Justice | Michah 6:6-8

Recently, as my wife and I were cleaning the garage, Kate came across a box of old journals. Of course, she couldn't help digging in right then and there, and finding a few choice things to read aloud and to be embarrassed about (while I worked, of course!) After a couple of nuggets of good cringe-material, she opened one of the journals to a particularly poignant spot: to an account of the night we met.

It was six years ago, in a Denny's in Fremont. I had been running a Fundamentalists Anonymous group for people recovering from abusive religious experience, and Kate saw my ad in the newspaper. She had been raised as a Pentecostal evangelical, and had suffered under that oppressive system every bit as much as I.

It was a good meeting; one that I remember well. I mostly talked. Kate mostly cried. And her journal's account of this bore this all out. But then she read something which I had all but forgotten about. I had, at that time, reached a conclusion that there were three doctrines I could wholeheartedly embrace; about all else, I was agnostic. I have, in the intervening years, almost completely forgotten about my three, hard-won doctrines, but Kate not only remembered them from one telling, but she recorded them in her journal.

The three doctrines are these:

Number one: You cannot know. Religious traditions represent our "best guesses." When we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that we can not know.

The second doctrine was: religion motivated by fear is invalid.

The third doctrine is similar to the second: religion motivated by personal salvation is immoral.

Now that's a lot to take in, and I'm not going to elaborate much further upon these, but hearing them after so many years, I am struck by how indicative they are of my generation.

At thirty-five years old, I am on the cusp of what popular culture has named Generation X, those who missed out on the idealism of the 60's and were given no suitable ideology to take its place. Generation X'ers are cynical, suspicious and largely pessimistic about the world in general. My doctrines represent in a distilled form the attitudes of many young people. You cannot know. I will not allow you to manipulate me by fear. Nor will I buy into the lie that the part is more important that the whole.

These are not attitudes that could have existed in ages past. They are the product of Post-modernity, a time when all of our cherished ideas about how the universe functions have been blown away by quantum mechanics, when all of our ideas about God have been reduced to the evolution of human consciousness, when any scriptures we once held as sacred have been deconstructed and dissected into contradictory and non-authoritative layers of text.

These attitudes are born out of a scientific worldview which most adults have chosen to simply live in denial of. A worldview which says that all symbol systems, all cultural markers are arbitrary and vacant of any intrinsic meaning or value. A worldview which is deeply distrustful of corporations and hierarchy. A worldview which sees that our personal greed and machavellian attitudes towards the planet may have already rung the death-knell of any succeeding generations.

This worldview is not a bad thing, in my opinion. Oh, it's uncomfortable and unsettling, but it is also the painful processes of the human race growing out of adolescence into adulthood. I do not scorn, or struggle against the time I was born into, instead I struggle with it.

We all caught a pretty heavy dose of post-modern theology last summer, when in one of our sermon series' we deconstructed the Apostle's Creed. This was an enlightening experience for me. It was, in fact, transformative; but through it all I was nagged by the feeling that as I was ripping away the dross of so many centuries, I was erecting nothing in its place. I began to ask myself questions about what one CAN affirm in the Christian tradition. I began to look for something concrete, something that would answer the question: if all of our signposts have been taken away, how are we to live?

What makes you a Christian? When I was growing up, I would have told you that you are a Christian based on what you BELIEVE.

But this kind of thinking would be alien to the Jews. A Jew is a Jew until he or she dies. Regardless of what they believe, they are part of the family.

Christianity is not a racial religion; we can't belong by birth. But I suggest that it is still not what we believe that makes us Christians. I think it is what we DO that makes us Christians.

We are Christians because we follow Jesus. "Follow" is verb. It does not imply intellectual thought, but bodily movement. It does not imply assent, but action. The earliest of Christians, as we have seen, were not united by common belief; their beliefs about Jesus were wildly divergent from one another. What made them all Christians is that each, to the best of their ability, sought to live as they believed Jesus would have them live.

A couple of months ago, I was researching a story for the Pacific Church News, and visited a Spirituality-At-Work meeting in the cafeteria of a busy San Francisco office building. Here about six people of faith met over their sandwiches to pray together and talk about living spiritually in the workaday world. During one point of the conversation, the participants seemed at a loss for how to gauge whether or not they felt "successful" in their spiritual lives that day. Leave it to business people want to count out their spiritual till at the end of the workday!

During a pregnant pause, I was reminded of the prophet Micah's exhortation of the people of Israel: You have been told what is good. You know what God requires of you: to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God. I spoke this verse to the group and heads nodded in assent all around.

Here it was: simple, elegant, all-encompassing. Here is what God requires of you. Here is how you may gauge how "successful" you have been in your spiritual life this day. Theologians may spin their theologies from here to kingdom come, but when we bring our heads out of the clouds, and feel our feet once more on the good earth, we come back to the same three things: act justly, love mercy, walk humbly with God.

Micah knew what he was talking about. In some ways, his situation was similar to our own. The children of Israel had been taken away into captivity in Babylon. Judah had been conquered and colonized. The religious ideas of the Jews were being challenged by their proximity to their Zoroastrian neighbors, and there was no little bit of religious uncertainty and confusion. Micah warned them about the dangers of tossing away their heritage and reminded them that God really only requires very little.

Just as in a time of great personal stress, my three doctrines made sense of my existential discomfort, likewise in another time of great stress, it was these three doctrines of Micah's that comforted and supported this great people of faith. I believe they can comfort and support us as well.

Having finished my apologia for this series, let's talk about the first of Micah's "doctrines": Act Justly.

Over the holidays, I found that every time I passed the Oakland airport on 880 towards my new home, I would glance at a sign off to the right, but too late. I say too late, because it is the type of sign that has huge words the size of minivans spelled out by a grid of lightbulbs. The sign is always changing, in a regular, rotating pattern. Even banks have these kinds of signs, rotating from the temperature to the time to an ad about their interest rates.

This sign, however, is situated atop a labor union building, and every time I saw it, it said in enormous letters "NO PEACE." What a disconcerting message. What did it mean? I realized that it was probably the tail end of a longer message, which I was not able to catch the first part of simply because I have impeccably bad timing. One day I was resolute and watched the sign deliberately, not waiting for it to simply catch my eye, and I finally saw the first part of the message: "No justice."

"No justice. No peace." was the full message. It was powerful. It was also familiar, being a condensation of the Roman Catholic peace and justice movement's famous dictum: "If you want peace, work for justice."

This is not a liberal catch-phrase. It is not the rallying cry of leftist or socialist rabble-rousers. It is a simply stated truth. If there is no justice, there can be no peace.

I'd like you to think about that for a minute. If a government, such as El Salvador, denies its people, especially its poorest people justice, the people will be resentful and troublesome. Perhaps, like the United States of America, suffering under the injustice of George the Third, the people will take to arms and declare war. No. Unless there is justice in the land, peace will not follow.

In our own country, it was an entire population of African-Americans who decided they were fed up with the injustice they suffered at the hands of white Americans. Though they did not make war, they denied the possibility of peace until justice was awarded them.

What about on a smaller scale? In our daily lives it is no different. If we treat our neighbor unfairly, he is likely to yell at us, punch us in the nose, or sue us. If we treat our spouse badly, our domestic lives are likely to turn into a living hell. If we are cruel and authoritarian with our children they will rebel and crush any sense of peace within our family. Does the fault lie with the child, with the spouse or with the neighbor? Certainly not. It is a case of simple causality.

What about on a global scale? Unless we wake up and view the earth as a living organism with needs and rights to be protected we are in grave trouble. If we destroy the only means of support we have, we incur famine, disease and death on a scale we can scarcely even imagine, unparalleled in the entire history of humankind. Justice for the people must include justice for the earth, or the people will have no place to enjoy their peace.

It is a simple concept, but it is difficult to really bring home. If, in your everyday life, you know strife, this strife was probably precipitated by some act, knowingly or unknowingly, of injustice. We are all guilty of it. Instead of hearing out our neighbor's grievance, we write them off as crazy. Instead of listening when someone says that we have hurt their feelings, we brush it off, or blame it on them.

Truly listening to one another is a great spiritual discipline. It is one which we consciously strive to engender in this community. It is also a discipline at which we frequently fail in this community. It doesn't mean we don't, or shouldn't try; it just means we are human. But it is also human to pick ourselves up when we fall and try again. I am proud that we in this community seek to listen, know how to brush the dust off of our butts, and also know how to forgive each other.

But spiritual discipline also involves attention, bringing our awareness into ever more remote areas of our lives. In this, the God of process is our partner. We are growing into greater consciousness, greater sensitivity, and greater receptivity to the spirit. This doesn't happen overnight. It is a lifetime's journey. It started the moment you emerged howling from the womb and begins afresh each morning when your feet hit the rug at the side of your bed.

I do not think we need to be sign-carrying protesters shouting for "justice!" Although public demonstrations are important and have their place, most of us desire live quieter lives than this. The challenge for us is to listen to the still small voice of God in our breasts, who is not shouting "Justice!" but instead is whispering, "Were you fair to your brother? Did you hurt your sister's feelings?" And then the subtle nagging of the Holy Ghost, reminding you that there will be no peace until you make it right.

We do not like to be reminded of our sin. We have inherited too much of the Puritan mindset that set the scarlet letter "A" on the clothing of adulterers, and proclaimed that their lives were defined by and limited to this sin.

But we are much more than our sin. We are beings of infinite worth, of marvelous construction, capable of sublime beauty and meaning. And we all blow it. But we are not the sum total of our sin. We are much more than that. We have the power to sin, and the power to repent; the power to hurt, and the power to heal; the power to offend, and the power to say "I'm sorry." The power to make justice, the power to make peace. And as Mechtild of Magdeburg said in the 14th century, "God has given us the power to change our ways."

Let us pray.

Holy and just God,
In our heart of hearts we want to do what is right
And with all our souls we desire to live in peace.
Help us to see that peace cannot come anywhere
in the world unless justice is served
and we are none of us relieved of the responsibility
to make sure that justice is denied to none,
no matter how small, for you desire justice even for children
no matter how weak, for you desire justice even for the ill
no matter how poor, for you desire justice even in the face of the powerful
no matter how silent, for you desire justice even for the earth who has no voice.
Help us to understand that we are the agents of this justice
that the small injustices of our little lives participate in and support
the injustice we find at large.
Help us to be accountable, and to hold our leaders accountable,
that we may do, and know that we are doing,
what few and simple things you require of us as your people,
as people of faith. Amen.