“Let Justice Roll ”
Midweek Lenten Service –
John 21:15-19; Acts 4:33-37; Micah 6:6-8
Grace and peace to you from our triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
This evening we focus on justice. When we think of justice we generally refer to the justice system, especially the criminal justice system – the law, the police and the courts. In our country, justice is done when alleged lawbreakers are caught and given a fair trial by a jury of their peers. To call a situation unjust, is to say it is not right or unfair.
But when the scriptures talk about justice, there is more than legal process. Especially in the Old Testament, wherever justice – Hebrew: Mishpawt is, God is rarely far away.
In our first reading tonight, the Old Testament prophet Micah, speaks to us saying, “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” The doing of justice in the scriptures is how our neighbor see and experience our love, our kindness and our relationship with God.
Think about it. Many of you have friends who don’t go to church at all. How do they know about what you do here in church? How do they see that it makes a difference that you come here? How do they know you are a Christian and not just someone with a good heart? Doing justice. It is an important way that we love our neighbors as ourselves.
Doing justice means going deeper than writing a check. It means getting more active. It means asking questions that people would rather not be asked. Doing justice means taking a risk. It means walking with God in humble obedience to that his will, not the world’s is done. There is more to justice than charity, just as there is more to loving your neighbors than waving at them when you see them on the street.
Doing justice means taking action at any level necessary. It is not only to treat the wound, but to try to eliminate the wound’s cause. Ronald Rollheiser relates a story, a kind of parable really, that illustrates how justice is more than charity, how it is something much more challenging and closer to who God calls us to be.
Once upon a time there was a town that was built just beyond the bend of a large river. One day some of the children from the town were playing beside the river when they noticed three bodies floating in the water. They ran for help and the townsfolk quickly pulled the bodies out of the water.
One body was dead so they buried it. One was alive, but quite ill, so they put that person in the hospital. The third turned out to be a healthy child, who they then placed with a family who cared for it and who took it to school.
From that day on, every day a number of bodies came floating down the river and, every day, the good people of the town would pull them out and tend to them – taking the sick to hospitals, placing the children with families, and burying those who were dead.
This went on for years; each day brought its quota of bodies, and the townsfolk not only came to expect a number of bodies each day but they also worked hard to develop more elaborate systems for picking them out of the water and tending to them. Some of the townsfolk became quite generous in tending to those bodies and a few extraordinary townspeople even gave up their jobs so that they could tend to this concern full-time. And the town itself felt a certain healthy pride in its generosity.
However, during all these years and despite all that generosity and effort, nobody thought to go up the river, beyond the bend that hid from their sight what was above them, and find out why, every day like clockwork, those bodies came floating down the river.
Justice is not only about treating the symptoms. It is fundamentally about caring and risking enough to tackle the cause of the symptoms. It’s one of the things that has been so exciting and fulfilling about our young people raising fund and working with the Heifer Project. Currently our Sunday school kids are giving offerings to (and we have a honeybee out in the narthex) fight hunger in
How many kids here tonight, know about or have given offerings to the Heifer Project?
What kind of animals? Pigs? Bunnies?
One way to do that would be to simply write a check to one of the International Relief Agencies. They would then deliver food (we hope) to the starving people. This is important work. Feeding the hungry is obedient to God’s call to care for the neighbor. But it doesn’t break the cycle of hunger. It doesn’t give the starving people a way to once more feed themselves.
The Heifer Project and many of the World Hunger programs that are funded through the Crop Walk and the Empty Bowls project, are ways to go up around the bend and find out why those bodies are floating down river.
When we discover the Why, we ask How? How do we change thing so the bodies stop coming down river in the first place? This year we are working to send bees to Malawi, not only help people feed themselves, but to provide a product – honey – that can bring in money to help them buy other necessities to improve their standard of living. This is doing justice. Changing the structures and the environments so that people can live as God has called them to live.
There is a great quote that says:
Strength without compassion is violence
Compassion without justice is mere sentiment
Justice without love is Marxism
And . . . love without Justice is baloney.
When Jesus give his three-fold command to Peter in tonight’s gospel:
Feed my lambs, tend my sheep, feed my sheep. We are hearing a call not only to feed and care for one another, but to do justice. To look deeper and farther and clearer to find the causes of injustice and unrighteousness. To seek our role in promoting justice and righteousness in their place.
It’s no coincidence that these words of Jesus in the gospel of John are often called the Pastor’s job description. But Jesus didn’t say these commands were only for clergy there the Christian’s job description. God’s justice and righteousness know no boundaries.
The famous words of the prophet Amos: . . . let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream . . .paint the picture. Justice and righteousness together rolling wherever they will, unchannelable. They are ever-flowing. No one dam them up or stop them.
You, in each of your lives, carry the waters of justice and righteousness into the world through your faith. And the God in whom you believe gives you the power not only to care, but to change. The God who calls you his sheep, calls you to feed and tend one another.
Remember, what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God. Let each of us so walk with God this Lenten season, and in every season. So that Justice may roll. Amen.
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