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Righteousness is a word that we seldom hear these days. It is the forgotten value. Micah was seeking to call Judah back to righteousness. What God sought for Judah, He seeks for the whole world. Micah condemns the wicked in Judah:

Woe to those who imagine wicked schemes ... They covet fields and seize them. They covet houses and take them for themselves. They break a man and his household: yes, they crush him and all his rightful inheritance. (Micah 2:1-2, Phillips Translation)

According to Micah, God follows his judgment with promise:

"I will most surely gather you all together again, O Jacob; I will most surely bring home the survivors of Israel. I will bring them all together like sheep into afold ... "(Micah 2:12, Phillips Translation)

Micah calls it like it is:

I am filled with power through the Spirit of the Lord! I can see what is just and right. I have the strength to declare it, to tell Jacob plainly of his transgression, and Israel of his sin. Listen to this, you leaders of Jacob, and rulers of the house of Israel, you who hate what is right and twist what is straight; who build zion with bloodshed, and Jerusalem with crime. (Micah 3:8-10, Phillips Translation)

And now Micah makes clear what God expects of his people:

You know well enough, man, what is good! For what does the Lord require from you; but to be just, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8, Phillips Translation)

And when humanity catches on and obeys, then what happens?

And he will judge between great peoples, and make decision between nations far and wide. Then they shall hammer their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks. Nation shall lift up no sword against nation, and never again will they learn to make war. Every man shall live beneath the shade of his own vine and fig tree, and no one shall make him afraid. The Lord of hosts has declared this with his own voice! (Micah 4:3-4, Phillips Translation)

Now we come to the text - the prophecy, the promise, the Advent theme:

But you, Bethlehem Ephratah, almost too small to be counted among the ranks of Judah, from you shall come forth for me the future ruler of Israel! He springs from a line of ancient times, from the days of long ago ... Then he shall stand as their shepherd firm in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God ... Because he will be great to the very ends of the earth. (Micah 5:2, 4, Phillips Translation)

Advent! A new spirit of righteousness is coming to the world. Judgment, repentence, New Life! Peace!

For a moment we turn from the ancient prophet Micah to the contemporary prophet, Jim Wallis. In his book The Call to Conversion, Wallis describes his search for "deeper roots," and his resulting journey through the New Testament. After years of ignoring the nagging presence of Jesus in his life, Wallis is "called back" through the words Jesus proclaimed in his Sermon on the Mount, realizing at last the significance of those words, and the profundity of Jesus' promise of a "new order." Within these words, Wallis finds his king - a king of the oppressed and of the dispossessed - a king he could love and follow. His personal focus on social action is at last reconciled with a strong personal faith; his primary focus now will be on the meaning and responsibilities of being a Christian in today's society.

Wallis continues: "Despite certain risk, the relationship of personal faith to public life must be documentated anew." (p. xvii)

Advent is not just a sweet little Christmas card; it is a challenge to new life for the whole world.

Listen as Aristides describes the Christians to the Roman Emperor Hadrian:

They love one another. They never fail to help widows; they save orphans from those who would hurt them. If they have something they give freely to the man who has nothing; if they see a stranger, they take him home, and are happy, as though he were a real brother. They don't consider themselves brothers in the usual sense, but brothers instead through the Spirit, in God. (cf. Wallis, p. 14)

By contrast, Cyprian, the third-century bishop of Carthage, described the (selfish) rich this way:

Their property held them in chains ... chains which shackled their courage and choked their faith and hampered their judgment and throttled their soul ... If they stored up their treasure in heaven, they would not now have an enemy and a thief within their own household ... They think themselves as owners, whereas it is they rather who are owned: enslaved as they are to their own property, they are not the masters of their money but its slaves.
(Wallis, p. 50 [quoted])

Wallis relates how a wise man pointed out to him the difference between concern and compassion: "Being concerned is seeing something awful happening to somebody and feeling, 'Hey, that's really too bad.' Having compassion," he said, "is seeing the same thing and saying, 'I just can't let that happen to my brother.' " (Wallis, p. 51)

So then, Advent is getting involved in life in Christ's Spirit, for Christ's sake. And this means a Christlike relationship to all of life. Righteousness doesn't come easy, but it is what life is all about. God gives us a whole lifetime to learn by his grace to live and react in a Christlike way. This is the Spirit of Heaven toward which we are traveling.

To repeat, in substance, what Micah said in the text: From you, Bethlehem, shall come forth the future ruler of Israel, and he shall shepherd his people in the name of the Lord - in the majesty of the name of God. God and the way of life are revealed anew in every Advent season.

Listen as Jesus himself speaks in Matthew 24: "When you see the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place, spoken by the prophet Daniel, flee to the mountains." Luke quotes Jesus with more optimism: "When these things begin to take place, look up and raise up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near." You see, we can't do just as we please. God is in charge here. With repentance, God controls judgment and God gives new life. God enables righteousness. Again and again God shakes and shifts this creation into newness.

What does this reveal to us about the events of our time? Does the "abomination of desolation in the holy place" make any sense in today's world? Open your eyes! Look around you! There is evil at the center of things, in persons, in corporations, in governments, in literature, in entertainment. It seems that we are obsessed with evil. Yet, we refuse to admit it. The quality of our lives is deteriorating all about us. Recently the student council at a university in our land voted almost unanimously to allow sex relations in the dormitories. Terrible things are reported in the behavior of the Contras, whom we support in Central America. Preparation for nuclear war continues to escalate between the United States and the Soviet Union (now eased somewhat in the recent Summit).

Don Jacobson points it out in The Beginners: "You see it inside, deep inside everyone you meet. It's in you, in me ... it's a breakdown, not a build-up." There is a germ of evil that infests the human race. The disease breaks out in epidemic proportions again and again in history.

Desolation is in the holy place: atheism is in the place of faith; lust in the place of love; adversarial relationships instead of mutual support and respect. Humanity is off course! It seems that we are not intelligent enough to cope with life at the moral level. We are missing the meaning at the center of life, and that spells desolation. We ask the question, "What can they do for us? (Are they pretty, are they rich, do they have influence?)" - not, "How can I serve, how can I build a better world? Where do my talents meet the greatest needs of humanity at this moment of time?" Humanity usurps the place of God. That is our contemporary blasphemy!

Desolation is in the holy place. Poison pollutes the springs of life! Contemporary drama is discouraging, particularly when we realize that drama reveals what is really at the heart of our culture. Harold Pinter's play, The Homecoming, reveals the ultimate disintegration of the family: Two brothers, a father and an uncle welcome home a son and his wife for a visit. Immediately the brother seduces the wife of the son. The son leaves. The wife stays to live in prostitution with the whole family. The review of this play suggests that this is "respectable;" that this is a "splendid activity." How stupid can you get? Desecration is in the holy place! Sickness and disease are at the heart of the family.

Is our culture sick unto death? Or is it that we are advertising evil totally out of proportion to its reality? Is our contemporary literature reporting evil or promoting evil? You do not have to expend great talent to pull people downhill - they slide down quickly enough. We ask ourselves, why is it that so much of the brain power of our age is devoted to lust, to killing, to crime, to relentlessly shoving ahead of other people, to revealing and accentuating the lurid and the vulgar? Some of us and some of our youth will be shocked into a new stand. Realizing that the contest has become unequal and uninteresting, they will throw their weight in on the other side of the tug-of-war, and begin pulling humanity back up the hill. For them it might prove interesting, fighting again for truth and love, for righteousness and peace, and realism at its highest level. Under God, the dynamics of leadership can shift. This is what Christianity is for, that in the deep darkness of desolation and abomination, we seek God and life out where that spot of light is.

Robert Bolt's play, A Man for All Seasons, pulls us upward instead of downward. We see Sir Thomas More, a great man, refusing to amalgamate with the vulgar realism of the Court of Henry the VIII. We see this man risk his position, his family and his life; we see him destroyed; and it seems that all is lost. Then we take a glance forward in history and see that this man, in his death, became the launching pad for a renewed England. Sir Thomas More did not give in to the pressure of Cardinal Woolsey who said: "Thomas why can't you face the facts straight on, without that moral squint?" But Thomas More stood firm, realizing that the "moral squint" is the focusing of one's eyes under the eternal blaze of truth. When abomination was in the Holy Place in England, and a great man stood and was destroyed, we see the judgment, but the judgment was not on Thomas More. The judgment was on England. And then we see the renewal.

When Jesus says, "Blessed are they that are persecuted for righteousness sake," some real questions rise up in our minds. Our problem today may be that we do not risk enough for our faith for it to become effective. A contemporary example is David Wilkerson, well known for his book, The Cross and The Switchblade. He was one of the first to confront the drug problem head on. As a country preacher he went to New York City with an inner compulsion that he was to do something about seven condemned teenage gangsters who had killed a boy. Insisting that he see these prisoners, he was thrown out of court and the newspapers flashed a picture of him holding up his Bible. Under this ridicule he went home defeated. But he returned to New York once more, driven by the compulsion that he must reach these boys. He did not know where to find them. Exhausted, he parked his car in order to walk around and think, when someone behind him called out: "Hey, David! Hey, Dave, Preacher!" As he turned, a teenage boy asked him if he wasn't the preacher who had been thrown out of court. This boy was a member of one of the gangs, and it was because the preacher had been thrown out of court that he was accepted, and could begin his great ministry to teenage gangs and drug addicts. "Blessed are they that are persecuted for righteousness sake;" new worlds of service and ministry open to them. Could it be that "for this cause I was born"? I believe that is the answer to David Wilkerson's compulsion. When the finger of God points in my direction, I must put my life on the line. Somewhere along the path of life, I may see one spot at which humanity has not risen to God's high expectation for us. Seeing this, if I choose to be involved, I then stand with God. Standing thus, I see that by my risk mankind has been lifted a little closer to life's fulfilment. It is there that I know that life makes sense, and that I am truly living!

When we see desolation in the holy place, evil standing at the center of things, let us face the facts; let us look at the events. There's going to be trouble. Things are going to fall apart. They are already falling apart, for evil cannot stand. Evil self-destructs! God and humanity can put up with evil only so long. Then comes the judgment, and afterwards the renewal!

If we come through, it will be by the grace of God. "Where evil abides, Grace doth much more abide." Paul saw where the ultimate power was. We are all in the hands of God, and we shall know it some day - the evil persons with fear and trembling, and those trusting God, with joy and peace. We are not "all locked up in ourselves;" we do not start life "doomed;" there is hope for us, and challenge. Christ is coming back at the center of things. After Daniel's dark prophesies, Christ was born. After the fall of Jerusalem, Christianity triumphed. We seek to move with God's next move!

In The Cross and The Switchblade, a young girl responded thus to the redeeming love of Christ: "Christ's love is a love without angles; a love that asks nothing in return. It is a love that wants only the best for us; and this is the quality that draws us and redeems." Are we concentrating on desolation, or is it that we are concentrating on the spot of light where Christ is? Where we are looking, that to which we are given makes all the difference.

We ask, with Reuel Howe: "What do you want? What do you really want? What moves you from day to day, from week to week; from month to month; from year to year? What is it for which you would sell everything else?" That is the basic question: What stands in the holy place of my heart?

Karl Barth points the finger at us and says: "Thou art not in the audience, but in the center of the stage. This is meant for thee. Thou art this individual." In the events of our time, we face both judgment and redemption. We agree with George Buttrick: "Our whole cosmos, from its very origin in mystery, has been in the hands of Christ ... we travel learning ... we travel loving ... we travel worshiping." We look for a world, "full of love, subject to a spiritual discipline, headed toward a common goal, and free." As Jesus pointed out in Luke's Gospel: "When these things come to pass, look up and lift up your head, because your redemption is drawing near." The judgment is upon us; the renewal has begun!

Only righteousness can exhalt a nation. In this Advent season I tremble with hope. I look for Micah's promise: Christ shall be the Ruler; Christ shall be the Shepherd!