Each week in worship in my Baptist congregation, we confess our faith together. A part of that confession affirms:
“We are called to be the Church, to celebrate God’s presence, to love and serve others, to seek justice and resist evil, to proclaim Jesus, crucified and risen, our judge and our hope.”
As we repeated these words each week, many of us became convicted that we cannot confess what we did not practice. Seeking justice was an important part of our mission as church. But how does the church “seek justice?” In the past few months, a team has spent time searching the scriptures, identifying the theological underpinnings for an idea of biblical justice. What we discovered was that justice is one of the most prevalent themes in the Bible (appearing over 1,060 times!) and that biblical justice often looks quite different than our own common understandings of the rule of law. A biblical understanding of justice is about deliverance; restoration; community; compassion, and shalom (peace).
We have done our homework and pieced together a good understanding of justice. We have even begun to articulate a number of places God commands us to seek justice, on behalf of the poor, imprisoned, orphan, and alien (Matthew 25:31-45) But we have to be honest and also say that it has been much easier to keep “justice” at the abstract over the practical. Now that we have been convinced that seeking justice is a part of our Christian life, how do we live into that calling?
No doubt, most churches face their own fears in taking justice to the practical level. For any church there is often the fear of stepping into partisan politics – subjects that often lead to divisions in church and that we have been told by our elders to ignore in polite company. For other churches, there is a fear of turning “justice” into another program– adding it as one more thing into an established missions committee or chalking it up to our Sunday school’s efforts of adopting a family each Christmas. These fears and others might prevent us from ever taking Christ’s command to “seek justice” from the abstract to the practical.
One way that may help us in getting over our fears is to see justice as a necessary part of the whole Christian life. While we might keep religion and politics to ourselves among polite company, Jesus clearly did not separate the public and private spheres. We as the church have an opportunity to come together to discuss issues of justice together, search the scriptures, and pray. While we still may ultimately differ on a political policy, we share a common bond as brothers and sisters in Christ. Despite differences, we should agree that some issues are biblical justice issues to which we must respond as people of faith. [Health care might be one tough issue to which Christians should interact. For examples of what I consider both helpful and unhelpful dialogue among Christians, see David Gushee’s recent opinion article and subsequent comments on the Associated Baptist Press’ website: http://www.abpnews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4555&Itemid=9]
If seeking justice must be an essential part of a Christian’s life, then we also should not separate it from other aspects of discipleship. Justice fits within our worship, prayer, Bible study, and service. We work to grow in this aspect of our Christian journey as a matter of Christian discipleship just like any other.
Our church is finding that moving from the abstract to the practical is hard. But we have begun to seek what the Lord requires of us, “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God.” (Micah 6:8) I wonder how other churches have handled the practice of biblical justice in their communities?