Sowing Justice

Sowing Justice

Prov. 22:8-9,22-23; Jas. 2:1-10; Mk. 7:24-37[1]

As a white male, born into a relatively comfortable middle-class family, I didn't have much experience with the systemic injustice in our culture as I was growing up.  Not personal experience at least.  I did have a run-in with a Texas Christian University Campus Cop who had quite an attitude and cornered me in my car over a parking ticket.  But otherwise, I really can’t say I suffered injustice.  In fact, I’m quite sure I benefitted from the systemic injustice of our culture indirectly at least—whether I knew it or not, I had certain advantages that others did not.  It seems to me that justice is like that—you have to have experienced injustice personally to have much concern for it. Most people like us these days don’t seem to have much interest in justice.  We are worried about our jobs, or about our kids, or about where our culture and society are headed.  Come to think of it, maybe we are interested in justice after all.

Justice is a concept that is at the heart of the Hebrew Bible.[2]  The very essence of what God expects from the people who claim to practice faith is to “do justly and love mercy and walk humbly with our God” (Mic 6:8).  I’m not sure we know what to do with that.  We think of justice in terms of crime and punishment.  It’s hard for us to reconcile justice with mercy, because in our minds they seem to be opposites.  But in the Hebrew Bible, nothing could be further from the truth.  The practice of justice and the practice of mercy are one and the same.  They go hand-in-hand, like faith and hope and love.  The Hebrew Bible makes it clear over and over again that justice is about ensuring well-being, or shalom, for everyone.[3]  It’s about a way of life that makes it possible to everyone to thrive, not just the privileged few.

If you look at key passages in the Hebrew Bible, you’ll find that justice is about lifting up those who have been beaten down.  It’s a way of life defined by compassion and generosity (Prov. 22:9).[4]  As we saw last week, the Bible gets very specific about this—justice means taking care of orphans and widows, who have no one else to take care of them.  It means welcoming immigrants, not hunting them down and chasing them out.  It means feeding the hungry, not blaming their bad choices for their lot in life.  It’s about supporting the sick with a compassionate presence, and comforting those who are grieving.  It is mercy in action.[5]

One reason we Christians are so unfamiliar with the concept of justice is because the New Testament doesn’t speak the same language the Hebrew Bible does.  For that reason, it’s easy to get confused and think that the Hebrew Bible is a book of Law and commandments and obedience and judgment.  We much prefer the New Testament as a book of grace and compassion.  But that kind of understanding is a vast misunderstanding.  The Hebrew Bible is just as much a book of grace and love and mercy as the New Testament, and the New Testament is just as much a book of obedience and justice.  They just use different words to talk about it.

It seems to me that the way the New Testament talks about “doing justly” is “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Jas. 2:8).  Jesus said this was the heart of God’s command.  And, in fact, in this Jesus is following the Law, the Torah, of the Hebrew Bible, because he is quoting from one of the Books of the Law, the book of Leviticus.  If we were to take the time to look at Leviticus 19, where this command comes from, we would find that loving your neighbor is defined in very down-to-earth terms.[6]  For example, loving your neighbor is about leaving the gleanings from your field for the poor (Lev. 19:9-10).  It’s about dealing honestly with others (Lev. 19: 13).  It’s about honoring the handicapped (Lev. 19:14).  It’s about not slandering others, not hating them, and not seeking revenge (Lev. 19:16-18).  Sounds like justice to me.[7]

When you look at our world, it feels like things are out of kilter.  From the workplace to the schoolhouse to the courtroom to the home, it feels like things aren’t quite the way they’re supposed to be.  It certainly doesn’t feel like we’re thriving.  Perhaps we are in this situation not in spite of all that we’re doing, but precisely because of what we’re doing.  If you take a close look at our way of life, I think it’s hard not to conclude that we as a people are sowing injustice.  We ought not be so surprised, then, when we reap the calamity that goes with injustice (Prov. 22:8).

How do we change things?  What can we do to make a difference?  What would it look like for us to sow justice in our land instead of injustice?  Well, it may sound trite, but I think we won’t go far astray if we follow Jesus’ example.  It seems to me that Jesus’ whole life was one of sowing justice—whether it meant healing a gentile woman’s daughter, even though both of them would have been despised by most of the Jewish people of their day.  Or whether it meant caring for a deaf mute, who would have been very easy to overlook and ignore.  As in the two examples from our Gospel lesson for today, Jesus’ life was dedicated to caring for those who were the least and the left out and the passed over and the shut out.  This made him not so popular with the “job creators” of his day and time, but he did it because he was following the Biblical mandate to love your neighbor as yourself.  As we follow his example, we will sow justice, and hopefully bring healing to ourselves and to those around us.

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[1] © 2012 Alan Brehm. A sermon preached by Rev. Dr. Alan Brehm on 9/9/12 at First Presbyterian Church, Dickinson, TX and at A Community of the Servant-Savior Presbyterian Church, Houston, TX.

[2] Cf. Gerhard Von Rad, Old Testament Theology I:370, where he says that there is no concept in the Hebrew Bible with so central a significance.

[3] Cf. James L. Mays, Psalms, 311, “Righteousness is the rightness that makes for life and shalom; justice is found in decisions and actions according to righteousness,” Cf. also Jürgen Moltmann,The Way of Jesus Christ, 121: “God’s justice and righteousness brings shalom to both his people and land.”  Cf. also J. Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, 163-96; Hans Küng, The Christian Challenge: A Shortened Version of On Being A Christian, 293-312.

[4] Cf. R. E. Murphy, Proverbs, 167: “riches do not entitle one to establish class distinctions since God created all, both rich and poor.” Cf. also ibid., 261 where goes further: “both rich and poor were created by God, so that mockery of the poor is a blasphemy.”  Cf. also Raymond C. Van Leeuwen, “Book of Proverbs,” in New Interpreters Bible V:200.

[5] Cf. Von Rad, Old Testament Theology I:374.  Cf. Robert W. Wall, “Where Wisdom is Found,” Christian Ethics 2009, 31: “The care of poor and powerless believers is a hallmark of God’s covenant-keeping people.”  Cf. also Robert W. Wall, The Community of the Wise, 114: “God stands on the side of those the powerful of this world exploit and the people of God ignore.”

[6]Cf. similarly Luke Timothy Johnson, “The Letter of James,” New Interpreters Bible XII:195, where he says that the actions specified by Lev. 19 (and in the Letter of James) are “incompatible with love.”  Cf. also J. Milgrom, Leviticus, 226; Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 4.2:804.

[7]Cf. J. E. Hartley, Leviticus, 322-24, where he explains that Lev. 19 is a call to holy living, and that “Holiness finds tangible expression in loving,” especially in the ways spelled out in this chapter.  Cf. also Milgrom, Leviticus, 235-36.

Heart Service

Heart Service

Dt. 4:1-9; Mk. 7:1-23; Jas. 1:17-27[1]

As we enter the last phase of this year’s political campaign season, it seems to me that most of us have heard so much rhetoric that we have become almost immune to it all.  It wouldn’t be too hard to find sound bites where most of the politicians running for office have taken one side of a position, and then have reversed themselves completely.  Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that they have contradicted themselves.  We have been so saturated with words and promises and claims and counter-claims that none of it means much to us any more.  Most of us have already made up our minds any way.  Politics these days—especially presidential politics—are about where you take your stand in the cultural battles that divide us.  And yet, the parties will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to try to win our votes.  But in my humble opinion, most of the words we’ll be exposed to in the coming months won’t do much to change anybody’s mind. 

I suspect a lot of people view our faith the way we view politics: it’s all a lot of words that don’t mean much.  If they’re not completely jaded by religion, they may still look to see if those of us who profess faith follow up with actions that demonstrate it. But many people in our world have already given up on religion.  And it’s because we religious people have spent our time and energy arguing about things that tend to appear to the average bystander as something like debating the right way to wash your hands as a religious ritual.  Or we’ve done things that have completely contradicted our claim to faith.  Or we’ve bogged down our religion with making rules about who’s in and who’s out.

 But Jesus took a completely different approach.  Jesus demanded that his disciples do two things: love God and love their fellow human beings.  While it’s not a long list of rules, it’s still not particularly easy when you think about it.  We shouldn’t think that Jesus came to let us off the hook when it comes to obeying God’s commands.  Jesus doesn’t make it easier for us to live the life of faith, he makes it harder!  He challenges us “observe the commandments of the Lord your God diligently” (Deut. 4:5-6) by fulfilling the spirit of the commands, not just the letter.  Jesus follows the tradition of the biblical prophets when he insists that faith should include one’s whole life.  From the very beginning, that tradition has insisted that those who profess faith show that their faith truly makes a difference in the way they live.[2]   Otherwise, it’s no faith at all; as Jesus said, it’s just “lip service” (Mk. 7:6-7; quoting Isa. 29:13)!

Now it may seem strange to people raised on the gospel of grace to hear about observing the commandments.  But the simple truth is that the biblical witness has always insisted that the way you live your life demonstrates the quality of your faith.  For example, James says that “true religion” is to bridle your tongue, care for widows and orphans, and keep yourself untainted by the world (Jas. 1:27).  Like the prophets before him, James knew that putting your faith into action has to be specific—faith is a matter of how you use your words, how you treat the powerless and destitute, and how you view “holiness.”  If you think about it, these three areas of our lives are where our faith shows up—or doesn’t.  How easy it is to turn from our “Christian life” to slandering or condemning another person!  How easy it is to make ourselves feel less impotent in this world by mistreating someone who has no voice!  How easy it is to rationalize and justify our failure to “do justly and love mercy and walk humbly with our God” by wrapping ourselves in a mantle of false piety.

It seems to me that is precisely one of the great problems with all religions. It is all too easy for religion to become nothing more than a cultural phenomenon—it simply endorses “the way things have always been” and uses God and Scripture to reinforce that tradition.  But since God’s word challenges all societies and all cultures to recognize their profound failures, if we are going to simply go along with the way things are, then we must “abandon the commandment of God” (Mk. 7:8).[3] 

But Jesus makes it clear in his dispute with his Jewish opponents that it’s not the so-called cultural “sins” that defile us in God's sight.[4]  You know what I’m talking about here—those ways we define people who are different from us as “unclean” regardless of their true character!  For the Pharisees of Jesus’ day it was washing your hands the right way.  We have different ways of defining people as unclean, but they are just as culturally motivated.[5] Jesus says that it is what you do that defiles you. 

Jesus presents us with a choice.  The reality is that if we choose to live the life of faith, we will have to turn our back on sham religion that justifies our sin—even if it means turning our back on the cultural norms that most of us cling to for a sense of stability.[6]  The plain but challenging truth is that authentic faith has always been about God’s grace changing your heart and mind so much that it changes the way you live. It’s not a matter of lip service, but of heart service.[7]  Authentic faith is about a different way of living that flows naturally from a heart that has been changed by God’s love and mercy and grace, and therefore a heart that can do no less than seek to make all of life about loving God and loving others

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[1] © 2012 Alan Brehm. A sermon preached by Rev. Dr. Alan Brehm on 9/2/12 at First Presbyterian Church, Dickinson, TX and at A Community of the Servant-Savior Presbyterian Church, Houston, TX.

[2] Cf. Emil Brunner, The Divine Imperative, 116, speaking of God claiming us for his kingdom through his love; cf. also Paul Tillich, “Doing the Truth,” The Shaking of the Foundations, 114-117; Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, 187-206; and Brian McLaren, Generous Orthodoxy, 249-51.  Cf. also Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 63, where he can say that only those who are obedient believe!

[3] The specific commandment involved supporting aged parents as a way of “honoring your father and mother.”  For the background, see Pheme Perkins, “The Gospel of Mark,” New Interpreters Bible VIII:606-7; H. W. Attridge and A. Y. Collins, Mark, 351-53.

[4] John Ortberg, “Pharisees Are Us,” The Christian Century (Aug 23, 2003): 20, where he points out that even though the Pharisees knew that the heart of the Torah was loving God with heart and soul and mind and strength, they focused on things like dietary laws (hand washing) as “boundary markers.”  He says, “All groups of human beings have a tendency to be exclusive; they want to know who is inside and who is out. So they adopt identity markers—visible practices of dress or vocabulary or behavior that serve to distinguish who is inside the group from who is outside.”

[5] Ortberg, “Pharisees Are Us,” 20 says, “Any time people are not experiencing authentic transformation … they will inevitably be drawn toward some kind of faith characterized by boundary markers. We will look for substitute ways of distinguishing ourselves from those on the outside. The boundary markers change from century to century, but they all reinforce a false sense of superiority, fed by the intent to exclude others.”

[6] Cf. Cynthia M. Campbell, “ID Check,” The Christian Century (Aug. 22, 2006): 16.  She says, “For many Christians, there seems to be a need to find ways to guard the borders of religious identity All sorts of issues are lifted up as identity-defining, and the stance one takes with respect to them determines whether one is a ‘real Christian.’”  Cf. similarly, Lamar Williamson, Jr., Mark, 135-36.

[7] Cf. Heidi Husted, “Matters of the Heart,” The Christian Century (Aug. 16, 2000): 828.  She says, “It’s ironic that the first-century Bible believers and the big-time Bible defenders are the ones who end up being the worst Bible breakers, because they do not realize that, as Mary Ann Tolbert says in Sowing the Gospel, ‘if the heart is God’s ground, nothing else is required; and if the heart is not God’s ground, nothing else will suffice.’”  Cf. also Perkins, “The Gospel of Mark,” NIB VIII:606; and Robert A. Guelich, Mark 1-8:26, 371.

A Whole New Way

A Whole New Way

Jn. 6:35, 41-51[1]

For several weeks we’ve been exploring the role of faith in our lives.  Faith challenges us to move beyond believing only what we can see to entrusting our lives to God. It is a whole different way of life that sees the possibility of new life in every death, the possibility of light shining in the deepest darkness, and the possibility of hope in the midst of despair. Faith is a challenge because it takes something of a leap for all of us to really entrust our lives to something like that.  Faith is also a choice.  To embrace faith is to choose to look at reality from the point of view that God is making all things new.  Besides that, faith is also a response.  It is a response to our experience of something beyond us, something that perhaps even strains our ability to understand or even imagine.

Ironically, I don’t think faith plays a very significant role in most of our lives these days.  For all the rhetoric of faith in our culture, I don’t believe it is the primary motivation behind much of what we do.  I think we’re motivated much more significantly by other things.  Things like ambition: we want to succeed, we want to achieve something great.  Or we’re motivated by competition: we want to be seen as better than others, or to see ourselves as better than others.  Some of us are motivated by the desire for prestige, seeking recognition or even fame.  Others are driven by greed: thinking somehow that the quality and quantity of our stuff defines our worth as individuals.  And then there are those who are obsessed with power:  wanting to control our own lives and the lives of those around us.  And many of us are motivated by fear.  We fear being alone, we fear losing our livelihood, we fear losing our health, we fear losing our stability, and so we try to protect ourselves from what we fear in any way we can.

But the reality is that a life motivated by these things is no life at all.  They are relentless taskmasters that always ask us for more and never give us the life we hoped to gain through them. I think that’s one of the lessons Jesus was trying to teach the people of his day and ours through the “Bread of Life” discourse.  In one puzzling verse, Jesus brings this into focus by saying that he’s going to give his flesh for the life of the world (John 6:51).  Some people take that literally and believe that you have to actually eat the flesh of Jesus and drink his blood in order to have eternal life.[2] But I think what that misses the fact that Jesus is speaking metaphorically.  There are many places in the Gospel of John where Jesus talks about laying down or giving his life for the world.  In all of them, he’s pointing to his death on the cross as an event that changes everything for everyone, everywhere.[3]  Unfortunately, we run into some obstacles here as well.  The traditional view of Jesus’ death on the cross is that, by pouring out his life’s blood on the cross to satisfy God’s wrath against us, he makes  it possible for us to live forever in heaven rather than being condemned to hell for our sins. 

But that seems to me to stray far afield from what Jesus is talking about here.  In John’s Gospel, he talks about giving people eternal life, but it is a life that begins now.  It is a full and abundant life here and now.[4]  It is a whole new way of living.  And so I think we have to ask ourselves, from that perspective, how it is that Jesus giving his life for us makes it possible for us to have this life here and now.  For one thing, I think Jesus’ own faith in God that enabled him to endure such suffering for our sakes explodes the false motivations that control our lives. When it comes to ambition, what level of “success” or “achievement” could ever compare with Jesus’ sacrifice of his very life?  And it seems to me that all our superficial measures for competing with each other just fall away when we really comprehend the depth of love Jesus expressed in that one act. Again, when you think about the fact that Jesus gave up his very life, our greed for more stuff can’t even come close to satisfying us.  And then there’s power: it seems to me that Jesus exploded the myth of power by showing what true power is—the power of love that is willing to sacrifice itself for others.  And finally, Jesus’ courageous faith in the face a terrifying death inspires us to overcome the fears we face.

In short, it seems to me that when we seek to follow in the footsteps of the faith that enabled Jesus to give up his life for the life of the world, it frees us for a whole new way of living.  When we embrace that kind of faith, we discover a life that is free from the relentless taskmasters that never deliver what they promise.  We discover a whole new way of living, one that is motivated by compassion and giving, by mercy and caring, by faith and hope and love.  It’s a whole new way of living that is full and abundant and free—a life that is truly worth living.

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[1] © 2012 Alan Brehm. A sermon preached by Rev. Dr. Alan Brehm on 8/12/12 at First Presbyterian Church, Dickinson, TX and at A Community of the Servant-Savior Presbyterian Church, Houston, TX.

[2] Ernst Haenchen, John: Commentary on the Gospel of John, 298-99, points out that the letters of Ignatius show that the early church saw this as the only way to “guard against the gnostic heresy that Jesus’ body was only an apparition.”  Cf. also Gerard S. Sloyan, 73.

[3] Cf. John Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel According to John, on 6:51; cf. also Haenchen, John, 294; and George. R. Beasley-Murray, John, 93.  Cf. also Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 4.2:274, where he refers to Question 76 of the Heidelberg Catechism, which raises the question of eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking his blood, and answers that it means “to embrace with a trusting heart the whole passion and death of Christ” and to be “united more and more to his blessed body by the Holy Spirit.”

[4] Cf. Beasley-Murray, John, 94: “It is characteristic of this Gospel, however, that the emphasis in the passage falls not on Christ’s death for sin but on his death for life.”

Perishable Things

Perishable Things

Jn. 6:24-35[1]

Last week we talked about the difficulty of putting our faith in a God that no one has ever seen and a Savior whom none of us ever met in person.  I think the challenge we have with believing in things “unseen” is one reason why we tend to put our faith much more easily in other things.  Things we can see and touch.  Things like career, finances, family, relationships, and our own ability to control our lives. Unfortunately, life has a way of reminding us that our faith in those things may not be rewarded in the way we expect.  When it comes to our career, most of us these days can expect to experience a significant disruption in our career at least once in our lives.  Finances are no more reliable.  We entrust our life savings to financial institutions who engage in what is basically a sophisticated form of gambling, and may wind up losing our shirts.  And people—whether our family or our spouses or our children or our friends—are all flawed and fallible and imminently capable of letting us down when we most need them. 

In a very real sense, most of the what we invest our faith in fall under the category of “perishable things” that Jesus talks about in our Gospel lesson for today.  After feeding the 5000 with five loaves and two fish, he and the disciples crossed the lake, only to find that the crowd had followed them there.  When they approached him, he abruptly accused them of seeking the “food that perishes.”  In a sense, he said they followed him not because they were trusted in him and in God’s cause of peace and justice and freedom in the world, but because they had a good meal.  In the dialogue that follows, it would seem that they were looking for a repeat of the miracle of manna in the wilderness.  It would seem that they believed that if Jesus could give them the manna from heaven like Moses did, then he must really be the Messiah.[2] It’s hard to tell whether the crowd was even aware of the miracle that had happened the day before.[3] What they did understand was that it was Jesus who fed them, by whatever means. 

But Jesus was constantly aware of the dangers of faith that is based on tangible results.[4]  Whenever you get whatever it is you asked for, it’s only a matter of time before you begin to wonder, and then you need something more to bolster your faith.  I think that’s why Jesus was so harsh with the crowd.  He was aware that they weren’t looking for the new life of God’s peace and justice and freedom.  They weren’t following Jesus because they believed he was bringing them this new life.  They were following him because they were looking for some kind of visible confirmation so they could believe.[5]

But Jesus called them to a completely different kind of faith.[6]  He called them to “Throw your lot in with the One that God has sent” (Jn. 6:29 MSG).  That means throwing their lot in with God’s cause.  It’s the same kind of the faith that the three young men displayed when they confronted King Nebuchadnezzar and refused to worship his statue.  In effect, they said to him, “Our God is able rescue us from the fiery furnace, but even if he doesn’t we will not worship you” (Daniel 3:17-18).  They had “thrown in their lot” with God’s cause in the world.  They weren’t about to give that up for the sake of anything or anyone.

That kind of faith is not easy. It’s very much like Abraham and Sarah setting out on a journey without even knowing where you’re going.  That kind of faith without external props can feel incredibly uncertain. It deals with “things hoped for” and “things not seen” (Heb. 11:1).  It’s impossible to wrap your hands around that kind of faith and get a firm grip on it.  It’s no wonder most of us prefer to place our faith in something concrete, something we can see and touch.  But at the end of the day, all those seemingly reliable objects of our faith fall short.  They all let us down.  And we really shouldn’t be surprised at that.  Because those “perishable things” that we put so much of our faith in simply lack the ability to satisfy our deepest need.  What we need is the life that only God can provide.

I think Jesus knew that we all have a tendency to put our faith in things that ultimately cannot satisfy the deepest longings of our soul.  St. Augustine said it this way, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”[7]  The only “bread” that can truly satisfy our hunger is the life that God offers us.  And the amazing truth is that when we take the risk of “throwing in our lot the one whom God sent” to carry out God’s cause in the world, we find that somehow we experience a peace, a freedom, a quality of life that none of those “perishable things” can possibly provide.  When we take the risk of faith and begin to quiet our restless hearts, we find the life God offers us truly satisfies us in ways we may never have expected.

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[1] © 2012 Alan Brehm. A sermon preached by Rev. Dr. Alan Brehm on 8/5/12 at First Presbyterian Church, Dickinson, TX and at A Community of the Servant-Savior Presbyterian Church, Houston, TX.

[2] Cf. G. R. Beasley-Murray, John, 98.

[3] To some extent, it would seem that only Jesus and his disciples knew what had happened. Cf. Gail R. O’Day, “The Gospel of John,” New Interpreters Bible IX:599: “The crowd does not recognize the sign that has been enacted before them.”

[4] Cf. O’Day, “Gospel of John,” New Interpreters Bible IX:611; cf. also ibid., 576: “The person who interprets a miracle solely as a miraculous act will remain transfixed by and limited to the act itself … .  Jesus could be revered, perhaps even believed in on account of that act, but only as a miracle worker.” On the contrary, “it is not the miracle per se, but the glimpse of the presence of God at work with and in human experience that can lead to faith.”

[5] This is somewhat problematic in John’s Gospel, because one of the main emphases in the Gospel is that Jesus works miraculous signs so that people might believe.  I think  Stephen Fowl “John 6:25-35,” Interpretation 61 (July 2007): 315 puts it in perspective well when he says, “the signs challenge those who see them, hear about them, and ultimately read about them, to look beyond the miracles that are performed to the one who performs the miracles. … Signs, rightly understood, deepen and strengthen belief in Jesus. They are gracious gifts. Like many gifts, however, they are not always received in the right ways.”

[6] Cf. Gerard S. Sloyan, John, 73: “This chapter is about believing without seeing (v. 36), about coming to God through Jesus and being assured that trust in him cannot be misplaced (v. 37).” 

[7] Augustine, Confessions, I.1; cf. John Caputo, On Religion, 15, 29, 127, where he discusses Augustine’s statement from the perspective that faith always involves an element of being restless and “unhinged.”