The Cow God Gives You
With what should I approach the Lord
and bow down before God on high?
Should I come before him with entirely burned offerings,
with year-old calves?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with many torrents of oil?
Should I give my oldest child for my crime;
the fruit of my body for the sin of my spirit?
He has told you, human one, what is good and
what the Lord requires from you:
to do justice, embrace faithful love, and walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:6-8, CEB translation)
Okay, some of you are really wondering about the title. Perhaps you think I am getting excited about Christmas Eve and the nativity, and for some reason I am enamored at the idea of a cow in the nativity (though really sheep are far more likely). Some of you may wonder if I have gone off the rails and am about to prophesy about finding the red heifer and bringing about the end of the world (if you don’t know what I am talking about, count yourself blessed and move on with your life). And then some of you may just think I have misread the above passage, and you want to tap me on the shoulder and say, “Hey, God doesn’t bring us a cow. We are supposed to bring God a cow.”
And I am going to say, “Exactly. Don’t refuse the cow God gives you.”
And you are more confused, but I assure you I can explain. Now, let me get you there.
A few days ago I listened to a podcast on the TED Talks Daily by Johann Hari entitled, “This Could Be Why You’re Depressed or Anxious.” In it he tells the story of a group of doctors who tried to bring antidepressants to Cambodia. As they explained the medications to the Cambodian doctors, the Cambodians responded, “Oh we have antidepressants.” Then they described them by telling a story. They had a patient who was working in the rice fields and stepped on an old landmine from past conflicts and blew his leg off. They got him a prosthetic leg, and then he went back to work in the rice fields. It was not very long, though, before he started crying all the time while he worked, and then eventually couldn’t even get out of bed and go to work. So, the doctors went and sat with him, and listened. They learned first of all that it was painful to stand in water with his prosthetic leg. It was probably also painful to go back every day to the field where he lost his leg. So, the doctors thought, “Maybe he would do better as a dairy farmer.” So they got him a cow.
Within a month his depression was gone. That, the Cambodians said, is their antidepressant.
Hari, who has spent much of his life researching anxiety and depression, has determined that two key factors in controlling those mental struggles are purpose and community. In the story from Cambodia, the community listened to the man in pain. And then the community responded by giving him a new purpose in providing his cow.
God has in mind a cow for all of us. We are all uniquely gifted to serve a distinct purpose in God’s kindom. God wants us to find and to live that purpose. However, that purpose is not for us in isolation, but is meant to be discerned and lived out in community. Community is especially important in those moments when God’s original purpose for us has to be altered because our leg has been blown off, also known as a life-altering event. Community needs to help us think in new and creative ways, and perhaps also to help equip us for that new purpose. With purpose and community, we have the means to live with joy.
God needed a mechanism, however, to gather us in community. Worship. Worship would do it. Gather together with a common goal of praising God. That puts our focus on something outside of ourselves. It literally gives us a collective higher purpose. Worship helps us practice having that perspective and goal. And then God asks us to bring cows to offer God in that space, but the cows don’t really totally go to God, but to supporting members of the community in living out their purpose (i.e. the cows feed the priests). In fact, over and over in the prophets we are told God doesn’t really care about the offerings we bring. God cares that we get together, and then that we do something meaningful and transformative. This passage from Micah makes a similar point: the meaning behind worship is not in the bringing of offerings. It is in the getting together and committing to justice, mercy (translated here are faithful love), and humility. Those three traits are all traits that benefit the collective, not so much individuals. If you are isolated, you do not need justice, mercy, or humility. Those are all needed to build a stronger society, however. And when we all pull together and focus on that together, we all have purpose and meaning in our lives.
So God asks us to bring God a cow so that we can in turn receive a cow from God. Except our cow is a purpose in community.
This makes so much more sense for a reason for worship to exist than that God is some lonely old man who needs our adoration. God already exists in perfect love and communion as the Trinity. What God needs is for us to know God loves us enough to give each of us a reason for being. And God also knows that when we come together and focus on God and the life God calls us to have, individually and collectively, that we do greater things. Things that move and change the world. And God also knew if we came together and called on God to partner with us, then the greatest good would come to be. After all, Jesus told us, “I assure you that whoever believes in me will do the works that I do. They will do even greater works than these because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask for in my name, so that the Father can be glorified in the Son. When you ask me for anything in my name, I will do it.” (John 14:12-14) Worship allows us to practice purpose in community. Worship allows us to learn how to be the people God has created us to be.
Could it really be that worship exists solely as a mechanism to give all of us purpose and community?
If that’s the case, worship may have become disconnected from its own purpose. Perhaps we never understood its purpose to begin with. Perhaps God was always telling us, “Come together, love me and one another, focus on something bigger than you, pool your resources, and enact justice and mercy out of a spirit of humility for all the world to see.” But instead we thought, “I gotta do my duty and go drop off this cow so I can get on with my life from here.” That looks like we missed the point.
We are meant to be dairy farmers. Let’s go get the cow God has for us. Let’s collectively live lives of real purpose. And let the church be a gathering place where that can happen, and real transformation can occur. Amen.
Photo by Luke Stackpoole on Unsplash
