Juneteenth at St Marcus

Walk Humbly with God (youtube) (auto-generated transcript)- "Juneteenth celebration weekend"

Today we'll take a brief respite from Pride Month and discuss a sermon preached by Pastor James Hein, lead pastor at St Marcus, in Milwaukee, WI. This sermon was preached on June 15, the weekend before Juneteenth, which on the liturgical church calendar is reserved for Holy Trinity Sunday. Hold that thought... 

The basis for this sermon is Micah 6:6-8

    6 With what am I to appear before the LORD? 

    How should I bow down to God on high? 

    Should I appear before him with burnt offerings, 

    with one-year-old calves? 

    7 Will the LORD be delighted with thousands of rams, 

    with tens of thousands of streams of oil? 

    Should I give my firstborn for my rebellion, 

    the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? 

    8 He has told you, mankind, what is good. 

    What does the LORD require from you, 

    except to carry out justice and to love mercy 

    and to walk humbly with your God? (EHV)

I encourage you to watch or listen to the sermon in its entirety before engaging with this post.

Pastor Hein starts off asking if humanity has improved over time, and makes the point that while quality of life has improved (in his opinion), human character has not. The latter is absolutely correct. He makes the point around 4 minutes that Israel would absorb the false value systems of their neighbors. Hang onto that thought, too.

Around six minutes Hein explains that verses 6 and 7 are "wrong answers" and that verse 8 is the "right answer", as if it is a choice - either sacrifice, or act - but it's not either-or it's both-and! The EHV Bible note on verse 8:

Sacrifices that were only external acts, sacrifices offered without repentance and faith, sacrifices which produced no fruits of faith—such sacrifices could not please God or win his favor. God was looking for sacrifices and loving deeds that flowed from repentant hearts.

The Wartburg Project, Holy Bible: Evangelical Heritage Version Study Bible (Midland, MI: Northwestern Publishing House; Wartburg Project, 2019), Mic 6:8. 

It's not that God was abolishing the system of worship He instituted, it was that there was a disconnect between the formal religious practice and lived faith. This is consistent in the New Testament: Jesus in Matthew 23:23 declares a woe to the Pharisees that they tithe mint, dill and cumin but have left aside the weightier matters of the Law: justice, mercy and faith. See the parallel? And Jesus concludes that the tithing of mint, dill and cumin should not be left undone.

While Hein rightly points out that burnt offering do not atone for sins, only sin offerings do that, he draws the wrong conclusion. Hein states that they are offering commitment, but not seeking forgiveness. Keil-Delitzsch ("KD") writes

 It is only with sacrifices, the means appointed by God Himself for the maintenance of fellowship with Him, that any man can come to meet Him. These the people offer to bring; and, indeed, burnt-offerings. There is no reference here to sin-offerings, through which disturbed or interrupted fellowship could be restored, by means of the expiation of their sins; because the people had as yet no true knowledge of sin, but were still living under the delusion that they were standing firmly in the covenant with the Lord, which they themselves had practically dissolved... Hence this offer of the nation shows that it has no true knowledge of the will of its God, that it is still entangled in the heathen delusion, that the wrath of God can be expiated by human sacrifices.

Carl Friedrich Keil and Franz Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament, vol. 10 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996), 335-6.

That is, the problem is not that they were unwilling to atone for sin: they still needed to be convicted of their sin. They needed the first use of the law applied to their consciences to awaken the need for atonement. After the first use of the law does its work of convicting us of our sin, we turn to our Savior with repentance and receive the gift of forgiveness of sins. Then we move on to the third use of the law. KD explains that "carry out justice and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God" covers the two tables of the Decalogue: justice and mercy for the second table, and walk humbly with your God, the first. God was convicting them of their sin. 

The Gospel is proclaimed around 12 minutes - Hein ties the offering of the firstborn to God giving his Son on Calvary, but in the same breath ties it to social justice:

You must humble yourself to receive forgiveness and salvation as a gift from a gracious God and on a weekend like Juneteenth weekend. What that means is any sins we are guilty of when it comes to the realm of social injustices, and there are many - racism is under this category, scary words, prejudice is in this category - Every single one of us struggles with this.

And he rightly points out that we repent before working on our sin. But then he points out what he considers his most important section. First, to do justice almost always relates to four groups of people "widows, orphans, immigrants and poor." But I think we need to be careful here because the Old Testament doesn't really talk about "immigrants"; God is more specific than that. He speaks of the sojourner (one passing through a country) and the foreigner (one residing in Israel). I would refer you to an excellent discussion between Rev. Braaten and Rev. Ramirez on the distinctions but let me point one thing out here: foreigners in Israel were only accepted if they had an eye for assimilation. They had to abandon their foreign Gods and follow the one true God. In many cases they had a different, more restrictive set of laws, and could not participate in worship until the third or tenth generation (in some cases, never). There is little overlap with the Old Testament view of foreigner and the modern concept of (legal) immigrant. 

One of the marks of a true believer is how you treat the most marginalized people groups in our society that God calls us repeatedly - and I'm not even saying don't just commit injustice against them, I'm saying go out of your way to actively protect those that this world tends to exploit

Thus stepping into the concept of do the work. We've heard this before: It's not enough not to be racist, you must be actively antiracist [1] [2].

Second, loving mercy: God's mercy. This is a fine point.

Third, walk humbly with God: A decent point, but I'm not convinced this is the point of this pericope. KD says this refers to fellowship with God, namely obeying the first table of the Decalogue, and not a call to action.

Reflecting on the first twenty minutes, Jesus is mentioned thrice: the first in reference to salvation, but the second and third sandwiched around active obedience with an eye towards the specific sins of social justice, manipulating a pericope about a people so far away from their God that they needed the first use of the law to break their hearts of stone, rather, to affect a third use motivation towards a specific end based on the civic calendar.

But this goes from a botched sermon to a heretical one at the twenty-minute mark, where Hein proceeds to allow Dr. Martin Luther King to preach from his pulpit plexiglass podium, quoting verbatim a portion of "Paul's Letter to American Christians", which urges a moral and spiritual 'progress' that keeps up with our scientific and technological progress.

The congregation closes with applause for King.

...

I asked you to hold onto two thoughts. The second was the Israelites picking up the false value systems of their neighbors. This is exactly the problem with Pastor Hein's sermon. He has picked up the false value system of critical social justice and it has colored his exegesis of this pericope. 

And back to the first thought: celebrating Juneteenth in place of Trinity Sunday. A substantial portion of the sermon was handed over to MLK, a man who denied the Trinity and who denied the two natures of Christ. You know, the very things we defend in the Athanasian Creed, which is recited on Trinity Sunday.

"This is the catholic faith; which except a man believe truly and firmly, he cannot be saved."

Let the reader understand...