There’s an episode in the Old Testament, a very clear one, where God dresses his people down for losing sight of what’s most important, offering a simple list of what he wants more than anything else:
He has shown you, human, what is good. And what does God require of you? Do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God. ~ Micah 6:8
If you’ve spent any time in church, you’ve heard this one a few times. It’s benign, maybe a little boring. But when we rephrase with a bit more contemporary parlance (while considering the larger context), it reads something like this:
He has already shown you, over and over again, puny human — ye who could never understand the mind of God — what is good. And what does he require? Religious observance? Here’s a simple list: Don’t lie, cheat, steal, or take more than you should. Fall in love with mercy. Live your life with a deep sense of humility, like God is constantly walking behind you.
In the book of Micah, God is angry and deeply unimpressed with Israel’s legion of religious observances — not because they’re meaningless, but because Israel had lost sight of something more important.
It’s as if God is saying, “If you’re not doing these three things, your religion is meaningless.”
For us religious folks, following is part one of three reflections on these three things:
#1 – Act “Justly”
I had a difficult time writing this. The more I think about what God wants here, the more I realize that I’m doing my daily life within a corporate/financial/political system that’s driven by profit before anything else. Because $$ is the endgame, just about anything goes. This system travels far from “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” living much closer to “do whatever the market will bear.”
Because this is so baked into our everyday lives, I hardly notice it.
For example, a friend of mine bought a house that had a massive problem with the land that it sat on, but the seller wasn’t legally required to disclose anything. Though my friend paid thousands of dollars and a mountain of time and energy, the problem was never rectified. It ended up being one of those things you just have to live with.
When it came time to sell the house, he had to make a difficult decision: break the Golden Rule, or take a huge financial hit. What would you do? The situation is unfair. My friend did nothing to deserve this. It’s totally OK to sell the house “as is” because that’s what the previous owner did.
That’s what anyone would do.
We don’t operate this way because we’re dishonest people. We simply don’t see the point in losing money, especially in circumstances like this. If you disclose everything, you lose, right?
How far should we take the Golden Rule? I don’t want people to keep important information from me when I’m buying a house. I don’t mind little picadilloes here and there, but the big stuff? Can you do that and still believe in “do unto others”?
The Almighty Market
Here’s another tricky one…
If I buy a house for, say, $600,000 and in 10 years it doubles, I’d be a complete idiot to sell it for anything less than market price. But if I sell my house for twice the original cost, I drive prices up along with everyone else that’s selling their house at 100% profit. Soon, the cost of living goes up for everyone in that area, including the people who are struggling to get by. Ultimately, some will have to move to a place they can afford. This happens all the time in booming neighborhoods; the poor people move out, the rich people move in, and somehow that sounds totally fair to us.
Not sure God likes that, nor would anyone who’s on the business end of it.
Even if my house does double in value, the bank will keep me close to the break-even point. My bank loves me. I come first, they say, and were happy to loan me the money to buy our house. All I had to do was sign a contract that committed me to pay the agreed upon price, plus the same amount in interest.
When I’m done paying for my house, I will have forked out twice what it was worth when I bought it.
You have to wonder what would happen to our economic system if we based our prices on 1) the real value of things, 2) what’s best for buyer and seller, and 3) a deep commitment to honesty, maybe even overkill, in our business dealings.
Would we have inflation, the kind that kills people who are scraping to get by? Would there be systems that keep the poor in their place and whatever bootstraps just out of reach?
I have to believe that “acting justly” would have a deep impact, even if it was just the Christians who committed to it. I’ll guarantee you that Christianity would have a better reputation than it does now.
Sadly, despite the many fairness codes in our legal system, our economy is geared the person making the money. In most cases, you and I can charge whatever we can get away with, withholding whatever information that might lie within our stunningly spacious legal boundaries, disregarding any impact on the buyer and beyond.
That’s what everybody else is doing, why shouldn’t we?
That’s our system, one that ripples far beyond the extra $500 we made selling the family minivan, failing to disclose how the tailpipe smokes a little when you start it up in the morning.
What’s funny to me is that few are complaining or critiquing, especially the Christian folk who whine incessantly about how America’s moral code is disintegrating in so many ways.
Not a whisper about the sins so closely tied to our pocketbooks.
If things like the queer/transgender developments in our culture outrage us, we should be even more outraged by a system that honors the market at the expense of so many other things. God seemed to want something else: a system that made the market its servant, not its God, one that put fairness and honesty first, compelling people to take better care of one another.
That’s the system we tend to live under when we do business with family members. Why is it so different when we do business with everyone else?
Either way, when it’s time to move, am I going to sell my house for what I paid for it? That’s where this passage gets my goat. My family has benefitted from unwittingly moving to a popular city just before it got popular, while the people who’ve lived here most of their lives – now just getting by – are forced to make some difficult decisions.
What Now?
Am I taking this too far?
It’s silly to believe that, in attempting to follow God, our pocketbooks aren’t going to be deeply assaulted.
And is contemporary Christian America less guilty in this particular arena than the Israelites were so long ago? Their system revolved around a theocracy, for crying out loud, there’s no way we’re doing it better than they did; no way that we’re not caught up in the same current, just as blind to it.
If God was angry with them, how does he feel about us?
Is this such a huge leap?
I doubt that God’s looking down on America, thinking, “Oh yeah, let’s keep that shit going.”
To the Christian nationalist and/or MAGA believer, this passage suggests that your patriotism is misguided and does not impress God any more than the Israelites of Jesus’ day who put far more on the line for their nation. He seems to be much more interested in you, fighting with everything you’ve got to make yourself great.
And when folks try to ease the burdens of our system by, for example, paying off student debt, providing affordable healthcare, pursuing a deeper level of racial justice, equity, equality, etc., maybe reconsider getting so angry about it.
To the average, everyday Christian, bored with church and wanting to find an expression of faith that’s more “dynamic” and “exciting,” this is a reminder that God’s world, upon invitation, invades everything, especially the things we worship that we shouldn’t be worshipping. Instead of searching the world for something new, we’d do better to take a brutally honest look at the places where we simply don’t trust God.
For me, money’s a great place to start.
While I’m not sure how to integrate any of this into my life, or how deep I want God’s hands in my purse, I do believe that adherence to this “live justly” commandment requires two things that are fundamental to faith: a deep commitment to the welfare of the strangest stranger, and the belief that God, not the market, is the one who controls everything.
It’s on His whim that paupers and princesses are made.
