Richard Davenport
February 1, 2026 – 4th Sunday after Epiphany
Micah 6:1-8
If you’ve ever worked in retail, you’ve probably heard the expression, “the customer is always right.” The idea that you as the salesman, manager, cashier, or whatever role you have, you should do absolutely everything in your power to ensure the customer is happy with their shopping experience. Now, if you’re a customer, this is a nice policy. It means you can expect good service and that any issue you have will be addressed. If you’re a worker at the store, unless you have that certain kind of personality that is happiest when you’re taking care of problems, you may have a different opinion of the policy.
It’s a pretty major feature of our culture. The average person in America has far more money than most other countries, so a greater proportion of our lives are spent shopping. The store wants your money, so it behooves them to do whatever they can to keep you coming back. If business dries up, then the store closes. The owners don’t want that to happen, so it becomes every employee’s job to make the customer happy.
When you’re an employee working with a customer who is calm and collected, it’s pretty nice to be able to help them out. Something isn’t working the way it should and you do your best to solve their problem and make their day a little better. They’re very appreciative and you feel good for helping. There are the many, many others though, who make working retail a little slice of hell. There are those who yell at you and think you’re incompetent when you had nothing to do with the problem and have no way to help them. There are those who look you straight in the eye and lie, even when you both know they’re lying. There are others who make ridiculous requests that could never be fulfilled and they feel entitled to receive whatever it is they’re asking for. Life gets a lot more frustrating when these types of customers are the order of the day and there are a lot of them out there.
God sounds a bit like a customer service rep here. The people are clamoring that they aren’t getting what they want. They complain and complain about the service and all of the things that are going wrong. Like the poor customer service rep who is doing his best to try and meet the needs of those who come to him, God calls out, asking what more do they want? You can picture the lone employee surrounded by a mob of people on Black Friday, all clamoring for his attention as he tries his best to meet the needs of all the customers, but there’s always more and more and more.
God sounds pretty exasperated here, almost confused. He recounts some of the things he has done for them. He brought them out of Egypt and saved them from Pharaoh and his slave masters. He gave them good and righteous leaders who led them and cared for them. He gave them a prophet who would do mighty works and a priest who would lead them in worship. He protected them from the threats of enemies, those who sought to curse them and impede their march to the Promised Land. Even that is just a small sampling of what he did for them. The list could go on for quite a while.
The Israelites don’t really like the service they’re getting, so they take their business elsewhere. We think of America as a consumer society, which is how it is structured. Companies or individuals provide goods and services that others pay for. It’s what keeps the economy moving. However, the mindset isn’t anything new. If you don’t like what you’re getting in one place, go somewhere else. It’s really all the same thing. For instance, if you don’t like the products, prices, or service at a store like Walmart, you can take your business to Aldi, or Harps. If you don’t like any of them, then you can show them what you think of their stores by finding one of the farmers markets that pop up around here and buying your groceries there. We make our displeasure known by taking our business elsewhere. The stores we leave suffer the loss of income which, we hope, will force them to make changes that might encourage us to come back.
This attitude doesn’t stop with our shopping habits. We tend to treat everything this way. We look at God as a service provider. We think of our worship and selfless good deeds as currency we use to pay God for his services. I go to church regularly, God owes me a better job or maybe a new car. I’ve been very good lately, even given some extra to charity, so God should give me a nice vacation in Maui. We shop and the God store and pay him in prayers and hymns, in offerings in the plate and he gives us what we want. If he doesn’t, then we look somewhere else.
If God isn’t giving quite the salary I deserve to buy the things I want, then I’m open to shopping somewhere else. Maybe someone else will offer me some work under the table doing some quasi-legal things. Or maybe I’ll just start pocketing some things from the office that I want. If God doesn’t give me the husband or wife I think is the perfect match, then I’ll just divorce them and find someone who suits me better. If God doesn’t want to pay me for my service here, then I’ll go find some other religion that will respect me and give me my due. Perhaps Buddha will care that I put in the time and effort, or maybe Allah will give me what I want. It’s my time and resources that are being spent, so I will take them to whoever will give me the best return on them.
That’s generally the Israelite mindset in the days of Micah. They’ve added slews of other gods to their worship roster and will bounce around to whoever makes the best promises and seems to be doing what they want. But, as usual, God’s people are only God’s people as long as they get what they want. The minute God doesn’t fulfill their every whim, they wander off in search of greener pastures.
What was true then is true now. We are still God’s people, and yet God’s people are leaving him behind in record numbers these days. Kids find no use for God and adults find other things that are better places to put their time and effort. God doesn’t give me what I need so I’m going to give my loyalty to someone else who will. If that is secretly your view of God, then it’s only a matter of time before you walk out this church door and never come back. God will fail to live up to your expectations and you will give your worship and works currency to someone else.
You might think, in doing so, that you’re sticking to God. You’re taking your worship and giving it to something you think is more deserving. Unfortunately the whole economy idea only works if you have something someone else needs. God is the creator of all things, ruler of all things, and owner of all things. There is nothing at all you have that God needs. God doesn’t need your worship. God doesn’t need your offerings. God doesn’t need your works. God doesn’t need you. God was around long before this world and anyone in it existed and he did just fine. It’s all his already, so you can’t give him what he already owns.
God doesn’t deal in currency or exchanges. God gives us what we need, just as he gave the Israelites what they needed. He saw they needed relief from their oppressive slavery. They had nothing to offer him and simply asked for mercy and he gave it to them. They needed a prophet to convey his words and commands to them, so he gave them a good and righteous man in Moses. They needed a priest to lead them in worship so they could learn to come to the only one who could care for them, so they would grow in their trust of him and continue to receive his gifts. So he gave them Aaron and his sons who would carry out that role. Moses and Aaron needed a helper to take care of so many people, so he gave them Miriam. They needed protection from their enemies, since they were a comparatively small group of people wandering without protection out in the wilderness where they could be attacked by any of the nations around them. So he defended them from all enemies that sought to exploit their weakness in any form.
God questions the Israelites because, for all of the mighty and wondrous things he has freely given them, it never seems to be enough. Even though he has given them things nothing else in all creation could give them and even though he responded personally to their cries for mercy, they feel their time is better spent serving someone or something else.
He brings a charge against them, an indictment for their seemingly endless greed and pride. They think they have earned his good gifts, paid for them themselves. They think they can make demands of him to provide whatever they want. But that’s not how the arrangement works. God gives. We receive. God gives what he chooses to give and when he chooses to give it and we receive it joyfully or not at all. Anything we might give to him is a response to what he has given us, offering him what is already his because we know it isn’t ours.
The magnitude of God’s gifts only goes up from there. Freedom from slavery, the promised land, the temple and everything associated with it, righteous prophets and rulers, even the discipline that is sometimes required to return the wayward to the fold. All of that culminates in the gift of his Son, who gives his very life to protect us from ourselves.
Our worship is not because God needs it, but because we need it. We need to be in worship and worshipping because it keeps us focused on the one who has given everything to save us. The gifts he gives us in worship are there to forgive our waywardness and to remind us again of what he has done for us and what he will yet do. Just as we come to his table and receive the sacrificial body and blood of Christ that preserves us in the true faith to life everlasting. Even here in worship God is still giving us more than we could ever hope or ask for. This is where we are united with his saving grace.
The gifts of God’s grace. The wonders he does for us to protect and save us, to provide for us and care for us, go beyond our understanding or our ability to count, even to the point of giving the life of his own Son. But they are gifts. As Luther says, “without any merit or worthiness in me.” We do not earn them. We do not deserve them, but he gives them to us anyway because he loves us. Our response in worship and in the world is to acknowledge what he has done for us and to offer what little we have back to the good and gracious God who has given them to us in the first place.