Do Justice
Notes
Transcript
What is Justice?
What is Justice?
Have you ever thought about how strange it is that in the world outside of humanity it’s totally socially acceptable for some really strange things to occur?
Like I think about one of the most prevalent stories from my childhood, a movie called the Lion King. The opening song is about the circle of life. Which is also a core teaching from the king Mufasa down to his son, Simba. All things exist in a relationship of being devoured in order to keep balance within the ecosystem of the savanna. Every being had a place, and often that place had its ultimate destiny in becoming someone else’s snack.
Pretty easy thing to teach when you are a lion who sits atop that circle of life right? It’s weird because it doesn’t offend us at all. That’s nature. That’s how the world literally works. Because even the lion eventually dies, becomes dust, and fertilizes the ground which then grows the food that those at the bottom of the food chain eat. It’s how it is. It’s not a problem for us, and it sure isn’t a problem for them.
But even within species it’s not like socially unacceptable to do some things that we’d certainly call criminal here in the world of humans. Lexi and I’s first home together was in an apartment complex that had a bunch of ponds, and with lots of ponds came lots of ducks. And with ducks come ducklings. We’d watch them grow up and it was really cute.
But one day as we were taking a walk we noticed that there was a duckling who was separated from the rest of his little duck family. He had a bit of a bum leg, and couldn’t waddle quickly at all. Concerned, we tried to figure out a way to reconnect the little chick with it’s people. But what we quickly found out by a simple search of the internet was that our little friend had likely been purposely abandoned. He or she was just too slow. And so momma abandoned them, and out of self preservation wouldn’t take them back. In a world full of gators and less than attentive drivers, you’re only as fast as your slowest pack member.
Yes. It’s really sad. It was hard to come to terms with. But I don’t think the ducks had a problem with it. Just us humans. And that’s because this is pretty unthinkable. Actually it’s a crime to abandon your child. Just last week a 1 hour old baby was found abandoned outside of a trailer park in Mulberry Florida. Luckily she is ok and healthy now, but that makes you feel something terrible inside right?
That’s because as human beings we have an internal sense of one of God’s most prevalent attributes. Something that we have been given because we bear God’s image. That sense is called justice. When there is suffering, when there is pain, when there is harm being done, we have been given an internal reaction that demands that it be made right.
Justice is a highly prevalent theme throughout the biblical story, and it’s something that the church and we as God’s people are called to be deeply concerned about. Which can be tough for us to recon with in a society that is so deeply divided like our own. But just because it might be tough, doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility to talk about it and to live it out in our lives.
The Words of the Prophet
The Words of the Prophet
Today we begin a short 3 week series called “Walk” and this series is going to focus around the words of the prophet Micah. Particularly we are going to dissect Micah 6:6-8 and see the wisdom that it speaks into our lives about how we are called to practically live in our world.
Now Micah’s words come to Israel sometime in the 8th Century BC, before the exile to Babylon, when both the Northern and Southern Kingdoms are doing fairly well. But disaster is looming out in the distance for both Kingdoms. And what you’ll find in studying Israel’s history is that neither kingdom was doing a very good job of living into the ethic of radical equality that God had taught them though the law.
(If you’re reading along in the Bible with us then you are in the midst of the law now. I know it’s super tough to stick with, but do please look for the ways that God is instituting a radically equal society. It’s written all throughout it.)
So back to Micah. Micah is writing to speak out and remind the people what they have been called to do as God’s people. So here we go this is Micah 6:6-8
“With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
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?
In the form of a rhetorical question, Micah is making an argument that like, hey it’s not about your sacrifices. That’s not what God wants from you. Which if you’re reading Leviticus right now you’re like.. wait that sounds not like what is happening in my Bible right now. I get it, but this should help you see what’s really up with that part of the law. That stuff is not really what God is after. God is after the fruit of following him.
Justice, mercy aka kindness, and humility. Micah is saying “this is what it all boils down to.” So these three things are super important to God in the Old Testament, and if you know anything about the life of Jesus, you can probably see how Jesus embodied these three ways of life as well.
So today we are going to focus solely on the first of these three “requirements” from God. Doing Justice. So Let’s dive right in.
Mishpat and Tsedeqah
Mishpat and Tsedeqah
When we look at the whole story of the Bible, we see that as soon as sin is introduced into the world things start to go really badly. Relationships start to be fractured, and violence becomes a part of the human condition.
The failure of Adam and Eve to obey God in the garden caused their relationship to one another and their relationship to God. And then once Cain kills Abel the trajectory of humanity declines sharply towards deep pain and injury.
And the entire work of God to fix all of this mess is what’s called God’s Justice. God sees the brokenness of this world and sets out on a course of action that seeks to bring wholeness and restoration back to the world that he created. He seeks to make it right — or righteous — again.
God’s justice, which is the Hebrew worship “mishpat” is deeply connected to his goal of making people and communities righteous. Righteousness, another Hebrew word “tsedeqah” is a really churchy word that we use and often misunderstand. But it’s critical that we understand what it really means if we are going to understand the end goal of God’s justice, and therefore our own pursuit of doing justice.
Righteousness is not like some checklist of whether we are good or not. If you are like me when you here “oh they are a very righteous person” what you think of is that they are morally blameless, that they have checked all the right boxes in order to have achieved some high level of “goodness.” But that’s not really what biblical righteousness, or tsedeqah, is really all about.
Righteousness is a state of being in right relationship. It means that the brokenness that sin introduces into our relationships is healed, and that we are broken free from the cycles that cause the deterioration of our relationships, and that we do the work required not to slip back into those cycles.
So if that’s just a bunch of words to you, let me give you an example. Say you are an employee who has some struggles with time management, particularly in the morning. That struggle causes you to be late to work often. This strains the relationship between you and you supervisor — who happens to be your friend. It gets complicated because they don’t fire you, but they are covering for you. And it’s bothering them deeply. Your friendship is suffering.
In order to have a righteous relationship with them again some things need to change. You need to take a look at what’s happening in the morning. The reality is that the morning isn’t the problem. It’s the night before where you watch TV until 2am that’s the problem. This causes you to oversleep, which causes you to be late, which causes your current relational stress with your friend.
So you say to your friend, I’m sorry and I’m going to change. You start going to bed at 10pm and getting enough sleep to easily wake up and be at work on time. Your friend is like yeah but lets see how long this lasts. Days turn into weeks which turn into months of you being on time and being a better employee, and your friend has almost forgotten all the mess that was created. Your relationship is righteous again.
Do you see the point here. Righteousness is the goal of the human experience. It’s what God wants for us. God wants us to have a righteous relationship with one another, and God wants us to have a righteous relationship with him.
But the only way for that to happen is for justice to be done. Righteousness is the goal of biblical justice. God’s justice in the Bible (which can also be called judgment) is almost exclusively referring to restorative justice. It is the means by which relationships are meant to be healed.
For you and your boss/friend that justice probably came in the form of a conversation like “I can’t cover for you anymore and I’m going to have to fire you if you don’t change, and also I don’t trust you anymore and I’m not sure we can continue being friends if this keeps up.”
In the Bible it looks like God setting forth a whole bunch of laws about how people were practically called to love one another and make up for it when terrible things occurred between people and communities. It looks like God giving a few practical ways for the people to love him.
And when people still couldn’t get it together, God’s justice looked like the person of Jesus Christ who came to embody righteousness, and to spread and share that righteousness with us through his blameless life, his death on the cross, and subsequent resurrection from the grave.
Trying too Hard
Trying too Hard
And that’s really the basis of justice. I know that justice is something that the world outside of the church and the Bible has really distorted, but God is quite clear that the type of justice that we are called to seek after and do is the kind of justice that creates a state of righteousness.
We are called to be people who go about the work of restoration. We are called to be the people who restore individuals and communities and repair the broken relationships that have been caused though sin.
But we often get too caught up in trying to be “good Christians.” We overemphasize all the secondary stuff. Just like the prophet Micah asked… “what does the Lord want from me? Lots of religious observance? sacrifices? no. Do justice.”
What does that look like for us as Christians? Well it really starts with us evaluating our world and our own lives to see what’s not really righteous. Where are the broken relationships in our own lives, in our own community, in our world? Where can some restorative justice be used in order to make this world look more like the world God wants?
And beyond that, how are you, how are we as a church called to embody that work? I’ll tell you that it starts with meeting people where they are. In the book of Romans, the apostle Paul writes to a community that is divided over some really silly things.
See the believers who converted from the pagan religion of Rome to Christianity are in the majority. But they do have some Jewish-Christian folks among them, and Jewish-Christians still followed a lot of the customs of the Jewish faith, especially concerning food that they ingested.
So Paul writes this to them in Romans 15:1-5
We who are strong ought to put up with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves.
Each of us must please our neighbor for the good purpose of building up the neighbor.
For Christ did not please himself; but, as it is written, “The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.”
For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.
May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus,
These words: strong and weak also simply mean powerful and powerless. The strong in this context were those who had no dietary restriction, while the weak were those that did. And the relationship between them was suffering because the powerful majority was not being sensitive to the needs of the powerless majority. The Gentile Christians would include in their fellowship foods that Jewish Christians couldn’t even been in the same room as. They were excluded from the communal life of the church because it involved practices that they could not partake in.
Paul’s point to the Romans is that in order to do justice for these Jewish converts and have a righteous relationship with them they must put aside their own preferences in order to nurture the faith and well being of their neighbors.
For you and I this mean simply looking at the ways that our church or our lives are unintentionally exclusive. Are there practices in our community or in our world that cause harm, without us even meaning it. And what does it look like for us to do justice to those situations and create a world that is more righteous.
We live in dark times, in divided times. As a country we continue to draw lines of separation. Blue/Red. Black/White. Straight/Queer. Whatever/Whatever. But this is not the way of Jesus, and I truly hope for and believe that it’s not really as bad as we are taught to believe. But it only gets better if we meet people where they are and do the work of justice that leads to restored love, trust, and relationships. We cannot just allow ourselves to accept that which is broken and say “well that’s just the way it is” or “it’s the circle of life.” That works in the Savanna. That doesn’t work here in Fort Pierce. That doesn’t work in our country. That doesn’t work in God’s kingdom.
There’s so much work to be done, and so much work we are doing. This is the work that Jesus came and embodied, and it is the work that God requires us to do. The question is, are you going to do it?