Justice or Just Us
June 10, 2007
Micah 6: 8
Matthew 25: 34-40
My wife, Nancy, and I alternate taking our 7-year-old, Whitney, to school each day. It is one of the parenting responsibilities that I absolutely love, because it gives me a chance to talk with her about her day then give her a kiss and a last wave, before she passes through the school gate and heads off to the playground. Another joy of taking her is seeing the excitement and energy of other kid’s on their way to school. Kids zip by us on their bikes, boys yell to their buddies a few yards ahead, and little girls lugging backpacks as big as they are run to catch up with their friends.
Now imagine we’re approaching the gate and one of these exuberant little girl runs past us, trips, and falls to the ground scraping both her knees. She begins to cry, but her mom is nowhere around. What do you suppose I’d do? Well, I’d do what all of you would do. I’d take Whitney with me and we’d see if we could comfort and help her. We’d talk to her, help her back onto her feet, maybe hold her if she was still crying, and if she still needed help, we’d walk her to the nurse’s office. We’d look for the nurse and if she wasn’t there, we’d stay until the nurse returned. And if I was a little late for work, so be it.
I want you to hold this scenario in your mind, because we’re going to come back to it in a few moments.
Today I’m going to talk to you about charity, social justice, and the difference between the two. I wanted to do this because social justice is one of those terms that we use a lot in the UCC, yet I’m not sure how many of us know what it means. I know for the longest time I didn’t, but I didn’t want to ask anyone, because everyone else seemed to know and I didn’t want to look stupid. I’ve also noticed over the years, that social justice is one of those word combinations that elicits strong emotions—some favorable, some not so much—sort of like “Darwinian evolution,” “affirmative action,” or “Hillary Clinton.”
Let’s start, then, with charity. Charity involves helping that is motivated by love and compassion. Jesus calls on us to love our neighbor. And as our scripture passage suggested, He especially wants us to care for the least of these—children, the poor, the sick, the elderly, foreigners, and the oppressed. When Whitney and I help the little girl who has fallen down, when we take care of her and give her the support she needs, we are really doing charity. We’re not required to help. We could, in fact, turn away, but we are moved by compassion—especially for someone so vulnerable—and feel a sense of obligation to make things better for her.
Now, let’s say tomorrow I’m taking Whitney to school, and the same thing happens again: another young child excited to catch up with her friends trips in exactly the same place and falls to her knees. Again, we provide comfort and help her to the office. After taking care of her, I walk back to my car, and I notice that there’s a raised piece of sidewalk right at the spot where both girls tripped. I wonder if this could have caused them to trip.
The next day, the exact same thing happens. Sure enough, a little boy stumbles on the sidewalk and hurts himself. Again I help, but now, in addition to my feelings of compassion for the little boy, I’m feeling angry and indignant. “How can this keep happening? Children should be safe walking to school, but three days now I’ve watched kids get hurt. This is not right and it must stop.”
So now I march into the office and ask to speak to the principal. I tell her that something needs to be done—the sidewalk grinded down, or maybe a teacher stationed near the offending spot reminding children to slow down. And I hope this is all it takes. But if the principal does nothing, I’m prepared to take it to the PTA, the school board, the newspaper and any influential columnists I happen to know, and anyone else who will listen, because it’s just not right that children are getting hurt.
I’ve now moved from charity to social justice.
Let’s look, then, at some of the similarities and differences between the two.
First, both charity and social justice involve acting on behalf of other people. Both are obligations that God places upon us. And both are directed at the least of these—people who need our help. Providing help to people who don’t need it is called... well it’s called just being pushy and annoying, and we probably shouldn’t do it.
But when we’re helping people who truly need our help, we may be doing charity. When I help the little girl who has skinned her knee, I’m taking an individual action to relieve her immediate suffering. When I serve at the homeless shelter, I’m providing a valuable service to poor and hungry people. When I help build a house for Habitat, I’m insuring that at least one family is going to have a better life. And when I donate to tsunami relief, I’m hoping to bring some normalcy into the lives of people ravaged by bad fortune. In each example of charity, my actions are directed at unavoidable disasters or at the symptoms and effects of some social problem, like unsafe schools, hunger, and poverty.
Social justice, on the other hand, attempts to alter the root causes of suffering. It aims to make life more fair and bearable. It attempts to change unjust institutions. And by unjust, I mean institutions that contribute to the suffering of the least among us. In my sidewalk example, when I move from just giving comfort to the children who have been hurt to trying to get the school to become safer, I’ve moved to social justice. Once I know something can be done to prevent suffering, I become an advocate for the children that have been hurt and for the children that will be hurt if something doesn’t change. These children will need less comforting and charity if they’re not hurt in the first place.
So when children are hurt by an unsafe sidewalk, I can comfort them after their fall and I can do things to prevent their falls. God demands both charity and justice from us—we don’t have to choose. We should do both.
Often, however, we choose to do neither. Frequently we blame the victim, and when we do, we take ourselves off the hook for helping. We say things like “Those darn kids shouldn’t be running anyway”… Or “When I was a kid, I didn’t fall like that”… Or “Those kids have popsicle sticks, safety scissors and gloppy white paste. If they wanted to, they could fix that gap in the sidewalk themselves.”
Blaming is, of course, natural, it’s normal, and it’s common. But it’s not Christian. Jesus didn’t tell us to blame the least among us. He didn’t say “blessed are the judgmental.” Not at all. He and the Old Testament prophets railed against powerful people who found reasons not to help.
For most of us, charity is easier than social justice. Charity is more private and more acceptable. We can do it quietly by ourselves. We can send our checks to the United Way, or to UNICEF, or to the Lung Association and it feels good because we know we are helping. And if others know we give to the Lung Association, it doesn’t draw much heat because who, after all, could be for lung disease. People like us for our charity.
Working for justice, however, is more political. Not in the sense of Democrats vs. Republicans, or liberals vs. conservatives. But political in the sense that I’m going to need allies. I’m going to have to work with others. And I’m going to have to take a stand, because someone is going to have a stake in not changing. Perhaps the principal doesn’t have enough money in her budget to grind down the sidewalk. I can be sympathetic to her predicament, but I can’t let that be the end of the story.
Advocating for changes in cherished institutions is also more controversial. To others, working for social justice may seem unpatriotic, a threat to a growing economy, or even heretical. When we advocate for the least among us, others will know what we stand for, and they may not like it.
When Congregationalists took up the abolitionist cause, they rocked the boat. Many people had a vested interest in slavery, and they didn’t like the rabble-rousers who opposed it. But charity would never have ended slavery. It was not a matter of slave owners being kinder toward their slaves. The government position on slavery was unjust at its core. The institution had to be changed, and thanks to the tenacity and courage of the rabble-rousers, and the help of God, it was.
So who needs justice today? The same kinds of people who have always needed it, going back to the days of Micah and the other prophets: People who are dismissed by the powerful and treated with little regard for basic human dignity. These are people who suffer from hunger, poverty, inadequate health care, and poor access to education. People who face abuse and oppression based on race, gender, or sexual preference. People who are enslaved through child labor or corporate indifference. People who are homeless, helpless, and hopeless. People who are inconvenient.
Who needs justice? The 30,000 children who will needlessly die today, and tomorrow, and the day after that. These are children whose only sin is being poor—extremely poor. Most of these children live among the one billion of our neighbors who survive on less than $1 per day. About half our world neighbors live on less than $2 per day. Think about it... that’s the amount of money some of us will spend just coming to church this morning and it’s less than a cup of coffee at Starbuck’s.
Thirty thousand children will die today because their parents cannot afford $10 bed nets that would protect them from malaria-carrying mosquitoes. They will die, and their mothers will die, because they are born under unsanitary conditions, far from medical help and running water. They will die because their frail tiny bodies are so weakened by starvation. They will die from diarrhea contracted through tainted water that their young sisters may have walked miles to fetch. They will die because they are invisible to most of us.
But if we didn’t cause the problem, why are we responsible for fixing it? First, we need to back up and examine the assumption of blamelessness in the question itself. Many economists with no particular ax to grind agree that the West has inadvertently contributed to global poverty through policies like one-sided trade agreements, lending practices of the World Bank, and flooding world markets with subsidized American agricultural products. Justice demands action on these policies, but analyzing each of them here would take far too much time.
The short answer to why we should fix the problem of extreme poverty, and the simpler one, is this: We should fix it because we can. Remember Jesus’ words from Luke 12: “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded.” We must help more because we’ve been given more. We can end this kind of suffering. The experts tell us the only thing preventing an end to extreme poverty is the will to do so.
God expects us to find that will, as inconvenient as this may be.
But why focus on children a world away when we have poor children right here in America? I am not suggesting that we ignore our own poor. Our hearts and our blessings are big enough for our own poor and the poor of the world. What I will suggest, however, is that there is no Christian foundation for the commonly held view that we should help our own first.
Again, the idea of helping our own is a very natural idea. We see it all over the world. People owe their greatest allegiances to immediate family members, then to other kin, then to friends and then to others who are not friends but who are like them. And people from our state and our country are seen as more like us than people from other places. Now, I’m not a Biblical scholar, but as a psychologist, I do know a lot about behavior, and I can tell you this: This pattern of helping, where we help our own first, can be traced to our evolution, not our Bibles. Helping your own is common to many social animals. Among the apes, the animals closest to us genetically, we see a pattern of helping very similar to our own. But morality is about rising above what comes naturally—it is about using our uniquely human capacities for love and hope.
The Bible makes no such distinctions between foreigners and locals, in fact, Jesus and the prophets frequently encourage kindness to outsiders. In one of the best examples, found in Matthew 5: 46, Jesus says:
“If you love only those who love you, what good is that? Even corrupt tax collectors do that much. If you are kind only to your friends, how are you different from anyone else? Even pagans do that.”
We are most like Christ, then, when we love the neighbor who can’t love us back.
So charity and justice are interwoven threads of the same healing cloth. Charity is about compassion. Justice is about hope. Jesus challenges us to change the world, to bring the Kingdom of God to earth through acts of both love and hope. Not good wishes, but acts of love and hope.
I began today telling you how fortunate I feel sharing time with Whitney each morning before school. I know most of you are parents, or grandparents, or favorite aunts or uncles, so you can easily imagine the joy of those timeless moments.
Now imagine another father and a day not so far in the future. Imagine a day when a father living in a remote village in Rwanda or the Sudan can walk the 7-year-old he loves so much to school. Picture him looking into her smiling eyes, kissing her goodbye, and then watching as she runs to catch up with her classmates. We’ll know we’ve made real progress toward a more loving and just world when that father’s worst fear for his precious young daughter’s future is a skinned knee on the schoolyard playground.
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