September 2, 2005
Justice
Pentecost 16/18A Mt 18.15-20
It strikes me that the Great Commandment to love God and to love neighbor as oneself must surely have been easier to keep track of back during Jesus’ time. Even if there was only one God then as there is now, surely there were a lot fewer neighbors.
On the other hand, justice and fairness were no less important. So, as Matthew tells us, the early church devised its own system of appeals all the way from one-on-one — to only a few — to the whole community. If all that process failed, then it was down the chute along with all the other sinners. Although something tells me that not Jesus, but some of his confused followers came up with that “chute” idea.
This Great Commandment, this summary of the law and the prophets, talks about love, but it is also about justice. I like to think that justice is the way families and societies and institutions best love one another. Justice is the way our nation can now embrace the stricken Gulf Coast remembering how deeply connected are we all.
Justice has always been the very heart of the gospel. A just peace for all continues as the thrust of the church’s ministry and the message we proclaim in the name of God. Be it not only for the way we treat one another in our congregations, but be it also the way a diocese learns to live together and to use its energies in God’s name and not it’s own. And be it that way on and up to the highest courts in our land. Hearing Jesus’ counsel about a just society once again well serves to remind us and to recall us to that charge. We surely now don’t want for enough neighbors on whom to practice.
But justice is on hard times. We are so distracted, it’s difficult to do anything about it. Just a few weeks ago at a neighboring church right over there across the Cumberland River and with a lot better media connections than we have, the religious right got considerable press claiming — actually judging, if the truth be known — that our courts are as bad and as dangerous as, if not worse, than the terrorists. A short time later, one of their patron saints closed his case by recommending assassination be added to the simple and somewhat gentler appellate system just now suggested in Matthew’s gospel. Perhaps that might make them less terrible than the terrorists?
But that’s not all. Similarly minded folk in an organization called “Repent America” are claiming now that the gays and lesbians are at it again. Just as we caused 9/11, they’re now claiming that Katrina — whose orientation so far as we know was mostly north — was an act of God aimed at an upcoming gay pride event scheduled for New Orleans. Such flagrant blindness to the gospel of love and justice is apparently not enlightened even by a catastrophic tragedy of this dimension. Justice is not vengeance, and justice is on hard times.
This nation at its founding declared its interdependence with all nations and affirmed the notion that we are created equal… and endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among (us), deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Further, our founders struck an international chord consistent with and resonant to the gospel understanding of human being when they wisely devised a system of justice by balancing authority in our judicial, legislative, and executive branches. They left us this legacy that we might be its stewards. They certainly did not have in mind that it be hijacked by some or any religion and thus thrown into imbalance with total disregard for their wise counsel and, I might add, their understanding of the gospel and its Judaeo-Christian tradition.
But if Justice is the grammar of things, mercy is the poetry of things. The Cross says something like the same thing on a scale so cosmic and full of mystery that it is next to impossible to grasp. As it represents what in one way or another we are always doing to each other, the death of that innocent man hanging up there convicts us as the whole of humanity, and so we deserve the grim world that over the centuries we have made for ourselves. As it also represents what one or another thing we are always doing not so much to God above us somewhere as to God within us and among us everywhere, we deserve the very godlessness we have brought down upon our own heads. That is the justice of things.
But the Cross also represents the fact that goodness is present even in grimness, and God is present even in godlessness. That is why the Cross has become the symbol not of our darkest hopelessness, but of our brightest hope. That is the mercy of things. Granted who we are, perhaps we could have understood it no other way.
So long as the religious right remains wrong about justice, it will never be right about mercy. If Katrina is punishment about anything — and I believe it is rather a consequence than a punishment — it is the consequence of our continuing lack of stewardship of our environment and of our social responsibilities and of our economic inequities and their gradual bulldozing of us into what could ultimately become a class warfare beyond our wildest imagination and further, of our carelessness in our international relations.
Jesus fulfilled the law and the prophets and what they portended. He fulfilled it by consummating it with justice and peace and love. We are commanded to go and do likewise, for that is our stewardship. That is the way out of Gethsemane and through the Cross. That is the way back to Eden and into the kingdom of God.
September 1, 2005
Jesus wept
It is the usual OoN practice on Thursdays to offer some reflections on the coming Sunday’s propers. The gospel for this Sunday (Mt 18.15-20) is about justice. Today instead, I’m forwarding comments by the Revd Susan Russell, President of Integrity, a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender ministry in and to TEC. Their cause is self-explanatory. — LD
“I thought I was kidding when I preached on Sunday about the Rabid Religious Right fixing to blame gays and lesbians for Global Warming.
“Evidently not. I just finished a conversation with a reporter calling to ask if I had any comment on a press release from a group called ‘Repent America’ which is now blaming Hurricane Katrina on an act of God aimed at a gay pride event scheduled for New Orleans.
“You bet I had a comment: and it started with John 11:35 … ‘Jesus wept.’
“My comment was that just as Jesus wept at the grave of his friend Lazarus he weeps today for the death and destruction, for the suffering and loss caused by this stupendous natural disaster. And he weeps today that the Gospel he died to bring to life continues to be hijacked by those who use it as a weapon of mass destruction rather than a vehicle of abundant grace.
“My comment was that this kind of reckless religious rhetoric is as destructive to the fabric of our constitutional democracy as Hurricane Katrina was to the Gulf Coast.
“My comment was that what we need now is the united effort of those focused on reaching out to people in desperate need not the polarizing rhetoric of those focused on scapegoating a percentage of the population for a tragedy that affects an entire nation. Finally, my comment was that the death and destruction wreaked by Hurricane Katrina did not discriminate between gay and straight — and neither does the God who yearns to draw all people into relationship with God and with each other.
“I encourage you to check out the webpage for Repent America
“Let me know how you do. I’m too busy undermining western civilization and causing global warming to have time to check it out for myself. That and donating to the hurricane relief effort being coordinated by Episcopal Relief and Development. You, too, can donate online at