God’s Requirements: A Reflection Shared During Christian Unity Week

Rev. Kevin Cassiday-Maloney, Pastor at First Congregational UCC, Fargo, presented the following reflection  on Micah 6:6-8   at an inter-faith prayer service for Christian Unity at Olivet Lutheran Church on January 20th:

It’s hard to believe that my turn has rolled around already to be the preacher at our annual Christian Unity Worship. We’ve been coming together as folk from Olivet Lutheran, First Baptist, Nativity Catholic, and First Congregational United Church of Christ for so many years that it isn’t brand new anymore! We don’t even have to think about whether or not we’re going to do it; we simply put the event on our calendars, come together for planning, and then rejoice in our unity in the Body of Christ, a unity that’s always important as we work together in sharing the love of Christ wherever it’s needed most.
Our celebration of Christian Unity is local, close-to-home, as we neighbor churches realize we have so much more in common than whatever our different doctrines and practices might be. And as part of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity promoted by the World Council of Churches, our celebration of Christian unity is profoundly global, too. This year’s theme comes from India and calls on us to remember that “the search for visible unity cannot be disassociated from the dismantling of caste-ism and the lifting up of contributions to unity by the poorest of the poor.”
The folk from India offer some background about conditions in their native country that are not only of sociological or historical interest, but that also invite us to reflect on the ways injustice is prevalent in our own hemisphere, in our own nation, and in our own communities of Fargo-Moorhead. This far-away context comes near in helping us to see more clearly what it might mean to “do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God.” Here are a couple paragraphs of background material that are particularly illuminating:
The Dalits in the Indian context are the communities which are considered “outcastes.” They are the people worst affected by the caste-system, which is a rigid form of social stratification based on notions of ritual purity and pollution. Under the caste-system, the castes are considered to be “higher” or “lower.” The Dalit communities are considered to be the most polluted and polluting 2

and thus placed outside the caste-system and were previously even called “untouchable.” Because of caste-ism the Dalits are socially marginalized, politically under-represented, economically exploited and culturally subjugated. Almost 80% of Indian Christians have a Dalit background.
Despite outstanding progress in the twentieth century, the churches in India remain divided along the doctrinal divisions inherited from Europe and elsewhere. Christian disunity in India within churches and between them is further accentuated by the caste system. Caste-ism, like apartheid, racism and nationalism poses severe challenges for the unity of Christians in India and therefore, for the moral and ecclesial witness of the Church as the one body of Christ. As a church-dividing issue, caste-ism is consequently an acute doctrinal issue.
Thank God we don’t have caste-ism here! We really don’t; or, do we???
As we consider the Prophet Micah’s call to “do justice,” we might ponder the many ways justice is not done in our context… or at least is not done nearly as completely as it might be. Consider the many “isms” that continue to marginalize people in our day: racism, ageism, sexism, classism. Consider the ways discrimination continues against various groups of people in our society… and how we church folk can’t always agree around where our actions might be unjust and discriminatory, or where our stance and the actions that follow might be instead a matter of holding firmly to the convictions of our faith. Consider our criminal justice system, where we rightly seek to do justice on behalf of those who are harmed, even as we so often do little to rehabilitate offenders and to make it possible for them to turn their lives around and function meaningfully in society.
What might it mean to “do justice” here in the F-M area? The work we do together to shelter the homeless, to feed the hungry, to care for the sick is some of the best work we Christian folk do. Justice has to do with fairness, with treating people with respect and compassion, with trying to level the often wildly skewed playing field. And to “do justice” might also mean going even further to invest more energy together in addressing root causes of hunger and 3

homelessness, to become more informed and aware around various issues of our time, trying to view these issues through the lenses of justice and then engaging in conversation with each other and with our elected officials that might lead to new initiatives and new policies.
This kind of “doing justice” is tougher than feeding and sheltering and caring, for it runs us up against the walls of our differing doctrinal beliefs and the competing “party lines” of our denominational traditions. I don’t know any easy way around some of the areas where our differences can all too easily become acrimonious. Perhaps the best we can do in some cases is simply “agree to disagree.” But I am convinced that if our mindset is one of Christian unity, then the differences will not be nearly so divisive, and we will surely find much more energy and vitality as we join together in the call to “do justice.”
To “love kindness” seems the much easier task. Who can argue with kindness? The renowned Tibetan Buddhist leader, the Dalai Lama, has gone so far as to say, “Kindness is my religion.” Sounds a lot like the heart and soul of our Christian faith! Kindness takes shape as we look at one another through the eyes of love, seeing each other as beloved children of God, knowing that we’re all in the same boat as redeemed sinners who live by God’s grace, knowing that we are so much more connected with each other than we can even imagine! We are the recipients of God’s kindness, so why wouldn’t we be kind to one another? In kindness there is amazing happiness, and all sorts of good things unfold from that!
In a Facebook post this week, the Presbyterian author, Anne Lamott, shares a story along these lines,
My pastor told us about a young girl who was trying to explain to a friend what her minister grandfather did for a living. She said, “Every Sunday, he goes up to the pulpit, and tells everyone, ‘God loves you so much, and is keeping you so safe.’ And everyone gets really happy, but by the middle of the week, they forget. So the next Sunday, my grandfather goes back up to the pulpit, and tells everyone, ‘God loves you so much, and is keeping you really safe…”. Then everyone gets happy again. 4

To love kindness might well be to offer ourselves as vehicles of this universal happiness, finding that we discover our own happiness only as we work for the happiness of others. Who knew???
Finally, “to walk humbly with our God,” suggests that instead of being “full of ourselves,” we seek to be full of Christ, full of the awareness that we are, at some level, all among “the poor in spirit”… or, as some translations have it, “those who know their need for God.” To be humble means we don’t pretend to have all the answers, no matter how firm we may be in our own convictions and faith. We acknowledge that there’s more than one way of looking at things. And even if we are convinced someone else is wrong and far off the track, we refrain from demonizing people and we remember that there are probably countless ways any one of us is “wrong and far off the track” at various times in our life. Walking humbly with our God, we dwell not on the differences, but look for the commonalities, the places where we might join hands with one another, together trying to build a world where justice and kindness abound for all.
What does the Lord require of us but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God? That’s something we can do, whether we’re Lutheran, Baptist, Catholic, or UCC! For apart from our denominational labels, we are all Christian and we can all experience Christian unity, not only one Sunday a year, but every Sunday and every day.
So may it be. Amen.