Readings: Micah 6:6-8; Luke 24: 13-35 (The Road to Emmaus)
The Christians of India prepared the material for this year’s ecumenical service.
To do this, they reflected on their own situation.
Here are three quotations from the background they provide.
Almost 80% of Indian Christians are Dalits.
The Dalit communities are considered to be the most polluted and polluting, and thus placed outside the caste system.
They were previously even called ‘untouchable’.
Christian disunity in India
within churches and between them
is further accentuated by the caste system.
This final quotation recognises how,
in India, historical and doctrinal divisions
are only one aspect of Christian disunity.
From this context, the Christians of India bring before themselves,
and then before us,
the text from Micah we heard,
with the headline:
What does the Lord require of us?
Now we should pause there and feel the weight of the question.
Not its weight for the Christians of India,
but its weight for the Christians of this area of Sheffield,
gathered here.
Now, we, here, in this Church, are the ‘us’.
What does the Lord require of us?
I know the question make me feel uncomfortable.
I don’t have a clear insight.
Let’s look further at that first reading.
Micah is telling off the people of Judah.
He has a fairly typical prophetic disdain
for any suggestion that ritual offerings find favour with God.
Authentic worship involves more.
what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice,
and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God
Micah intends the three dimensions here
to complement and reinforce one another,
The key to his deepest sense is the final one.
Walk humbly with your God.
The people of Judah are conscious of a special relationship with God, not as individuals but as a race, as descendants of Abraham.
They have been chosen,
and, thereby,
privileged in their knowledge of God –
as summarised in that wonderful Old Testament motif:
You shall be my people and I will be your God.
(Jr 11:4, 30:22, Ezk11:20, 36:28, Ex 6:7, 2S 7:24, Dt 26: 17-18)
So the ‘your’ in walk humbly with your God is there
as a powerful reminder that the people are chosen by God.
They are a people who walked away from Egypt,
from slavery,
through God’s guiding presence.
This covenant relationship is with all the people
and so they should treat each other as God treats them:
with justice and kindness.
If the people continually renew that sense of walking together into freedom, humbly submitting to God’s guiding presence,
they will be bound more closely together,
they will be in solidarity with one another.
‘Walking with the Lord’ is also what our gospel reading is all about.
Luke’s gospel is a journey up to Jerusalem.
Spreading out from Jerusalem comes later, in Acts.
He expects us to notice that the two disciples are going the wrong way.
The redirection, the turnaround,
for these disciples actually starts with their walking together.
This gives them the chance to talk over what they have recently experienced.
Then they are joined by, accompanied by, a stranger.
The conversation continues.
This wasn’t a ‘nice day isn’t it?’; ‘are you going far?’
kind of exchange,
it was a real conversation:
springing from the disciples’ immediate situation
and their raw feelings about it.
Our immediate situation is different from those disciples.
But if we accompany one another, if we ‘walk’ together,
and engage in honest conversation
about our lives as 21st century Christians,
we too can find ourselves accompanied, and spoken to,
by the Lord.
Such conversation isn’t easy:
it involves opening up, expressing our uncertainties,
it involves a willingness to listen and to change,
it involves allowing the stranger to join us,
it requires humility.
So, returning to Micah’s teaching,
viewed now in the light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
God’s love extends to all humanity.
In His Son, God’s complete commitment to humanity is revealed.
It is our privilege to know this.
Micah advocated heartfelt solidarity among the chosen people.
The Christian counterpart is not solidarity among Christians;
it is heartfelt solidarity with everyone, for all are loved by God.
So our first conversation question today,
stimulated by the Dalit’s situation, should be:
What groups are on the margins round here, in this part of Sheffield?
This isn’t a question about financial poverty.
It is a question of who are generally disregarded,
seen as of little importance, left out of wider society –
maybe you think of the long-term housebound, or nearly so,
or maybe the confused and frail in residential care.
There will be different perspectives,
but in this conversation we should seek common ground,
watching out for what we agree on.
The second conversation question is:
when we agree on a marginal group, what should we do?
In particular, are there activities that we should undertake together, aimed at decreasing their exclusion?
The Indian Churches confess that their disunity is aggravated by how they live out their response to the caste system.
It must raise for us a third conversation question:
Are there areas where we, locally, in Ecclesall,
multiply disunity by working separately when we could work together?
So, do stay after the service for a cup of tea,
and don’t hold back in conversation.
Let us talk honestly and humbly
about how Micah’s words challenge us
as the Churches of this area.
What does the Lord require of us?