Throughout this sermon series, we have pondered the meaning of justice and what our God has to say about it. We began considering where the heart of justice lies, recognizing goodness as the amount of “Godness” in something, and that evil is the corruption of that goodness. Ryan then brought us to this definition of justice: that it is, in the eyes of God, the great leveling of humanity towards a common good. Finally, we explored the relationship between the church and government in implementing God’s justice in the world.
But what about the church? How do we do justice? And what does God purely require of His people? Repentance might not be the place one would consider starting when taking the journey towards discovering the church’s role in working out justice, but it is where we’re starting. For our repentance is the evidence that God’s mission to reveal His justice to the world has pierced our hearts.
…During the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the country around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. As it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet:
“A voice of one calling in the wilderness,
‘Prepare the way for the Lord,
make straight paths for him.
Every valley shall be filled in,
every mountain and hill made low.
The crooked roads shall become straight,
the rough ways smooth.
And all people will see God’s salvation.’”
John said to the crowds coming out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? (Luke 3:2-7)
If we had a nickel for every time we used the word “wrath” in a week, we would still be a nickel poorer. “Wrath” is not a word that we typically use in our conversations, and when we do hear that word it typically evokes feelings of fear and worry within us. “Wrath” might make us think of pent up anger suddenly exploding on a poor soul or maybe a violent outburst from someone seeking vengeance. And for those of us who grew up in the church pews, God’s wrath was definitely something none of us wanted to be on the receiving end of. But if John the Baptizer is supposed to be pointing to the arrival of Jesus of Nazareth, the savior of the world, and the gospel writers claim this announcement to be good news, then why choose the word “wrath” as the way to describe God’s action in the world?
A few years ago, I got to go on a short-term mission trip with some college friends to Colorado Springs, Arizona to work with the local Dream Center. While on the trip, our hosts invited our team to go with them to Zion National Park to hike up Angel’s Landing. Now, as a resident of the flat state of Florida, this opportunity was, to me, the equivalent of being invited to Buckingham Palace—an invitation you don’t pass up.
At the break of dawn, I was in a van with a few team mates and our hosts on our way to what I didn’t know at the time was one of the most dangerous hikes in the US. After a few hours of hiking and a few sobering encounters with my own mortality, I got to take in this glorious view:
I could have stared at this landscape for days.
The contrast in this landscape is what makes this view so captivating: the wide valley alongside the towering mountains; the blue sky draping the barren land; the green foliage sprinkling its arid surroundings. Valleys and mountains could never have been more beautiful.
And that is the bit isn’t it? Haven’t we become so captivated by the current lay of the world that, maybe, just maybe, we have deemed “beautiful” that which disgusts our Father? And have we called “ugly” what Jesus calls “good”?
And therefore, when Luke quotes the prophet Isaiah to describe John’s announcement about God’s work being carried out by Jesus, he chooses the words describing the terraformation of earth. That like a category 5 hurricane leaving in its wake an unrecognizable cityscape so is God’s reign upon the earth to the evil enterprises and structures we have built our human society on. This “wrath” is only negative in its connotation to those who believe such evil and injustice to be beautiful; but, to those crying out to God for mercy and relief—those under the boot of the demonic—such radical restructuring of the world is salvation.
Therefore, if justice is God’s great leveling of humanity towards a common good, then it is God’s mission to reveal this justice to every empire and soul on earth. God doesn’t need to warn anyone about His turning upside-down of the world. He would be completely justified in ridding away all that defiles His good world without giving any of us a heads up. If that is how our Father went about His business, yes, our continued existence in His restored earth might be up for question, but considering what we have done to this place and to each other, no one would blame Him for any of His actions.
Yet, think about that moment when you conscientiously made the decision to begin following Jesus. Perhaps you gave yourself to Him at an altar on a specific day that you remember. Maybe it wasn’t so instantaneous and specific, but instead it was a series of gentle people sharing unmerited kindness that moved you towards Him. Or, maybe you muttered a prayer under your breath that you thought went nowhere, but soon that which you hoped for materialized before your very eyes. Whatever your experience is, what captivated your heart was a glimpse of a world that stood dissonant to ours and only made possible by God’s faithfulness to raise valleys and lower the mountains. That in the place of loneliness there is a family, instead of hunger there is a table, instead of brokenness there is healing, and despite incredible loss, there is a forever feast where the last are first and the marginalized are brought front and center.
The point is that - despite convincing ourselves otherwise - you didn’t discover that beautiful world; it was God’s own commitment to you that led Him to lovingly reveal to you a world-wide rescue project that He desires you to become part of. And the moment you glimpsed a vision of this world that God is recreating and sensed the dissonance between it and the world as it is currently, is the moment that God’s mission pierced your very heart.
Your response - to forsake the old world (the world as it currently works) and choosing to live according to the ways of the one God is raising up—is what Christians have always called repentance. Your repentance is the proof that His justice has made a home within you.
John continues to the crowd of the repentant…
“Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.”
“What should we do then?” the crowd asked.
John answered, “Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same.”
Even tax collectors came to be baptized.“Teacher,” they asked, “what should we do?”
“Don’t collect any more than you are required to,” he told them.
Then some soldiers asked him, “And what should we do?”
He replied, “Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely—be content with your pay.”
(Luke 3:8-14)
Let me tell you a story…
One day, a skeptic who was unsatisfied was seen shouting up to the heavens, ‘God! If you’re up there, tell us what we should do!’
A voice suddenly responded, ‘Feed the hungry, house the homeless, establish justice.’
The skeptic was alarmed. ‘I was just testing you!” he replied nervously.
The voice responded, ‘Me too.’
Our repentance is evidence of God’s mission reaching our hearts, and it is our participation in that mission that serves as the evidence of our repentance.
Once the crowds have glimpsed that new world that God is raising up, they ask what we sometimes are too afraid to ask: what now? And at that exact moment—the moment of our repentance—is the moment that John places our forgotten neighbors in front of us. By doing so, the Baptizer exposes how our greed, extortion, and exploration of our less powerful neighbors have created the very mountains and valleys that God is working to level. The fruit of our repentance, as John tells us, then is to work with God to make our wrongs right.
John the Baptizer isn’t out of line when He makes this challenge to the crowd and to us. John read His Bible and continued in the tradition of the prophets. This is Isaiah 58:6-12 in Eugene Peterson’s The Message:
“This is the kind of fast day I’m after:
to break the chains of injustice,
get rid of exploitation in the workplace,
free the oppressed,
cancel debts.
What I’m interested in seeing you do is:
sharing your food with the hungry,
inviting the homeless poor into your homes,
putting clothes on the shivering ill-clad,
being available to your own families.
Do this and the lights will turn on,
and your lives will turn around at once.
Your righteousness will pave your way.
The God of glory will secure your passage.
Then when you pray, God will answer.
You’ll call out for help and I’ll say, ‘Here I am.’
“If you get rid of unfair practices,
quit blaming victims,
quit gossiping about other people’s sins,
If you are generous with the hungry
and start giving yourselves to the down-and-out,
Your lives will begin to glow in the darkness,
your shadowed lives will be bathed in sunlight.
I will always show you where to go.”
Fasting is a form of spiritual discipline. It follows in the same vein as prayer, contemplation, forgiveness, sabbath-keeping, and Scripture reading. Facts are that no Christian practice is truly substantial without the practice of these “inward” spiritual disciplines. In fact, that is one of the main drivers that brought me to City Beautiful Church.
I have come to appreciate my charismatic upbringing, but coming out of college I was starving for a community that practiced the contemplative and valued the intellect. Coming to City Beautiful Church was truly a breath of fresh air: this community values quiet meditation; communal liturgical prayer; listening to the Church fathers for interpreting Scriptures. In fact, it was at this church that I had my first dinner with a fellowship of Jesus followers!
All that being said, a faith that is born of a repentance that becomes so inwardly obsessed that it becomes outwardly allergic, can only be described as hypocrisy.
This is how Chris Green defines hypocrisy:
"Hypocrisy is not pretending to be what you're not. Hypocrisy is about the failure to discern what the Lord wants done, a failure to be present in the world as it actually is. And if you are a hypocrite you cannot do justice."
There is nothing wrong with fasting, prayer, and quiet meditation. On the contrary! As I mentioned earlier, such quiet practices are vital to maturing as a follower of Jesus. In fact, the Pharisees in the gospels—whom we deem as “the bad guys”—are masters of the contemplative and seek to prepare Israel for God’s terraformation through implementation of many spiritual disciplines. Yet, their lack of courage to look beyond their own self-righteousness causes them to stumble into that hypocrisy that Chris Green is talking about: they failed to hear God’s call to make right what they have made wrong; to participate in revealing God’s justice to the world.
The invitation to our community is not to be “world changers”, influencers in the highest places of government, or to even solve the issues of poverty and world hunger. The challenge presented to us is to be faithful. It is to place both our feet in the ground and live in this world as it actually is, and to reveal to it with our hands and lives that God is leveling the mountains and raising the valleys—that God has not forgotten, abandoned, or condemned our world, but that He is actively raising it from the dead.
Now, let me be clear: we cannot earn being “put right” by God—He already wants to do that. But we do have a responsibility to God and to the world once we are a people who claim to be those who have been put right. Chris Green mentions that we can’t keep God from being God to anybody, but we do get to determine how God has to be God to them. We either serve as the conduits of His love and rescue, or we become the obstacles that God must overcome to extend His justice to those we oppress in our hypocrisy. Our Father will either work with us to be God to our neighbor, or He will work against us to minister to them. That choice is up to us.
I had a friend in college who had participated in YWAM (Youth With A Mission) prior to beginning her academic career. Serving in this organization brought her to preach the gospel in countries such as New Zealand and India, and she always spoke fondly of her time in YWAM. She was genuinely a kind soul with a desire to share Jesus to the world.
Upon meeting her brother on a mission trip to Brazil, I became extremely perplexed about the sister he knew and the friend that I did. When he would share stories of my friend, he described her as meddlesome, selfish, and antagonistic—an adjective that I would never have used to describe his sister. I approached him shortly afterwards asking him to help settle the dissonance in my mind when he explained to me that, “my sister was totally a stinker growing up. But, once she came back from YWAM, she was a completely different person. I don’t know how to explain what happened, but she was… well, changed.”
Our Greek Orthodox brothers and sisters have a term that I’ve grown fond of over the past several months: deification—it isn’t too dissimilar to what we Protestants mean when referring to “sanctification”. The Greek Orthodox would describe deification as “our becoming into God”, or in other words, it is our eternal journey into becoming a people who love, give, and live lives like their God.
You see, just like my friend learned and lived at YWAM, the call to participate in God’s mission is the means by which He shapes us and the world by His love. It is the tool by which our God works out our deification. Our God, desiring just like any parent would hope for their children, yearns for us to exist in this world in the same manner that He does. How does our Father relate to the world? The Psalmists observe our God in this way:
Sing to God, sing in praise of his name,
extol him who rides on the clouds;
rejoice before him—his name is the Lord.
A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows,
is God in his holy dwelling.
God sets the lonely in families,
he leads out the prisoners with singing;
but the rebellious live in a sun-scorched land. (Psalm 68:4-6)
He upholds the cause of the oppressed
and gives food to the hungry.
The Lord sets prisoners free,
the Lord gives sight to the blind,
the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down,
the Lord loves the righteous.
The Lord watches over the foreigner
and sustains the fatherless and the widow,
but he frustrates the ways of the wicked. (Psalm 146:7-9)
Mission, at its core, is about revealing to the world what God is like with our hands and resources. By turning outward towards the neighbors placed in front of us at our repentance, we reveal to them a God who rescues those who have been forgotten in a world hellbent on erasing them away. The fruit of our repentance is not trying to satisfy the illogical commands of a demanding God, but the participation in the very life of God which extends itself to every hungry soul and every war-torn child. To participate in mission is to witness the world’s - and, to our surprise, our own - healing.
Therefore, we need not be “burdened” by the invitation to participate in God’s mission as if it were an unbearable task. Mission, for the Christian, is a gift. By stretching out our hands to the world around us, we reveal to the world a love it never knew possible as we watch God level mountains and raise up valleys. True, the amount of problems and injustice in the world is beyond our limited, human capacities. But God never asked us to “fix” the world, He simply asks us to “give to the one who asks [of us]” (Matt. 5:42 NIV) in the same manner that He has given to us. You see, God will be God to our world and will fix every wrong ever done; but, it is His desire for you to put in your metaphorical two cents wherever and however you can because through it we take on His own character.
That pain you feel when you watch the news or the heartaches you sense when you see a neighbor in need are not put there to torture you—they are the same burdens that ache the heart of your Father. When we come to our God in prayer lamenting the injustice of the world, we are not delivering to Him news that He would otherwise be unaware of. The truth is that He was aware of the injustice first and we are simply too slow in recognizing it as so. Thus, our prayer for Him to do something about evil can also be seen as His call to us: “Okay, but I desire to do something about it through you.”
Thus, let us glimpse that beautiful and just world that our Father is raising up and enter into it through repentance; and may our repentance lead us to co-labor with our Father in revealing that justice to the whole world, and may it be the means by which we and the world come to be shaped into His image.