what does the LORD require of you?

Monday January 31st, Micah 6: 6 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? 7 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? 8 He has shown you, O mortal, 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. The first part of this section of Micah could be translated as, how can I buy off the Lord and get him off my back so I can be about my business. But try as we might, it just doesn’t work. God won’t get off our back for the same reason that our parents or our spouse keep on our back, love. Instead of trying to buy God off with our actions and gifts we should be focusing on what the Lord wants from us in the first place. We are called to act justly, which means fairly without trying to give ourselves unfair advantage at the expense of someone else. Perhaps in here there could be discussion of a maximum wage as well as a living minimum wage. We are called to love mercy, which means that we will understand and act on the fact that those who seem to be on the bottom of the economic heap need a bit more of a leg up than those on the top of the economic heap. Perhaps here is where we should have had the discussion about passing the tax cut extension for the top 2%. We are called to walk humbly with our God, which means we need to deflate some of our own ego in order to let God have some room in there.