We sang about God's justice in church today. It's true that I have learned something about the law-- not in a
classroom, but under the shade of a prison in Brixton. It's a very different vantage point than a court of justice, I know, and certainly very different from the holy pews of a church. I stood in service today, hands clapping, remembering those unwavering prison cell lights, and wondered why we were so concerned. You see, I don't think we would be
murmuring our amens and singing for God to topple regimes and fell our enemies if we
really knew what the word "justice" meant. In any of its conceptions, judging ourselves under a perfectly just regime is frightening.
I've often wondered how it is that the church can cry for justice,
when it was the Samaritan that clothed the naked, when it was Peter that denied him, and when it was the woman with five husbands that shared the news of Jesus
with her town. Further, I wonder why it is that the church turns such a
blind eye to the circumstances of poverty and racism and sexism and
prejudice and bias that so plague our neighbor, and
how it came to be that we have relegated the task of 'loving others' to
those brave sisters and brothers who 'save the world.' Our lack of compassion and our arrogance are stains that turn the foreigner, the entire world away from us.
I do not think this is a failing without explanation - there is always a reason for the disconnect. I think we are afraid of our own reflection. For I am
the whore at the well and I have denied him. The only
difference between them and me is that up until now, I wasn't willing to go that far, to recognize myself in the people the church has deemed a little different: poor, voiceless, and "other." But if we believe the truth of sin that we so eagerly put on everyone else, we must also believe it for ourselves:
I deserve what justice ought to prevail upon my soul, and I am afraid
to see it.
Now do you think I sing songs about justice? I have seen war
victims witness before an international criminal tribunal. I have seen a man come beg the court not to
foreclose his home. I have witnessed the sentencing of defendants who
robbed, raped, murdered... I have sat in the rooms of the state
court, the federal court, the international court, and the prison cell
-- but Lord, when I saw the accused, all I could think is that there was a time when I ought
to have stood where they stand. So from that vantage point,
Do I want justice?
Do I want to save the world?
Justice, as a road to holiness, is purifying and
intangibly powerful. But I've long lost the fever to understand power
and its structures (legal and otherwise), and I don't know if it's even possible to fully grasp what it means to want justice. So I think of what I can do and turn to the two things
that I am sure Jesus told me to do: to love God and to love each other. I
have wondered what he meant, because it feels so selfish that God would
want me to love him first - but the more I think on it, I am more fully
aware that even this is for our own benefit. It's the same story retold -
for in loving him, we find a certain joy, absolution, freedom. So for now, I try to remember that. I try to sing about mercy and in the end, I hope I can say that I tried to walk humbly, tried to understand somebody and to understand God-- that, in the words of Dr. King himself, "I tried to love somebody."
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.
Written on MLK, Jr. Day 2013
