The prophet Micah, in our lesson from the Hebrew scriptures today, says, “ . . . the Lord has a controversy with his people.” Read that passage and see if it sounds to you as if it might be applicable to life today. The specifics of God’s controversy with the children of Israel are different, of course, but I suggest the prophet’s words are just as relevant to us in the 21st century in the Common Era as they were in the 8th century Before the Common Era.

Read the lesson again and hear God cry, “O, my people, what have I done to you? In what have I wearied you? Answer me!” Can you hear God’s frustration, dismay at our lack of realization of God’s presence with us? The prophet points out how God’s saving grace has been apparent at moments of crisis in their history. Consider for a moment how you have experienced God’s grace in your life, and then widen the circle of your attention to how you have seen God acting in your Church, and wider yet to notice God’s hand at work in this country, and wider still to encompass the whole world.

Look at how Micah describes the various ways the people of his day have devised both to praise and to placate God. Those offerings and sacrifices may not be the particular ways we choose to respond to God or to try to get God’s attention, but that doesn’t mean that we are off the hook, that we are not in controversy with the Lord. When it comes to recognizing the desire of God’s heart for relationship, we can be just as off track with the traditions and rituals that we have contrived in our various institutions around the world as was Micah’s community almost three millennia ago.

The message I get from Micah today is that God is not looking at the externals of our religious observances, rather that God wants hearts that are changed from within by the light of God’s love so that we , each and all, are inspired “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with [our] God.” May it be so for all God’s people throughout the world!