Isn't Christianity A Hindrance to Justice and Equality

No bad questions, and today we're looking for quality. And so we're gonna read God's word aloud together. So if you would join your voices with mine, the passage will appear on the screen behind me.

With what shall I come before the Lord and bow down before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with 10,000 rivers of oil? Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has shown you, o man, what is good and what the Lord requires of you, to act justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God. — Micah 6:6-8

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Now, I know I already told you the title of the sermon, so this is kind of a trick question. But if you had to pick one word that has been the most popular word or most often appearing in our discourse as a country over the last couple of years, you could come up with several. You could come up with Taylor Swift. You could, of course, come up with global warming or Ukraine, lots of things. And yet, the word that I've heard so many times is this word justice.

This is one of the biggest topics of conversation in our country over the last several years, most notably the justice gap in our relationships with one another, looking around at particular groups, particular people who have experienced being on the other side of justice, experiencing injustice in various forms. And there's so many questions around this topic. Who's responsible? Who do we blame? And this is not just in our news, it's also even in our entertainment.

One of my favorite storylines in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is the interplay between two characters. There's Daredevil and the Punisher, and Daredevil is a crime fighting vigilante, but by day, he is a blind lawyer—get the inference here—who at night puts on his red suit and goes out and beats up bad guys and turns them over to the police. He has a no kill policy. On the other side, in the same show, is the Punisher, who is an ex-military guy who goes out and just kills the bad guys. And the whole back and forth between these two is whose version of justice is right? Which justice?

Today's objection I'm talking about is Christianity a barrier? Is it a hindrance? Is it a blockade to justice and equity? It's a fair question. We know that the history of the church, not just in America but worldwide, is riddled with injustice. People doing all kinds of things in the name of Jesus that have been terribly unjust and cruel and wrong. So it's a fair question.

Riveau Abbey

I want to get at this question by telling you first a vignette. So years ago, my wife and I went to England, and we got to do a tour of churches, and it's a very nerdy pastor thing to do. But one of my favorite places we went to is a place called Riveau Abbey, and I've got several pictures of it here. So Riveau Abbey is a beautiful ruin of what had once been a Cistercian monastery.

In the history of England, King Henry the Eighth, in the year 1538, abolished the rule of the pope over the English church, and pronounced the English head of state as over the church. And with that came the destruction of all these monasteries and abbeys all over England. This is one of them. Several pictures here. What's left is the skeleton of this, and you can go visit today. It's a beautiful site. It's an absolutely gorgeous area around it. And what you see, though, is the leftovers. It's not like many of the churches you see that are intact.

The reason for this is after the dissolution, the community pulled down the church. Now, if you want to see the rest of Riveau Abbey, you go to the nearby village, and you go walk around the homes. And as you walk around some of the older houses in town, you'll see these normal homes that have an odd stone or two—something that looks like it's been shaped by a mason that somehow appears in part of the house. They've stolen from the Cistercian abbey, the ruins, and put them in their house.

Now, that's a great parallel for what—and this is my thesis for today—for what we see going on all the time in our culture with regard to justice. The materials for the conversations that are going on in our culture about justice, all the original raw materials of that came from—this is my thesis—the Christian faith. Came from scripture itself. So if you think that people should be treated fairly, if you think if you value human life just because it's human life, if you think equity is an important concept, if you think treating the common good is something important, all of those are rocks that we got way back from the Christian faith.

So here's my outline today, if you take notes. Number one, the justice we really want. Number two, the other justice gap. And number three, the Justice League. So let's talk about the justice we really want.

In this passage, Micah 6:6-8, is one of the most clear definitions in the Bible where God says, this is what's required. This is what I want from my people. Three things: to love justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. Anytime you hear a statement of what God requires, you should perk up. Because what God requires is not just random. It's an expression. God's law is always an expression of who he is and what he values.

God wants the good, the common good for people, not just for those who identify themselves with him, but the common good for all people. And I want you to notice, though, that there are three parts of this definition of what God calls good. First, justice. The word there is a Hebrew word mishpat, and that means this: it means to treat people equitably. It means acquitting or punishing every case, every crime on the basis and the merits of the case, regardless of race or social status or any other consideration.

God gives further definition to this in the Old Testament, where we see over and over what we call the quartet of the vulnerable. Here are the people, the objects of your justice. Four things, four groups of people: the widow, the orphan, the poor, and the stranger. Over and over again, these are the four powerless groups that are named by God. This is to whom you show justice.

Now, that's a great statement. But I love how in this passage, there's sort of a trifecta. There's these three things that are pulled together in God's particular call to his people. There's a particular flavor that God likes, and a particular form that God likes to his justice, just like your coffee. All of you who drink coffee have a particular form and a particular flavor. So you like your flavor either mocha, or you like it acidic, or you like it really bold. You have all kinds of different ways you may like your coffee to taste, but you also have a form you like. Some of you are drip people, some of you are pour over people, some of you are cappuccino people, Americano, latte—you can keep going. There's a form and a flavor, and with God, when he says, "This is the justice that I want," he tells us there's a particular form to this and a particular flavor to this. We see in this passage a justice tempered by mercy, a justice framed by repentance.

Justice Tempered by Mercy

Let's think about both of these. To love mercy is to exercise compassion. It's to show kindness, to not hold a person accountable for every wrong that they have done. We're very familiar with this, but think about the interplay between justice and mercy. They go together. It's easy in our culture to make mercy into something that's absent from justice. So we think of letting somebody off the hook—surely, that's merciful. We think of let bygones be bygones—surely, that's merciful. We have a tendency to turn mercy into leniency.

And this happens a lot in personal relationships, where someone has actually not asked for forgiveness or acknowledged a wrong. And when you show kindness in that place, that's kind, but it's not mercy. True mercy is when both parties acknowledge that there is some injustice that's been done. Both parties say, "Yeah, I did wrong. Yes, you did." But this person's not going to hold this person accountable. Someone has to pay for it. Someone is paying for that justice besides the person who did it. That's real mercy.

Are you familiar with Shakespeare's play, The Merchant of Venice? This play is famous really because of one character in the play, Shylock. Shylock has been done wrong in the community in Venice, and he goes to court, and he sues the one who did him wrong for a pound of flesh. You heard me right. A literal 16 ounce of the human flesh. That's what he wants. He doesn't want money. He doesn't want restitution. He wants one pound of that other person's flesh. And that word about a pound of flesh—that phrase has made its way into common usage in our culture today, talking about getting even, exacting revenge, making sure that someone else pays.

God holds up this as his type of justice: a justice that's tempered by mercy. It's also, though, a justice that is framed by repentance. Where do I get that from? From the phrase to walk humbly with your God. To walk humbly denotes a type of humility that comes only by repenting, only by acknowledging I did something wrong, and I know it, and I'm owning it. To include this in the definition of God's justice, his flavor and his form, is to say it's a justice that's framed by repentance, shaped or defined by repentance.

We live, by contrast, in a very judgmental time when it comes to justice. Have you noticed this? We live in a time when the justice people in our culture are very quick to cancel the person who gets it just a little bit wrong, gets it a little bit off. No room for failure.

No room for messing up. No room for a difference between our intentions and our impact. Jesus, this kind of picture that we see in the Bible of his form, his flavor of justice is one that is framed by repentance. It's very different from this.

Here's what I want you to see. God's justice—this is the one we really want. This is the one we're really hungry for. It's the good. He has shown you what's good. This is what's good, and the world keeps stealing rocks from this definition.

I mentioned the book Dominion by Tom Holland a couple weeks ago. Tom Holland, the writer, not Spider Man. Tom Holland is a self-proclaimed agnostic historian who has done a really thorough job looking at Western history. He goes through century upon century of Western history and says, "Wow, look at all these things that, despite many of the failures of Christianity, we actually receive from the Christian faith over time: affirmation of human dignity in all people, a sense of right and wrong, protection of minority viewpoints and perspectives, the longing for equity, treating everyone with fairness."

And it's interesting because here's an agnostic historian who's saying, "Guys, we borrowed a bunch of rocks from Christianity. The things that are in our houses now, the things that we treasure now in our culture—the things we even use to critique Christianity—come from the faith itself. These all have their roots, like at Rievaulx Abbey, in the Christian faith."

This is the justice we want. This is the justice everybody's talking about, and it's got its roots in the Bible itself: the trifecta—justice, mercy, humbly with our God.

The Justice Gap Within

This justice that we all want is, at the same time, a justice we can't do. We can't do this. There's a bigger justice gap than we observe in our culture. Of course, people are talking all the time about the justice gaps and the way that people are being treated, the rights of individuals and groups in our culture. And that's important on a horizontal level. But there is another justice gap that's not out there, but in here.

I want you to notice this. Notice the context of the passage we just read. Micah 6:8 sounds really good. There are public institutions in our country that have Micah 6:8 emblazoned on the walls that are not Christian institutions at all. But there's a context to this, and just like you don't like it when somebody takes you out of context, I don't think God does either.

So let's think about this verse in context. There's an easy way to make this into relativism: "Hey, this is what the Lord requires of you, to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God"—as in, whatever God you want, whatever God you happen to have. But listen, this is what God is saying.

This comes in the passage right before this. We read verse 6 about, "What will I do to come before God?" That's the question. That's the question in which God answers this. "With what shall I come before the word? In other words, how can I stand in the presence of God?" And he answers his own question: "Will I come with sacrifices? Will I offer the blood of my firstborn son? Will I offer rams and goats? Is that what's going to please the Lord?"

And God answers:

This is what the Lord requires of you: to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. — Micah 6:8

Perfectly and completely. I want you to think about what's being defined for us here. Can anybody say they've done this 100% of the time? To act in a way that selflessly benefited their neighbor—not the fictional one we all like to think of, the actual one who lives next door. To show kindness and mercy and not exact revenge when someone wrongs you, especially when someone says they're sorry. To live in humility without defensiveness and hiding. Nobody does this. No one is able to do this.

Here's what's not apparent to most people. Breaking God's requirements—it's not something we can take lightly. We know that there are magnitudes of ways that we can hurt one another. A sin or an injury against one person is serious. A sin or an injury against several people is even more serious. A sin or an injury against a large group of people is even more serious. A sin or an injury against a nation is incredibly serious. Magnitude going up in order of magnitude. A sin or an injury against an infinite holy God is infinite in debt, in size. It's beyond our accounting.

We don't often see this. Sin is a category word. It's a category word that tells us that God is just. He is the ultimate injustice. And in the Bible, God's justice—His justice—is displayed in two ways toward His people, toward people in the world.

First, the picture of justice in the Bible is one of retribution. That's where we get our word "tribute" from. It means to pay. God will make the bad guys pay. That's what that means. God will make the bad guys pay back for what they've done. Retribution. Every act of selfishness, every act of greed.

God does not spare the wicked, he says over and over in his word. The judge of all the earth will have his say, even with us. The other aspect of God's justice is his restoration. God promises that he will, in the end of all things, make all things right and good. Make all things right. If you picture again justice, we have this symbol in our culture of justice holding the scales, the scales below, and they're tipped up and down, this old kind of balance. God is the one holding the scales, not Lady Justice. God is the one. God will restore and renew all things, and if not in this life, in the life to come. That's what he promises. In other words, there is, between us and God, a very real and very enormous justice gap. We talk all the time about the justice gap that's horizontal in our relationships with one another in society, but there's a justice gap that's vertical as well. It's one that we don't see and that we're standing on the wrong side of.

Jesus Christ is the only person who in his life, in his interactions with others, did Micah 6:8—followed it, loved justice, pursued mercy, walked humbly with his God—over and over in his interactions. But he's also, for us, the answer to Micah 6:6 and 6:7. Jesus is the fulfillment of both of those as well. He's the sacrifice, and he's the firstborn son.

In the Old Testament, there's a story of Abraham. God tells Abraham, take your son, your only son who you love. Take him and sacrifice him. And so Abraham obeys. He takes his son. He takes rope. He takes a knife. He takes fire. He goes walking up the mountain with his son, and he binds Isaac and puts him on an altar and raises the knife in the air. And just at the moment when he's about to drop his hand and execute his own son, sacrifice his own son, there's a voice: stop, Abraham. And he looks over, and there's a ram stuck in the thicket, and Abraham takes the ram, he unties his son, he sacrifices the ram in the place.

In the same way, God the Father, in a sense, walks up the mountain. He walks up with and takes his son with him, and Jesus is put on the altar of sin. And at the right moment, at just the moment when the knife is raised, no one shouted out, stop. No one stayed the hand, and Jesus was executed for us as the sacrifice to pay the tribute for my injustice, to pay the tribute for your injustice. We need Jesus who deals with this justice gap. And this is the only way, honestly, Christians can live into this calling, this invitation from God to join him in this walk, this walk of mercy, justice, walking humbly with our God.

God's Justice League

Some of you will remember when I say Justice League that there is, like the Avengers, there's a DC Comics version of this called the Justice League. I grew up watching this on Saturday morning cartoons. It's got Wonder Woman. It's got Batman, Superman, Aquaman, The Flash, Green Lantern. Justice League. But the Justice League were this team of superheroes who were meeting at the halls of Justice to go out into the world and do good. In the same way, God is inviting us into his Justice League, to this kind of Justice League.

I want to leave you this morning with 10 suggestions, and I'm going to ask you to pick one. You don't pick all 10. I'm going to ask you to pick one of these things as an application of today's sermon. So 10 ways I'm inviting you that scripture invites us to engage as God's Justice League, as those who have been justified by his grace through his justification of the cross to enter into His justice project in this world. So let's look at these. I've them in two groups, five and five.

Number one: start with the church. No one will listen to Christians calling the society to more and better justice if we don't exercise that within our own ranks. We're called to be a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, a people showing off his grace and mercy. This is the place to practice. This is a grace zone at church. This is a community where you can mess up and keep trying. Start with the church.

Number two: work in the world. The former prime minister of The Netherlands, a man named Abraham Kuiper, argued that the institutional church's job was to make disciples rather than to change society. But, he said, we have to form people. We have to form disciples in such a way that they go into the world to do justice. They go into the world this way. I think that's really helpful. We stay on mission as a church by making disciples, but these are the type of disciples God has called us to make. This is why this is part of the vision statement for our church: pursuing biblical justice.

Number three: with hopeful patience. Scripture shows us this weird tension that we live in between the sense that Christ's kingdom has already come, and yet it's not come in its fullness. There's a not yetness to this.

And so we live in this tension point, and it calls us to be people who live, therefore, with hope, not cynicism, and patience. That means we take steps toward justice, and yet we know the fulfillment of all of that. It's not all going to be fixed right now.

Number four, with informed listening. Sometimes Christians are like, hey, I have nothing to receive from the world around me. We have a doctrine called common grace, which means that God sprinkles good gifts throughout the world among Christians and non-Christians, and he restrains evil from being as bad as it could be. This means a couple things. Our doctrine of sin tells us Christians aren't as good as we should be, and common grace tells us unbelievers aren't as bad as they should be, or unwise. That means the church has things to learn, even from unbelievers in our society, about how we pursue justice and care for that with informed listening.

Number five, giving clear witness. I spoke a couple weeks ago about salt and light, and in that Jesus says, do good works in front of people so that they may proclaim your father in heaven. If they don't know you're connected with him, they're not going to do that. There is a need for us to step out of incognito mode. Many of us would much rather stay in incognito mode. How many people know that you're a believer, that this is your passion in life?

Number six, being political but not partisan. This is the big frustration with the church in America right now. People are like, y'all are just foot soldiers for a political cause. You're just partisan, and it's divisive within the church. It discredits the gospel out in the world. There's really no way for us to live as citizens of this country without participating in some way in politics. And yet, there's a way that we have to do so that doesn't reflect this worldly kingdoms, but the real kingdom that we're a part of. To say that Christians should do nothing politically is a vote for the status quo.

Number seven, going local. All the conversations I see online, particularly on social media, are around global issues, national issues. It's really hard for Christians to do anything of real, immediate, and big influence on those things. And so my call is go local. Go local where you can do something about it. All the stuff going on social media, most of that is virtue signaling anyway. Go local. Find ways to engage right here, right now in justice.

Number eight, embrace complexity. This means that one of the real helpful things about our scripture is that it speaks to there being a multitude of forces at work in the world, not just one or two. The Bible speaks with incredible complexity to the problems of social evils and internal personal evils. So we can be people who take that and apply that out in how we look at the world. This isn't a straight line, dot to dot connection between one thing and the other.

Number nine, don't overthink. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. There's a huge amount of analysis paralysis among Christians with regard to justice. Find somewhere and roll up your sleeves. Don't overthink this.

Number ten, pray. I know people are sick of the phrase thoughts and prayers. That's been emblazoned on huge problems in our society, huge sorrows that are to be grieved. Of course they are. The thoughts and prayers response probably comes from a really appropriate heart, but doesn't sound right. It sounds trite. And yet, we're people who believe that the God of the universe prizes justice.

It is the foundation of his throne — Psalm 97:2

Asking him, Lord, where should I go? What should I do? Maybe the smartest thing you could do is start with Him.

Remember how I said that God's justice is like His coffee? It's got a particular form and flavor. One of the things I love about coffee is the smell. The whole experience to me is not just what it tastes like, but the smell, when the beans are being ground, when the coffee's brewing, all of that.

My prayer for our church is that we would be part of the answer to people's objection. Is Christianity a blockade or a hindrance to justice in this world? I pray that like good coffee, your lives would give off an aroma of Christ in this area that would cause people to be drawn, not to you, but to him.

Let's pray together. Father, we thank you for your word. There's nothing like your word. I pray, Father, as we think about the barriers there are in our society all over the place to belief in Christ, I pray that we would be, in our own lives, part of the answer. I pray that this congregation, in the small ways that we live out the gospel together in our city, Lord, would be a light post and aroma of Jesus. Lord, we pray all these things in his name. Amen.

I'm going to invite you to stand and respond to God's word and song together.