Sunday, November 11, 2018

Not life, liberty, and happiness; but justice, kindness, and humble-walking

Micah 6:6-8

Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with God.
It starts with justice. Wow, justice. This is one we have a hard time wrapping our heads around. We live in the country with the most prisoners in the world—with over two million people locked away. What is justice for us? And as a country who celebrates Veterans Day but so often fails to provide adequate services for veterans upon their return to society, what does it mean to do justice? For that matter, when we talk about justice, are we talking about criminal justice? Is it God’s justice, or is it something else?
I think we need to jump to the end of this passage from Micah in order to get at this question.
Walk humbly with God—now there’s the pivot point for the entirety of the ethical Christian life. What does it mean to walk humbly with God?
In Philippians 2, it says that Jesus “humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.” I think that’s the best example we get of what it looks like—humble-walking means walking toward the cross. Be obedient not to the powers of this world that tell you it is this way or that—black or white—left or right—red or blue. Instead, humble yourself, trusting God far more than you trust your judgments.
We are told in a million ways every day of our lives that the world out there is black-and-white; it is me versus them; good versus evil; and—funny—I’m always the good one. Humble-walking with God requires us to see we are not just victims but perpetrators. It’s not relativism; it’s not saying everything is the same and the world is grey. Rather, it is saying that everything is far more colorful than I gave it credit, and I can’t possibly understand it all. I won’t understand every nuance of what it means to be human; I won’t be able to put myself in your shoes—never completely. So, I will choose to fear God, rather than other people; I will choose to fear my own capacity for evil, rather than things I don’t understand. Again, humble-walking is trusting God more than I trust my judgments.
This judging—that’s the problem. It’s hard to be humble and to do justice at the same time, but in order to live in this world we have to make judgments—both snap judgments and those carefully considered. How can we judge not, lest ye be judged, be humble, and still get by in this world? That’s the question.
In order to get at that, I want to talk a little about my family:

When Elias was born two months ago, we took some time deciding on a middle name. My family, like many of yours I imagine, has names that get passed down through the generations, and “Francis” is one of those names that runs on my dad’s side. I’m Francis. My dad’s middle name is “Francis.” His mother’s dad—my great-grandfather—was Francis, and his father, my great-great grandfather was also Francis. His father was Edward, so as far as I can tell that’s where it started, but—who knows?—it might have gone further back than that.
We were fighting this desire to pass on a name with this desire to not name my son after myself (which I felt fairly strongly) and so we tried to find a middle road, giving him the middle name of Cadwell, which was the surname of my dad’s mom. The Cadwell name connects Elias with a whole host of judges, including his great-great-great grandfather, who sat on the bench for the first and only death penalty case in Carver County, Minnesota.
I bring this up today because as I think about justice and walking humbly, I started to think about my great-great grandfather, and I wondered how he viewed justice and humility and walking with God. Luckily, because he was a public figure, some of this stuff exists on the internet, and I was particularly interested in the judgment he laid down when it came to the death penalty case. Following the sentencing, he said:
“Mr. Tapper, you have no hope, and the sentence will be executed.” Great start, I thought. Then, he continued and said, “May God forgive you for the crime you have committed. Pray for yourself and that the awful guilt now fastened to you may be forgiven by Almighty God.”
I stewed with that for a long time, considering this tension between the way my great-grandfather understood temporal justice and eternal justice. He sentenced this man to his death according to how he understood the law, and in turn he asked God to forgive the man, so that he is not judged according to a higher law. After thinking about this for some time, I began to understand how bad I would be as a judge—not because I couldn’t be impartial or make hard decisions, but because I can’t pretend that any of this was justice. We all live in our own world of idealism. My great-great grandfather’s idealism was based on the law and the constitution; mine is based on God’s kingdom. My sense of justice will never align with his, even if, practically-speaking, I can completely understand it.
True justice would have been restoring the life of the woman murdered that led to the court case in the first place. Justice would have been going back in time. Of course, we can’t do that. But God can. And this is why I’m a pastor and not a judge; I’m too idealistic one way, while my great-great grandpa Frank was idealistic in another.
The problem we have is that all of us live in a world that is both. Our religious convictions butt up against our practical convictions of living in a country with its own kind of idealism—“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
This is not less idealistic and unattainable. The Declaration of Independence said this and then turned around and said, “Well, we didn’t mean slaves or women! That would be impractical!”
Prophets, like Micah, are also hopelessly idealistic, but at least when I look at Micah, I can see that the world he is after is one I can rally behind. He takes a look at this world of terribly imperfect justice, and says, “Nope. Not good enough.” And then he gives us two messages: 1) Get your house in order. Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly. And 2) Be obedient to God and not to the powers that be.
I suspect my great-great grandfather Frank would be deeply uncomfortable with that idea. For him, the law was the bedrock and grace the thing to catch us, but for me, as the hopeless idealist that I am in the other direction, justice is never confined to rules or laws; instead, it only happens through humble-walking, understanding that both the prisoners and those they have victimized stand before us in need of something better, and it isn’t happening here.
We’re failed victims by suggesting that the path to restoration is through vengeance, and we’re failed perpetrators by suggesting that their worst sins will always define them. Meanwhile, we have people killing people all over this country for reasons we haven’t even begun to understand. I don’t dare even say that the example in Thousand Oaks—just outside of California Lutheran University where many of my friends went to school—is the latest, because I didn’t check the news this morning and there’s likely been something else.
I don’t have answers for these things—not really—but I think that one of the understated reasons why we find ourselves where we do is related to Micah’s walk humbly, and this is particularly hard, but also needed, on Veterans Day. If we’re going to learn how to walk humbly, then it’s really hard to hold on to our exceptionalism. Those ideals talked about in the Declaration of Independence are worth striving for, but they’ve never happened—and they never will happen. Meanwhile, we sell our soldiers and non-soldiers alike on the idea that we are the greatest country in the world, and I get why we do it. I look back on my great-great grandfather and the legacy he left, and then I look at his father, Edward, whose great-grandfather before him crossed the Delaware with George Washington, and man, that’s a thing that seems like it must be great enough to unite all of us, but it hasn’t.
In some ways, Elias’ middle name is a testament to the fact that we’ve had high hopes for this country, but as Christians it cannot be our highest allegiance—and like so many things that are next-most important; it can be the easiest thing to put in the place of God. When we do, the idealism we are striving toward—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—may yet fall outside of our grasp. We need a better way than that, and Micah provides it. Micah suggests that the idealism of country may be a thing worth striving for, but it doesn’t match the idealism of the kingdom of God.
Instead of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly.
None of these things will save you. But the kingdom of God is not about your best life; it’s about what you do for the sake of others because of what Jesus has done for you.

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