Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“Make yourselves bald and cut off your hair for your pampered children; make yourselves as bald as the eagle, for they have gone from you into exile.”
NL Daily Devotion for Monday, November 14, 2022
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
Micah comes out of the gate swinging. His prophecy is straight to the point. God is angry at you and you’re going down. He does not, at this point, say anything about why God is so incensed. Except for this one line which—while I can’t say anything about the original Hebrew, so I have to take it at its translated face value—gives a clue: “…cut off your hair for your pampered children…” The word “pampered” is loaded indeed. It means “treated with extreme or excessive care and attention” and when it’s connect with children, it basically means “spoiled.” God’s people in Jerusalem have spoiled their children and as a result those children will be taken from them.
Is it so bad to spoil your children that your entire city will be destroyed and your people sent into exile? Micah gets much more specific going forward, but from this one little word, we can extrapolate quite a bit. Or, at least, I can—and will here.
To spoil your children means you’re lavishing resources on them in order to make their lives luxurious and easy. That means you’re not using your resources on behalf of “the widow and the orphan,” words often used in the Hebrew Bible, which basically mean “the vulnerable and powerless,” which in our context can include people who are poor, victims of racism and other oppressive systems, people who are disabled or differently-abled, victims of trauma and sufferers of mental illness—the list could go on. God has gifted us with ridiculous abundance and makes it abundantly clear in God’s law that we are to use it in just ways. So if it’s all just being poured right back into the family coffers through our children, we are big time missing the point.
Like I said, Micah has a lot more to say over the next few days. But boy does this give us a place to start wondering about what drives him to deliver such a frightening message to God’s people!
Where is the line between supporting our children’s independence and long-term success and ‘pampering’ them?
