bible it’s an accurate description of what I am thinking as I teach this passage. The last time I taught Micah was 22 years ago – so do the math. While some of the fundamental values of the Christian life are in this text we rarely get around to looking at them. Our focus is on other things – good things – but I’ve always thought this is a place I should have visited more than I have. Like James 1:27 – “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” Here then is the same simplicity and directness that is probably worthy of teaching every year and not just every several decades.

Still, here we are and it is good to be back for a moment.

“With what shall I come before the Lord
and bow down before the exalted God?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousand rivers of olive oil?
Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”

The passage this morning breaks up into three parts:

1. A life too full
2. A life that is empty
3. A life that satisfies

How many of us have not asked the question “What will please God?” Verses 6-7 deal with those of us who are forever feeling there is something more we should be doing to please a God who is never satisfied with what we are doing. We always say “yes” to more – more service, more giving, more good deeds, more self-sacrifice until we are worn out and have become bone weary in well doing. I know James says “Faith without works is dead” and it is true. We cannot forever lean back on we are save by grace alone and it is only through faith that we are reconciled with God. Without faith being worked out in the every day it withers and dies. Faith cannot live on faith alone. It needs to be expressed. Otherwise, it is merely a concept with no flesh attached. Yes, faith without works is dead.

But faith withers when it is dependent on works. We can become so caught up in justifying ourselves with God through our good works that we lose the sense of being totally dependent on grace. We begin to earn God’s love through our good works and while faith cannot live without works it cannot grow in the soil of works alone. Dallas Willard says it this way, “Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action.”

The best relationship between faith and works is this, I think. Works are a way of expressing our faith and relationship with God. Works without faith are expressionless in other words. Have you ever seen someone doing something with absolutely no expression on their face? They are blank. That is what happens when our works are not motivated by our faith but by our merely human sense of responsibility or compassion or duty. There is nothing behind them that point to God. Our works are meant to be expressions on the face of God and without faith they are blank – no matter how good and well-intentioned they are. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 9:12 – “This service you perform is not only supplying the needs of God’s people but it is also overflowing in many expressions of thanks to God. Because of the service by which you have proved yourselves, men will praise God for the obedience that accompanies your confession of the Gospel of Christ, and for your generosity in sharing with them and with everyone else.” Did you catch that word “expression”? There is an expression on the face of the one who gives and that expression causes people who receive to give thanks to God. If our good works only cause people to thank us and not express thanks to God then we are giving with blank faces.

Pope Benedict this week spoke to members of the Little Order of Divine Providence and said to follow the path of Christ means to serve the poor and the downtrodden while not turning Christian virtues simply into ideas and humanitarian endeavors. “In them (the poor), you touch and serve the flesh of Christ and grow in union with him, while always keeping watch so that faith does not become an ideology and charity is not reduced to philanthropy so that the church doesn’t end up becoming a non-profit agency.”

But they also apply to those of us who are tempted to believe that God is not pleased unless we give up everything for him – so we can never really enjoy anything completely as it might not be pleasing to God. We become dour and fearful of displeasing God. We lose our joy just as we lose our laughter and the enjoyment of good things we have been given. We allow the guilt of others not having as much to ruin the legitimate pleasure of what we have. Ecclesiastes 5:18 reads, “Then I realized that it is good and proper for a man to eat and drink, and to find satisfaction in his toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of his life God has given him – for this is his lot. Moreover, when God gives any man wealth and possessions, and enables him to enjoy them, to accept his lot and be happy in his work – this is a gift from God. He seldom reflects on the days of his life, because God keeps him occupied with gladness of heart.”

We’ve heard it said that the unexamined life is not worth living but I think Ecclesiastes tells us that the overly examined can become narcissistic. Everything – including our labor – must lead to personal fulfillment and we are never satisfied with regular work. I think there is a “toilsome” element to work that is necessary and inevitable. My father used to say that “work is the glue that holds life together” and he was right. When we try to make work give us meaning we are asking too much of it. It is a gift to be able to enjoy our work but it is not a promise.

Or they speak to those of us who need to achieve and have impact and whose God will not let us rest until we have accomplished something great in the eyes of the world.

Or they speak to those who have sacrificed their marriage and family to satisfy what was once a calling but is now a curse to satisfy a God who can never be pleased but can possibly be put off or distracted for a time. It is the God who wants it all. I’ve been reading the book “Evicted” by Matthew Desmond and, as I mentioned last week, it is the story of men and women who live their lives with the continual prospect of being evicted for failure to pay rents that are often two-thirds or more of their total income. They become adept at avoiding the landlord and the inevitable knock at the door of the sheriff’s deputies and the movers. They are always dodging and hiding, creating excuses and hoping to put off what always comes in the end – judgment and eviction.

These words speak to those of us who are so caught up in doing and achieving and impressing and self-sacrificial service, those of who are trying to keep God quiet with the noise of our constant activity, those of us who cannot seem to bring enough to the altar for God to please Him.

But this passage also speaks to those of us who gradually, by degrees, have become practical atheists who live a life for which God is not really necessary – and from whose life God disappeared ever so quietly and unnoticed until one day we ourselves are surprised to find he is gone altogether and life goes on anyway.

It’s not so much about greed but about a life where Hell has already begun. What does God say in verse 13? “I have already begun your destruction.” When we live like this we wake up one day and find ourselves being a ruin of what we once had been. After all, what is a ruin? It is what remains of what once was a living place filled with people and a future. Ruins are both reminders and warnings. They are what remains when the foundations crumble. A ruin typically does not disappear completely but stands as a witness of what once was.

I love Peggy Noonan’s writing and this week she wrote a column about decadence – which is just another word for ruin. It is what remains when integrity and fidelity have been exhausted and used up. She was writing about the real decadence of Washington – not that of one or several individuals but “an utterly decadent system.”

“A high official in the IRS named Lois Lerner targets those she finds politically hateful. IRS officials are in the White House a lot, which oddly enough finds the same people hateful. News of the IRS targeting is about to break because an inspector general is on the case, so Ms. Lerner plants a question at a conference, answers with a rehearsed lie, tries to pin the scandal on workers in a cubicle farm in Cincinnati, lies some more, gets called into Congress, takes the Fifth — and then retires with full pension and benefits, bonuses intact. Taxpayers will be footing the bill for years for the woman who in some cases targeted them, and blew up the reputation of the IRS.

Why wouldn’t Americans think the system is rigged?

This is Washington in our era: a place not so much of personal as of civic decadence, where the Lois Lerner always gets away with it.”

C.S. Lewis in “The Screwtape Letters” writes of the importance of the process being gradual so it does not create a crisis or a sudden turning.

“We know that we have introduced a change of direction in his course which is already carrying him out of his orbit around the Enemy; but he must be made to imagine that all the choices which have effected this change of course are trivial and revocable. He must not be allowed to suspect that he is now, however slowly, heading right away from the sun on a line which will carry him into the cold and dark of utmost space. For this reason I am almost glad to hear that he is still a churchgoer and a communicant. I know there are dangers in this; but anything is better than that he should realise the break it has made with the first months of his Christian life. As long as he retains externally the habits of a Christian he can still be made to think of himself as one who has adopted a few new friends and amusements but whose spiritual state is much the same as it was six weeks ago. And while he thinks that, we do not have to contend with the explicit repentance of a definite, fully recognised, sin, but only with his vague, though uneasy, feeling that he hasn’t been doing very well lately.

This dim uneasiness needs careful handling. If it gets too strong it may wake him up and spoil the whole game. On the other hand, if you suppress it entirely—which, by the by, the Enemy will probably not allow you to do—we lose an element in the situation which can be turned to good account. If such a feeling is allowed to live, but not allowed to become irresistible and flower into real repentance, it has one invaluable tendency. It increases the patient’s reluctance to think about the Enemy. All humans at nearly all times have some such reluctance; but when thinking of Him involves facing and intensifying a whole vague cloud of half-conscious guilt, this reluctance is increased tenfold. They hate every idea that suggests Him, just as men in financial embarrassment hate the very sight of a pass-book. In this state your patient will not omit, but he will increasingly dislike, his religious duties. He will think about them as little as he feels he decently can beforehand, and forget them as soon as possible when they are over. A few weeks ago you had to tempt him to unreality and inattention in his prayers: but now you will find him opening his arms to you and almost begging you to distract his purpose and benumb his heart. He will want his prayers to be unreal, for he will dread nothing so much as effective contact with the Enemy. His aim will be to let sleeping worms lie.

You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

More importantly, this passage describes for those of us who found ourselves in one or all of the previous categories how simply God is pleased and how rich and full life can be.

“He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
And to walk humbly with your God.”

Three words describe a life that satisfies Him and us as well because we are made in His image. Over time we’ll find that what pleases him pleases us and we begin to actually enjoy God.

First, be fair to people for whom you have responsibility. The Jewish tradition calls this “mishpat”. We are not responsible for universal Justice. That would be impossible but we are responsible to treat people within our daily life with fairness.

Second, we are to be kind to people for whom we have responsibility. The Hebrew word is “hesed” and it is used hundreds of times to describe the everlasting and constant graciousness of God. It does not mean niceness. In fact, David says, “Let a righteous man strike me – that is a kindness; let him rebuke me – that is oil on my head.” Kindness and truth are always linked. Psalm 117:2 reads, “For his merciful kindness is great toward us; and the truth of the Lord endures forever.” It is the bedrock of kindness that underlies our relationship with God and should be the same with each other. Our kindness toward one another should be patient and enduring. I love the phrase “tender mercies” for that reason. We are to show each other mercy.

Third, we are to walk humbly with God. Not walk humbly on our own but with God. Humility is not a self-help project. One of the several meanings of the word for humble in Scripture is being ready for whatever comes. Humility is the confidence of knowing where our strength comes from whatever the situation. As you know one of our class members, Earl Blackwell, died last week. In a story about him during his last days in the hospital a friend told about a nurse who was surprised at his insisting on spending time with a friend when he had critical health issues instead of letting the doctors in to look at him. He told the nurse, “My confidence is not in the doctors or this hospital but in Christ. My time with this friend is more important than my time with the doctors.” Earl was one of the humblest and yet most confident men I have ever known. He walked with God and that is where he found his strength to face whatever came – even death.

Thomas Merton said that spiritual life is not just mental activity but it requires doing – if only a little. These are not mental attributes but practices with people. You cannot do them in solitude – they require people.

So, this week work on these questions:

1. To whom will I stop being unfair and begin to be fair – not just neutral.

2. To whom will I stop being unkind and begin to be kind and to show tender mercy – and not just be neutral.

3. Am I living a life ready for whatever comes because I am walking with the one who loves me?