Is Social Justice Divine?

Sermon by James W. Crawford

March 9, 1997, The Fourth Sunday in Lent

From Job 24; Job 31

Job sits on his ash heap bewailing his condition. He vents his fury at God. He rejects those who arrive to comfort him. He sits appalled at his terrible reversal of fortune. Once a rich man, now he is poor. Once respected and feared for his wealth and power, now he is a nobody. Once in robust health, now he is sick almost unto death. Once at the center of attention, he now lives poverty-stricken, disease-laden, alone. He is invisible, powerless, devastated by a condition he cannot himself control. So there he sits on his ash heap, complaining, moaning, arguing with God and his cronies about his indigent circumstances.

And then? And then we witness a dramatic shift. Job's perceptions change.  He gains some peripheral vision. He begins to see he is not really alone. Yes, he is poverty-stricken now, but he is not the only one. He is sick, without access to physicians, but he observes others in the same condition.  He is out there on his ash heap, out of sight, out of mind, but looking around he discovers some others out there in isolation with him. Suddenly the tilt of Job's self centered complaint changes to include a social dimension. No longer does he sit there deploring his own situation. He now sees other people in the world, indeed, people right next to him, who suffer poverty, illness, invisibility, dereliction just as he does. His problem is not only personal, now it is social. And while contemplating this social dimension of his circumstances, he stumbles on another shocking realization. He thought his spiritual dilemma lay only in trying to figure out why bad things happen to good people. But from the vantage point of his poverty, his perspective changes. He sees some very bad people successfully climbing to the top of the heap unscathed. As we read this morning, Job sees some wicked folk getting away with murder. They move landmarks and steal the property of their weaker neighbors. They plunder the flocks of the powerless, engaging in grand larceny, shamelessly claiming the booty their own. He sees widows and orphans deprived by law of their only means of support and survival.  He sees for the first time, a relentless attack on people in his circumstances. He begins to identify with the vulnerable getting squeezed, the poor getting cheated, the defenseless pushed aside. He feels rank injustice holding sway.  For the first time in his life, Job gains a new perspective on how--to use a cliché--how the other half lives. He is stunned, mortified, and infuriated by what he discovers.

Do you see what happens here? Do you understand what the poet tells us?  We get a glimpse of social injustice as major concern of the Biblical faith.  We see the social condition of Job as it afflicts not just one person, but hundreds, or thousands, or millions as a passionate concern of God. We see undeserved poverty, unmerited illness, economic vulnerability, social invisibility as a human problem compelling tremendous Divine concern.  And we see, in addition, that it takes profound empathy to identify with it. For although Job, as he testifies himself, has been thoughtful of the poor, has been kind and charitable to those not so nearly well off as he, until struck down himself, until afflicted, assaulted, destroyed, alienated, and left friendless in poverty, he never understood its crippling, draining, and soul-battering effects.

As I think about this reversal of Job's fortunes and its resultant impact on his consciousness, I find myself in a peculiar position. (Oh friends, how this book makes an impact on our own self perception!) You see, I find myself in Job's position before his catastrophe hit. I find myself--and perhaps you do too--I find myself self and the churches we know best in Job's privileged position before he is wiped out and relegated to the trash heap. Forgive me for speaking personally in this case. But you know I have never known poverty. I have never known what it is to be totally without, living on the edge, threatened with walking over the economic cliff. I know some of you have. I know some of you work with people every day snared by cycles and spirals and obstacles unimaginable to some others of us. But I never have.  I grew up in a family where one income took care of us: my father a skilled, successful, beloved orthopedic surgeon--our hero. My mother, still alive,  is a cultured, accomplished woman given to music, books, and family nurture--a rare and ennobling presence wherever she is. She has mentioned in these later years what she called my father's "money look." But we children never saw it. The best education, the promise of support when I was in a jam, accessibility to human networks enabling things to happen, travel,  friends, conversation, four wonderful children, a loyal, loving, angel of  spouse--I am Job before the wipeout. Born white, male, into a secure, supportive, happy family. I earned none of these privileges. I deserve none of them. Luck!

Let me take this one step further. Years ago, Linda and I took our two eldest children to live and work in New York City's East Harlem. Our two younger boys were born there. East Harlem was then the poorest neighborhood in New York. We lived in what was then known as George Washington Houses at the corner of 99th Street and Second Avenue, one block from a street The New York Times labeled the worst block in New York. In an excellent book called The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs called the housing project we lived in at the time, a classic illustration of the "death" of great American Cities. For a while, we believed we could identify--identify--with the daily problems of the people who lived in those projects or in the tenements on the adjacent streets. But we were kidding ourselves. There was no way we could identify. Because, even then, we lived there, not by necessity, but by choice. We could move out whenever we wanted. Oh, our children knew the vulnerabilities of growing up there. We felt the risks of safety. We saw the numbing implications of economic deprivation. We witnessed and shared in the long lines everywhere--waiting, waiting, waiting. But we could not identify. We never slept in a building where the landlord cut off the heat, or abandoned  it, where rats dominated the corridors, where hot water was a luxury, where it might be torched for insurance purposes. Our kids never went to schools where drugs or weapons or violence were the currency of exchange. We never got caught in the deep and incessant spirals of municipal bureaucracy begging for medicine, breakfast, a bed to sleep on. I know it occurs but I do not know what it truly means to be trapped this way. I do know that, regardless of where we live, there are tens of thousands of families working hard to raise their children, seeking a decent and honest living,  working honestly, faithfully, diligently, sometimes at two jobs, from early morning to late at night to pay the rent, put bread on the table, send their kids to college, and who just barely make it, whose lives are close to subsistence. I know that is true. I see the statistics regularly. My eyes tell me it is all around us. The stories make the headlines, but I do not know what it means. I am Job before his descent into calamity.

I tell you this in order to remind all of us of two salient points the Bible delivers as if a strong left jab to the jaw. The first point is this: privilege protects us from the real pain of the world. It builds barriers around us, cutting us off from understanding or empathizing with the chaotic, cruel, exhausting, mind- and heart-deadening circumstances threatening millions of our brothers and sisters in God's world. Privilege can secretly, subtly construct a shell around our hearts blocking the cries of those in vast need; it can veil our eyes to seeing the depths and breadth of the world beyond the borders of our culture or class. The prophets shout this risk from the housetops. Hear Amos: "Alas for those who are at ease in Zion, and for those who feel secure on Mount Samaria, the notables of the first of nations. . . who lie on beds of ivory and lounge on their couches. . . but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph." The Bible will have no truck with complacency and privilege while there exists the wide gap between the rich and the poor, the content and the tormented, vast wealth and crushing  poverty.

But that is not all. For when Job finds himself no longer alone, but amid a strata of human existence he really never knew, we come face to face with the intensity of our faith tradition for social justice. And with him we find one root of our justice tradition. Remember? Job looks out on the powerless and oppressed and asserts a common humanity: "Did not the God who made me in the womb, make them? Did not one God fashion us in the womb?" With that affirmation Job strikes at the heart of those distinctions  separating us by class, by culture, by tribe, by gender, by sexual orientation, by nation. He dissolves the barriers we build, the niches we design setting ourselves apart from or against one another to scapegoat, to point the finger to secure our own precarious position.

And more. If we stick with Job in his poverty-stricken and oppressed position, we find ourselves shoulder to shoulder with another Biblical person in his poverty-stricken and oppressed condition: Jesus, who in his great parable insists that whenever we provide the cup of water, the morsel of food, whenever we visit the prisoner, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked--right there we encounter the living Christ. Right there, the dominion of God takes place, a new community emerges, the social fabric re-knits.  A fresh approach to how we treat one another and build our neighborhoods, our cities, our communities surfaces. Following Job and Jesus, justice becomes the byword; justice becomes the objective. And something decisive happens, something moving to turn the world upside down: We find ourselves called not to charity--not to charity--but to justice.

Oh, how we need be reminded of the difference between charity and justice from time to time. And I dare say it makes a lot of us uneasy. It certainly makes me uneasy. Without intent to demean or play down the charitable instincts of so many of us here, let us be clear. Charity can be an expedient. Charity can be an attempt to make tolerable really miserable and unjust conditions, hoping to take the edge off, quench the fires, and bribe the sufferer into silence. Charity tends to support an unjust status quo. Charity tends to provide safety nets rather than radically assaulting the inequity making the safety net an option. Charity steadfastly refuses to attack the conditions it seeks to ameliorate. In light of the prophets' vision of a new community where vast class, power, economic and political differentials are dissolved, charity, as one man remarks, "is a confession that we have failed to make good our religion and are trying to cover it up." That insight hits a lot of us church folk, certainly us preacher types, close to the bone. It make my knees quake.

You see, friends, this urgency for social justice--and a Christian congregation's pursuit of it--is not a matter of choice if the congregation is to remain faithful to its high calling. As the prophet Isaiah makes clear, the worship God invites from us is "to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke and to let the oppressed go free." That is our vocation in worship and mission. We may not be able, as Job did, to identify with the suffering and oppression of the outsider, the marginalized, the one trapped in or falling through the safety net. But we can stand with them.  That is why in this congregation we consider homelessness not just a social catastrophe, but a sacrilege, and support a housing committee here. That is why we consider homophobia a blasphemy, and why we provide a safe haven for and march in behalf of those who are gay or lesbian and who are society's outcasts still. That is why we consider poverty, not just an economic problem, but for a nation claiming to be Christian, a religious heresy and thus house here the Poor People's United Fund, striking for social change as a pursuit of the faithful in behalf of the poor and the powerless. That is why we support the United Church of Christ and its Office for Racial Justice, its Office for Church in Society, its men and women on the front lines organizing, educating, empowering other men and women toward social equality. Politics it demands, since politics is about the distribution and redistribution of power. We begin with empathy; we end in action. For God's sake we pursue a new community grounded in love, realizing there can be no true communal peace apart from justice for all.  "Did not one God fashion us in the womb?"

Over the desk where I write these sermons there is a picture. Linda is in it.  I am in it. There are one or two other friendly faces. And there, in the middle, is a small man in a purple shirt. His hair is gray. His face is brown. It is Desmond Tutu. An amazing man in this twentieth century whose witness to the Gospel of justice in face of incredible resistance, hatred, ideological, religious and military force staggers us all. Facing month after month, year after year the threats of the South African government's apartheid suppression, Bishop Tutu would defend, in God's name, his perceived subversive activities. He protested starvation in resettlement camps. He condemned the disappearance of citizens in detention. He censured the banning without charges of still others from all social discourse. He stood against the worst abuses of tyranny protesting, "If God did not care about these and similar matters, the worship of such a God would be worthless." But again and again he would proclaim one way or another, "Ours is not such a God."

Bishop Tutu's incredible hope in a God countenancing and working for social justice--in spite of all the continuing problems, issues, and remaining pathologies--Bishop Tutu's hope has been vindicated. Perhaps his conviction, as we pursue God's mission here, perhaps his conviction could be our own, in seeking justice for all God's children:

Goodness is stronger than evil;

Love is stronger than hate;

Life is stronger than death;

Victory is ours through Christ who loves us.

Is social justice divine? You bet it is!