About 25 years after graduating college, I was invited to a luncheon on campus where one of my small group of friends was being honored. Living in Mississippi, I was the farthest away, and this was the first time I’d seen them all in the same room in decades, and I experienced a small revelation. As some dean was speaking, I looked around the table, and it dawned on me that I finally understood my first assignment in college.
It was a reading from Aristotle’s Ethics. I had been excited to read it because I thought ethics would be about making difficult decisions, and that seemed important. But it was about friendship, and for the life of me I couldn’t see why it mattered. I was disappointed and puzzled, and I hadn’t thought of it in years. But sitting around the table, looking at those friends, now after 9/11, and two wars had begun, and my own American insulation had been stripped away, after struggling to lead a pretty good church-community as a pastor in a time of increasing distrust and division, it occurred to me that I’d never really made an ethical decision. Instead, I’d only done what these friends would have expected me to do, given the commitments we’d shaped and shared about what mattered in our few years together.
It turns out that friends are essential to living what is sometimes called the good life, which is not an easy life free of suffering. It’s a life at least aimed at discovering and telling the truth about who we are and who we are called to be. This past Tuesday, when I learned of Mark’s death, after a night of calls to and from other shocked and suddenly grieving friends, I realized again the goodness and beauty and rarity of a truthful community like this one. And I realized before I went to bed that I wanted to preach from Micah 6.
Micah was a country prophet, who lived among the peasant people and measured the health of the land by the well-being of the most vulnerable. Micah is short, like a good sermon, and in just a few pages, he manages to establish three of the towering passages of scripture. First comes his vision of swords beaten into plowshares and spears beaten into pruning hooks. Unlike Isaiah, he includes, And everyone beneath their vine and fig tree shall live in peace and unafraid. He sees a connection between courage and peace and fear and violence.
Micah is also the book that led the Magi to Bethlehem – “one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me the one who is to come, whose origin is from ancient days, who shall feed the flock. And he shall be the one of peace.†It took a country boy to see that the Messiah would come from a small, humble place like Bethlehem.
And then finally there is Micah 6, the great summary question: What does the Lord require of you?
It’s an entrance liturgy. (Micah’s a liturgical country prophet.) A pilgrim reaches the temple, and before entering asks, “with what shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before God on high?†A pilgrim is one on a journey toward some destination, some end that tells us something about our human destination, about life itself. What’s it all about? So, it’s right to ask as you enter the holy destination: “with what shall I come before the Lord?â€
The second voice replies: God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God.
In his book The Road to Character, David Brooks distinguishes between two kinds of virtues. One he calls resume virtues. The others he calls eulogy virtues. They are just what they sound like. One are the virtues we list on a resume: hard working, efficient, usually something that suggests that you are so consumed with success that you actually have a problem not working. But then there are the virtues you want spoken about you when you’re not around, most poignantly when you’re gone. These are the eulogy virtues. By definition a eulogy virtue assumes our mortality. God has told you, O mortal one, what is good and what does the Lord require of you. A eulogy virtue is one that stands up in the face of mortality.
It’s too soon for his eulogy, but it’s not too soon to notice one thing Mark Wiggs did. In fact, we should take note of this while we can. Mark was an accomplished lawyer, who realized about 20 years ago that he’d worked enough, and they had enough to allow him to pursue other tasks, like the Baptist Joint Committee and other important struggles. And most crucially, to pursue friendship. Friendship is how virtue is acquired. You really can’t just decide to become just, kind, or humble. They are not new years resolutions. You only acquire those within friendships built on truth about who we are, and what we are for.
And if we notice nothing else, let’s recognize that justice, kindness, and humility are not resume virtues. These are not what you want to tell some future employer. Not every employer wants you to be humble; they want to know if you can sell yourself and them. There’s no room for kindness in a ruthless market. And what is justice, anyway? We think of justice as a set of rules we set up to balance power. The resume builder needs to know how to make the rules work to their advantage.
These are not resume virtues. They are eulogy virtues. They may make us an odd fit in a resume building world. Humility has been an odd virtue for a long time. The Greeks like Aristotle did recognize the significance of the virtues, and they recognized we needed friends to become virtuous, but they didn’t have much room for humility. But the country prophet knew that we all come from the earth and to the earth we shall return. He prophesied that the Messiah would come from the little town of Bethlehem. And the One we proclaim as Messiah still shocks and scandalizes us with humility. Paul says, “he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave . . . and being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.†That still sounds like folly, if not a scandal.
And kindness is also an odd fit in a world that values niceness. Nice can smile while violence is being hidden. Nice says “bless your heart.†But kindness is the quality of God’s mercy, who sends rain on the just and the unjust. The opposite of nice is truthful – nice avoids the truth. The opposite of kindness is cruelty. The virtue of kindness is not an occasional random act; it is a disposition formed by a tender recognition of the delicate gift of every life.
And justice is not a rule; it’s a virtue. A moral life doesn’t consist of playing by rules. Somebody tried to teach me this in my first lesson in college: It consists of being formed and found within a truthful community. It consists in acquiring character from friends who are in pursuit of the truth about who we are and what we’re for. We like to think that justice can be established if everyone would only follow the rules, but it turns out we can’t have justice short of our becoming just.1
Justice is not a rule; it’s a quality of God. God’s justice is completed in kindness (or mercy) and humility. This is the One we approach at the end of our journey. With what shall we come before the Lord? We come with justice, kindness, and humility we acquire through friendship. And the good news, in fact, the urgent message in a week like this: God has shown us, mortal ones, what is good. And we have been befriended.
Amen.
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1 I learned this way of thinking about friendship and virtue from Stanley Hauerwas and his students and friends. See especially his beautiful book, The Character of Virtue: Letters to a Godson (Eerdmans, 2018).