A Sermon preached by J. Stuart Taylor III
St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church
It is with fear and trembling that a preacher approaches certain great texts of the Bible. From the New Testament, that text would be for me Jesus' great commandment to love the Lord with all your heart and mind and soul and your neighbor as yourself. From the Hebrew Scriptures, one of the most awe inspiring and there fore humbling text for me is from the prophet Micah 6:8. He has told you 0 mortal what is good? And what does the Lord require of you?" but to do justice, love kindness and to walk humbly with your God. How can a preacher dare to add one word to a text, which so eloquently, so simply captures the essence of Biblical faith? Micah 6 has been adopted by St. Mark’s as our new mission statement that tells the world around us, this is who we are, this is what we are called to do. As we begin this new program year with a new mission statement, I intend to spend this and next two Sundays in conversation with you about each dimension of prophetic faith revealed in Micah 6. This morning: What does the Lord require of you but to do justice.
The God of the Bible is first and foremost portrayed in the Hebrew scriptures as a lover of Justice. This lover of justice is revealed in the Exodus Story as a God who hears the cries of slaves and is moved with compassion and righteous anger is revealed in the life and witness of Moses standing before the grand power of Pharaoh's court saying" Let my people go". This lover of justice is revealed in all the prophets who like Nathan confronting King David were emboldened to speak truth to power. This Divine lover of justice is revealed wherever God's people encounter a wrong and seek to make it right. This is the true meaning of righteousness - the biblical synonym for justice, which we have tended to interpret as a moral purity or holiness. What the Bible is emphasizing when it speaks of the righteousness of God, is not so much God's other, worldly Holiness or moral perfection, as it is God's passion to make wrongs right; to come to the aid of those who have been wronged and to make it right. The prophets always judged society by how it treats its most vulnerable members. The widow, orphan, stranger. This is biblical justice. And Micah stands in this tradition. Just listen to his words as he denounces the leaders of his nation who "give judgment for a bride, the priests teach for hire, the prophets foretell for money. Yet they lean upon the Lord and say, is not the Lord in the midst of us? No evil shall come upon us." Passage after passage from the book of Micah reverberates with this Divine Pathos of compassion toward anyone one who has been oppressed, violated, impoverished or excluded. The Divine Lover of Justice is moving in history and in our world to work to restore justice so that all have access to the goodness of God’s creation.
Think about the very first time that you encountered injustice in the world. What was that like for you, what feelings did it provoke and what did you do with that experience? From my earliest years I have always been fascinated by Native American history. And I was deeply disturbed by what I have learned over the years about how our nation has treated Native Americans. This summer my family visited the Taos pueblo in northern NM, considered by many to be the oldest continuously inhabited community in North America. Our guide was a young Taos woman by the name of Red Coral Flower who took us around this visually stunning pueblo. Red Coral Flower shared with us the story of her people, the story of how her ancestors rose up revolt in 1680 against the Spanish conquistadors. She talked about that tragic moment during the Mexican American war when US troops attacked her village and bombarded the church where 200 women and children lost their lives. The ruins of the old church are there and in the courtyard is the cemetery of those who died that day. Later Red Coral Flower told me of her grandfather who was a part of a struggle to reclaim sacred lands and waters that had been taken by the us govt. and she said the village elders were telling the young people like her that there would yet be great struggles for justice for her generation as well. The struggle for justice by Native Americans has been one of the most important themes in American history. And that same struggle goes on today.
Another highlight of my summer was going to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Birmingham Alabama. And during that week I had the opportunity to visit some of the most important sites of the Civil Rights movement. I saw the 16th street Baptist church in downtown Birmingham became a national, international symbol of the civil rights movement when it was bombed by the Kkk and four young girls going to Sunday school on Sunday morning were killed. Across the street from 16th St. Baptist is Kelly Ingrahm Park the scene of that moment that changed American history when Sheriff Bull Conner ordered his troops to attack with tear gas, billy clubs and fire hoses a group non-violent marchers led by Rev. MLK. And finally with a busload of Presbyterians I had the opportunity to make a 100-mile pilgrimage to Selma Alabama. During this long rich day, we visited Brown Chapel that was one of the historic black churches that embraced the civil rights movement. We heard the testimony of Delores an African-American woman who was an 11th grader in that church in 1963 when “Black Sunday” occurred. Between poll taxes and written examinations, and of course the threat of violence, very few African Americans were registered to vote in Alabama. And to bring attention to this, MLK and the SCLC decided to march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery. They left from Brown Chapel, marched through town and as they approached the Edmund Pettus bridge spanning the Alabama river they were attacked by Ala. State patrol on horseback who plowed into women and men on foot, billy clubs swinging wantonly. Back at Brown Chapel, Delores and her mother heard the noise and began to see the wounded and bleeding marchers streaming back. She said that as long as she lives she would never forget the sight of A. State troopers on horseback riding up the steps of her church. 3 weeks later 20,000 marchers, including our very own Mike Smith a vast majority from the churches joined Dr. King on a triumphant march to Montgomery that became the catalyst for new voting rights legislation signed into Law by President Johnson. The poet activist priest Daniel Berrigan has said: “if faith does anything as shown by the prophets and by Jesus, it leads us into the injustice and suffering of the world”
Jim Corbett who was the co-founder of the sanctuary movement and a desert philosopher wrote: “An individual can resist injustice but only a community can do justice”. (Repeat)
This wisdom invites us to reflect on the ways that St. mark’s over our history has sought to do justice in the world. This congregation still carries within us a hunger for justice that was instilled by our founding pastor and prophet, David Sholin. More recently, we have been involved in successfully advocating for a living wage ordinance for the city of Tucson and for Pima County. We have worked on a racial profiling agreement with the Tucson Police Dept that has become a model for the country. We have worked on improving our schools and providing job training. And of course consider the national impact that we have had on immigration and the justice struggle of migrants through No More Deaths and our other border commitments. When I returned from SC this week Lisa handed me the paper with the headlines. And I rejoiced to see that justice has been done and the charges against Daniel and Shanti had been tossed out. And as the Session prepares to make a decision about becoming more light we need to know that the exclusion of Gay and lesbian from church and society is a question of justice. This is why I believe that it is so important for this congregation to move beyond being quietly welcoming to a more visible witness on this issue a more vocal prophetic voice calling for a world that fully includes gay and lesbian people.
There is no lack of justice issues before us. There are issues about eco-justice. This summer presented another one of those moments. St. Mark’s through our For Others Fund has helped to bring Dr. Jackie King of S. Africa to S. Arizona to discuss water policy. You should have been there at the Univ. of AZ. Eller School of management auditorium. Over 200 hydrologists, policy wonks, scientists and other political leaders gathered to hear how water has become a global justice issue and that in SA the right of the land and of people to water is primary before all other users. And then to hear the conversation about water policy in Arizona among all these experts who universally acknowledged that we are headed for a profound crisis. This fall we are going to be having a class on the politics of water, globally and locally and I urge all of us to be a part of that conversation. God’s justice is not just concerned with people but that all God’s creatures and the earth itself have a right to water, a right to life.
What is it that weighs most heavily upon your heart as a lover of justice? It is the 5th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack on America. And 5 years later we have only begun to comprehend the impact that trauma had upon the soul of this nation. In the midst of every crisis is an opportunity but 5 years later, we have yet to embrace the opportunity that is before us to work for global peace, security and justice. There is a huge elephant sitting in the middle of the living room of the church. And that elephant is the war in Iraq. Because peace and justice go hand in hand for people of faith, I hear from many of you about your on-going concern about the war in Iraq and the spiral of violence in the Middle East. It is the prophetic work of justice to speak the truth to power but first we must be willing to speak the truth to one another. Let me name this moment that we are in as I see it. The Bush administration sent American troops into Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction. They were not there. The President said that Saddam Hussein regime had given help to Al Qaeda, but it had not. Our nation was taken to war on the basis of falsehoods. This administration says that the torture of Abu Graib and elsewhere has been the work of a few bad apples whereas in fact abuses were sanctioned at the highest levels of the executive branch in secret memos. The President has flatly stated that all wiretaps of Americans were pursued in legal means but in fact he was repeatedly authorizing wiretaps without warrants in a specific violation of the law. And here we are in a moment when almost 20,000 Us wounded service men and women have had their lives shattered. 2,662 have died. And the number of Iraqi’s estimated to have been killed ranges from 45,000 to one hundred thousand. And when our own military reports say that Iraq is headed for civil war, you can rest assured that civil war has already begun. What does it mean to speak the truth to power in such a moment as we are living in the United States? This is not the conversation that we might have as Republicans and Democrats and independents discussing policies and the role of government. Speaking truth to power means first of all that the church reclaim its prophetic voice and speak out clearly, authoritatively for peace and for justice.
The prophet Micah could not be more relevant to our reality today. From Micah’s point of view all religious life is profoundly suspect unless it addresses the urgent demands of justice. Micah would agree with that great American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who said, " Love without justice is mere sentimentality". From the pulpits of the American church we are in no way lacking in sermons on love. There is a superabundance of teaching on the subject of love but on justice there is a loud silence. However if we want to be listen faithfully to Biblical speech, if we want the church's working vocabulary to accurately mirror the vocabulary of the scriptures every time we mention love we should mention justice. A wise lover of justice once said: “ we were never promised a life free from fear and struggle. We were offered the hope that by committing ourselves to the struggle for a righteous society in solidarity with the wretched of the earth, we would discover the secret of life. “