Jesus and Justice

The long line at the Deconstruction door discourages me.

Hundreds of thousands, even millions of people are standing in line to dump their religion. Perhaps not God, nor even Jesus: but this is not yet clear.

Many want to be spiritual but not religious. They want to give up their religion—the gathering, the praying, the organizing, certainly the giving. They are tired of scandals and exclusion, of pontificating bishops and demanding preachers, of wealthy evangelists and narrow dogmas. Mostly they are weary of sexual abuse, and power struggles, and the widespread failure to take women seriously, especially as leaders in the family of faith.

I have listened to many testimonies posted on various social media platforms.  It makes me sad, and it makes me examine my own faith, my own commitments, my own motivations.

Just this afternoon, three ministers talked to me about an ugly and ungodly power struggle in a congregation I know well. It could kill the church. People are walking away from such things.

Out of this religious mess, I find myself focusing my faith on two things: Jesus and Justice.

I grew up with Jesus. He was the first J-man that came into my life. You can read about the other three here.

I read In His Steps and The Cost of Discipleship before I learned about higher criticism and professional skepticism.  I read The Seven Storey Mountain, Mere Christianity, and The Validity of the Christian Mission. Then we sang “Good News” and “Tell it Like It Is.” I was wonderfully rooted into the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. His grip on me was strong and now is stronger than ever.

Justice took much longer, because justice was not taught in the churches that formed my faith. Yes, those were the days of Civil Rights and the Vietnam War, of women’s rights and later gay rights. It seeped in, though, in spite of what the churches refused to do; it seeped into my mind and imagination. And when I started reading the Hebrew Prophets in college, my soul was ready for all they had to say.

Dr. Joe Lewis taught us Hebrew and helped us translate the Bible book of Amos. I never got over it. I didn’t know what to do with all of it at the time, but I have never recovered from that deep dive into the social conscious of that man of God. “Let justice roll down like waters,” he wrote 800 years before Jesus, “and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Long before I knew how the verse was connected to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it was reshaping my religion from the inside out.

Later, the notion of Justice pushed me back to the Exodus and gave me the intellectual tools to understand the wider work of God. It also gave me a new lens through which to see and love the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Along the way, my conservative Baptist upbringing had to deal with Roman Catholics, Disciples of Christ, and Pentecostal and Orthodox Christians, among others. A year in Jerusalem blew up any provincialism in my spirit; and that phrase “blew up” is appropriate at this point because, during that year in the Holy Land, Arab armies invaded Israel—the year was 1973. It was the Yom Kippur War.

Christians, Jews, Muslims, and secularists of all stripes made their way into my understanding of God, religion, and life.

Justice has become the watchword of the progressive religious movements in our day. But it now appears even in the most unlikely of places, like the gathering last week of scholars of the Church of Christ. I was there to read a paper on “The Gospel and John Prine.” Among the many things I did not expect was this hymn, sung at the morning worship, acapella of course:

For the healing of the nations, Lord we pray with one accord.
For a just and equal sharing of the things that earth affords.
To a life of love in action help us rise and pledge our word.

Lead your people into freedom, from despair your world release.
That, redeemed from war and hatred, all may come and go in peace.
Show us how through care and goodness, fear will die and hope increase.

All that kills abundant living let it from the earth be banned,
Pride of status, race or schooling, dogmas that obscure your plan.
In our common quest for justice may we hallow life’s brief span.

You, Creator God, have written your great name on humankind.
For our growing in your likeness, bring the life of Christ to mind,
That by our response and service earth its destiny may find.

In music, in scripture, and in the deep places of my soul, Justice joined Jesus to give me a religious life, a religious imagination that has helped me survive in these heady days of deconstruction. I am ready for whatever comes next, in life and in death.