But now Assyria is at the door. The land is in chaos. Micah asks, what can we do about our situation? "With what shall I come before the Lord?" What does God want from us?

Micah thinks first of things the people could bring to God. He makes a list. Each item on the list is a little better than the last: burnt offerings, calves a year old, thousands of rams (get that: thousands of rams), ten thousand rivers of oil, my firstborn child. These are major league offerings. Is that what God requires?

Did you notice that almost all the items on this list are things that people give to God in worship? If Micah would write such a list for us, it might go something like this: cut the church lawn so that every blade of grass is the same height and bends the same way; sing a solo in which every note is in perfect pitch; fill the offering trays with 90 percent of your income. Instead of collection plates, we would need wheelbarrows to take up the offerings.

Micah never says there is anything wrong with such things. In fact I have heard some soloists who could have enriched the worshipping atmosphere with a little more practice prior to the service. And at its best, worship symbolizes the fullness of our life with God. The praise that we sing out of the hymnal is a miniature of the praise we render in the kitchen and at the desk. The grace that we receive from the Lord's Table is a token of the grace we receive in a bright sunrise or in a child's embrace. The offerings we drop in the collection plate are a prototype of the offerings that we make as we change diapers or march to end social injustice.

But sometimes worship gets cut off from life. From Sunday to Sunday, God slips from our minds. Worship no longer represents our life with God. Instead, we let the acts of worship substitute for the fullness of our life with God. We put a big check in the offering plate instead of giving ourselves with heart, mind, soul and strength to God's ways. And that cannot calm Assyria from without or the chaos from within.

So Micah asks, "What does God require but to do justice, to love kindness, to walk humbly with God?" (6:8)

Now, it occurs to me that in talking about what God requires, I may leave the wrong impression. You could make the mistake of thinking that we do these things because we need to do so in order to win God's friendship. You could get the idea that justice, kindness and humility are tests that we must pass in order to be welcome in God's house. No, Micah is thinking of what comes from you because of who you are. A peach tree does not give peaches in order to prove that it is a peach tree. It gives peaches because it is a peach tree.

We spent one summer in Africa. While we were there we visited a school where there was a student who was at odds with arithmetic. In fact, the multiplication tables and long division seemed to stand between her and the rest of life. So, one day, during an exam, her eyes wandered across the aisle to the paper of the student next to her. As her eyes wandered back to her own paper she met the eyes of her teacher. Not only did she fail the exam but the teacher told her parents that she cheated.