Sunday, February 2, 2014: Micah 6:1-8

My college years resonated with Micah’s challenge to Judaean society to “do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.” I heard this challenge on the lips of Martin Luther King Jr. and William Sloane Coffin, heroes of my adolescence. But the pinnacle of its power for me came in Jimmy Carter’s 1977 inaugural address:

The passion for freedom is on the rise. Tapping this new spirit, there can be no nobler nor more ambitious task for America to undertake on this day of a new beginning than to help shape a just and peaceful world that is truly humane.

Carter’s address buoyed my hopes for a better, more compassionate nation. But by the end of his term, the Bert Lance scandal and the hostage crisis in Tehran with its failed rescue mission had played out on Nightline. I was much less sanguine about the possibilities of that new beginning. I spent most of the next 12 years feeling the malaise Carter suggested we were facing. My idealism has never quite recovered. Perhaps that’s why Micah’s words always give me heartburn. They speak of exhausted hopes and dented expectations.