Watching And Waiting For Justice

"Watching And Waiting For Justice"

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11
December 14, 2008

The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me; he has
sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to
proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the
Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; to provide
for those who mourn in Zion— to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of
gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit. They will be
called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, to display his glory.
They shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations; they
shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations. For I the LORD
love justice, I hate robbery and wrongdoing; I will faithfully give them their recompense,
and I will make an everlasting covenant with them. Their descendants shall be known
among the nations, and their offspring among the peoples; all who see them shall
acknowledge that they are a people whom the LORD has blessed.
I will greatly rejoice in the LORD, my whole being shall exult in my God; for he has
clothed me with the garments of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of
righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland, and as a bride adorns
herself with her jewels. For as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes
what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord GOD will cause righteousness and praise to
spring up before all the nations.

Last week, many of you may have heard the story about John Thain, the Chief
Executive Officer of Merrill Lynch, who was battling his board’s compensation
committee about a $10 million bonus he felt was entitled to for the year 2008. Now, I
suspect many of you may have heard that the economy is not doing so hot, and the
financial sector is a little bit colder than the rest—ice cold, to the tune of a 700 billion
dollar bailout, stock purchases, bridge loan, whatever, made by us, the tax payer, with
no oversight and accountability, it seems. That sense of not being accountable, that
John Thain had the gall to show up with his request for his $10 million, when the
company he led is about to lose billions and billions, and had to borrow billions from the
US Government to just stay afloat, that sense that he was not at all responsible for the
decisions his company made that led to those losses, but he was only responsible for
engineering a purchase of Bank of America, that might, MIGHT save the company—
that is the kind of thing that just, frankly, galls me. I guess he felt that he ought to be
rewarded for being a bad capitalist, and in the very sick world of corporate America
nowadays, you can run a company into the ground, lay off thousands of employees,
waste away the stockholder’s investment, and still feel that one should be rewarded
with millions and millions of dollars as you are quickly shown the door, as another rock
star CEO walks in with a contract that’s guarantee to reward incompetence. Folks, I
don’t know about you, but the world seems to have gone a little bit crazy, and though I
am just shy of forty, EVEN I remember a time when leaders of companies were actually
rewarded for actually doing a good job, and demoted or fired for doing a bad job, with
no $50 million dollar parachute to cushion their fall. Has the world gone crazy?

Well, the truth of the matter is that question has been asked since the beginning of
time, and at the root of rhetorical question is the profound issue of justice: how is it
possible that someone like John Thain could think that he could ask for that kind of
money when his company is about to lose billions? The reality is that those who are in
the midst of doing injustice always find some sort of justification for what they are
doing—for Thain, the justification was that it could have been much worse, if he hadn’t
been at the helm…folks, there are always people who do bad things who think they are
actually doing good things. The measure of whether something is good or bad is
ultimately rooted in the two great commandments—did I love God and did I love my
neighbor as myself? I don’t know what Thain’s relationship with God is, but he can’t
think that he could love his neighbor whose home is about to be foreclosed on, or the
thousands of employees he just let go, by demanding to be paid millions of dollars in
bonuses? But, of course, when we all participate in injustice, when we do the wrong
thing towards our own neighbor, our own loved ones, whomever, we often find good
reason for doing the wrong thing—that just seems to be the human condition.
Telling ourselves the truth, of course, is a hard thing, telling ourselves that we are
indeed doing the wrong thing, is sometimes the most difficult thing. The journalist Bill
Moyers, who is a member of the United Church of Christ, spoke at the General Synod
in 2007, and he told a story encapsulated the way we humans can compartmentalize
what we know to be true, what we know to just, and separate it from the way we actually
live our lives: “I tremble for my country,” [Thomas Jefferson] wrote, “when I reflect that
God is just, and that his justice cannot sleep forever.” Jefferson knew from his own
experience the perversity of owning another person as chattel. For the hand that wrote
those words, “All men are created equal” also [loved] a woman named Sally Hemings. It
is no longer a secret: This learned, philosophical and far-seeing founder had a long-
term sexual relationship with his slave, who bore him several children. DNA confirms it,
and even the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation in Virginia accepts it. One guest
at Monticello looked up at a dinner one evening and was startled to see a young
servant who was the spitting image of the master at the head of the table. Jefferson
never acknowledged those children as his own. And as he grew older, he relied more
and more on slavery to keep him financially afloat. When he died, his slaves were sold
to satisfy his creditors — all except for Sally. His probaters found in Jefferson’s will an
obscure passage, setting her children free. None of the others. Just the children of
Sally Hemings. Two of the descendants of those children settled in Ohio, where their
own descendants today have increased, some living as blacks, and some as whites.
And two centuries later, despite their common parenting, race still divides them. But
here’s the point. Jefferson could not really think that the words on that parchment were
markers solely for white men of privilege and property who liked port and politics. He
had to know ....that the flesh- and-blood woman in his arms was his equal. In her desire
for life, her longing for liberty. and her passion for happiness. But the law ... but the law
had been fashioned by white men of wealth and privilege to keep her outside the gate
of promise opened by the Declaration of Independence. She lay in his arms, the arms
of its author, but could not travel with him to the promised land.— Bill Moyers, in a June
23, 2007, keynote address to the General Synod of the United Church of Christ.
I wonder if Sally Hemings ever had the chance to be that truthful, that courageous with
Jefferson, though one can understand why she would never be able to do it.
Sometimes, we just need someone to tell us the truth about our actions, or our lack of
actions when it comes to some things in life, and I suspect that it surprised John Thain,
the Merrill Lynch CEO, to have the rest of us be so outraged by his logic, by his
justification for his bonus. Was it all of us, the outraged public, outraged at the
excesses of corporate America that made him eventually back down from his pursuit of
that $10 million? Certainly it wasn’t the committee that did it—they resisted his request,
but they didn’t say no, not until the rest of us got outraged about it. Sometimes we
need people or we need a person to tell us the truth about our actions. Years ago,
when I was a freshman in college, I was dating two different people who didn’t know I
was dating the other one—now, we hadn’t gotten to a serious stage, nor were promises
of everlasting love exchanged, but when they found out about the other, it wasn’t
pretty. I can remember my friend Lee, sitting with me in a car, sharing with me that,
maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t right of me to have kept the truth from both of these folks,
and he was right, of course, but it was hard for me at first to admit it, that indeed I had
done the wrong thing, that I hadn’t been entirely truthful. He told me the truth about my
actions, and he was right, and I was wrong, but I needed him to tell me the truth about
what I had done, or in this case, what I hadn’t done, which was to tell the truth.

I think in many ways, we the public became that kind of truth teller for John Thain,
though, often times, it has been as single person that have taken on that role in our
lives, and in the lives of nations, people like the great prophets of the Old Testament,
who were constantly telling the truth about Israel’s actions or lack of actions to the poor
and the outsiders, the people mentioned in our passage today: the oppressed, the
captives, the brokenhearted. Jim Wallis tells this story: One time, while I was in
seminary, my friends and I decided to do an experiment. We got an old Bible and a pair
of scissors, and we cut out of the Bible, Old Testament and New Testament, every
single reference to the poor, every time the poor were named: God is on the side of the
poor. The gospel is good news for the poor. We cut all those verses out. When we
were done, we had a Bible that was literally in shreds. It would not stay together. I used
to go out and preach with that Bible and hold it up high in front of American
congregations and say, Brothers and sisters, this is the American Bible, full of holes. -
Jim Wallis, How Do We Right the Wrong? Questions of Faith (Philadelphia: Trinity Press
International, 1990), 80. But it wasn’t just us Americans that struggled with the words of
the prophets—it was the people of Israel as well, the ones whom those words were
originally spoken to.   You don’t speak to people about a problem like justice if they’re
having no problem with actually doing justice.

And yet, this passage from Isaiah hints at different kind of prophet, a different kind of
truth teller, one who would not only tell the truth, but do the truth, and set the people
free from all that held them in captivity. For the first listeners of the texts, it was a set of
literal enemies they wanted to be free from, the Babylonians, the heavy handed fist of
the cruel Babylonian Empire. Those who had mourned , those who had experienced
what it meant to be a captive people, their pain will be turned into joy, their lives will be
made better because what God will do restore the ruins of the shattered cities and
towns of Israel. Justice will be finally done, and Jubilee, that ancient practice of the
Israelites where after each 50 years all land would be restored back to its original
owner, all the land purchased by wealthier, more powerful would be returned back to
the original family that owned it. The point was to make sure that no one accumulated
too much wealth, and that the original owners who had once had to sell the land to pay
off a debt would not forever end up being poor.   Now, we don’t know if the Jubilee
principle was actually practiced in Israel, but the idea was right there in scripture
(Leviticus 25:8-17) and it was an attempt to counter so much what is happening in our
country, where the wealth seems to be accumulating at the top, with the rest of the
country just trying to make it. The prophet said that all would be restored, and good
would return to the land, good people doing good things, on behalf of all of God’s
children, not just the rich and powerful.

Now, it’s interesting that another Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, actually uses this text as the
words he says to describe his ministry in Luke 4—this is what he believed he was called
to do in this life, and because of that we Christians have used this passage as a way of
interpreting Jesus’ mission in the world. And yet, we got be honest here—when Jesus
came, he showed us what justice look like, he showed us what love look like, and if it is
true that justice is what love looks like in public—let me say that again, if it is true that
justice is what love looks like in public—if that is true, then the liberation and love Christ
has promised sometimes seems non-existent, or at the very least it is slow in coming,
too slow, for impatient people like me. We’ve been watching and waiting for justice for
a long time, some two thousand years, and sometimes it seems as if the world is just
getting worse, that no one is being set free, the blind become blinder, the broken heart
have their hearts ground into dust, and the wars and genocides, and all the signs that
the world is not all that interested in justice just keep on piling up. Now some would say
that isn’t really a problem, because Jesus wasn’t talking about actual justice—what he
promised to bring was spiritual liberation, relief from spiritual oppression and spiritual
broken heartedness. And I do think Jesus did those things—he did set us free inside—
and yet, if you had told the Jewish prophet that his words were meant only of speak to
spiritual freedom, he would have been horrified by such an interpretation. The people
of Israel needed to be set free, both inside and outside, in spirit and in flesh.

And though I have experienced the spiritual freedom, the spiritual liberation in my
spiritual own life more often than I seen liberation and freedom in the world, I do think
that our watching and waiting for justice in this world during this Advent season, I do
think that if we look hard enough, if we peer out over the long horizon of history, if we
get over our impatience with the pace of justice coming about in this world, I do think
there are signs that what Christ promised, Christ is fulfilling. The world is becoming
more just, more good, more moral, more humane, even though we often take a step
backwards after taking two steps forward. It’s too slow for my taste, but I’m not the one
running the show, and I’m not the one making the promises. But I do think I am the one
being told by this Jesus to be a part of the two steps forward, and that I have a job in
making the love of Christ be something that is expressed in public. If more of us
actually did the right things, spoke up against hate and bigotry, if more of us shared a
concern for the poor, if more of us became outraged at the fleecing of America by
those who think that poor performance should be rewarded with millions in bonuses, if
we cared more for our environment, and cared for the hungry in this world, then maybe
there would be three steps forward for every one step backward. Watching and waiting
is a good thing, but just like the presence we’ve been waiting for and the compassion
we’ve been watching for, we have a part to play in the story. And it really get here
quicker, the kingdom of God, if we do the right things in our lives with the Sally
Hemings, and our neighbor next door, and our neighbor across the globe, if we
strengthen them so that they can strengthen themselves, and we can finally end the
madness that so often grips our world and hurts the least of these.

Thomas Long, who now teaches at the seminary I graduated from, uses this story from
Tillie Olsen's collection Tell Me a Riddle (1971) where a poverty-stricken mother
works at an ironing board while anguishing over a note she has received from school
calling her to come in and discuss her daughter, who needs help: She was a child
seldom smiled at. Her father left me before she was a year old ... She was dark and
thin and foreign-looking in a world where the prestige went to blondness and curly hair
and dimples; she was slow where glibness was prized. She was a child of anxious, not
proud, love. We were poor and could not afford the soil of easy growth. I was a young
mother; I was a distracted mother ... My wisdom came too late. She has much to her
and probably little will come of it. She is a child of her age, of depression, of war, of
fear. Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom _ but in how many does it? There is
still enough left to live by. Only help her to know _ help make it so there is cause for
her to know _ that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the
iron. (I Stand Here Ironing [New York: Dell Books, 1971], 20-21.) Justice is about
making sure that no one is like that dress on that ironing board, that we and others are
never that helpless because God is still working in this world, still making things right,
through others, through history, and through us. Amen.