Justice, Love, and the Will of the People

October 18, 2020 • Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
Readings: Habakkuk 2:1-5 (The Inclusive Bible) &
Acts 9:10-19 (The Inclusive Bible)
Reverend Althea Spencer Miller, Ph.D.

Good morning, Church family. It is good to be with you this morning. It is such a somber time, when hope hangs in the vacuum created by our bated breaths. We await the realization of our best hopes or for the renewed call to action that comes from our disappointments. This, as the shadow of the upcoming elections shortens and the election season awaits its fulfilment. In so many ways so many of us have put our bodies, our hearts, our minds into working, praying, hoping for the change that restores stability, decency, and good sense. We have understood that the soul of our nation is on the gallows. Democracy, a sense that the arc of the universe bends towards justice, that our divisions can be healed, freedom, autonomy, equality, welcome, care are words along with others that name our collective soul. The rule of law has been a rallying cry and an aspiration. 

But for us, God’s people here at COTV, in our covenant with each other, we agreed to “actively work to change and end systems of oppression and advocate for those who are hurt by them.” The thing is, oppression breeds a toxic atmosphere. There is scarcely any of us who have avoided its noxious fumes. Our covenant for justice is based, not in the rule of law but in the theology that God’s purpose is for social shalom, for transformation from injustice to fair play and a level playing field for all of our people. But in our church and society we are not there yet.

So we can imagine ourselves aligned with the indignation and possible frustration of Habakuk, a man of the 7th or 6th century BCE. This prophet has been praying in Hab. 1:2-4 “O Lord shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you “Violence!’ and you will not save? Why do you make me see wrongdoing and look at trouble? Destruction and violence are before me: strife and contention arise. So the law becomes slack and justice never prevails. The wicked surround the righteous – therefore judgment comes forth perverted.” 7th cent. BCE but he speaks the words of our 21st cent. yearnings. Our reading from Habakuk contains an impassioned confrontation with Yahweh. Habakuk was skeptically looking to see what Yahweh would have to say given Yahweh’s breach of covenant responsibility. Yahweh’s word, scarcely comforting, is, “Write down the vision. If it lingers, wait for it. It will come.” 

It would be understandable if, in our generation, we were impatient for the vision’s arrival. We endure injury, and insult. We sometimes need proof that God’s values and our Christian way of life are real and viable as the vision lingers despite our best efforts and we are put upon. In the meantime, we are advocating, exhorting each other, keeping our hopes high, remaining committed and wondering when our nightmares will end. 

In our second reading, there’s another character whose plight we can understand. When our ancestor Ananias receives direct instructions from Jesus to find Saul and minister to him, he is rightly consternated. Ananias lived in the town to which Paul was going with papers that permitted him to capture any Jews in the synagogue who were followers of Jesus and return them to Jerusalem. Followers of Jesus were being imprisoned there. Saul was very angry, irrationally so. His maddened race to Damascus was the culmination of a pogrom that persecuted his fellow Jews whose choices differed from his. Prior to our morning’s passage Saul had already witnessed Stephen’s martyrdom. Acts 8:3 narrates that “Saul was ravaging the church by entering house after house, dragging off both men and women he committed them to prison.” It seems a bit over the top for Jesus to instruct Ananias to go to Saul’s house. It is reasonable for Ananias to protest. He had “heard from many sources about Saul and all the harm he has done to [Jesus’] holy people in Jerusalem. He is here now with authorization from the chief priests to arrest everybody who calls on your name.” Nonetheless, Jesus instructs him to go anyhow. 

We have something new in our nation’s midst that will wreak its own havoc as Paul did in his time. What shall be our response?

Our ancestors in the faith have walked the way we now walk. While the vision tarries, the present is dangerous. Please bear with me while I share with you a matter that has roiled my spirit this week. Some of you may have heard about the White House Executive Order signed into efficacy on September 22, 2020. I invite you to listen to me, not in your usual accustomedness but with empathy for the acute discomfort this edict inspires in people like myself, a person of color, a woman, and an advocating academic. Then I hope you will not consider me to have been afflicted with madness myself. I share it because I believe that this edict lays down the gauntlet before people of justice, hope, and faith. It marauds through our sensibilities with laser like precision intent on discombobulation, reorientation, repression and tyranny. Emanating from the White House it establishes dysfunctionality, upends established wisdom, and presents a beguiling attractiveness that belies the foxlike cunning, the stalking horror that waits to ensnare the unaware.

The title is Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping. That would grab our progressive attention. One paragraph advises that, “Executive departments and agencies, our Uniformed Services, Federal contractors, and Federal grant recipients should, of course . . . foster environments devoid of hostility grounded in race, sex, and other federally protected characteristics.” There shall be no training that “promotes race or sex stereotyping, or scapegoating.” Training is a broad term because it also includes education and therefore educational institutions and religious groups that receive federal grants and any organization that does race and gender sensitivity training in agencies or organizations that receive federal grants. Yet, I have not presented anything that I and many of you would disagree with  prima fācie. 

The problem is visible in a list of “Divisive Concepts” that are presented as hostile, contrary to the spirit of the highest values of the U.S.A. Before we get to the “Divisive Concepts” know that the edict declares them to be an ideology “rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country; that some people, simply on account of their race or sex, are oppressors, and that racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as human beings and Americans.” These beliefs, it asserts, are held by “many people pushing a different vision of America that is grounded in hierarchies based on collective and social and political identities rather than in the inherent and equal dignity of every person as an individual.” Are you beginning to be uncomfortable? This edict protects neither the anti-racism women’s nor movements. It protects white nationalism and traditional sexism.

“Divisive Concepts” include ideas such as the possibility that someone can be consciously or unconsciously racist or sexist based on their race or sex; (a cornerstone of anti-racism and anti-sexism work); you cannot discriminate against someone based on their race or sex; (there goes race and gender based affirmative action); it promotes the idea that individuals bear no responsibility for their ancestors’ actions based on their race or sex (there goes a slew of historical accountabilities based on slavery, Jim Crow, systemic racism, and sexism); you cannot cause any person to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex (in other words we cannot confront someone’s sexist or racist behavior if it causes any of these feelings). I am naming some in the hope of illuminating how this edict stigmatizes and mutes the wisdom of the very people who do anti-racism and anti-sexism advocacy and ensures that we can neither call out or teach with commitment to these values without risking punitive repercussions from the Federal government. 

More broadly, this edict polices speech and restricts thought. It is repressive and far reaching. It guarantees danger and hostility towards any of us who have stoutly believed that the path to healing our racial and gender antagonisms lies in honest conversation and the importance of recognizing those who have been systemically, politically, educationally, financially discriminated against. We cannot be unaware of the edict.

This makes the cause of justice more urgent. We who live awaiting the vision’s arrival need to be more committed to the vision. We need to deepen our understanding of the vision to which justice calls us. This edict does not call us forward. It makes the way easier for those who are committed to the evils of racism, sexism, and all the other isms that need to cede to inclusion, equality, and the embrace of LIFE ABUNDANT – Life in community, in ensuring sufficiency for all with humility and love.  Love was usefully defined as unconquerable goodwill, invincible  benevolence by William Barclay. I commend it for our contemplation – unconquerable goodwill and invincible benevolence.

Such love resists the toxicity of the age. It refuses to be guided by animosity and rage. Love does not deny the right to experience the fullness and range of all our human feelings. But a life surrendered to love can find an endless pool of resources with which to practice unconquerable goodwill and invincible benevolence. It improves over time. It allows us to know when to separate, when to join, when to protect ourselves, when to be open. It allows us to do all these with goodwill and benevolence. By the grace of God, the movement of the Holy Spirit, and the community of faith gathered, we can, we do.

I am emphasizing these reachable horizons because the kind of U.S. that the edict would shape is going to require our perseverance in justice and love. We must respond to its hatred with love. Justice with love now requires that we create and strengthen new alliances, however tenuous their beginnings. It requires that we look for constructive possibilities and pursue them. That we study, reflect, open ourselves to the powerful love that fuels grace, and contemplate together what it means today to be an Ananias going to Saul’s residence even though we know him to be a man of evil.

My friends and siblings in Christ, this is my testimony. I am going to remain faithful to the best visions of anti-racism and anti-sexism work that I know. It is the way that is now deemed a “divisive concept.” The way of God’s justice has never been easy. It is filled with difficult choices. At times it requires unreasonable action. As the Wesley Covenant Service says, “Jesus Christ has left us with many services to be done. Some of these services are easy and honorable, but some are difficult and disgraceful. Some line up with our desires and interests, others are contrary to both. In some we please both Christ and ourselves, but then there are other works where we cannot please Christ except by denying ourselves.” It’s old school. I know. Yet it contains truths that are worth remembering and invigorating.

This is the age, now is the time, when we must believe that love is stronger than hate, good can defeat evil every time, that benevolence outstrips malevolence. We must believe it enough to want to practice it, to try to practice it, until we are perfected in love. For this heinous document and the vileness it represents cannot be the mark of our time. It cannot be the trait that endures as policy. What must be shown to be more powerful, more sustaining, healthier, wiser, more productive is justice with love. Theological justice calls us forward to structure love, to organize for love. May it be that this is the will of the people of God – that our response to evil folly is to embrace the challenges of our time  with love for God’s justice and by loving justly. It is the way, that helps to make the vision real in our time and to ensure that justice wins. May the people’s will align with that of the prophets, of Saul who was transformed, of the Jesus who included all, and called Ananias to jeopardy en route to transformation. The vision tarries. Bring it home! Ase. 

(c) 2020 Althea Spencer Miller
All rights reserved.

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