Texts: Micah 6:1-8, “We Are Sunflowers” Poem, Psalm 24:1
Speaker: Joel Miller
Today’s reading from Micah 6 is familiar. At least that last part. At least if you’ve ever looked up on your way in from the church parking lot. That big green banner summarizes Micah 6:8 in three short phrases. “Do Justice. Love Mercy. Walk Humbly.” The early Anabaptist Hans Denck pointed to these three “fruits” and wrote, simply, “When held together, these make a Christian; when transgressed, they make a non-Christian” (Cited in Anabaptist Community Bible, p. 1123).
What’s less familiar in that passage is the set up. In the previous verses the prophet Micah imagines the Lord, the Creator of the cosmos, taking his people to trial for all the harm they’ve done. Since God is kind of tied up as the plaintiff, and the people are the defendants, God calls on the mountains and the hills, the earth itself, to serve as a witness.
Micah 6:1-2: “Arise, lay out the lawsuit before the mountains; let the hills hear your voice! Hear, mountains, the lawsuit of the Lord! Hear, eternal foundations of the earth! The Lord has a lawsuit against his people.”
After some back and forth, the prophet announces the verdict of what the people must do: Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly.
Holding creation as a reference point for our relationship with God, a witness to truths we often forget, was a key part of early Anabaptist theology. It still is.
We’ll get to that in a bit, but first let’s do another set up. Let’s get the lay of the land that we, the people, have created.
Here’s the situation:
We’ve got a world still recovering from a global pandemic, and while it feels like the storm is over, its long term effects on society are yet to be determined.
We’ve got a new-ish technology that promised to decentralize the power of communication and give access to information to everyone. Side effect: The most opinionated folks out there can broadcast their views and anxieties more rapidly than was ever thought possible, splintering us into little pockets of conviction, each with their own version of reality.
We’ve got a massive gap between the rich and the poor, still growing, decades in the making, with hostility between urban centers and rural folks.
We’ve got political authorities more concerned with consolidating their own power than serving the people and
We’ve got a church cozied up to the state, actively supporting the worst of all these things.
If you find this troubling. If you can feel this tension in your body – Can you feel it? – Good! That means you have a visceral understanding of the situation in 16th century central Europe tha I just described, when the Anabaptist movement began. 500 years ago. You didn’t think I was talking about now, did you?!
That’s the set up.
It was a time when the church and the state were so closely aligned that the baptism of every infant served as their birth certificate – their papers, a documented citizen, on the roles for future tax payment and military service.
The Black Death, or bubonic plague, or just The Plague had started 150 years prior, but people were still dying. It was the worst pandemic in recorded history, killing maybe half of Europe – massively destabilizing. Initially it actually gave more power to the peasants, what was left of them, to negotiate better terms for their much-needed labor. But it didn’t take long for the landowners to regain the upper hand, and the wealth gap to expand, and keep expanding.
And then there was a transformative piece of technological innovation. The printing press. Rather than the long and slow work of copying texts by hand, printing presses could crank out pages faster than anyone could previously imagine. It had a democratizing effect. Literacy rates went up. Ideas spread. Mass produced pamphlets were the blogs and memes of their time. And of course, having the Bible – newly translated and replicated in the language of the people – enabled study groups to make their own conclusions rather than depend on a priest.
It was within such small group Bible studies, within the churn of all these larger forces that feel so eerily similar to today, that the Anabaptist movement was born. A group of young students in Zurich, Switzerland, inspired by their teacher Ulrich Zwingli, himself inspired by the boldness of Martin Luther to challenge the corruptions of the Catholic Church — this group of students and friends and family would gather to discuss what they found in the teachings of Jesus and the life of the early church. What they found was a nonviolent community that practiced economic sharing with leaders accountable to the congregation. They found the beatitudes. Blessed are the merciful. Blessed are the peacemakers. They found a church filled with the power of the Holy Spirit.
What they didn’t find was the practice of baptizing infants. As they saw it, since following the Jesus-way was a life-defining choice, the person must be able to freely make that choice. For these folks, adult baptism, or re-baptism in their case, became the defining symbol of breaking away from the state church and undergoing a personal spiritual rebirth that empowered individuals and the gathering of believers to… do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with God.
The first adult baptisms took place in the home of Anna Manz on January 25, 1525. This, despite the fact that even speaking publicly about adult baptism had just been declared illegal by the Zurich City Council. It was too divisive. The Anabaptists, re-baptizers, soon became popular with poor farmers in the region who noticed that a literal interpretation of scripture would relieve them of their crippling tax burden – “You shall not oppress a hired hand who is poor and needy,” Deuteronomy 24:14, and “forgive us our debts,” Matthew 6:12, the Lord’s Prayer. That summer these emboldened Anabaptists marched through the streets of Zurich declaring woe to Zwingli and the authorities – who were having none of it.
When Anna Manz was on trial a year later, asked about what took place within those mysterious meetings of the Anabaptists, she responded that they “talked about nothing other than the love of God.” Anna’s son Felix, one of those dissenting students, was also brought to trial. He became the first of many Anabaptist martyrs, drowned in the Limmat River the following year, 1527.
The prophet Micah dreams of a trial. It will be the Lord bringing a case against the people, and it will be creation that serves as a witness, creation maybe now including the waters of the Limmat River, the Apache Stronghold of Oakflat, Arizona, the war-torn Nuba Mountains in Sudan. The mountains Micah references have seen a lot. If those hills could talk. If the earth could take the witness stand against humanity, what would it say? We don’t actually hear from these elements in this passage. But the witness of the earth as having something to say about who God is, and who we are in relation to God and one another, is something than ran strong in the imagination of the Anabaptists.
One of their favorite verses, cited in letters and court records, was Psalm 24:1: “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it, the world and its inhabitants too.” This simple verse had profound implications on how the Anabaptists thought of themselves in relation to the accusations brought against them.
Some examples:
The Hutterites were a branch of Anabaptists who shared all their possessions in common. When they were commanded to leave their homes and villages in Moravia in 1535, Jacob Hutter wrote a letter to the governor saying “we can’t simply be denied a place in this country or on this earth. For the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it belongs to our God in heaven.”
Hans Landis, who was the last Swiss Anabaptist martyr in 1614 was initially ordered by the authorities to leave the region. In refusing, he cited Psalm 24:1: “The earth is the Lord’s.” What he meant was that the region he would not leave didn’t ultimately belong to the Zurich leaders, so they had no real authority to exile him. When Landis was sentenced to death he said “no one had the ‘authority to expel (me) and others like (me) from the land.’”
That anecdote appears, by the way, as a study note next to Psalm 24:1 in the new Anabaptist Community Bible (p. 635).
After the Swiss death penalty was abolished, and Anabaptists were merely forcibly removed after having their property confiscated, many would return to their land, even though they had promised they wouldn’t. One letter among many similar letters about this states, “the earth is the Lord’s” and no one has the authority to “forbid us to live in this or that land” (published in the series Documents of Brotherly Love).
Gerald Mast, a scholar who lives in Bluffton, OH from whom I got several of these stories, ended his message to me by writing: “All this to say, that early Anabaptists used Psalm 24:1 as an anti-deportation proof text.”
Adult baptism doesn’t carry the same kind of risks it once did, or the same kind of urgency. In fact, if you come to this church and were baptized as an infant we will encourage you to find new meaning in that baptism to honor whatever tradition in which you were baptized, rather than be re-baptized, although could still be an option.
Even if we’re not risking imminent death in the way the early Anabaptists did, our world is not so different than theirs. There are sharp boundaries being defended. There are threats from within being expelled and deported. There are theologies of dominion and triumphalism being proclaimed.
And there is still the message of the prophet Micah lingering in the air: Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly. There are still the beatitudes in their scandalous simplicity: Blessed are those are mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. There is still the radical witness of the early Anabaptists and their Psalm: “The earth is the Lord’s,” which means it is only ours insomuch as we align ourselves with the Spirit of the Creator.
As we consider what it means for us to live out a baptismal identity, I can’t help but think that this practice of baptism can be as vital and path-shaping as ever. And I can’t help but notice that baptism, past and present, is a water ritual. A water ritual that connects the Spirit and the human and the created order under the banner of Divine love. In other words, we have this practice, in baptism, of publicly proclaiming that our small lives of defending our little egos and our little territories and even our most cherished certainties – all this has ended. In Christ, in the waters of baptism, there is, as the Apostle Paul wrote, “a new creation.” In joining ourselves to Christ, we join ourselves to the Great Life, the Breath of Life, however it would breathe and move through us. The water is a witness that we are belong to God, and the earth belongs to God, The earth is the Lord’s. May we live in such a way to help this become true.