Authority

In seminary, I came so close to being a Hebrew scriptures scholar. This literature and the issues it addresses, the challenges it raises, still grab me. Years ago, when Bill Moyers did a series of PBS programs on Genesis, I was riveted by the Biblical scholars who discussed Genesis and its different stories and the ways of interpretation. I just loved it. And the reason why is not only because of all the background and context and the understanding of which there is layer and layer, but it's because the Hebrew scriptures, especially, and the prophets in particular, speak to us, they have something important to say.

Micah 6:8 is a quintessential piece of Hebrew scripture, a life philosophy from the prophets, that group of biblical personalities that Western tradition refers to and respects: preacher and politician, teacher and the taught, the rebel and the rich, have all called on the prophets. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all embrace the prophetic tradition, as does Unitarian Universalism, where we claim the prophethood of all believers: We speak the truth in love and demand justice.

One of the ways I read the prophets is to go back and look at the kinds of questions they were trying to answer, to understand the context to which they were preaching. If you look at the kind of issues and questions that prompted some of Micah's remarks, you'll see that Micah is paraphrasing what the people were asking. What they were asking was, "How many rams do I have to sacrifice before the Lord? How many prayers do I have to say? Do I need to bring my firstborn child and sacrifice him to the Lord?" In the language of their day, they were wondering, "How do I make sense out of my life? What do I have to do in order to lead a good life? What do I need to do in order to get right with my God? What do I need to do in order to find unconditional acceptance in the world?" What is striking is how, when removed from the specific context of 7 BCE, these people were asking many of the questions I hear people asking today: "What do I have to do to get right with life? What is the meaning of life? And how do I know?" So Micah answers them in 6:8, "What does the Lord require of you? Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God."

I used to have a professor who would always demand, "DDT. DDT." This meant "diagnosis determines the therapy." What that means for us, in learning from Micah, is this: How we diagnose the question "What does the Lord require of you?" determines how we are going to understand the answer. So answering this first part of Micah 6:8 becomes critical. Diagnosis determines the therapy.

What does it mean when Micah says, "And what does the Lord require of you?" Unitarian Universalists, as might free-thinking religious liberals anywhere, have a knee-jerk reaction to this question because it's about authority. Face it, Unitarian Universalists don't do authority very well. In fact one of the reasons many of us are here is because we don't like to deal with religious authority. In the New U class I lead (an introduction to Unitarian Universalist theology, history, and polity), I use a paradigm that offers a way to understand religious authority. Highlighting the religions that we're most familiar with, I suggest how each frames its authority. In Judaism religious authority is their tradition: "Why do we do it (believe) this way? Tradition!" Because that's the way we've always done it. In Catholicism the religious authority is the bureaucracy. When you want to know about something-especially something religious in nature-you go to the nuns, priests, bishops, and cardinals and finally the Pope to get your information. In Protestantism religious authority is the gospels. These books from the Christian Scriptures offer the "Gospel truth." Now, Unitarian Universalism's religious authority is our own individual experience. This isn't to say that we don't use tradition, or hierarchy, or the Gospels, but we look at all three, as well as a lot of other sources of authority, through the lens of our own experience.

In all the years I've been facilitating, teaching, discussing this class, no one has ever said, "I disagree with that. It's not personal experience." After all one of the reasons we are Unitarian Universalists, whether or not we grew up in a Jewish home, or Catholic home, a Protestant, agnostic, or atheist home, is because we question, reject, or hold as suspect other people's authority: we want to make our own decisions. There's a wonderful story that explains this:

A woman once came to Rabbi Israel and told him her secret sorrow: she had been married twenty years and still had not born a son. "What a coincidence!" said the rabbi. "It was exactly thus with my mother." And this is the story he told her: For twenty years his mother had had no child. One day she heard that the holy Bal Sham Tov was in town so she hurried to the house he was in and begged him to pray that she might have a son. "What are you willing to do about it?" the holy man asked. "What can I do?" she replied. "My husband is a poor librarian but I do have something I can offer the rabbi." With that she rushed home, pulled a katinka out of the chest where it had been carefully stored away, and ran back again to offer it to the Rabbi. Now the katinka, as everyone knows, was the cape worn by the bride on her wedding day-a precious heirloom handed down from one generation to another. By the time the woman got back, the rabbi had left for another town, so that is where she went. Being poor, however, she had to walk the distance; by the time she got there, the rabbi had left for another destination. Six weeks she followed after him from town to town till she finally caught up with him. The rabbi took the katinka and gave it to the local synagogue. Then Rabbi Israel concluded, "My mother walked all the way back home. A year later I was born." "What a coincidence, indeed!" cried the woman. "I too, have a katinka at home. I shall bring it to you at once, and if you offer it to the local synagogue, God will give me a son."
"Ah no, my dear," said the rabbi sadly, "that will not work. The difference between my mother and you is this: you heard her story; she had no story to go by."

Rabbi Israel was telling the woman that she had to have her own story. You can use another's story to guide you, as a reference, but you have to create your own story: you have to do things on your own. We would say, you've got to have your own journey, your own spiritual path, your own odyssey. You can read about someone else's and maybe pick up some nice pointers, some guidelines, but you have to create your own story.

Ultimately we have to make our own decisions. But these decisions are made in two larger contexts that cannot be forgotten. Micah talks about both of those. One of these is the context of the larger community, something that separates us from those who are at home reading the Sunday paper or out playing golf or tennis, or still sleeping at the "church of St. Mattress." I hear people say that they aren't religious but they're spiritual, which means that they don't value or trust the institutional religious setting, but only the private one. Those of us who are part of a congregation choose to live our spiritual journey in a community, as opposed to individually. When Micah says, "What does the Lord require of you?" he doesn't respond by saying what you really need to do is go off in the desert for three years and find out what the Lord wants you to do. He doesn't say you need to climb to the mountain top and live in a cave for a couple years and then wait for the Lord to tell you what to do. He says, "Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God." His theology is a relational one, living in community, being with other people. So while you may have your own individual experience, those individual experiences have to be worked out in relationship with other people, in community, in a congregation.

This is one way that personal experience is acted out, it's journeyed in the larger context of community.

There's an even wider context. Sometimes I think we "protesteth too much" about this issue of authority. I don't know anyone who makes all their decisions totally in isolation. We always seem to refer to something more transcendent. The other day I was thinking about when we make choices how oftentimes we say, "Now what would my parents say about this?" or "What would my relatives say about this?" or "What would my teacher or mentor say about this?" While it may vary from case to case, we never decide in isolation. It's always contextual. Perhaps you may call up your neighbor, your parents, or a friend. But you are always referring to someone, something, some other event that gives you information. Yes, you may ultimately decide on your own, but there's a larger, additional context in which the decision is made. You refer to other people, things, and events.

There's a poem by Mary Oliver entitled, "Am I Not Among the Early Risers?" which is the first line of the poem. While, she is talking about going for a walk in the early morning, it's a metaphor: she may have walked, but what she is talking about in this poem is who she is accountable to. She is talking about something, someone, some other event as a context in which she makes her decisions. The poem, as you will read, has a lot of questions in it. One of the things that has been eating at me is she sounds on the defensive, in a very Jobean style. If you remember the story of Job, he's been subjected to one horrible event after enough, and he's absolutely stunned by it all: he doesn't understand why. He keeps asking "Why is this happening to me? I've done this, I've done that, I've lived a good life. I've done all the things I am supposed to do. Why is this happening to me?" There's this same feeling in Oliver's poem. It's as if she's being asked to account for the way she has lived her life. And she responds by declaring, "Am I not among the early risers and the long distance walkers?" The tone and attitude in which she is writing this poem is almost a justification and defense of her existence. The poem is from her book West Wind.

Am I not among the early risers
and the long distance walkers?
Have I not stood, amazed, as I consider
the perfection of the morning star
above the peaks of the houses, and the crowns of the trees
blue in the first light?

And, while I waited, have I not leaned close, to see everything?
Have I not been stung as I watched their milling and gleaming,
and stung hard?
Have I not always been ready at the iron door,
not knowing to what country it opens-to death or to more life?
Have I ever said that the day was too hot or too cold
or the night too long and as black as oil anyway,
or the morning, washed blue and emptied entirely
of the second rate, less than happiness
as I stepped down from the porch and set out along
the green paths of the world?

She seems to be saying, "Have I not kept faith, have I not done everything to keep faith with living?" Almost as if to say to someone, "How dare you hold me accountable? I've done everything I'm supposed to do. Am I not among the early risers and the long distance walkers?" She's been stung, and stung hard. I've called Oliver one of the New Transcendentalist poets and in this poem she writes in the spirit of Thoreau who wrote: "I wish to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, I want to cut a broad swath, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms. If it proves to be mean, then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world. Or if it is sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it."

What is it that could ask these questions of Mary Oliver, that she would feel that she's being held accountable and she has to tell why she has kept faith with living? I think it's Life. She is being asked by Life, what have you done with your life? In another Oliver poem, in the last line, she asks "What is it you plan on doing with your one wild and precious life?" It's as though there's a cosmic Life presence transcending some thing, some one, some event, that is asking her if she has kept faith with life.

These, then, are the contexts in which we make our decisions. One is the greater community-perhaps the congregation. This community gives us support. The other is the larger, almost transcendent context of Life itself that is asking, "How have you kept faith?"

Given this understanding, I would rephrase Micah's question. Instead of, "What does the Lord require of you," I would suggest "What does Life expect of you?" Or to put it another way, "To whom are you accountable, for what, and how would you ever know?"

© the Rev. Fredric J. Muir
February 11, 2001

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