When we look at the spiritual streams we have discussed so far, this stream is a natural next step on our journey. We have discussed seeking to be more like God in our personal actions, we have discussed the gifts of the Holy Spirit in our lives, and we have discussed a life focused on God’s love for us. So it makes sense to extend that love that God has for us out to other people.
Now, even as I say this, I recognize that in some circles social justice gets used as a bad word. We see people on social media referring to others as SJWs, so-called Social Justice Warriors, as if it is (or should be) an insult.
But this does a disservice both to the concept of social justice and to our own tradition. You see, social justice is very much at the heart of the movement of Jesus in the world, both in the past and in the present.
Jesus, who summed up the law and the prophets by calling on us to love God and to love our neighbors.
Jesus, who constantly centered outsiders and outcasts as heroes in his stories.
Jesus, who told us to not only love the people who believe as we do but to also love our enemies.
Those centered in the social justice stream live a life committed to compassion and justice for all peoples. It is a call to love the same people that God loves, to serve the same people that God serves. It is living according to the question: how would Jesus show love in this situation?
This is summarized well in today’s text from Paul's Second Letter to the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 5:16-21). The very first sentence says, “from this point on we won’t recognize people by human standards” (2 Cor 5:16, CEB). Through our relationship with Jesus, a relationship built on prayer and study and the work of the Holy Spirit, we see other people through new eyes. Instead of judging others according to human standards, instead of making value judgments about people based on our own criteria, we learn to see others as God sees them. We learn to recognize that each of us is formed in God’s image. And so we learn to value others as much as God values them, a God that valued humanity and creation enough to come down and live among us, a God that valued us enough to offer us love and relationship even in the midst of our sin and imperfection.
A few lines later, Paul goes on to say, “God was reconciling the world to himself through Christ, by not counting people’s sins against them” (2 Cor 5:19, CEB). This is the heart of God’s divine love for us and the very same love we are called to show to one another.
Too often I think that when we hear the word love, we may think of romantic love or we may have some more generic concept of love. But the love of God is not a soft love, not an easy love. It is the love of compassion, the love of recognizing people’s imperfections and loving them anyway, the love of caring about others regardless of their ability to offer us anything in return. This love can be found in the Jewish laws related to gleaning that command the Hebrew people to leave a portion of their crops in the fields to provide for those in need. It is not a question of how the people wound up in poverty, of whether or not they deserved to be poor and starving. The very fact they were hungry was reason enough to feed them.
This love can be found at the center of the Jesus story in the Sermon on the Mount (or Plain). Here we are told exactly what it means to love other people as God has loved us. Jesus extends our notions of love beyond the ideas of family or even local community to incorporate even those that are against us or persecute us.
This love can be found in the continuing stories of the disciples as the Greek-speaking community complains to the early Christian leaders in Jerusalem that their widows are being neglected in the service of the church in the community. And so seven Greek men were given positions of leadership and responsibility with the church. Rather than exclude those who had heard and sought to follow God’s love in their lives, even though they were people from outside the Hebrew community, the disciples sought to include and empower those that were not exactly like them to minister in their own ways.
Or, to put it another way, “We look for those who are excluded or neglected because of their social status, or their race, or their background, or their gender, or their age, or any number of other things. And we lobby for their acceptance and welcome and embrace into the social network. We also look to see if there are social networks that are destructive to human life...”(Foster, Streams of Living Water, 174).
We feed the hungry. We help the helpless. We reach out to those in need, those on the margins, those who have been cast out. And we find a place in the spectrum of their needs to help them.
Maybe we feed their immediate needs for food or water or clothing or shelter. And maybe we dig deeper to work towards changing the systems and policies in place that caused them to be without food or water or clothing or shelter in the first place. Or maybe our response falls somewhere in between. There is no single way of living a life of compassion, no single right way of seeking justice.
I recently saw a post on Facebook that was playing with the idea of Social Justice Warriors that has become such a rallying cry for people on both sides of many issues. This person took the notion of a Social Justice Warrior and expanded it to include common types of Dungeons & Dragons classes. So they spoke of Social Justice Barbarians and Social Justice Clerics and Social Justice Bards. It was done in fun, but it was also done to make it clear that there are many ways of doing the necessary work of seeking God’s justice for the world around us. Not everyone is a warrior, nor should we all seek to be.
Jesus, who constantly centered outsiders and outcasts as heroes in his stories.
Jesus, who told us to not only love the people who believe as we do but to also love our enemies.
Those centered in the social justice stream live a life committed to compassion and justice for all peoples. It is a call to love the same people that God loves, to serve the same people that God serves. It is living according to the question: how would Jesus show love in this situation?
This is summarized well in today’s text from Paul's Second Letter to the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 5:16-21). The very first sentence says, “from this point on we won’t recognize people by human standards” (2 Cor 5:16, CEB). Through our relationship with Jesus, a relationship built on prayer and study and the work of the Holy Spirit, we see other people through new eyes. Instead of judging others according to human standards, instead of making value judgments about people based on our own criteria, we learn to see others as God sees them. We learn to recognize that each of us is formed in God’s image. And so we learn to value others as much as God values them, a God that valued humanity and creation enough to come down and live among us, a God that valued us enough to offer us love and relationship even in the midst of our sin and imperfection.
A few lines later, Paul goes on to say, “God was reconciling the world to himself through Christ, by not counting people’s sins against them” (2 Cor 5:19, CEB). This is the heart of God’s divine love for us and the very same love we are called to show to one another.
Too often I think that when we hear the word love, we may think of romantic love or we may have some more generic concept of love. But the love of God is not a soft love, not an easy love. It is the love of compassion, the love of recognizing people’s imperfections and loving them anyway, the love of caring about others regardless of their ability to offer us anything in return. This love can be found in the Jewish laws related to gleaning that command the Hebrew people to leave a portion of their crops in the fields to provide for those in need. It is not a question of how the people wound up in poverty, of whether or not they deserved to be poor and starving. The very fact they were hungry was reason enough to feed them.
This love can be found at the center of the Jesus story in the Sermon on the Mount (or Plain). Here we are told exactly what it means to love other people as God has loved us. Jesus extends our notions of love beyond the ideas of family or even local community to incorporate even those that are against us or persecute us.
This love can be found in the continuing stories of the disciples as the Greek-speaking community complains to the early Christian leaders in Jerusalem that their widows are being neglected in the service of the church in the community. And so seven Greek men were given positions of leadership and responsibility with the church. Rather than exclude those who had heard and sought to follow God’s love in their lives, even though they were people from outside the Hebrew community, the disciples sought to include and empower those that were not exactly like them to minister in their own ways.
Or, to put it another way, “We look for those who are excluded or neglected because of their social status, or their race, or their background, or their gender, or their age, or any number of other things. And we lobby for their acceptance and welcome and embrace into the social network. We also look to see if there are social networks that are destructive to human life...”(Foster, Streams of Living Water, 174).
We feed the hungry. We help the helpless. We reach out to those in need, those on the margins, those who have been cast out. And we find a place in the spectrum of their needs to help them.
Maybe we feed their immediate needs for food or water or clothing or shelter. And maybe we dig deeper to work towards changing the systems and policies in place that caused them to be without food or water or clothing or shelter in the first place. Or maybe our response falls somewhere in between. There is no single way of living a life of compassion, no single right way of seeking justice.
I recently saw a post on Facebook that was playing with the idea of Social Justice Warriors that has become such a rallying cry for people on both sides of many issues. This person took the notion of a Social Justice Warrior and expanded it to include common types of Dungeons & Dragons classes. So they spoke of Social Justice Barbarians and Social Justice Clerics and Social Justice Bards. It was done in fun, but it was also done to make it clear that there are many ways of doing the necessary work of seeking God’s justice for the world around us. Not everyone is a warrior, nor should we all seek to be.
As I rolled the different ideas and ways of understanding social justice and compassion around in my head this week, I wanted to be sure I could find an example that would work well in many ways. I first thought of the role the Hobbits play in The Lord of the Rings. Then I thought about Princess Leia in the Star Wars films. But, as good as those examples could be, I still felt they were missing something.
Then Black Panther came up in a conversation with my wife, and I remembered a reflection I had written last summer on exactly this intersection ("Who Is My Neighbor? Wakandan Edition"). What makes this such a good example is that not only is social justice a significant aspect of the story, the movie also touches on some of the perils and misconceptions related to social justice.
You see, in the movie, the country of Wakanda had vast highly advanced resources and medicines, but for centuries they had kept them to themselves, closing out all outsiders. As the movie begins the old king has very recently been killed during a terrorist bombing in another country and his son is preparing to ascend to the throne. But he is still learning wisdom and is surrounded by different ideas of what it means to be king and to support justice for his people.
On the one hand, there is the Dora Milaje, a group of women trained as warriors and protectors for the king and for Wakanda. Their loyalty is first and foremost to Wakanda and by extension to the king. They hesitate to help others even when they could because the others are not Wakandan and helping them might cause trouble for Wakanda. For them, justice is only for the “in group” and not meant to be extended to those on the outside.
At another extreme, we have N’Jadaka, the king's cousin, who challenges Black Panther for the throne. His idea of justice is to violently throw off those he sees as oppressors and to then subject them to the same oppression he has seen them visit on others. But here again, this justice is only for a select group of people and not meant for everyone. I also think this is often what people think of when they hear “social justice” - that it is about taking the people currently on the bottom and putting them on top and taking the people currently on top and putting them on the bottom.
And yet the true justice that Jesus taught falls somewhere in the middle. In the movie, there is a third character close to the king, Nakia, who presents a different vision of justice. For her, justice for others focuses on using the resources that the Wakandans have to heal diseases and feed people, to improve their quality of life. It is not about power structures or protectionism. It is simply about helping people in need because they are in need and Wakanda has the means to help them.
In the end, with all that he learns along the way, the Black Panther, King T’Challa, realizes that Nakia’s way is the best way. He appears at a meeting of the United Nations to offer the resources of Wakanda to the rest of the world. And in this speech, we hear exactly what it is he learned (from 0:24 to 1:10 in the video below).
[Text of King T'Challa's speech:
"Wakanda will no longer watch from the shadows. We cannot. We must not. We will work to be an example of how we as brothers and sisters on this earth should treat each other. Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis, the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe."]
This is what it means to be compassionate. This is what the social justice that Jesus models looks like. It is about caring for the needs of the people simply because they have needs, about sharing the resources we have available to us with others simply because of God’s love for all. It is about looking after one another as if we are one single tribe.
So let us remember that social justice is not a bad word, and it is not an insult. It about sharing God’s compassion for the world, about taking in God’s love for us and sharing it out with all the people that God loves. It is about seeing the world with God’s eyes, loving the world with God’s heart, serving the world as God’s hands.
Where Contemplation is about turning our attention to the love of God, Social Justice is about extending that love out to others.
Where the Charismatic life is about the gifts of God’s Spirit still at work in the world, Social Justice is one of the ways in which those gifts are put to use.
Where Holiness is about being righteous in our personal lives, Social Justice is about being righteous in our social lives.
Paul reminds us that “we are ambassadors who represent Christ” and as “Christ’s representatives” we must “be reconciled to God” (2 Cor 5:20, CEB). Through this reconciliation with God and as Christ’s representatives here on Earth, we are called to love others just as God has loved us.
For as the prophet Micah reminds us, “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”(Micah 6:8, NRSV)
Then Black Panther came up in a conversation with my wife, and I remembered a reflection I had written last summer on exactly this intersection ("Who Is My Neighbor? Wakandan Edition"). What makes this such a good example is that not only is social justice a significant aspect of the story, the movie also touches on some of the perils and misconceptions related to social justice.
You see, in the movie, the country of Wakanda had vast highly advanced resources and medicines, but for centuries they had kept them to themselves, closing out all outsiders. As the movie begins the old king has very recently been killed during a terrorist bombing in another country and his son is preparing to ascend to the throne. But he is still learning wisdom and is surrounded by different ideas of what it means to be king and to support justice for his people.
On the one hand, there is the Dora Milaje, a group of women trained as warriors and protectors for the king and for Wakanda. Their loyalty is first and foremost to Wakanda and by extension to the king. They hesitate to help others even when they could because the others are not Wakandan and helping them might cause trouble for Wakanda. For them, justice is only for the “in group” and not meant to be extended to those on the outside.
At another extreme, we have N’Jadaka, the king's cousin, who challenges Black Panther for the throne. His idea of justice is to violently throw off those he sees as oppressors and to then subject them to the same oppression he has seen them visit on others. But here again, this justice is only for a select group of people and not meant for everyone. I also think this is often what people think of when they hear “social justice” - that it is about taking the people currently on the bottom and putting them on top and taking the people currently on top and putting them on the bottom.
And yet the true justice that Jesus taught falls somewhere in the middle. In the movie, there is a third character close to the king, Nakia, who presents a different vision of justice. For her, justice for others focuses on using the resources that the Wakandans have to heal diseases and feed people, to improve their quality of life. It is not about power structures or protectionism. It is simply about helping people in need because they are in need and Wakanda has the means to help them.
In the end, with all that he learns along the way, the Black Panther, King T’Challa, realizes that Nakia’s way is the best way. He appears at a meeting of the United Nations to offer the resources of Wakanda to the rest of the world. And in this speech, we hear exactly what it is he learned (from 0:24 to 1:10 in the video below).
[Text of King T'Challa's speech:
"Wakanda will no longer watch from the shadows. We cannot. We must not. We will work to be an example of how we as brothers and sisters on this earth should treat each other. Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis, the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe."]
This is what it means to be compassionate. This is what the social justice that Jesus models looks like. It is about caring for the needs of the people simply because they have needs, about sharing the resources we have available to us with others simply because of God’s love for all. It is about looking after one another as if we are one single tribe.
So let us remember that social justice is not a bad word, and it is not an insult. It about sharing God’s compassion for the world, about taking in God’s love for us and sharing it out with all the people that God loves. It is about seeing the world with God’s eyes, loving the world with God’s heart, serving the world as God’s hands.
Where Contemplation is about turning our attention to the love of God, Social Justice is about extending that love out to others.
Where the Charismatic life is about the gifts of God’s Spirit still at work in the world, Social Justice is one of the ways in which those gifts are put to use.
Where Holiness is about being righteous in our personal lives, Social Justice is about being righteous in our social lives.
Paul reminds us that “we are ambassadors who represent Christ” and as “Christ’s representatives” we must “be reconciled to God” (2 Cor 5:20, CEB). Through this reconciliation with God and as Christ’s representatives here on Earth, we are called to love others just as God has loved us.
For as the prophet Micah reminds us, “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”(Micah 6:8, NRSV)