From Waters of Mercy to Rivers of Justice

This is the conclusion of Elisha's story and a transition to new kinds of prophets - first up:  Micah and his famous question.  See Micah 6: 6-8

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Transcript

Sermons from 

Mission Hills UCC

San Diego, California

Rev. Dr. David Bahr

david.bahr@missionhillsucc.org

August 10, 2025

“From the Waters of Mercy to the Rivers of Justice”

Micah 6: 6-8 – The Message

How can I stand up before God
     and show proper respect to the high God?
 Should I bring an armload of offerings
     topped off with yearling calves?
 Would God be impressed with thousands of rams,
     with buckets and barrels of olive oil?

Or be moved if I sacrificed my firstborn child,
     my precious baby, to cancel my sin?

8 But God’s already made it plain how to live, what to do,
     what God is looking for in men and women.
 It’s quite simple: Do what is fair and just to your neighbor,
     be compassionate and loyal in your love,
 And don’t take yourself too seriously—
     take God seriously.”

This summer we’ve been following Elisha, not a prophet of spectacle like Elijah, but one who began his first day on the job with a real problem:  people came to him and said, “Our water is poisoned.  People are getting sick.  The land is dying.”  So, he took a bowl, filled it with salt and poured it into the spring. And, scripture says, “The water was healed.”  And from there, the stories kept unfolding one after another.

For example, when others saw a foreign general with a skin disease as a threat, Elisha saw a human being worth healing.  Another time, when the king asked if he should kill their enemies, Elisha said no. “Feed them.”   Prepare a banquet for them.  That’s moral imagination – disrupting the usual pattern of violence and revenge. 

At the same time, Elisha also responded to real people with real needs — even when those needs seemed trivial.  For example, he cared about a man who borrowed an axe head.  It accidentally sank in the river, but because the man couldn’t afford to replace it, it began to float.  Whether or not it literally floated isn’t the point.  What matters is that Elisha believed even small burdens deserved his attention.  It was another example of how he used the power he had to repair what had been broken – no matter how small. 

In our story today, Elisha is now dying, but there’s no fiery chariot or whirlwind to carry him off like Elijah.  He’s just an old prophet at the end of a long life, bones weary and breath thin.  But even now, Elisha dares one final act of moral imagination.  The scene in 2nd Kings 13 is both intimate and strange.  The king – Joash – comes to visit the dying man.  Elisha tells the king to take a bow and shoot an arrow through the window toward the east.  He did.  “That,” Elisha says, “is the arrow of the Lord’s victory.”

Then, oddly, he tells the king to strike the ground with more arrows.  Joash strikes the ground three times and stops, but Elisha is furious.  “You should have struck five or six times!  Then you would have had full victory.  But now you’ll only win partially.”  It’s an unsettling final conversation.

It was a test of Joash’s imagination and courage and he failed. 

The consequences are haunting.  Israel wins a few battles – exactly three, the number of times Joash struck the ground.  But what could have been a full liberation becomes a partial relief and so, wars continue.  Oppression continues.  And the suffering of the people drags on.  Joash settles for survival but Elisha’s dying vision was for the kind of boldness that could have broken the siege entirely.  The story demonstrates:  when leaders lack imagination, the people pay the price.  

Then Elisha dies and is buried.  The end.  Except…  You’re now familiar enough with these stories to know that the end is often not the end.  

And so, there’s a final oddity:  Later, during those continued wars, a dead man’s body is tossed into Elisha’s tomb.  When that body touches the prophet’s bones, the man comes back to life.  Symbolically, this moment declares that the prophetic tradition does not die with the prophet.  Elisha was the last of his kind, but his healing work was not buried with him.  And yet, the sickness in the nation was no longer a surface wound, it had metastasized.  It was systemic.  And so, the next prophets needed a different voice, a sharper edge.

Future prophets are as different from the quiet, healing presence of Elisha as Elisha was different from over-the-top spectacles of Elijah.  We transition now to the names of more familiar prophets – first up, Amos and Hosea, then Micah and Isaiah, and later, Jeremiah – and a bunch of “who??!” like Nahum and Obadiah in between.  What becomes important are not their acts of power but their powerful questions. Micah’s was the most famous among them:  “And what does the Lord require of you?”
 
 

Micah is nothing like Elisha.  There are no stories of multiplying oil or raising the dead.  He doesn’t whisper hope.  He shouts truth.  The people needed not just Elisha’s waters of mercy, they needed change.  They needed rivers of justice.  As Amos declared, “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”  

Micah walked into a world not with spiritual confusion, but a fully functioning system designed for wealth inequity and economic exploitation.  Just one example, land was being stolen from the poor through impossible debt-loads enforced by corrupt courts.  And religion was used to justify it all.

If there were ever a time to see parallels with scripture, it’s certainly now.  Obscene and growing wealth gap while seniors are the fastest growing group of people falling into homelessness.  Courts stacked.  Rights stripped away.  And often, religion weaponized, used to justify, to bless, the harm.  Micah’s world is not of the distant past—it’s our living nightmare.

And notably, Micah is not gentle with kings or priests alike.  He is not patient with corruption.  He’s the kind of prophet who names names and calls out the way religion has been bought and turned into a weapon.  And he says, clearly and forcefully, “This is not of God.”

We hear Micah’s voice echoed today in leaders like Rev. Dr. William Barber, who reminds us, “We cannot be satisfied with a religion that just blesses personal piety while children are hungry and policies are cruel.”  That’s what Micah’s voice sounds like now.

Micah tells the truth – that our worship means nothing if it doesn’t lead to justice.  His vision is not only about healing what is broken but about dismantling the systems that keep breaking people in the first place.  If Elisha’s ministry was about mercy and walking quietly beside the suffering, Micah demands to know why there’s still suffering at all and he will not let us pretend that we don’t know.  Micah seeks accountability.  

To which Micah asks among the most basic of prophetic questions:
 What does the Holy One require of you?

To do justice

To love mercy

To walk humbly with our God.

Which brings me to this morning.  We didn’t just bless backpacks and send students back to school with a prayer.  I pray we commissioned prophets.  Kids who will care deeply and walk alongside those who are hurting with compassion as well as speak truth without fear.  Teenagers love to question everything, right?  They’re natural truth-tellers who see through hypocrisy and ask the hard questions.  And I pray that in this church,
 they are learning to ask prophetic questions, like Dolores Huerta – co-founder of the United Farm Workers:  “Why do the people who harvest our food so often go hungry themselves?”  That is the spirit of Micah.  That is the spirit I hope we are passing on.

Our children in Sunday School are learning about this kind of prophet – not just the ones from scripture.  They’re studying a book called Holy Troublemakers & Unconventional Saints – full of real people, some dead, some alive, who stand up for what is right.  Like John Lewis.

They’re learning about people who practice Micah’s bold truth-telling:  like Malala Yousafzai – the young Pakistani girl who was nearly killed simply for daring to go to school, and who now speaks truth to power for girls everywhere.  

And like climate justice advocate Greta Thunberg, who asks:
 “How can we expect young people to care about the future, if no one is listening when we speak up now?”  She confronts a world that applauds their passion – so long as it doesn’t disrupt the status quo.  Quick to call young people “the future,” but slow to respond when they demand justice in the present.

They’re also learning in Sunday School about people who practice Elisha’s healing presence, like the joyful Bishop Desmond Tutu.  And, in the book, Mr. Rogers, whose TV show created a healing sanctuary for children’s fears.  And in one quiet, radical act, he shared a small plastic pool with Officer Clemmons, a Black man, defying segregation with a towel and a smile.  Prophetic imagination in a cardigan—saying, without yelling, “This is not of God.”

They’re studying people who practice moral courage:  like Jazz Jennings, the transgender teenager who teaches the world that being yourself is not just brave—it’s prophetic.  And Valarie Kaur – whose Ted Talk we watched together a few weeks ago, who asks, “Why do we treat strangers as enemies instead of family we haven't met yet?”

These aren’t perfect people – prophets never are.  But we want our students to embody what Micah implores:
 to do justice in their classrooms,
 to love mercy on the playground,
 to walk humbly with each other, their teachers, and especially with those that other students might overlook or leave behind.
 In other words, to practice moral imagination — not just someday, but now, in their daily lives.

As I said last week:  this is not a moment for cautious optimism.  It is the time for unrealistic, relentless courage.  That’s what Joash lacked.  Joash wanted a quick fix, not a calling, and he stopped too soon.  He wanted reassurance, not responsibility.  My call is for all of us who hear the whisper of discouragement thundering in our ears… who are tempted to believe we’ve already done enough.  We won’t stop when so much is on the line, right? 

• Even though the headlines keep breaking our hearts, we won’t stop praying.  
• We won’t stop showing up for people in pain, even when the need feels too vast and the solutions too slow.
• We won’t stop speaking out when this country tries to build a hierarchy of white Christian men at the top and everyone else pushed to the margins – or thrown out the door.

We can’t stop.  Not now.  Not when so much is at stake for our children who need more than our encouragement.  They deserve our courage – churches that don’t just bless them with words, but fight for the kind of world where they can thrive in every classroom, in every neighborhood.

This is the covenant we’re called to.  Micah asked, what does the Lord require of you?  He might have answered:  it's time for some of that John-Lewis-kind of “good trouble.”