Do Justice

As I was thinking about this second clause of Micah 6:8, "do justice," I remembered a time I was here at the church several years ago. We were setting up for the auction, or I should say some of our members were setting up, because I was in my office when one of the auction committee members came to me saying there was someone in the front hallway who had a bunch of questions about the church. So I came out to meet this visitor.

The woman (and her husband, who was still out in the car in the parking lot), had moved here from Florida, and they were looking for a new church. Someone had told them about the Unitarian Universalist church. So, what could I tell her about us? She took the lead: "Are you a Bible-based church?" "Sometimes I read from the Bible," I told her. "Do you sing songs in church?" I said, "Well yes, we sing hymns all the time." "When you sing, does everybody stand and sway?" "Usually not," I said, "but then occasionally we might stand and sway." Finally she asked what I thought was a decisive question: "Do people in your congregation - do you - take Jesus Christ as your Lord and personal Savior?" "I suppose there are some that might. I personally don't." She kind of paused for a moment, looked at me, and said: "Are you one of those liberal churches?" I smiled and said, "Some people call us a liberal church. We're a church of free-thinkers." I went on to explain a little bit more, but she cut me off saying, "Thank you very much. I don't think this is the church I'm looking for." And she was right. It wasn't the church she was looking for.

Not just this inquiring visitor, but we all come to a faith community with a set of expectations. Expectations are what Micah was addressing in 6:8. If you read the verses before this one you can see that people were asking Micah questions about rules and regulations. Their questions were very specific. They were asking, What do I need to do to get right with my God? What do I need to do in order to lead a meaningful life? But they were asking in the language of their day: How many more sacrifices, how many more rams do I have to sacrifice?" Sacrificing in those days was an important part of religious ritual. They wanted to know, "What do we need to do to be in right relationship; what are the rules and regulations of this religion you are asking us to follow?"

Micah responds by saying something that might sound like this: "Well, I've got good news and bad news. The good news is, what's required of you, what Life expects out of you, is not nearly as legalistic as you think (Judaism was very legalistic - dot every "I", cross every "T"). It's not nearly as legalistic as you've been used to," he tells them. "It's not an issue of how many rams you sacrifice or how many prayers you say. That's the good news. The bad news is, religion is no longer a private affair. It's not so pietistic any more. What's expected of you is to relate to other people. And while that may sound easy, it's a lot harder than dotting every "I" and crossing every "T". Your religion is no longer private. You are expected to be public. You are expected to be with other people." He proceeds describing what he means by this and the first thing he says is that they are expected to do justice.

The word for justice in ancient Hebrew is the word mishpot. You lose a lot in the translation. When Micah told the people to "do justice," they knew exactly what he meant. Especially the word mishpot. You see, there are two words that are used in the Hebrew scriptures for justice. One of them means "righteousness" - almost a state of being in justice. The other, mishpot, means "to do justice." It's active. Everybody listening to Micah understood that. I want to explore this a little bit more because in order to understand what it means to do justice, we've got to understand what justice is.

Justice can be understood on three levels. One is the more rational, or intellectual. Another is the spiritual. And a third level is the physical, or material notion of justice.

Abraham Heschel was one of the great Jewish theologians; a mystic and social activist too. (There's a picture in some Unitarian Universalist publications of the march for civil rights in Selma. In the front line is Abraham Heschel and close to him, arm-in-arm with the other clergy, is Unitarian Universalist Dana Greeley, the first president of the UUA.) Heschel writes about how justice is an interpersonal relationship. And that's what Micah's talking about. As a relationship it's composed of two things: it's composed of duty and it's composed of rights. You see, the word mishpot (justice) encompasses both of these. You can't separate them. It encompasses duty and right. It's the right of someone to have justice and it's the duty of someone to provide justice. It's like the ying and yang, you can't separate right from duty. The following story explains this tight fitting relationship of justice given and received. Lawrence Kushner tells it:

A long time ago in the northern part of Israel, in the town of Safed, the richest man in town was sleeping, as usual, through Shabbat morning services. Every now and then, he would almost wake up, trying to get comfortable on the hard wooden bench, and then sink back into a deep sleep. One morning he awoke just long enough to hear the chanting of the Torah verses from Leviticus 24:5-6 in which God instructs the children of Israel to place twelve loaves of chalah on a table in the ancient wilderness tabernacle.

Then the rabbi asked them to look at their hands. "Your hands," he said to the rich man, "are the hands of God giving food to the poor. And your hands," said the rabbi to the poor man, "also are the hands of God, receiving gifts from the rich. So you see, God can still be present in your lives. Continue baking and continue taking. Your hands are the hands of God."

The rabbi doesn't call the rich man and the poor man together and say, "You fools. Forget it. No longer make the bread and no longer receive the bread." He says, in order to have God's hands, you've got to have both. You've got to have the person baking the bread and you have to have the person receiving the bread. And then he doesn't send them on their way and say, don't believe this foolishness anymore. He says continue doing what you're doing.

On a spiritual level, justice is the recognition of the inherent worth and dignity of every person, one of our Unitarian Universalist principles. It means recognizing every individual's integrity and value. There's a wonderful story about Peter Maurin, who was one of the early workers in the Catholic Worker Movement, one of the more radical social justice movements within the Catholic Church. Of course, usually the name associated with the Catholic Worker Movement is Dorothy Day (who I hope one day will be Saint Dorothy Day). Maurin recalls his first meeting with Day, which is an example of this spiritual notion of justice. He had never met her before. She was sitting at a table, talking with a woman who was, I quickly realized, quite drunk, yet determined to carry on a conversation. The woman …had a large purple-red birthmark along the right side of her forehead. She kept touching it as she uttered one exclamatory remark after another, none of which seemed to get the slightest rise from the person sitting opposite her. I found myself increasingly confused by what seemed to be an interminable, essentially absurd exchange taking place between the two middle-aged woman. When would it end-the alcoholic ranting and the silent nodding, occasionally interrupted by a brief question, which only served, maddeningly, to wind her down? Finally silence fell upon the room. Dorothy Day asked the woman if should would mind an interruption. She got up and came over to me. She said, "Are you waiting to talk with one of us?"

One of us. She recognized the inherent worth and dignity of the woman she was with. And Peter Maurin says that was the uniqueness of Dorothy Day. She understood that every individual has integrity. This is another form of justice. A third kind of justice-a physical or material kind-is balance. Walter Bruggeman, who is a wonderful Old Testament scholar, talks about justice as the sorting out of what belongs to whom, and returning it to them. I was struck with this idea while attending a conference recently. There was a man, a FirstAmerican who lives on a reservation just outside of Denver. He is also a Ph.D. and teaches at Iliff Theological Seminary. During one of the conference's discussion periods, individuals were talking about their sense of justice as wholeness, atonement, (at-onement), of a time in our lives when we will have wholeness or completeness. After everyone had spoken about what this meant to them and as a vision of justice, the FirstAmerican says, "You know, we don't think this way. We are more temporal. We understand justice as balance. Here and now is balance, not in some future time." Right now. Justice is sorting out what belongs to whom and returning it to them. And certainly FirstAmericans have a rightful claim to that. So these are three forms of justice. Justice as interpersonal relations, justice as recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and justice as balance. Now how do we incorporate a sense of justice into our lives? There are four ways we can do it. The first way is one I'm sure everyone is familiar with, and that is doing justice as social service, what we often think of as charitable work.

At the end of the year people write out checks to different organizations. That's a form of charitable work. Often at Christmas time we collect baskets for people in town or folks at county HIV-AIDS program. We do all kinds of charitable work. And it's important, really important.

What can come after social service work is social education. There is a story that makes the connection between social service work and social education. It's the story about a small village, a wonderful place, right by the river. Everybody knew everybody and there was a sense of fulfillment. One day a peasant was walking by the river. He looks over into the river and sees a baby floating in the water. He jumps in, pulls the baby to shore, and rescues the baby. The next day he's walking by the river in the same place and there are two babies floating in the river. He calls out for help and eventually two of the villagers jump in and pull the babies ashore rescuing them. The next day there are four babies, the next day eight babies. This continues with more and more babies coming down the river. Soon it reaches the point where the whole town has to organize in order to rescue the babies that are increasing in number. In fact, there are so many babies floating down this stream that they organize big towers for people to look up the river so they know when any babies are coming, and they have a whole crew of people who know artificial respiration and they get other people who can sew new clothes and agencies develop in order to place the babies with families. This goes on and they keep rescuing more and more babies and they become so well known throughout the area that clergy people would come and bless them for what they were doing.

Finally one day somebody says, "You know, maybe we should go upstream to find out where these babies are coming from." But the elders of the town say, "We can't do that. If we take a group upstream there won't be enough people to rescue the babies here." Now the person who had made the suggestion was a lone voice. "I'm still sure that we really should go up the river because even though we may lose a few babies, we'll find out what the source of this is and we can put a stop to it, and there will be no more babies floating down the river." But the elders said, "No, we can't afford to do that. We must stay here and continue to perform the social service of rescuing these babies." So they continued to rescue more and more babies, but it got so overwhelming that they couldn't rescue them all.

Social service eventually reaches the point where you have to do social education. You have to go to the root cause. You have to figure out why is this happening. So you study, and you do research. A good example of this in our congregation was all of the study and research and discussion that we did prior to our vote on becoming a Welcoming Congregation, of affirming gays and lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered persons. We did at least two years worth of congregational study and discussion and meetings. Same thing is true of what is going on right now with our Journey Toward Wholeness program, our anti-racist and anti-oppression work. They do some social service work, but they also do a lot of social education, a lot of self-study and study with the congregation at large.

Eventually, you reach a point where you have to do your justice at a third level, and that is the level of social witness. You have strong convictions and you can no longer just do social service and no longer do research-your study, your social education. You have to go and witness, you must take your values, what it is you believe, into the public arena. Many times this congregation has done this. Twice when the Ku Klux Klan came to Annapolis, we organized and went out and made public witness at a unity rally. Several times around gun legislation people from this congregation have gone and made public witness. We've gathered with people from Free State Justice and demanded that the rights of all people in the state of Maryland, specifically gays and lesbians, be upheld and respected.

After social service, social education, and social witness, there's social action. This is when a group comes together to organize to change policy, to change the minds of the decision makers, to change the underlying causes that you often discover when you are doing social education. This is something that as a congregation we have never done. But through the Unitarian Universalist Association and our Washington Office, we do try to affect change at a very critical decision-making, power-making level. In doing these four kinds of justice, encompassing the three definitions of justice, it often is very easy to get sidetracked. We have to stay focused. We have to stay aware and focused, keeping our eyes on the prize, as to what it is we want. It reminds me of the man who was walking around his village shouting, "Power, greed, corruption. Power, greed, corruption." At first he got everybody's attention, but after doing this for days and weeks, everybody lost interest and they fell back into their routines. Still, this man kept walking and repeating, "Power, greed, corruption. Power, greed, corruption." Finally one night a child came out to this elder and said, "Why do you keep doing this? Nobody's listening anymore. Nobody's going to change because of what you are doing." And he said, "I'm not trying to change them. I keep saying power, greed, corruption because I don't want them to change me."

We have to stay focused. We have to become in the words of Kushner's story, "God's hands." Or in my reinterpretation, we need to become the "hands of life." We need to do justice as interpersonal relations. We need to do justice as recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of every person. We need to do justice as balance. We need to stay focused. Maybe we need to have our own mantra of power, greed, and corruption. We need to be the hands of life because there is only us.

© the Rev. Fredric J. Muir
February 18, 2001

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