A couple weeks ago, I stood outside a hotel in Muskegon and held a sign. The sign said, “Jesus was a Liberal.” Inside the hotel was a presidential candidate. [Rick Santorum.] He’s a well-known conservative. The media said over 500 people came to hear him. I would guess that 99.9% of them are conservatives. When many of them walked past my sign that I was carrying, many of them said, “Oh, no. That’s not right. Jesus was a conservative.” I said, “I don’t think so, because Jesus said to feed the hungry and house the homeless and care for the poor.” I said, “If Jesus was a conservative, I don’t think he would have said that.” Not that conservatives don’t feed the hungry or house the homeless or care for the poor, but those are more traditionally liberal values. One woman told me, “Go to hell!” Now I try to look on the positive side of anything and try to think the best of everyone, so I assumed that she was telling me that this particular presidential candidate was going to make a campaign stop in Hell, Michigan and she was inviting me to go there with my sign.
I didn’t see the presidential candidate go into the hotel, because he went in the back and I was in the front. But by the end of his talk, I realized that and stood at the back where his SUV was. He got inside his SUV on the passenger side and took off and looked over and saw, I hope, my sign and kind of smiled and waved.
I didn’t do that to try to antagonize those hundreds of people going in. I was exercising justice. I was trying to speak truth to power, which I think is one definition of justice and has been for thousands of years.
Moses went to Pharaoh in Egypt and said, “Let my people go!” and Pharaoh said, “No.” This happened repeatedly and Pharaoh continued to say, “No,” even when, according to the story, God sent many calamities and catastrophes to fall on Egypt. Finally Moses said, “Let my people go!” and Pharaoh said, “No,” and according to the story, God killed the first born male of every family in Egypt. Then Pharaoh said, “Go!” And the Israelites left Egypt to search for their own land, to worship as they saw fit.
Now I tell you that story, not to make you think that I believe that it’s true. I think it was a mythological story, a story told to show the Israelites that they are God’s chosen people. And I don’t tell you that story in the event that you’re pro-choice, so that whenever you encounter an anti-choice person and they say God is pro-life, you could tell that story and say, “Well, God killed the first-born male of all the Egyptians and that doesn’t sound pro-life to me.” That’s not why I tell you this story. I tell you this story because Moses was engaging in justice, Moses was speaking truth to power, Moses was bringing justice to the powerless. Pharaoh’s response was a political one. He didn’t want to free the slaves. He didn’t want to free the Israelites. In part, I think, because of the negative economic impact on Egypt.
Justice has a long history and it means different things to different people. To some people, justice means what it means in Texas – hang ‘em high. That’s not how I use the word justice. I use the word justice the way religious people of different faiths use it. The way non-religious people use it. It’s used in a sacred way and a secular way to mean speaking truth to power, to mean caring for the poor, to mean housing the homeless and feeding the hungry. The prophets in the Hebrew scriptures talked about justice – taking care of the widow and the orphan. All that’s what I mean by justice.
Scholars say that the entire Bible can be summed up in one verse. The Hebrew scriptures and the Christian New Testament can be summed up in one verse, found in the book of the prophet Micah. Micah 6:8: “God has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does God require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with God.”
To many people that just means individual action. Justice means what one person does for another person. I’d go along with that, except that I believe in American Exceptionalism. I think that American Exceptionalism doesn’t just mean that we can invade any country we want to whenever we want. I think American Exceptionalism means that we care about everybody in our country. Because I believe in American Exceptionalism. And because of three pesky words in the Preamble to the Constitution: We the People. If only that said, “I the dictator,” or “We the special committee of folks,” but it says “We the people.” To me that means that “We the people” is the government. That collectively we elect the representatives to the House and Senate and the White House. So I don’t think the justice that was talked about by the prophets of old or by secular groups or by other faith traditions is just an individual thing. Especially here in America. I think it’s more expansive than that. It’s “We the people.” Perhaps that means we the people are going to act prophetically and do justice for all of our citizens. If that was just an individual thing or if churches could just take care of justice in America, there wouldn’t be 49 million people without health insurance. There wouldn’t be 45,000 people who die every year because they don’t have health insurance. To stop that kind of thing, it can’t just be fixed by individuals or churches or synagogues. It has to be “We the people” in the form of our government.
I am proud and pleased to be the minister of two different churches that both care about justice. Interfaith Congregation in Holland serves breakfast to needy people every Saturday morning. Harbor Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Muskegon serves supper through Mission for Area People, the MAP Supper House, and sponsors a food truck periodically to provide for people in need. Those actions are part of justice, but I think they are different than justice. They’re charitable acts, they’re compassionate acts, they’re random acts of kindness or planned acts of kindness. And charity, I think, is different than justice. Justice tries to get at the root cause of poverty. Charity helps those who are in poverty, but justice tries to get at the root cause of poverty. Charity deals with the symptoms, justice tries to get at the disease.
Archbishop Dom Helder Camarra of Brazil said once, “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint; when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist.” Doing justice, speaking out for justice, trying to get at the root cause of poverty, might cause you to be called a communist or a socialist or what, in some people’s minds, is even worse – a liberal! But we need to get at the root cause of the systems that cause things like poverty in order to eliminate poverty. Jesus said, “The poor you will always have with you,” but that was not a directive. He was not saying make sure you always have the poor with you. He knew that we would always have the poor with us because we’d always have greedy people and whenever you have greedy people, you have needy people.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was the personification of justice. Martin Luther King, Jr. started his ministry in 1954, basically with the Montgomery bus boycott. Rosa Parks, who was the secretary for the NAACP, refused, as you know, to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery to a white man and refused to sit in the back of the bus, which started the Montgomery bus boycott which went on for months and months. Finally, justice prevailed and discrimination was no longer allowed on Montgomery buses. Dr. King was the leader of that as he was the leader of many demands for justice – civil rights, voting rights, equal rights. He led marches, as you know, that got some people killed and eventually got him killed.
Dr. King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” He knew it couldn’t happen overnight. Barack Obama, before he became president, said, “Dr. King once said that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. It bends towards justice, but here is the thing: it does not bend on its own. It bends because each of us in our own ways put our hand on that arc and we bend it in the direction of justice.”
The interesting thing is that justice oftentimes needs politicians to become reality. Justice needed Dr. King to demand civil rights and voting rights, but it took Congress to pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and for the President to sign them. A lot of times justice requires politics to become reality.
A few years ago when I and several other ministers went to Washington, D.C., we lobbied Congress to pass a hate crimes bill, the Matthew Shepard Bill. But we could only do so much and then the politicians, the elected people, “We the people,” had to act on justice for it to become reality, and they did. They passed the Hate Crimes Bill and the President signed it.
A couple of years ago, I and other ministers went to Lansing to lobby legislators to pass the anti-bullying bill. It took a lot of demands for justice, but it finally happened when enough politicians did justice and passed the anti-bullying bill and the governor signed it into law.
I was thinking the other day about what ministry means, what does it mean to be a minister? I think it’s in the name. The best that a minister can hope for, I think, is to create a “mini stir” among us. [Groans.] Forgive me for that. But that’s what we did in Lansing and in Washington. Justice needs politicians, oftentimes, to become reality.
This past week we were working on a new booklet for this church to describe all the aspects of this church for first-time visitors and long-time regulars. We did that. As we did that, we said we should make a brochure, so I took different parts of that booklet and made a brochure. A brochure is too small to put the entire booklet in it, but I thought I took the highlights of what this church is all about, what we’re like on Sunday: the music program, the education program, our theology (or lack of same). Tuesday night I went to bed thinking, “It’s perfect. I wouldn’t change a word of it. The brochure says exactly who we are.” Then I woke up on Wednesday and thought, “I forgot to include justice in the brochure.” A church without justice isn’t a church. A church that isn’t welcoming of everyone, a church that doesn’t help everyone they can, a church that doesn’t speak out against discrimination, a church that doesn’t speak for justice for all isn’t a church. People would just come in and sit down and listen to a lecture and go have coffee afterwards and that’s all it would be. A church without justice isn’t a church. A church without justice is just a country club.
Now you can look at this next example as coincidence or providence, I’ll leave that up to you. That happened on Wednesday morning. On Wednesday evening I went to the Holland City Council, as I have been known to do, and first I told them about my little adventure with the brochure and how I realized that a church without justice isn’t a church, it’s just a country club. Then I asked them again, as I often do, to add the words “sexual orientation and gender identity” to their already existing anti-discrimination ordinances, to be fair to lesbians, gays, bisexual, and transgender people. Then I said, “It seems to me that a city without justice isn’t a city. A city that doesn’t welcome everyone isn’t a city. A city that allows discrimination against anyone isn’t a city. A city that isn’t about justice for all isn’t a city. A city that isn’t about justice for all is just a country club.” And the five people who voted no in the past stood up and said, “Bill, that was brilliant! We’re going to change our vote!” No, they didn’t. My words, as usual, fell on deaf ears.
But I’m not going to quit speaking those words. I’m not going to quit speaking truth to power. I just can’t. I have to go before the city council whenever I can and say, “Be about justice for all.” Because if I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t feel like I was a minister. I would feel like I was the leader of a country club. We all, or many of us, have that need to speak out for justice whenever we can, to work for justice whenever we can. We all, or many of us, have to do our part to bend that arc of the moral universe towards justice.
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