Justice and Peace in All the Earth
March 24, 2021 | By Deacon Karen Melang
Micah 6:6-8
“With what shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
7 Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
8 He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
Some years ago, through a WELCA program, I had the opportunity to visit the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Cameroon. I spent six weeks going all over northern Cameroon visiting churches and women’s organizations with my host, a lovely woman named Satou Marte. Often Satou shepherded me around on the back of her scooter.
Several years later, after Satou had attended a meeting in the States, I had a chance to host her in my home for a few days.
I met her at Eppley airport in Omaha. There were joyful greetings and heartfelt hugs. We picked up her meager luggage and waited for my husband to pick us up. Out of the blue, Satou asked, Do you have more than one car? Um, yes, I said. How many cars do you have? Four, I mumbled.
Four? I hastened to explain that we needed four cars. Jim and I each needed a car for work. Each of our kids needed a school car. And the cars weren’t that great – none of them, especially the kids’ cars. Honestly, they were actually pretty junky.
But it did not matter. The truth was out. Our family of four had four cars. Her much larger family had one scooter. And that was a lot more than most Cameroonian families could afford.
Fast forward a few days. Trying to think of novel experiences for Satou, I hit on taking her to an ATM. Stick in a card, pull out your money. Might be interesting. In went the card, out came the cash. You people, said Satou, you people will get nothing new in heaven. You have everything already.
I never hear the Magnificat, Mary’s radical song, without thinking of that moment at the ATM.
God casts the mighty from their thrones and raises the lowly.
God fills the starving with good things and sends the rich away empty.
It was a remarkable moment of truth-telling at an ATM. There was no getting around it. I am a wealthy and privileged person.
Four cars. Yes, in my world – we needed them. But in the world, one car per person is over-the-top extravagance.
Seeing what is and naming it is a vital task of doing justice. Unless we name it, we do not know what we are working with. Without a name, we can pretend, or at least try to explain, that what is, is really something else.
This last year we have all lived through what seem like, and what we hope are, extraordinary times. In January 2020 my eye doctor threw a Vision party. 2020, right? Perfect for an eye doctor. Little did any of us know what we would see in that momentous year.
To say that it has not been a pretty picture is an understatement. Body bags waiting in refrigerated trucks. Fragile seniors isolated for their own safety, their hearts and minds, and even their bodies, breaking with loneliness. Vigorous young people sickening and dying. Black, brown and indigenous people succumbing at alarming rates. Medical staffers exhausted, discouraged, afraid.
Our political divisions bruised and broke families and communities. They poisoned our public life in so many ways. Perhaps even a trip to the coffee shop might provide an opportunity ripe for conflict. We talked past each other or we yelled or we didn’t talk at all. Many of us got to the point of just being done.
And racial injustice, that 400-year-old pandemic, roared to the surface again. George Floyd (and others) died breathlessly before our eyes. Whose lives matter anyway?
It is a hellish time. A time in which all of us are forced to look closely at things we had hoped to never see and to name what is going on before our eyes.
Recently, Fr. Richard Rohr with the Center for Action and Contemplation shocked me with his gratitude for this difficult moment. Listen to his prayer:
Thank you for leading us into a time where more of reality is being unveiled for us all to see.
Wow. Not sure how grateful I am for all this unveiled reality. Less unveiling might have worked fine for me.
The prophet Micah, like all the prophets, was an unveiler. He saw and named injustice and insisted on its opposite.
Micah lived during a time of political turmoil and social upheaval. Uncertainty and fear were everywhere. It was the kind of time when people gather as many resources for themselves as possible just in case.
To this situation, Micah spoke with brutal clarity about what he saw: You cheat the poor, he declared. You are dishonest, you are violent, you lie, you offer bribes to save your skin. You powerful ones arrange everything for your own benefit, and so you pervert justice for all.
Talk about naming injustice. No one needs to wonder what Micah sees.
Sometimes Micah envisions conversations between God and God’s people. What do you want, God?, Micah imagines the people asking, hoping, it seems, to get God off their backs.
Thousands of rams, God? 10,000 rivers of oil? Or how about my firstborn? Remember, human sacrifice was still alive and well among some of Israel’s neighbors.
You know very well what I want, God says in Micah’s eloquent voice:
He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?
To strive for justice and peace in all the earth. This is the last of the baptismal promises we consider together this Lent.
Opportunities to strive for justice might pop up anywhere. There’s a tug on your heart and you hear your own voice say: That isn’t fair. That isn’t right. That isn’t true.
Or you see others being left behind or demonized because they are considered the wrong kind of people. The wrong color, the wrong language, the wrong abilities, the wrong gender or sexual orientation, the wrong country of origin – or one of the other thousands of ways that people manage to pigeon-hole others as “wrong.”
Just then you have a chance to strive for justice.
I used to work for Habitat for Humanity in Fremont. I loved the job, and half the fun was meeting such a variety of people. Every family who bought a Habitat home needed a house and could not afford a conventional mortgage. Other than that, they were different in a lot of ways.
One morning I drove past one of the houses in progress, and my heart sank. Our sign had been defaced. The words Habitat for Humanity were replaced by Habitat for Mexicans. I was sick. Gut-punched. At the police station the helpful officer told me fixing it fast was the best course of action.
That afternoon our executive committee met to plan our fix: what supplies we would need, when it could happen, and then I looked over at Kathy, our treasurer. There was a look on her face I had not seen before. The steely, gritty look one gets from encountering something shamefully wrong that must be addressed.
This is your job, isn’t it, Kathy? I said. Yes, it was her job.
Later, after she finished, Kathy told me how it felt. It had been kinda scary. What if the person who vandalized the sign was watching her repaint? The vandalizer could certainly have been in the neighborhood. What if there were more than one? What if . . .
There are always what ifs, but Kathy persisted. She repainted that sign. She strove for justice on that block in Fremont.
To strive for justice and with justice, peace – it’s what you promised on your confirmation day. But even more importantly, God made promises to you. At your baptism God promised that you are God’s own child marked with the cross of Christ forever. God’s Spirit lives and breathes in you. You have everything you need to strive for justice in your corner of the earth.
You never know when a striving for justice opportunity will show up. Times to speak up, speak for, stand up, stand with, show up or repaint a sign will come along.
Watch for them.
Deacon Karen Melang
February 2021
