February 1, 2026 Fourth Sunday after Epiphany: Bowing Down that We May Rise Up

February 1, 2026  Fourth Sunday after Epiphany
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Micah 6:1-8
“Bowing Down that We May Rise Up”
Douglas T. King

Have you ever wondered why the majority of Presbyterian churches celebrate communion once a month, unlike our Catholic sisters and brothers who celebrate the sacrament every week?  It all started in John Calvin’s Geneva and the birth of our Presbyterian heritage.  The apocryphal story I prefer goes like this.  Calvin emphasized the need for confession before receiving the sacrament.  But the people of Geneva liked to have a good time on Saturday night, a really good time.  And they felt they would not be ready to adequately confess all of their revelry before the sacrament every Sunday morning so they decided once a month was enough.  The real and unfortunately less salacious story is that John Calvin wanted communion every Sunday but the leaders in Geneva were worried it made them seem too Roman Catholic so they compromised with once a month. Personally, I still prefer the notion of Genevans whipping up a party like New Orleans during Mardi Gras every Saturday night making them unprepared to receive the sacrament.

Back in the prophet Micah’s day when a layperson wished to enter the temple for worship or proposed to offer a sacrifice, there was a ritual of inquiry and instruction before they were deemed prepared to do so.  You needed to be vetted to make sure you were worthy enough to engage in the rituals of worshipping God.  Can you imagine that today?  Having our ushers and our greeters evaluate your worthiness for worship before you were given access to the sanctuary on a Sunday morning?  Perhaps I am out on a limb here, but I am not sure that would go over all that well.  

But the question of how we approach the table, and for that matter, worship in general, remains.  Our reading from Micah speaks to this question.  The first portion of the text is God condemning the nation for its lack of faithfulness in the face of all the divine has done for them.  The people respond, questioning how, in the face of all of their failures, they can appropriately approach God in the temple.  They suggest traditional sacrifices in absurd quantities, “thousands of rams” and “ten thousands of rivers of oil.”  They even offer up their very children, their first born.  

God’s answer sweeps away their entreaties with the three things actually required to come into the presence of God; “do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.”  The trio of expectations has both a powerful rhetorical flourish and deep implications for whom we are called to be.  I do, however, have one quibble.  I would argue that rearranging the order of the trio is in order.  What is listed as the ending point should be the starting point.

These first two pithy exhortations, “do justice” and “love kindness” roll rather trippingly off the tongue but they are not all that easily lived out.  It is a new challenge every day to live up to these high ideals.  Justice and kindness are easy to believe in as words and theories.  But both offering kindness and engaging in efforts of justice involve seeing beyond ourselves on a continual and regular basis.   And that is easier said than done.  

If we want to be people who live lives exhibiting kindness to others and working for justice for those in need we need to start with the final item of exhortation brought to us in Micah, “walking humbly with our God.”  It is being aware of God’s presence in our lives that enlightens us to the reality that we are not the self-sufficient center of the universe.  And this humbling reality allows us to make the needs of others a priority.  

But this process can be a bit of a catch 22.  To experience God’s presence and discover humility, it might involve discovering some initial humility.  We are far too likely to place ourselves at the center of all things and become gods unto ourselves which does not leave much room for our actual God.

The brilliant author George Saunders recently had an interview in the New York Times. In it he discussed the three delusions we must ditch to step into kindness and save ourselves.  “You’re not permanent, you’re not the most important thing and you’re not separate.”  Sounds like deep humility to me.  

The artist Makoto Fujimura has a story that bears light on this journey to humility.  He writes of Sen no Rikyu’s creation of an elaborate form of the Japanese tea service, which took apprentices a decade to “master all the minute movements…It was…Rikyu’s invention to create a nijiriguchi, a small, square crawl-in entry to the tearoom…a samurai was forced to bow and humble himself to enter the teahouse and, more importantly, had to remove his sword and leave it beside the rock at the entry.  The journey into the teahouse is considered just as important as sitting to have tea.” (Fujimura, pp. 49-50)  

When Rikyu was creating this new ritual of tea service there was much “feudal bloodshed in Japan.” (Fujimura, p. 50)  He wisely realized that without some degree of humility these samurai warlords would never cease in their pointless bloodshed.  Humility is indeed an essential step in peacemaking, in doing justice, in loving kindness.  There is much to be said for laying down what gives us power and prestige in the world, even if momentarily, to allow us to be reminded that we are indeed not the center of all things.  And thus we discover who is the center of all things.  

It is a fair question to ponder, just how much of the strife and violence and warfare in our world finds its seeds in prideful arrogance.  It would be far too simplistic to lay all of conflict at the feet of pride.  But I do believe we cannot truly do justice and love kindness without humility.  

I wonder what it would be like if to enter into our sanctuary on a Sunday morning we had to pass through a nijiriguchi, a small, square crawl-in entry of our own.  What if we had to lay aside all the sundry accoutrement that define our worldly value, our fancy degrees and important titles, our stock portfolios and club memberships, our self-inflated images of ourselves?  What if we entered into worship possessing solely one identity marker, a child of God?  What if that were the single most important way we defined ourselves on each new day?  How much kindness would we bring to bear if in every interaction we solely saw each other as fellow children of God?  How much passion and energy would we bring to bear when confronted with injustice in this world toward fellow children of God?  What would it be like to live in a community where everyone with whom we interacted was present with us in such deep humility?  Imagine, if we, one and all, walked humbly with our God, defined ourselves primarily as children of God, and demonstrated that in our lives?  
 
In the midst of this talk of humility, of walking humbly with our God, it is important to clarify something.  Humility, walking humbly with our God, does not mean we see ourselves as lesser than in any way.  What it does is redefine our understanding of what makes each of us valuable and precious.  Our true value is not to be found in anything any of us will ever accomplish.  Our true value is found in what we have been given; in the way in which we have been claimed as beloved by our God.  When we find our true and ultimate value not in what we have accomplished but what we have been given, and when we recognize that very same value in all those who cross our paths we hold our heads high not in prideful arrogance but in a prideful shared gratitude.

Imagine a world where everyone from the least powerful to the most powerful heeded the wisdom of George Saunders.  “You’re not permanent, you’re not the most important thing and you’re not separate.”  A society built on humility and prideful shared gratitude will surely flourish.  A society built on indulgent arrogance will sooner or later eat itself alive.

As we come to the table this morning we are invited to do so both in great humility and in great prideful shared gratitude, for we are God’s beloved children.  And we are called to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God.  

May it indeed be so.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.      
 
Fujimura, Makoto, Art is a journey into the light, Yale     University Press, New Haven, 2025.