“I AM MAD AS HELL AND NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”

Seven hundred years before Christ, Israel was in the middle of a revival—so to speak. Its temples were crowded. Congregational giving put their ledgers in the black for the first time in years. And despite being occupied by the Assyrians after two devastating incursions into the Northern and Southern kingdoms, a certain class of Israelites was thriving amid their own oppression. The prophet Micah, who was a bit like John the Baptist—country guy, a little rough around the edges—bore witnesses this sorry situation. And instead of imploring the Israelites to repent, he took the Howard Beale tack and howled, and I’m paraphrasing: “I am mad as hell—and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

I am really aging myself by quoting Beale, the deranged but prophetic news anchor in the 1976 Oscar-winning film Network. It’s been 50 years since this satirical film was made, but Beale’s famous on-air soliloquy still touches a nerve. The fictional television news anchor undergoes a psychotic break during a live broadcast.

A psychotic break—but also a prophetic one. “I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street,” he yells. “All I know is that first you’ve got to get MAD. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a HUMAN BEING, My life has VALUE!’ So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, ‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’” And by the millions, his viewers do just that.

Micah, much like Beale, had reached a breaking point too. Us church folk would call it righteous indignation on steroids! He called out the power and privilege of the upper crust, the intelligentsia, and the cultural elite of the cities of Samaria and Jerusalem who were profiting off the backs of their own people—especially displaced refugees and exiles from the north.

Micah paints a horrifying picture of political oppression and economic exploitation by the strong and powerful against the weak and dispossessed. “There’s not a decent person in sight,” he wails. “Right-living humans are extinct. They’re all out for one another’s blood, animals preying on each other. They’ve all become experts in evil. Corrupt leaders demand bribes. The powerful rich make sure they get what they want.” (7:3-4 Message).

He also calls out religious leaders for peddling the worst kind of false comfort. “Its rulers give judgment for a bribe; its priests teach for a price; its prophets give oracles for money; yet they lean upon the Lord and say, ‘Surely the Lord is with us!’” (3:11). Worst of all, they legitimize this status quo by claiming it is all God’s will.

Micah can only weep and wail at this status quo. He claims it has driven him to walk the earth barefoot and naked, howling like a jackal and moaning like an owl. Why? Because Israel’s wound is incurable (1:8–9). “The faithful have disappeared from the land, and there is no one left who is upright; they all lie in wait for blood, and they hunt each other with nets” (7:2).
But just when his prophetic critique feels like too much to bear, Micah, almost inexplicably, comforts God’s people with words of hope. After all the vinegar he has dished out, he offers honey for the heart. Micah tells the Israelites how to make amends with Yahweh—by “remembering” who they are, their histories, their ancestors, and most of all their God, who has never given up on them and never will. He poses a number of soul-searching questions aimed at their atonement:

He 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 your God? (6:8)

And just like that, Micah reduces Judaism to its ethical essence. This verse is considered the compendium of the Mitzvot—the 613 divine commandments or obligations in the Torah given to Moses to guide Jewish life. They represent a connection to God through action, comprising 248 positive actions (what to do) and 365 prohibitions (what not to do).¹ Micah reduced them to a three-part formula–doing justice, loving kindness and walking humbly with God. It is equaled only by Jesus’ command “To love your neighbor yourself” (Matt 22:39).

Let’s begin with the Lord’s requirement to do justice. To understand God’s justice theologically, we must accept two propositions: first, that God is not neutral in the face of injustice; and second, that God’s justice is measured by how a society treats the most vulnerable of its members. When it comes to Micah, the operative word is the verb, “do.” Doing justice. Walking the walk in addition to talking the talk. We have witnessed this call to action over the last week, have we not? This incarnational embodiment of moral courage being exercised by American citizens as they protest the brutality that our government has unleashed upon the streets of our cities.

Despite important progress in our nation’s 250-year history, our social contract has never closed the chasm between the promise, and the fulfillment of all its citizens. This is what people of color have known their entire lives, and what White people are finally experiencing. The scales of power and privilege are falling from our eyes in real time as we witness the same kind of dehumanizing Jim Crow-era-type policing and injustice that our parents and grandparents witnessed on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, to name just one.

I mention this because today marks the beginning of Black History Month. Carter G. Woodson, the “father of Black history,” set out in 1926 to designate a time to promote and educate people about Black history and culture. It came to fruition in 1976, 50 years ago, when President Gerald Ford made the commemoration official as part of our nation’s bicentennial, arguing that, “There is no more powerful force than a people steeped in their history.”² Let me pair that quote with another from our own Canon Theologian, Kelly Brown Douglas, who with colleagues wrote this week, wrote that “While the church is not called to partisan politics, it is unmistakably called to be partisan for the values of God: justice, love, dignity, freedom and the sacred worth of every human being.”³

In that spirit, I note that just last week, the administration instructed the National Park Service to take down an exhibit at Philadelphia’s Independence Mall that highlighted President George Washington’s treatment of his enslaved workers. Compared to what we’ve seen this week on the streets of Minneapolis, the removal of that plaque in Philadelphia was a quiet event. But both are blunt distillations of the administration’s racial politics.

Now, on to “love kindness.” In Hebrew it is translated “hesed.” Micah is calling us back to Mount Sinai, to where God bestowed the 10 commandants upon Moses—to the place Yahweh told Moses exactly who he is: ‘The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Exodus 34:6). That steadfast love—it is not a gentle, lukewarm love; it’s a fierce and forgiving love that refuses to let go. It manifests itself in action. It is all-consuming. It cannot be contained. Think of it as a love that cannot sit at home, a love that goes out into the world, that marches in the streets, that shows up for neighbors armed only with the nonviolent force of truth. It is the sacrificial offering of taking up one’s cross for another. This is hesed.

And third, to walk humbly with our God is perhaps the most important. Only when one walks humbly with God will one come to truly understand how to love kindness while doing justice. This means we walk with reverence, integrity, and empathy, and it means we cannot fall prey to the tactic of weaponizing decency.

On January 22, Valarie Kaur, who leads the Revolutionary Love Project, a national movement to reclaim love as a force for justice in this country, addressed the call of the local clergy organizing group, M.A.R.C.H. in Minneapolis. She said, “We carry each other through the impossible. Revolutionary Love is the choice to see no stranger – to leave no one outside our circle of care, to risk ourselves for one another, to show up with whistles when they have guns. We are practicing the world we want in the space between us– we are living into the dream of a world that is green and whole, safe and free, where I see your child as mine, and you see mine as yours. Our dream is more powerful than your nightmare.”⁴ End quote.

That right there—that is exactly why Jesus pronounces blessings on the meek, the hungry, the impoverished, and the oppressed. He lived during the time of Roman oppression, when a stink-eye glance at a soldier could be repaid with a knee to the neck. But what does Jesus do before and after his sermon on the mount? He empowers the meek, he feeds the hungry, he cares for the poor, and he demands justice for the oppressed.

Jesus spent every waking moment he had on earth alleviating suffering. He never valorized misery as God’s will, or as the proverbial weight we humans must bear on our shoulders. He didn’t ignore the cruelty of the religious elite and the politically powerful. He didn’t turn a blind eye to the incarcerated, the demonized or the deported. And he never told anyone to just “grin and bear” their pain because all would be made right in the sweet by and by. Instead, Jesus lived a justice that freed people to fully inhabit their own sacred humanity.

My friends, your righteous indignation may be at a breaking point, just as it was for Howard Beale. If you feel you can’t take it anymore, then go—go out!—and be the blessing you want to see in this world! The gospel calls us all to live out, in the messiness of our everyday lives, the mercy, love and peace God desires for all people. So make “blessing” an action verb rather than a gerund! Use your feet to do justice, your heart to love your neighbor and your enemy, and your prayers to talk humbly with your God. Our moral courage is defined by what it means to be Christian—to follow Jesus faithfully in times like these.

Amen.

¹ The Jewish Study Bible, Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler, editors, Quoting R. Simlai for Micah, pg. 1203.
² Sara Clarke Kaplan, executive director of the Antiracist Research & Policy Center at American University in Washington, D.C. https://www.npr.org/2022/02/01/1075623826/why-is-february-black-history-month
³ https://religionnews.com/2026/01/27/how-to-hold-up-both-democracy-and-the-gospel-pauli-murray-is-a-guide-for-christians/
⁴ From Freedom Road ([email protected])