June 16, 2013 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

God’s Justice

Laird Stuart
Guest Preacher, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 5:1–8
1 Kings 21:1–21
Luke 7:36–50

“Do you see this woman?”
Luke 7:44 (NRSV)

You say the little efforts that I make will do no good:
they will never prevail to tip the hovering scale
where justice hangs in balance.

I don’t think I ever thought they would.
But I am prejudiced beyond debate
in favor of my right to choose which side
shall feel the stubborn ounces of my weight.

Bonaro Overstreet

It is often said God loves justice. It is said in the Old Testament over and over. God’s love for justice is praised in psalms. It is told in stories. Not only does God love justice, but God abhors injustice. One of the lectionary texts for today, Psalm 5, has these lines:

For you are not a God who delights in wickedness;
     evil will not sojourn with you.
The boastful will not stand before your eyes;
     you hate all evildoers.
You destroy those who speak lies;
     the Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and the deceitful.

God loves justice. It has been said that justice is God’s middle name.

If that is so, and surely it is, then consider this story: the story of Ahab, Naboth, Jezebel, elders, nobles, scoundrels, the people, God, and Elijah.

In our text, King Ahab sees a vineyard beside his palace. He wants it. He wants it for a vegetable garden. So he approaches the owner of the vineyard, a man named Naboth. He offers Naboth another vineyard or money for the full value of this vineyard. Naboth refuses. He is not concerned about the price of the land. It is the value of the land that matters. It is ancestral land. He came to him through his family. He is to keep and then give it to his descendants. It is ancestral land.

Last week a man who works for our denomination in Alaska was telling a group of us about a tribe that lives on an island in a very remote part of Alaska. There are no jobs. There is widespread poverty. There does not seem to be any future. Yet they will not leave. Why would people not leave a place where there are no jobs? Why would people stay in a place where there seems to be no future? It is ancestral land. It was given to them by their ancestors, and they are to give it to coming generations. Ancestral land is what Naboth had and would not give up.

Ahab goes off in a pout. Enter Queen Jezebel. She hears Ahab’s story. She asks him, “Do you now govern Israel?” She does not know it, but it is an ironic question. It is God who governs Israel. King Ahab governs on behalf of God. The king and queen have forgotten this trust. The story proceeds as you heard it read. Jezebel sends letters with Ahab’s seal to the elders and nobles who live with Naboth. They were to recruit scandals to falsely accuse Naboth, to frame him on false charges. It works. Naboth is killed by his neighbors. Then, near the end of the story, God enters. God calls on his prophet Elijah to go to Ahab. Elijah does. Elijah tells King Ahab he has been unjust. He has killed Naboth for Naboth’s land. Elijah tells King Ahab he will die.

King Ahab does die. He dies three years later. Much later, over in 2 Kings at the end of the ninth chapter, Queen Jezebel dies a violent death.

Justice is done for Naboth. This is the reassuring message for us in this account. It is the main message we are to hear. Justice is done. God is the agent of this justice. God loves justice.

Yet it is also clear that justice takes a while. Even in God’s hands, justice takes time. King Ahab gets the land that was Naboth’s land. He gets his vegetable garden. The land that was to sustain a man and his family for generations now produces side dishes for a royal family. Martin Luther King Jr. told us that justice takes time. In a sermon entitled “How Long, Not Long” he said these oft-quoted words: “How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

It is comforting to know that God prefers justice. It is necessary to accept that justice takes time.

Yet there is one other element of this story that is disturbing. Naboth is killed. No one protects Naboth. Not one of the elders speaks up for Naboth. Not one of the nobles speaks up for Naboth. No one in the people invited to the fast speaks up for Naboth. They all go along. The power that is corrupting king and queen is corrupting those who want the benefits of that power.

God loves justice. Yet there are victims. The fabric of God’s justice is not tightly woven. It has holes in it. There are people stuck in those holes.

We know about these holes, these gaps. We see them. We read of them. We experience them. In those holes are women needing safe abortions now. In those holes are children who need nutritional food in schools. In those holes are people caught in the horrible war in Syria, while the nations of the world circle around trying to figure out which card to play. In those holes are people caught in the horrible war in the Republic of the Congo while the world mostly just shrugs its shoulders.

The question then is what will God do about those holes and the people trapped in them? God could change this system, of course. It is, after all, God’s creation. God could rewire our experience of life and take out all time and chance. God could, in other words, take out all freedom. We would be like puppets, safe but strung up. That is not what God wants.

So God brings into this world Jesus Christ. In the New Testament the word justice is not used very much. Even allowing for issues of translation, the word is mostly absent from the New Testament. That is in part because Jesus Christ is the embodiment of justice. He is the revelation of it. He is the practitioner of it. He is the example of it. Jesus Christ shows us God’s eyes are on everyone. Jesus Christ shows us God’s love is for everyone.

Jesus Christ brings God’s justice into the home of Simon the Pharisee.

Simon is an intriguing character. You have to wonder why he, a Pharisee, invited Jesus. Was he genuinely curious? Was he hoping Jesus would slip up? It is not clear. What we know is that as the dinner progresses, this woman appears and treats Jesus with extraordinary gratitude and reverence. Simon, the host, knows this woman. He knows that she is a sinner. He sees, in the way Jesus accepts the woman, confirmation of the charges being brought against Jesus by so many of his fellow Pharisees. This Jesus is no prophet. If he was a prophet, Simon reasons, Jesus would know who and what sort of woman she was. He would have pushed her away.

Jesus flips the whole dynamic of the dinner by telling a parable about forgiveness. Then he asks Simon the central question of the text: “Do you see this woman?” Jesus details the breakdown of Simon’s hospitality and the extravagance of the woman’s hospitality. It was Simon’s house and Simon’s dinner, but this woman was the truest host to Jesus.

Simon sees the woman’s reputation. Jesus sees the woman. Simon has his own version of justice. It is justice based on merit. It is the justice that decrees you get what you deserve. Jesus has another justice. It is justice based on mercy. It is justice that goes deeper into our souls. Jesus knows all about humans. He knew about that woman’s sins. He knows about ours. He knows how flawed and conflicted we are. Jesus knows the mistakes we make. Jesus knows the loneliness of guilt and the searing effects of shame. Jesus knows how we defeat ourselves, shame our values, fall short not just because of external pressures but because of internal confusions and turmoil.

Jesus forgives the woman. It is the ultimate expression of justice. It is love. It is love laced with mercy. It is love that is immediate and personal.

This is Father’s Day. I remember a moment when I received this kind of justice from my father. For many years my family lived near St. Louis, Missouri. We had first one and then two cottages on a lake in Iowa, Clear Lake. We spent our summers there. Dad would be with us for his three weeks of vacation. One day when I think I was about ten years old, we were all at the table in the cottage: Mom, Dad, my two brothers, my sister, and I. I was sitting across the table from Dad. Something came up, and my Dad and I disagreed in a mild sort of way. This was back in the day when disagreements between parents and children were not settled by negotiation but by decree, parental decree. I said something to Dad, and he said, “If you believe that, you will be a failure.” The cottage was getting very quiet. I shot back to my Dad something like, “Then I’ll be a failure.” Now the cottage was very quiet. I expected that rich Iowa dirt to open up and swallow me whole. I was looking right at my Dad. Almost immediately, I saw my Dad’s eyes shift. They softened. Looking right at me he said, “No, you won’t.” I think the whole cottage breathed a sigh of relief. And if you had asked me just then what happened between you and your dad, I am not sure I had words for it. But I knew then and there he had given me a great gift. It turned out to be a gift I drew upon so many times, all of my life.

With those words “No, you won’t,” Dad swept away my youthful impetuousness and even pride, swept away my retort to him, swept all that away because he saw something deeper in me that he would not abandon. Not only did he see it, but he lifted it up so that I could see it as well.

It was a parent’s way of going not equal to but parallel to what Christ did for that woman and what Christ does for us

III

The Lord who practices justice with such love and mercy calls us to practice this love and mercy with others. The Lord who treats us with justice calls us to treat others with justice. We are called to practice a justice that is not looking primarily for merit but is looking primarily with mercy.

We are to fill in the world’s justice gaps. We are to add to the sum of justice in this world. We are even to do what we can to quicken its pace.

This past Wednesday, there was a witness to the resurrection in this sanctuary for John Boyle, who served this church as a member of its pastoral staff from 1976 to 2013. A member of this church sent me a devotion he wrote on November 16, 2008. He wrote,

In Jesus Christ you have shown us that life lived to the fullest is life lived with compassion toward those who suffer and toward those whom some would consign to the dark back alleys of our cities and to the back wards of the world. In Jesus Christ you have shown that life lived to the fullest is life lived in service to those in need.

There is no way that any one of us or even all of us can address all the episodes of justice delayed and justice denied. Yet we can choose which occurrences of injustice and which policies of injustice will receive our relentless attention.

Two weeks ago, a colleague sent me a CD. It is a CD of Duke Ellington and his band playing at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1956 (Ellington at Newport). As the letter that came with the CD and the program notes that were with the CD indicate, at this time Ellington was still a big name in jazz, but musical tastes were changing and he was not as popular as he had been. The night before his and his group was to play, Ellington asked one of his saxophonists, Paul Gonsalves, to prepare a bridge between their next-to-last number and their last one. On the CD you hear Ellington and his band introduced. There is applause. The music begins, and the crowd is quiet. The band gets to its next-to-last number. When it ends, Ellington on the piano and the drummer lay down a beat. Then the saxophonist, Gonsalves, comes in. Shortly after he starts playing, you can begin to hear the crowd. They are listening closely now. They get it. They know this is not music that has been played in cabarets and other venues a hundred times. This is new, this is fresh, this is being made and created on the fly. As Gonsalves plays, you can hear Ellington calling out, “Yeah,” “Yeah,” “That’s right.” What you cannot see, but what is explained in the program notes, is that suddenly a woman in the box seats up front gets up and starts dancing. She cannot sit still. Now the crowd noise is building as people get up and start dancing and calling out. The saxophonists and his sax are singing their song. Ellington is calling out “Yeah,” “Yeah,” “That’s right.” It goes on for seven minutes before the sax is quiet and they move to the next number.

God loves the harmonies of justice. God needs people to dance those harmonies. Sometimes it just takes one person to step into some hole in God’s justice before others join in. If you dance God’s justice, if you do it, you might just hear God in the background calling out to you, “Yeah,” “Yeah,” “That’s right.”