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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