Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 9, 2007

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

This Advent season we are considering three aspects of what it means to call ourselves disciples of Christ. Specifically, we are considering three commitments that Christ expects of his disciples that are suggested by three of this year’s Advent readings from the prophet Isaiah. Last week we talked about peace—peace for our souls and peace in the world. In two weeks, after a break next week for our children’s Christmas pageant, we will consider Christ’s demand that we care for one another and for all whom we encounter in life. Today we consider the demand that the life of a disciple of Christ be a life devoted to justice.

Which of course immediately raises the question of what we mean by justice. As most of you know, I was a lawyer in an earlier life—at least, it feels like an earlier life even though technically I still am one. So maybe it seems that I might have an especially well-informed conception of what justice is. After all, lawyers work in “the justice system,” right? Well, I think that my work in law has definitely informed my understanding of justice, but let me tell you right now that what we so unthinkingly refer to as the justice system is anything but that. It’s a legal system. It’s not about justice, it’s about the law; and trust me, justice and law are often very, very different things.

The legal system, it turns out, actually has a very narrow understanding of justice. In that system justice is said to have been done if the law is applied properly regardless of outcome. That’s why former Chief Justice of the United States William Rehnquist could say with a straight face that in a criminal matter innocence is not grounds for a new trial. Most of us were outraged when we heard him say that, but within the bounds of the legal system he was quite right. The issue there is never what is just. Rather, it is has the proper law been applied and were the proper procedures followed. And was that done equally for every party in the case. In the legal system justice means applying the proper law and following the proper procedure without regard to the nature or circumstances of the parties appearing before the court. That’s why that system sees no injustice in treating a gigantic corporation with limitless resources and a poor single mother with no resources at all who has been injured by one of the corporation’s products exactly equally in a trial between them.

In that civil case as in the case of an innocent person seeking a new trial in a criminal case the law is mostly about process. Justice gets reduced to due process. It is rarely about substance or about result at all. Sometimes skilled lawyers can use the legal system to achieve justice. Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center has done so in several high profile cases against white supremacist groups. Still, the justice in those cases is a by-produce of the law and not something with which the law is directly concerned. When you understand these facts about the legal system it is easy to understand what cynical old law school professors always say to dreamy-eyed first year law students who come wanting to do justice. They say: This is a law school. If you want justice, go to seminary. So eventually I did.

You see, Christianity, and most if not all of the world’s great religions, have a very different conception of justice than does our legal system. The Judeo-Christian conception of justice is, of course, grounded in the Bible. There is a Biblical conception of justice, and it has little if anything to do with due process and proper procedure. It is substantive not procedural, and it focuses on a particular group of people. Biblical justice is substantive justice for the poor, as we see in our two Scripture readings this morning.

In the reading from his book that we heard, the prophet Isaiah dreams of a future king from the house of David. That’s what “a shoot shall come out of the stump of Jesse” means. Isaiah 11:1 NRSV Jesse was David’s father, and his “stump” is, I think, what was left of his descendants in Isaiah’s time. So far from being a prediction of the coming of Jesus, this passage is about an earthly king who differs from other earthly kings not in that he is divine and nonviolent but in that he rules wisely and with justice and that he is truly a man of faith. He will judge not by earthly standards or with earthly wisdom. That, I think, is what it means when Isaiah says “He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear.” Isaiah 11:3 NRSV He won’t judge the way the world does, not, that is, by information our ordinary senses give us. That is the way our legal system judges, on the basis of hard evidence that a judge and jury can see and hear. That’s a way of doing it that the Bible here rejects.

Why does the Bible reject that way of doing it? Apparently because while it may produce legally valid results, it produces unjust results. It produces results that are not grounded in “righteousness” and “equity.” The king of whom Isaiah dreams will be different. “With righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth.” Isaiah 11:4 This king’s justice will be justice for the poor, the oppressed, the vulnerable, and the marginalized. This king’s justice will protect those who need protection from those who are quite capable of protecting themselves. That is Biblical justice. That is justice indeed.

The Evangelist Luke drives the point home even more strongly. This morning we heard from Luke an ancient Christian hymn known as The Magnificat, from its opening lines in Latin: “Magnificat anima mea Dominum,” My soul magnifies the Lord. It is, scholars tell us, a very early Christian hymn that came from a time even before the writing of Luke’s Gospel in the late first century CE. Luke put it into the mouth of Mary because it reflects early Christian thinking, and of course Luke’s own thinking, on the significance of Jesus Christ.

In her hymn Mary states the Biblical conception of justice succinctly and powerfully. With the coming of Christ, she says, God “has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” Luke 1:52-53 NRSV Note how different this conception of justice is from our notion of justice as following proper procedure and treating the rich and powerful equally with the poor and powerless. This conception of justice, the Biblical conception of justice, isn’t about those things. It is about lifting up the lowly and filling the hungry with good things. The Bible knows that when justice gets reduced to the fiction that treating all equally truly makes all equal before the law, the rich and powerful prosper at the expense of the poor and powerless.

That may not be the intent of a legal system based on these principles, and a system based on these principles is certainly much better than one that overtly favors the rich and powerful. Nonetheless, such a system reinforces and perpetuates inequality because people come to it with unequal resources and with very unequal political, economic, and social power. The inequality with which people come into the legal system necessarily affects the results that come out of the legal system. If you doubt that, study the statistics that show that our criminal justice system punishes poor black men far more harshly than it does wealthy white men for the same crime. A legal system minimally committed to equality perpetuates inequality. Lady Justice may be blind, but in her blindness she still favors the wealthy and powerful over the poor and powerless.

Biblical justice knows all this and will have none of it. Marcus Borg has put the matter succinctly. Biblical justice, he says, is the social form of love. Borg, The Heart of Christianity, p. 76 Biblical love, of course, isn’t a sentimental feeling. It is agape, love as compassion that cares at least as much for others as for the self, with a special concern for the others most in need of compassion, the poor, displaced, marginalized, and vulnerable among us and in our world. Biblical justice is the social form of that kind of love. It is justice that, as Mary sings, lifts up the lowly and fills the hungry with good things. It is justice that, as Isaiah sings, decides with equity for the poor. Worldly justice leaves the poor at the mercy of the rich under the guise of equality. Biblical justice, God’s justice, aims at eliminating poverty, not at leaving people poor but equal.

That is the justice to which Christ calls us. Commitment to that kind of justice is the demand that Christ makes upon us. And we have ask just what that means for us and how we live our lives. It means, I think, several things. It means doing charitable work for those in need, giving them food, clothing, shelter, education, and medical care. We and our society to some of that, although of course there is a lot more that needs to be done. Yet our readings this morning suggest that there is a lot more to a commitment to Biblical justice than that, as important as those things are. Isaiah speaks of a king who rules justly. Mary sings of bringing down the powerful from their thrones. If we take those words literally they don’t have much to do with us. We don’t have kings and thrones. We do, however, have social, economic, and political systems and structures, as did those kings on their thrones in the ancient world of which the Bible speaks. The more-than-literal meaning of these verses is that Biblical justice is about transforming those systems in the direction of lifting up the lowly and filling the hungry with good things.

That is a political demand to be sure, but it is not necessarily a partisan one. We are all free as Christians and as citizens to decide for ourselves what specific policies and which leaders are most likely to move us in the direction of Biblical justice, and we don’t all have to agree on those questions. As Christians, however, we are called to work for that transformation in our nation and in the world and to support policies and leaders that will, in our carefully and prayerfully considered opinions, most effectively work for that transformation.

So in this Advent season let us recommit ourselves to lives of justice, Biblical justice, justice that lifts up the lowly and fills the hungry with good things. It is Christ’s call for us. It is Christ’s demand on us, and with Christ’s grace we can do it. Amen.