This is the sermon I preached at Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Beatrice, Neb., on Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2010. Midweek services from Ash Wednesday through Maundy Thursday will explore the theme, “Living as Christians.”

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Readings

Micah 6:6–8
Psalm 82
Romans 7:15–19
Matthew 22:34–40

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Prayer

You call us to return to you, Lord God, and to leave behind all things that keep us from giving ourselves fully to serve you. Reach out to us with your Word, so that we may turn to face you and to give you glory; through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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Message

Tonight is our second gathering
on our journey through Lent,
our second time to ask together,
“What does it look like for us to live as Christians in today’s world?”

Last week, on Ash Wednesday,
we faced the reality of the evil
that runs loose in our world
and that lurks in the depths of our being.
This is the truth that we live
“in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.”

We heard the call from Joel, the prophet,
to “return to the LORD our God.”
We received a word from Jesus Christ,
to prepare ourselves
to resist those forces of evil
through our prayer, our fasting, and our almsgiving.

We learned that evil is more than randomly bad things
happening to good people;
it’s a willful force opposed to God.

Well, tonight we turn our attention
to God’s response to the evil in His world.
In the same way that evil is not just bad stuff happening at random,
but is a willful rebellion against God,
justice is much more than getting fair treatment,
or benefitting from randomly good things.
Justice is the nature of the work of God’s love in our lives.

In Matthew’s Gospel,
we just heard the conversation between Jesus and the Pharisees.
Jesus told how all of God’s Word—
the law and the prophets—
hangs on a pair of commandments:
love God with all that He has given you
and love others as you love yourself.

And with apologies to Tina Turner,
we might ask, “What’s love got to do with it?”,
when the “it” is justice?

The key is to see that God is the source and the standard
both for justice and for love.

When His justice is at work in the world,
then others regard each of us as worthy of respect
simply because He has loved us enough
to create us in His image,
making us for a purpose,
to love Him in return.

That’s why the first commandment
calls us to love God with all that He gives us,
because this is why he made us.
And because He made us,
we are made to love ourselves,
because that means we love what God has made.
Then we love others because we see
that they too are made by God.

His justice is at work in our lives
when we view all of our relationships
through the lens of love of God,
a love that cherishes Him and all that He has made.

When we show our love to Him,
we are living as He made us, as we ought to live,
and so that is just and right.
The same is true of our love for others.
He made each of us in his image,
and so when we love one another,
not necessarily because we find one another enjoyable,
but simply because we see God’s handiwork
in the lives of those around us,
then we are living and acting justly.

It’s easy, then, to see the damage we inflict on others through hate,
the ways that hate takes shape in our lives as injustice.

Recently I’ve been reading a book by Raymond Arsenault entitled,
Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice.
In its beginning chapters,
it reaches back to the 1940s to fill in the background.
One incident happened with Isaac Woodard,
a twenty-seven year old veteran of “fifteen months
[spent] fighting the Japanese in the south Pacific,
tried to ride a Greyhound bus home to North Carolina
from a military base in Georgia.”

Woodard, who was black,
“was arrested in Batesburg, South Carolina,
after he and the bus driver
‘exchanged words over some minor point of racial etiquette.’
Dragged from the bus and beaten by Batesburg police chief Linwood Shull and a deputy,
the …solider suffered massive injuries, including the blinding of both eyes,
[because] he ran afoul of two white men
who saw fit to gouge out his eyes with the blunt end of a billy club.” (p. 34)

That was decades in a different place.
And while the details may change,
the root reality remains the same.

When we do not treat others
as lovingly fashioned creations of God,
but rather as objects or animals
or beings inferior simply because of difference,
then we practice injustice, not justice.
We can beat people with words and expressions and attitudes,
even if we never raise a fist or wield a weapon.

We are a force for evil, not good,
when we live by hate, not by love.

In fact, it has always been God’s measure of justice
to look at how His people—both Israel and the Church—
treat those who have no say, no power, no sway.
That’s why the psalmist says,

“Give justice to the weak and the orphan;
maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute.
Rescue the weak and the needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.” (Psalm 82:3–4, NRSV)

This helps us to know what justice looks like,
especially when we are faced with difficult choices.

First, we remember that God has made each of us in His image.
Second, we recognize that we are called to love one another.
Third, we recall that He charges us to care for people on the margins.
Fourth, we repent of the ways we turn away from God’s justice.
And finally, we return to God when we err and ask Him to guide us.

This is how we live as Christians who carry out God’s calling
to practice justice through love in all of our actions,
with everything we have been given by God,
our heart and soul and mind and strength. Amen.