To Do Justice
February 17, 2008
Gen. 12:1-4; John 3:1-17
When I was about 10 years old I got a basketball for Christmas. I may have mentioned once or twice that I am a hoops junkie, so you can imagine the joy that gift brought. I took that ball with me everywhere I went and played wherever I could find a game. Then one day the ball was stolen; another kid took it from the gym.
I saw him leave with the ball under his arm, and I told my Dad. The boy, a classmate of mine, lived in a downtrodden neighborhood of North Chattanooga. My Dad knew it well, having grown up there, and he took me. When we got out of the car we could hear the thump, thump, thump of a basketball bouncing in the house.
Dad knocked on the door and told the woman who opened it that I thought the boy had picked up my ball by mistake. She went in the house and came out a moment later with the ball. “Is this yours?” she asked. It was, as the name and phone number in indelible ink confirmed.
She apologized for the “misunderstanding,” and I went home with my ball.
Walter Brueggemann has written that the Biblical understanding of justice amounts to sorting out what belongs to whom and returning it.
I learned a little bit about justice that morning, and about tempering it with compassion.
“Justice at its best,” Martin Luther King said, “is love correcting everything that stands against love.”
Whether it’s a pilfered basketball returned without undue embarrassment, or much larger and more difficult transactions, the work of justice is fundamental to any human community. For Christians, it is an essential part of the call to follow the Nazarene.
“What does the Lord require of us? To do justice …”
“Take away from me the noise of your songs … but let justice roll down like waters.”
“Maintain justice, and do what is right, for soon my salvation will come.”
Clearly scripture is concerned with justice. The word appears, in the NRSV translation more than 150 times, and “righteousness,” which in most cases translates a synonym, appears more than 250 times. God cares deeply about justice, and calls people of faith to similar deep concern.
Indeed, it is not too much to say, simply, that the call of God is to do justice.
Micah frames it best in his simple question, “what does the Lord require of you?”
The answer, “to do justice, love kindly, walk humbly with God.”
It does seem so simple and straightforward, but look around. What is the measure of justice in our world? How much does loving kindness mark the measure of our communities? Is there much left of humility in people of faith these days?
Is this what God had in mind in promising to make of Abram a great nation, blessed and a blessing for all the families of the earth? Is this the salvation for which Jesus lived and died?
The call of Abraham is the foundational moment for the creation of our faith; the moment of God’s self-revelation and the initiation of a covenant through which a people will be called, shaped and formed as a specific community marked, first and foremost, by the practice of justice.
The arc of the story of that people rises and falls according to the measure of that practice, and is defined with clarity for all time when God hears the people cry out from the burden of their unjust task masters and brings them out of the tyranny and injustice of Egypt into a land that is to be defined by specific practices of justice: welcoming strangers; caring compassionately for the least powerful; seeking shalom.
Although these practices cannot be fully captured by or identified with any particular political agenda or social policy, every agenda and policy must be measured against them. Which is to say, no political party or leader or candidate will bring about the coming of the kingdom. Nevertheless, justice is the journey of the beloved community toward the kingdom.
As Diana Butler Bass puts it in the book that we are studying in our Lenten series, “justice is not about backing a secular political agenda – whether that be liberal or conservative. Rather, justice is part of the faithful life of being a Christian; justice is spirituality.”
Of course, to have affects in the world, the practice of justice must engage the powers or it amounts to nothing but an empty spiritualism. Empty spiritualism does not get the basketball back to whom it belongs. Empty spiritualism does not and cannot address the spiritual ills of injustice.
More than 40 years ago, Martin Luther King warned the nation of impending spiritual death and he identified the deep social diseases speeding us toward that demise as racism, militarism and poverty. At their root, although each of these ills have real and urgent manifestations in the lives of our neighbors, these great social ills are spiritual. They stand in opposition precisely to those practices that were to mark the great nation of Abraham’s descendants.
Racism, and we may broaden that to the more generalized attitude of bigotry and thus include in the list of its victims women, gays, lesbians, undocumented workers, Muslims and so on, is the behavioral manifestation of the spiritual illness that closes us off to authentic, soulful encounters with sisters and brothers who differ from us, with the stranger in our midst, the alien in our land.
When Jesus says that we must be born again in order to enter the kingdom, he calls us to die to racism. He calls us to let die within us the spiritual disease that closes us off from the relationships that form the foundation of the beloved community, and to be born again to the abundant life that is ours as we gather at an unfenced table and celebrate God’s boundless love for a wondrously diverse humankind.
Poverty, whatever else it may involve, arises out of the twin spiritual diseases of materialism and consumerism. When Jesus said, “you will have the poor with you always,” he was not suggesting that we do nothing to relieve the crushing weight of extreme poverty. No, he was expressing the conviction that the Christian community would always include those who are poor; that the table would always be open and welcoming, and that the poor would have a central place. Despite what our culture of rampant consumerism would have us believe, there is nothing wrong with being poor. I grew up economically poor but rich beyond measure in the those things that cannot be measured: love, compassion, a deep sense of justice. Much of my adult life has been lived on the lower half of the median American household income – far from poverty, to be sure, farther from wealth as measured in dollars, but much closer to the deeper wealth that God desires for us.
The spiritual disease of materialism and consumerism drags at me from time to time, to be sure. When it does, I find myself focusing on the things I do not have and, in that focus on plasma screens and sports cars, I turn away from sisters and brothers, from life in community measured by faithfulness and spirituality and justice, from my heart’s true home. When we all turn away like that, the results are clear: our sisters and brothers fall under the very real ills and diseases that come with extreme poverty. We shop till we drop; they simply drop.
When Jesus said, “you must be born from above,” he was not telling Nicodemus to turn away from the world and its troubles. He was telling him to be open to the movement of the spirit that blows where it will – despite where the currents of the culture and its values and their deep distortions might be blowing. In other words, when the culture says measure your worth and that of those around you by what they own, by their social standing, by their power in the market, I say to you, open yourself to the presence of the spirit that just might be most strongly felt among the least of these sisters and brothers.
To go and be present compassionately among the least of these will put us at risk, to be sure. Such risk moves us sometimes to great fearfulness. In such fear, it becomes all too easy to succumb to that third great social/spiritual disease: militarism.
It is not a partisan political statement to mention that the United States spends more than half a trillion dollars each year on its military, or that such spending is more than that of the next 160-some countries’ combined military spending, or that such spending is more than half of the discretionary spending of the United States’ federal budget. After all, these figures have been roughly parallel through administrations of both parties dating back for many years.
It is not a partisan political statement to recall King’s words from 40 years ago: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
These are not political statements; they are spiritual ones. They call us to confront a broad, national spiritual disease. They call us to the spiritual practice of doing justice, for justice is the ground on which stands the peace that we all desire.
Because bigotry, materialism and militarism are spiritual diseases they call us to be open, precisely, to the movement of the spirit and to the opportunity at every moment to be born again. That openness liberates us from particular partisan agendas and frees us to approach these diseases on the spiritual level – looking first deep within our own souls in order to confront and confess our own complicity, receive God’s grace and mercy and be transformed – born again, and again, and again – into the calling to do justice.
But because these spiritual diseases are manifest in the world in concrete social ills – homophobic laws, the physical diseases of extreme poverty, a too-easy acceptance of violence and warfare – because these spiritual diseases have social manifestations we must not stop at self-examination but rather we must follow the calling of Christians to engage in the spiritual practice of doing justice in ways that respond to the concrete needs of all those touched by bigotry, poverty and violence. And we must act in the world – in the public square and in the market place – as faithfully as possible to address the root political, social and economic manifestations of these spiritual ills.
None of this is simple, and it will not be easy. There is great risk in it, always. Perhaps no risk is greater than the spiritual risk of beginning to believe that the cure lies with us. This is where it becomes more necessary than ever to recall the final of Micah’s challenges: “walk humbly with God.” At the present hour we do not need to claim that God is on our side; but we do desperately need to be on God’s side. At the same time, it is more necessary than ever to recall the words of John, “God so loved the world …” the kosmos, in the Greek – meaning all of creation. God so loves it, has such compassion for it as to suffer with creation and work in and through the created order not to condemn it but to save it.
Let our humble walk be the journey of justice toward a commonwealth in which the great social ills are addressed at their deepest spiritual levels. And let it be said of us, some day down the road, that there walked a people engaged deeply, fully and joyously in the fundamental Christian practice of doing justice. There walked a people trying to sort out what belonged to whom and return it. There walked a people trying to be on God’s side. And when that day comes, morning will have broken and we will sing and dance for our God who even now works wonders among us. Amen.
Gen. 12:1-4; John 3:1-17
When I was about 10 years old I got a basketball for Christmas. I may have mentioned once or twice that I am a hoops junkie, so you can imagine the joy that gift brought. I took that ball with me everywhere I went and played wherever I could find a game. Then one day the ball was stolen; another kid took it from the gym.
I saw him leave with the ball under his arm, and I told my Dad. The boy, a classmate of mine, lived in a downtrodden neighborhood of North Chattanooga. My Dad knew it well, having grown up there, and he took me. When we got out of the car we could hear the thump, thump, thump of a basketball bouncing in the house.
Dad knocked on the door and told the woman who opened it that I thought the boy had picked up my ball by mistake. She went in the house and came out a moment later with the ball. “Is this yours?” she asked. It was, as the name and phone number in indelible ink confirmed.
She apologized for the “misunderstanding,” and I went home with my ball.
Walter Brueggemann has written that the Biblical understanding of justice amounts to sorting out what belongs to whom and returning it.
I learned a little bit about justice that morning, and about tempering it with compassion.
“Justice at its best,” Martin Luther King said, “is love correcting everything that stands against love.”
Whether it’s a pilfered basketball returned without undue embarrassment, or much larger and more difficult transactions, the work of justice is fundamental to any human community. For Christians, it is an essential part of the call to follow the Nazarene.
“What does the Lord require of us? To do justice …”
“Take away from me the noise of your songs … but let justice roll down like waters.”
“Maintain justice, and do what is right, for soon my salvation will come.”
Clearly scripture is concerned with justice. The word appears, in the NRSV translation more than 150 times, and “righteousness,” which in most cases translates a synonym, appears more than 250 times. God cares deeply about justice, and calls people of faith to similar deep concern.
Indeed, it is not too much to say, simply, that the call of God is to do justice.
Micah frames it best in his simple question, “what does the Lord require of you?”
The answer, “to do justice, love kindly, walk humbly with God.”
It does seem so simple and straightforward, but look around. What is the measure of justice in our world? How much does loving kindness mark the measure of our communities? Is there much left of humility in people of faith these days?
Is this what God had in mind in promising to make of Abram a great nation, blessed and a blessing for all the families of the earth? Is this the salvation for which Jesus lived and died?
The call of Abraham is the foundational moment for the creation of our faith; the moment of God’s self-revelation and the initiation of a covenant through which a people will be called, shaped and formed as a specific community marked, first and foremost, by the practice of justice.
The arc of the story of that people rises and falls according to the measure of that practice, and is defined with clarity for all time when God hears the people cry out from the burden of their unjust task masters and brings them out of the tyranny and injustice of Egypt into a land that is to be defined by specific practices of justice: welcoming strangers; caring compassionately for the least powerful; seeking shalom.
Although these practices cannot be fully captured by or identified with any particular political agenda or social policy, every agenda and policy must be measured against them. Which is to say, no political party or leader or candidate will bring about the coming of the kingdom. Nevertheless, justice is the journey of the beloved community toward the kingdom.
As Diana Butler Bass puts it in the book that we are studying in our Lenten series, “justice is not about backing a secular political agenda – whether that be liberal or conservative. Rather, justice is part of the faithful life of being a Christian; justice is spirituality.”
Of course, to have affects in the world, the practice of justice must engage the powers or it amounts to nothing but an empty spiritualism. Empty spiritualism does not get the basketball back to whom it belongs. Empty spiritualism does not and cannot address the spiritual ills of injustice.
More than 40 years ago, Martin Luther King warned the nation of impending spiritual death and he identified the deep social diseases speeding us toward that demise as racism, militarism and poverty. At their root, although each of these ills have real and urgent manifestations in the lives of our neighbors, these great social ills are spiritual. They stand in opposition precisely to those practices that were to mark the great nation of Abraham’s descendants.
Racism, and we may broaden that to the more generalized attitude of bigotry and thus include in the list of its victims women, gays, lesbians, undocumented workers, Muslims and so on, is the behavioral manifestation of the spiritual illness that closes us off to authentic, soulful encounters with sisters and brothers who differ from us, with the stranger in our midst, the alien in our land.
When Jesus says that we must be born again in order to enter the kingdom, he calls us to die to racism. He calls us to let die within us the spiritual disease that closes us off from the relationships that form the foundation of the beloved community, and to be born again to the abundant life that is ours as we gather at an unfenced table and celebrate God’s boundless love for a wondrously diverse humankind.
Poverty, whatever else it may involve, arises out of the twin spiritual diseases of materialism and consumerism. When Jesus said, “you will have the poor with you always,” he was not suggesting that we do nothing to relieve the crushing weight of extreme poverty. No, he was expressing the conviction that the Christian community would always include those who are poor; that the table would always be open and welcoming, and that the poor would have a central place. Despite what our culture of rampant consumerism would have us believe, there is nothing wrong with being poor. I grew up economically poor but rich beyond measure in the those things that cannot be measured: love, compassion, a deep sense of justice. Much of my adult life has been lived on the lower half of the median American household income – far from poverty, to be sure, farther from wealth as measured in dollars, but much closer to the deeper wealth that God desires for us.
The spiritual disease of materialism and consumerism drags at me from time to time, to be sure. When it does, I find myself focusing on the things I do not have and, in that focus on plasma screens and sports cars, I turn away from sisters and brothers, from life in community measured by faithfulness and spirituality and justice, from my heart’s true home. When we all turn away like that, the results are clear: our sisters and brothers fall under the very real ills and diseases that come with extreme poverty. We shop till we drop; they simply drop.
When Jesus said, “you must be born from above,” he was not telling Nicodemus to turn away from the world and its troubles. He was telling him to be open to the movement of the spirit that blows where it will – despite where the currents of the culture and its values and their deep distortions might be blowing. In other words, when the culture says measure your worth and that of those around you by what they own, by their social standing, by their power in the market, I say to you, open yourself to the presence of the spirit that just might be most strongly felt among the least of these sisters and brothers.
To go and be present compassionately among the least of these will put us at risk, to be sure. Such risk moves us sometimes to great fearfulness. In such fear, it becomes all too easy to succumb to that third great social/spiritual disease: militarism.
It is not a partisan political statement to mention that the United States spends more than half a trillion dollars each year on its military, or that such spending is more than that of the next 160-some countries’ combined military spending, or that such spending is more than half of the discretionary spending of the United States’ federal budget. After all, these figures have been roughly parallel through administrations of both parties dating back for many years.
It is not a partisan political statement to recall King’s words from 40 years ago: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
These are not political statements; they are spiritual ones. They call us to confront a broad, national spiritual disease. They call us to the spiritual practice of doing justice, for justice is the ground on which stands the peace that we all desire.
Because bigotry, materialism and militarism are spiritual diseases they call us to be open, precisely, to the movement of the spirit and to the opportunity at every moment to be born again. That openness liberates us from particular partisan agendas and frees us to approach these diseases on the spiritual level – looking first deep within our own souls in order to confront and confess our own complicity, receive God’s grace and mercy and be transformed – born again, and again, and again – into the calling to do justice.
But because these spiritual diseases are manifest in the world in concrete social ills – homophobic laws, the physical diseases of extreme poverty, a too-easy acceptance of violence and warfare – because these spiritual diseases have social manifestations we must not stop at self-examination but rather we must follow the calling of Christians to engage in the spiritual practice of doing justice in ways that respond to the concrete needs of all those touched by bigotry, poverty and violence. And we must act in the world – in the public square and in the market place – as faithfully as possible to address the root political, social and economic manifestations of these spiritual ills.
None of this is simple, and it will not be easy. There is great risk in it, always. Perhaps no risk is greater than the spiritual risk of beginning to believe that the cure lies with us. This is where it becomes more necessary than ever to recall the final of Micah’s challenges: “walk humbly with God.” At the present hour we do not need to claim that God is on our side; but we do desperately need to be on God’s side. At the same time, it is more necessary than ever to recall the words of John, “God so loved the world …” the kosmos, in the Greek – meaning all of creation. God so loves it, has such compassion for it as to suffer with creation and work in and through the created order not to condemn it but to save it.
Let our humble walk be the journey of justice toward a commonwealth in which the great social ills are addressed at their deepest spiritual levels. And let it be said of us, some day down the road, that there walked a people engaged deeply, fully and joyously in the fundamental Christian practice of doing justice. There walked a people trying to sort out what belonged to whom and return it. There walked a people trying to be on God’s side. And when that day comes, morning will have broken and we will sing and dance for our God who even now works wonders among us. Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
7:13 AM
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