THE CHURCH: A FIRE
FOR JUSTICE
Today (July
16) is Ida B. Wells’ birthday. She was
born a slave in Marshall County, Mississippi, the county in which all my
forebears were born. Over the next 69
years, she would be a powerful voice and activist for justice for people of
African-American descent, for women, and for those who were poor. She was an “intersectionalist” long before that term came into vogue. She did all of this work as she experienced
white society strip away from African-Americans the hard-won rights of the
Civil War. Because of her lifelong work
for justice and mercy on so many levels under such difficult circumstances, she
is a woman for our time and indeed for all times. I’ll be writing more about her in another forum,
but if you do not know much about her, check her out!
She learned
this fire for justice from her church and from her family. She obviously grew up in the black church,
because many of the white churches in her time were fleeing from the idea of justice,
hoping to avoid any need for confrontation with the powers who were
re-instituting slavery and oppression under another name: Jim Crow, or “neo-slavery,” as Doug Blackmon
named it. I grew up in one of those
churches. I experienced love in my home
church, as I noted in last week’s blog, but I was not taught to have a fire for
justice. Teaching our church members to
have a fire for justice is a dangerous thing, so in Ida Wells’ time, in my
time, and in the current time, most churches of all colors now settle for
teaching a weak version of love at best.
In the 10th
chapter of Mark, a rich man comes to Jesus to ask him what he must do to find
the meaning of his life. This engagement
is an important one because it is included in all 3 synoptic gospels. Like the church, he has lived a good life in
his area, but he has missed the overall point of a life with God at the
center. Jesus tells him that in order to
find his definition as a child of God, he must sell all his possessions and
give the money to the poor. At that
moment, he hears, perhaps for the first time, that money is the center of his
life. Jesus offers him the opportunity
to find his center, his true north. Like
so many of us, he is unable to do make that move, and he goes away sad.
One of the
great legacies of the Jewish tradition, - a tradition in which Jesus the Jew
lived and breathed and had his being - is the idea that justice must be at the
center of life of the people of God. The
prophet Micah put it bluntly as he wondered what God required of humanity and
especially of the people of God. In
Chapter 6, he goes through a litany of liturgical and ecclesiastical
requirements that God might require, but then he proclaims the requirement that
he believes is central: do justice, love
mercy, walk humbly.
The church faces this same dilemma in
every age. We are asked to center our
life together on building an inclusive and welcoming community, on strong love,
and on teaching and doing justice. As I
experienced, we have done OK on love; we
have waffled on building a welcoming community;
we have failed pretty miserably on centering on justice. It is sad to say that when people think of
the church, not many think: “a place
where people learn about the importance of justice.” In our
current time, we as church seem to be going in the other direction. Indeed some of us are afraid that we are
currently building a road to a theocracy. It would be one thing if that
theocracy were built on the road to justice, but as always seems to be the
case, the road to theocracy is usually built on meanness and repression and
injustice.
Justice
requires that we consider others to be possibilities rather than problems. Justice requires that we consider our own
participation in the structures of injustice and seek to change that
participation. Justice requires that
when we look at the community of faith known as the church, we delight in
saying: “it’s the place where I learn
about equity and justice and love.”
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