What does the LORD require of you?  To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God (Micah 6:8).

Six months ago life was already pretty complicated, right?  Now add in a pandemic, turmoil and conflict around our complicated history with respect to race, and accompanying economic uncertainty, political gridlock, and it’s feeling more complicated than ever.

Not to mention the many things we’re not paying attention to because they have been shoved off our screens and out of our awareness.

Into this complicated mix we drop this apparently simple admonition that is almost three millennia old: “What does God require?  To act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.”

Humans are great complexifiers.  That is partly in recognition of the reality that life is complex.  “Do justice (or “act justly”)—just two simple words, a mere three syllables.  But there’s that word justice: does it mean to enforce the rules fairly and impartially?  Or to punish evildoers, or reward doers of good?  Or pay special attention to those who have been getting the short end of the stick for a long time?  Or “all of the above”?  Or …?

Making things complicated is a great way to avoid really grappling with the issues!  If things truly are “simple,” then we’re on the hook for our attitudes and behavior.  If they are really complicated, well, we get to shrug our shoulders (“Too complicated for me to figure out!”) and keep going but never changing.

Which is why there’s real wisdom in taking the verbs of Micah 6:8—do, love, and walk—in reverse order.

Walk humbly with your God is simple, which is different from saying that it is easy.  The promised land of walking humbly with our God is nonetheless stalked by Giants, with names like Look Good, Feel Good, Be Right, Be in Control, Personal Agenda, Refuse to Change.

Humility is an earthy word, from the Latin humus, dirt.  I suppose we could say that humility is as simple as dirt: I get off my various high horses, I climb down from my pedestals, I practice saying “I don’t know” more often.  I ask more questions and try harder to really listen to the answers.  I’m willing to become the first one to pick up the mop and bucket when mop and bucket are what are needed.

And it goes deeper.  The key to all we’re facing in these days is in the with God part of our verse.  In Christ, we no longer have to try to avoid God, or control God, or be afraid of God, or strive to prove ourselves to God, or attempt to be God.  We simply get to walk with God.  Humility is actually the key to deepening intimacy with God, and deepening intimacy with God is the need of this hour and every other hour as well.

“I only do what I see my Father doing,” Jesus says.  We tend to turn it around, complicate it—we focus on what we do and hope that if we do it right enough, long enough, we will then see God.  Jesus flips it: spend time getting to know your Father in heaven, invest yourself into that relationship, and you will know what to do because you will be seeing God more clearly, more often.

If we hang out with Jesus more and more, mercy and justice will start flowing...into us and then out from us.

So for starters, let’s keep it simple: walk humbly with God.

Can you see two or three ways you tend to turn to God “at the end” of your schedule or to-do list, rather than from the beginning?  What might practicing humility look like in your life this week?