There’s a poignant scene near the beginning of the movie A Beautiful Mind. John Nash is talking to his supervisor at Princeton University. Nash is a brilliant young mathematician who also battles schizophrenia. He never goes to class, and he lives in his own world of thought, searching for the next big original idea. He is in danger of being put out of school for lack of achievement. His classmates are making their contributions and gaining acclaim. Nash and his supervisor look in on a ceremonial tradition in which the faculty is giving fountain pens to the latest successful scholar. What do you see, John? he asks. Recognition, Nash replies. Try accomplishment, he is told.

What does God really want from us? Accomplishment? Are we welcome in the kingdom of God only if we do something big for God? Do we have to make a mark with the talents we have if God is to accept us?

This chapter in Micah opens with God lodging a complaint with Israel. But instead of sounding like a university dean, God sounds more like a Jewish mother who flings open her New York apartment windows and cries out to her neighbors. [Attempt a Jewish accent.] What have I done to my son that he should treat me this way? Did I not bring him into the world and give him my milk? Where have I gone wrong that he forgets his mother like this? When he was sick, was my chicken soup not good enough for him? When he brought that girl into my house, the skinny one that doesn’t eat and can’t cook or clean like his mother, did I say anything? So how does he punish me like this? I don’t sleep for worrying about him. He doesn’t call. He doesn’t come see his mother. Have I not loved him enough? What?

God has a bone to pick with Israel, Micah says. O, my people, what have I done to you? In what have I wearied you? … I brought you up from the land of Egypt, God says, and redeemed you from the house of slavery. … So it begins. God takes them back to when they were dying under the weight of injustice. God delivered them. God gave them Moses and Aaron and Miriam to look out for them. (Good for Micah putting a woman in the list, don’t you know?!) And then there was that thing with King Balak the Moabite, and Balaam son of Beor. Didn’t I do good by you there? God asks. And when they walked into the Promised Land, all those cities from Shittim to Gilgal, who do you think took care of all that? I was there for you, God is saying. Where have you been for me?

God’s beefs with us, like God’s beefs with Israel, have forgetfulness at their root. When God is upset, it’s because the things we have done or failed to do have grown out of our forgetfulness of God. We treat other people in ways that make it seem we owe God nothing. We act as if we are ungrateful for what God has done for us. But it’s not so much specific things as the whole attitude of our lives that God can’t stand.

And this is reflected in the seemingly sincere answer Israel gives to God’s complaint. With what shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before God on high? The image here is pilgrims going up to Jerusalem to worship at the temple. They ask what it takes to be worthy to kneel before the Lord. What sacrifice for their sin will set things right? What can they do to gain God’s approval? Burnt offerings of a year-old calf? A thousand rams or ten thousand rivers of oil? Maybe even that isn’t enough. Maybe God wants their firstborn child, the fruit of the body for the sins of the soul. What is enough? What does God want from us in order for us to feel at home in God’s presence?

Do you recognize that logic? You want to know what you can do to get back on good terms with God. Maybe if you pray long enough and hard enough, maybe if you are sorry enough for your sin—maybe then. So what, all God wants is to measure your sincerity? Or maybe you could give a lot of money to the church. Never mind you cheated a partner or employees or flouted the law to get it. You think God is going to let you buy your way out of things that easily? Or maybe God will just take something from you as compensation for your sin. Like my friend whose little boy died in infancy. He was living a secret life and was wracked with guilt. He asked me if I thought God might have been punishing him by taking his son.

Look, God doesn’t operate like that. God doesn’t need to hurt you or other people in order to get your attention. And God doesn’t need your stuff— your money, your time, your career, your hand-wringing sorrow, or your children in payment for your sin. God wants you. God wants you from this day forward to be a living sacrifice every day of your life. You can’t go back, but you can go forward. You can’t repair the past, but you can prepare for the future. You can’t get off, but you can get on.

But how? On with what? What does God want? We already know, don’t we? Micah says, He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God. Now.

Now, if you asked the common Baptist what God really wants from us, I doubt that this is the common answer. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I’m guessing most Baptists would think Micah’s words here are kind of, well, Old Testament. Sounds like all God wants is for us to be good. But aren’t we saved by faith and not by works? And doesn’t John 3:16 say that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but have eternal life? Aren’t we just supposed to believe in Jesus? Isn’t that it?

Okay, let’s step back from this for a minute and get some perspective. First of all, the whole point of God’s argument in Micah is that God has already done the saving. Israel was in a mess and couldn’t help herself, just as none of us can get ourselves out of our slavery to sin. God has to rescue us and redeem us and forgive us and restore us. And that is just what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. God has loved us smack in the middle of our sinfulness, when we couldn’t help ourselves, and has given us a chance at life. This is God’s work.

But what is our work? Believing in God? Having faith in Jesus? Yes, but what does that entail? Is it not being faithful to God by being faithful to others as a grateful response to what God has done for us? Are we not to join God in the same rescue business?

When they came to Jesus to ask him what God requires, what did he say? Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. And love your neighbor as yourself. Sounds a whole lot like Micah, doesn’t it? Walk humbly with God by doing justice and acting kindly toward your neighbor. Christianity that is turned in on itself is not Christianity at all. The gospel aims to deliver us from preoccupation with self and make us like Jesus, a man for others.

In recent years some Baptists have shifted the focus of missions work dramatically. Baptist missionaries once operated schools and hospitals and taught people how to find clean water and plant crops as a part of their witness to Christ. They worked to improve the lives of people by seeking justice for them. They offered mercy and kindness as signs of God’s grace. They humbly shared their faith by trusting God to make Christians out of people, rather than just making more Baptists. But now schools and hospitals and agricultural missions are out. Only saving souls is in. Oh, and getting those saved souls to believe exactly like them is all the more in.

For the past several years, their missionaries have had to prove their right beliefs by signing statements of faith that make sure they are loyal to the hierarchy back home, or else they are taken off the field. The little boy we met in Busia with the parasite in his leg that needed to be amputated if our doctor and nurses hadn’t gone to care for him but today is leaping and playing and praising God—somehow I don’t much think he cares about the doctrine of the doctor; he just cares that the doctor cared enough to go and help him in Jesus’ name. Same thing with those we have helped in the Valley and in the Delta. I can’t figure that those who believe making sure missionaries believe that wives are to be submissive to their husbands and women can’t be pastors are going to get more people to think Christianity is a great idea. Apparently, living among poor and oppressed people, seeking their welfare, and loving them with the gentleness of Christ are not what God really wants from us. And here I thought they thought the Bible was inerrant—that when it says that God wants us to do justice, to love kindness and walk humbly with God, that’s actually what God wants.

Of course, it’s easy to criticize others. But what are we doing, what are you doing to right wrongs, to heal hurts, to raise the lowly, to encourage the despairing, to feed the hungry, to tend to the needy in the name of Jesus? Some of you are making efforts at that all the time in the way you spend your time and money. You are giving and going, and growing the kingdom of God little by little with what little you can do. You are not waiting for some politician or some rich philanthropist to fix the world; you are taking up the repair of the world in your own little workshop. And it is making a difference. It is pleasing God. And you are making faith in Jesus Christ believable because of it.

Mohandas Gandhi was so impressed by his reading of the New Testament and what Jesus said we ought to do that he decided to take him at his word. He emulated Jesus by living simply and humbly, overturning injustice with love, and treating every human being as a precious child of God. India was transformed by it. They asked him why he didn’t just go ahead and become a Christian. He said, If I ever saw one I would become one.

Could that be the reason more people in our community do not come to faith in Christ? Could that be why you and I do not see more of our neighbors joining us as followers of Jesus? We owe the world a witness to the God who has overturned injustice, who has been totally loyal in loving-kindness, who has humbled himself and walked among us. We owe the world a shining example of the character of God. How we live out our faith matters if anyone else is ever to come to faith.

God doesn’t need our piety payoffs or our persistent pursuit of purity and perfection. Those things are good as far as they go, but God asks only that we remember what God has done for us and do the same for others. Aid the weak and vulnerable, be tenaciously kind, and walk humbly through the world. This is the way Jesus walked among us. This is what we must not forget. This is what God requires— that we believe in Jesus Christ by walking in his way. Nothing more, nothing less.