These days, the church speaks of change all the time. If we don't change, goes the conversation, inevitable consequences will follow: dwindling and aging membership, cultural irrelevance, sociopolitical marginalization, and so forth. What is ironic about this talk of change is not that change is necessary—most of us, even those who resist it, admit as much. Rather, the curious thing about these conversations is how little they actually reflect on the change of redemption, the story of God's saving acts, which are at the heart of the life of the church. It is almost as if we have been seduced by the marketing of change rather than the substance of change.

The novelist Jeanette Winterson describes our contemporary fascination with the transformations of the unreal: "The life plans, guru weekends, self-help manuals, get rich/thin/happy programs are no different than upgrading the car/house/job/wife/boyfriend ethos that confuses surface activity with change. Art isn't a surface activity. It comes from a deep place and it meets the wound we each carry."1 If change is the order of the day, and it is, we would benefit from reflecting on the root of Jesse, a root that introduces change from the depths of God's Spirit. Change worthy of the name will be grounded in a response to the activity and presence of the Spirit rather than merely a reaction to real or perceived changes in society and culture.

According to W. Eugene March, the historical setting assumed by chapters and 7 of Micah is best understood from the perspective of the sixth or early fifth century b.c."2 One can conceive of this text as a theological interpretation of the suffering experienced by Judah and Israel after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587 b.c.e.

Micah's lawsuit calls on the mountains and the hills, and the foundations of the earth to "hear … controversy of the Lord" (v. 2). Something like an intrusion takes place here, an intrusion into what might otherwise have been a dispute between God and Israel: it is not a controversy between the Lord and his people but, rather, it is a "controversy of the Lord" and a controversy the Lord "has … with his people … he will contend with Israel" (v. 2). And in verses 3-5, the Lord assumes the voice of the defendant: "O my people, what have I done to you? In what have I wearied you? Answer me!" (v. 3). The Lord, according to March, speaks as both plaintiff and defendant.3 To what end this controversy of the Lord? The creator of controversy stirs up the memory of the people, bringing to mind the history of the saving acts of God (v. 5).

One might say, left to our own resources, the human community would never look for, much less demand, the justice the prophet demands—only the Lord manifests this longing and it is a "controversy" created by God. And yet, if it is created by God, we are not thereby excused from responding to the questions that the prophet levels at the people. Of course, if it is in fact a controversy of the Lord, it will be a dispute that swirls out of our creaturely control, outstripping our moral imagination with the Lord's own unquenchable zeal.

This, it seems, is about the sum of it, when we hear the poetic expressions that come in verses 6-7, as the people struggle to answer the controversy of God. From the seemingly possible (burnt offerings, what the law required), to the absurd (thousands of rams and ten thousand rivers of oil), to the unbearable (the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul), Micah moves us steadily to the calling with which we have been called: do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God (6:8). Again, Micah says, "[The Lord] has told you," which is to say, "You know already, it is the covenant between the Lord and Israel, remember the change that I wrought in you and in your people in the history of my saving acts. Make these practices a vital expression of your life together."

While Micah speaks in the period after the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, Zephaniah speaks in a time of relative political peace for Judah, in the period around 640 b.c.e. Like Micah's setting, however, the people were in danger of losing their identity through the historical influence of Assyria's domination of the kingdom: "Canaanite Baal worship flourished, with its abominable practices of sacred prostitution and child sacrifice, and those prophets who objected were persecuted or killed… . The first two chapters of Zephaniah reflect the corruption in Judah before [King Josiah's] reform."4 Repentance is thus the primary goal of the second chapter of Zephaniah. Repent, says the prophet, and "perhaps you may be hidden on the day of the Lord's wrath" (v. 3).

At first a theological explanation of the catastrophes experienced by Israel seems a straightforward act: we should expect this from a prophet. However, the reality on the ground would likely speak against the prophet's interpretation, which, in a political climate defined by conquest and exile, would have been a form of revisionist history. Actually, it would probably be better to describe Micah's speech as something akin to religious graffiti, indecipherable to all but those it was intended to address. Seen this way, Micah's oracle uses unlicensed speech to provide a theological rather than merely sociopolitical account of catastrophic times.

One of the interesting characteristics of graffiti is its paradoxical character: scrawled onto concrete walls supporting an overpass built with taxpayer dollars; spray-painted onto the side of a passing train, the symbol of legal commerce; or cut into the sides of a bathroom stall, it claims public space for its illicit acts of communication. Maybe there is something of that going on here, with Micah choosing the image of a public lawsuit as the medium to scrawl out the dispute of the Lord. That dispute has to do with the submergence of the theological account of Israel's story beneath other nationalistic claims. It may be the case that the theological narrative lacks official authorization, it lacks citizenship papers, it exists as an "illegal" in the world but speaks with the confidence of a citizen of the kingdom.

Playing on the wording of Zephaniah, the prophetic voice urges the community of faith, gather twice ("Gather together, gather, O shameless nation"). What I mean here is that in the act of gathering, the church gathers to God's presence as well as gathers against the prevailing patterns of society. On the one hand, the church gathers as an affirmation of God but, on the other hand, it gathers, to use baptismal language, as a renunciation of the principalities and powers of the world. The art of repentance gathers us twice, the church authenticating and rehearsing its language as a peculiar community, so that, in the liturgical act of worship, it learns a tongue that may well be forbidden but, by God's grace, shall never be forgotten.

The fifteenth psalm would exclude everyone I know, including the one I know best, from "abiding" in God's tent. I don't know anyone who "walks blamelessly" or does what is right and speaks truth from their heart, or at least not on a consistent basis. Carroll Stuhlmueller helps us with this text, grouping Psalm 15 with a liturgy used for entering one of the Temple gates: "Psalm 15 … enabled a person once guilty or at least under suspicion to be declared worthy of acceptance."5 With this in mind, we hear a psalm written not for the healthy but the sick.

Psalm 146 begins what Stuhlmueller calls the "doxological" section of the book of Psalms, including 146–150.6 Although the lection offers only verses 6-10, it makes more sense to include verses 1-2: "Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord, O my soul! I will praise the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praises to my God all my life long." These verses seem to infuse the rest with the richness of someone who is not only singing the song but one in whom the song continues to sing. Augustine says this to an ancient congregation in whose ears the memory of the psalm surely still rang:

Ironically, in a setting of divisiveness, Paul actually underscores the witness of the cross as a more basic division than the divisions created by different loyalties. These loyalties, he seems to say, are actually superficial compared to the divisive power of the cross, which is "foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God" (1:18). The community is gathered, as it were, in the witness of the cross that, while it judges us, also announces our salvation. Apart from the reconciling act of God in Jesus Christ, the judgment of the cross scatters rather than gathers: its meaning can only be apprehended by the faith community. It is merely a controversy but never an occasion for communion. One could read Paul as saying to the church, if you're going to be divided, divide around the basic scandal of the cross, for it shows not a creaturely division (which is what the world sees) but, in Paul's view, the divine-human controversy (God's judgment), which is reconciled in Christ's work on the cross.

Saying this text is "significant" in the narrative world of Matthew vastly understates its role in the Matthean imagination. Not only is it a text that resonates in our collective imagination, it is deliberately set apart by Matthew as Jesus' inaugural sermon. The beginning of this pericope, 5:1-2, sets Jesus' words apart as those of an authoritative teacher who draws people to himself, where he speaks from "the mountain" a detail, according to Douglas Hare, that is meant to recall the story of Moses without obscuring the new thing of Christ.9 In effect, Matthew tells the readers that he intends this to be a christological statement: "[Jesus] is not simply 'one of the prophets' … but is the Messiah."10

Like Psalm 15, interpreters may be frustrated by this text since it, too, seems to set up an impossible situation: how can we say these words with integrity? We know Matthew's understanding of the coming of the kingdom: it is now and not yet. Jesus' sermon not only commands but, in the way of promissory speech, effects what he says. In promissory speech the act, for example, of declaring a couple "husband and wife" makes that obligation actual as they become husband and wife to each other. In a similar way, when Jesus says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven," he is both speaking of how the disciple should be as well as naming an actuality that, by God's eschatological grace, the discipling community now inhabits.

Modern skeptics might join with J. Paul Getty who famously remarked, "The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not the mineral rights."11 Jorge Luis Borges writes, "Wretched are the poor in spirit, for under the earth they will be as they are on the earth" and "Wretched is he who weeps, for he has the miserable habit of weeping."12 Poet and capitalist (strangely) concur: the claims of Jesus' Beatitudes do not agree with ordinary experience. This may lead us to talk of the "spiritual" meaning of these texts. If we go this direction, we will have to deal with the question of why Matthew puts the predictable misery of the world alongside the unanticipated promise of the kingdom. William Least Heat Moon helps us with this question as he ponders on the experience of seeing: "New ways of seeing can disclose new things: the radio telescope revealed quasars and pulsars, and the scanning electron microscope showed the whiskers of the dust mite." There is, however, another possibility: "… turn the question around: Do new things make for new ways of seeing?"13