Date: February 2, 2020
Scriptures: Micah 6:1-8
A ship is at sea. Suddenly: a light on the horizon. The ship radios to the light, “Turn your course 10 degrees to the north.” Comes the reply: “You turn your course 10 degrees to the south.”
Back-and-forth they go. “Turn your course 10 degrees to the north!” “No, turn yours ten – and to the south!”
The ship draws dangerously close. The captain commandeers the radio, shouting, “I’m the captain of this ship, and I demand that you turn your course 10 degrees to the north.” The reply? “I’m a sailor. You turn your course.”
“Listen, sailor: I’m a captain, and we’re a battleship! We demand you redirect your course ten degrees to the north.”
Replies the sailor: “Sorry, sir. We’re a lighthouse!”
I often take a peek at Facebook. Most days – not all, but most. And each time I go on Facebook, I see a lot of battleships.
I see a lot of battleships of logical reasoning from my friends – the reasoning is logical, of course, because they are my friends. I watch a lot of these battleships of reasoning sail through the choppy social media waters.
And I think I have noticed something about the navigational strategy of each of these battleships. The strategy is this: if you bring out just the right ammunition about a social or political matter – and aim it just right – you will have the power to move anyone your light falls upon. Or, at least, toward the light that you are shining.
The prophets we hear today and the next two Sundays provide us not with battleships, but with lighthouses. Lighthouses of God’s first ethical requirement before us today: doing justice. Standing our ground and shining our light when – for example – billionaires on all sides would buy this big election, turning aside long-time public servants with lighter wallets and too often darker skin. And yet over the course of these billionaires’ dark waters, the lighthouse of God’s truth – and our doing justice – shines forth. Immovably: it does.
Save the world, we cannot do. Live with integrity, we can. God’s requirement #1 of us, according to the prophet Micah: do justice. Be like a lighthouse: shining forth while standing your ground.
And yet doing justice without God’s requirement #2 – loving kindness – is justice punitive, and not justice social. On the grander map of justice: where to find the terrain of love?
A five-year-old girl runs up to her mother. “Mommy, Mommy – can we play?”
Mommy is busy. She’s holding down two jobs while rearing two children. She’s working on one of her jobs at home which the girl has interrupted. “Not now,” she keeps saying. “Not now.”
It grows apparent to the mom that her girl isn’t getting the memo. So she grabs a National Geographic nearby, which has a little map of the world folded up in it. She rips up the map in about 50 pieces. Then she gives the map to the little girl, gives her some tape, and tells her, “Go and put this map of the world back together, and when you’re done, we can play.”
Mom thinks to herself, that will take her about an hour. The little girl returns in 10 minutes. She’s got the whole map of the world taped back together. “Mommy, look! I did it!”
“Dear, that’s impossible! How did you do that so quickly?”
“Mommy, on the back of the map of the world was a picture of a woman. I put the woman back together, and the whole world fell into place.”
“I put the woman back together, and the whole world fell into place.” ’Twere it to be. And can it be?
This past Thursday eve, 50 persons gathered in our pews to see a documentary prepared by a Palestinian Muslim and produced by the Christian Peacemaker Teams organization – followed by Q-&-A. A documentary showing resistance to the day-to-day oppression his occupied townspeople face in Hebron, near Jerusalem.
In the two days prior, I received several phone calls and emails from Arizona to New York to DC excoriating our church for even showing this film. These eloquent protests complained of the film’s anti-Israel bias – based not on seeing the film, but on seeing a three-minute trailer of it online.
Not only that, several protesters showed up Thursday night, on-site. Three stood out on the Wilson Lane sidewalk holding signs.
The film producer Yousef and I walked out to greet them. They let us have it. And we let them have it as well. We let them have a welcome from us to come in and see his film entire. They declined. And so I went back in and brought back to them some water. They declined.
And then the unexpected happened: about 15 minutes later, the three plus a few friends walked in to see the film. Not a film they or the emailers or callers expected: one that demonized a people or a state. But a film that took a perverse map of a tragic land … and turned it obverse. The film tore the perverse map to pieces, and put it back together with the torn faces of the occupied on the other side. A film sharing Yousef’s lived experience growing up in Hebron – and not making lofty arguments based on punitive justice.
According to Micah, doing justice God’s way is not about punitive justice. Doing justice God’s way is about social justice. Reconstructing a map torn by injustice by peering into the suffering faces on the obverse – and piecing together those torn lives. Faces of the landless – the occupied – the walled-away – and all on both sides who have been terrorized.
For social justice: turn over the torn map of God’s world – and look into the torn faces. Do justice and love kindness: requirements of Micah’s God that should never be separated.
God’s requirement #1 of us, according to the prophet Micah: Be a lighthouse of justice. Shine forth, and stand your ground.
God’s requirement #2: Piece the map of justice together by seeing – and looking into – the faces torn on the other side.
God’s requirement #3: Walk humbly … with your God.
You may have heard recently of the tempest surrounding the release of a bestselling novel in our land.
I have not read American Dirt.
I am not planning to read American Dirt.
And I am not here to toss any dirt on American Dirt.
As we begin this Black History Month, I am here to share with you this story involving some real North American dirt. A story of walking with our God, and humbly – a word that comes to us from humus, or dirt. A story of walking humbly – trampling on the dirt and soil of our America’s original sin, racism. A story of walking humbly shared by Bryan Stevenson: founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, whose legal work on death row in the Deep South has been chronicled in a book our church has discussed and that is now a wonderful movie by the same name, “Just Mercy”.
You see, Bryan Stevenson founded the National Memorial for Peace and Justice for victims of lynching. At the memorial, jars of dirt are displayed: dirt dug from the sites where these murders occurred.
And Stevenson tells of this one African-American woman who participated in this project. She was on her hands and knees digging dirt and placing it in a jar at a lynching site when a white man in a truck slowed down and looked at her. He drove past, turned around … and stopped. He asked her what she was doing.
The woman told him the truth, despite her fear. The man got out of the truck and asked if he could help her. She offered him the trowel. He declined. Instead, he dug in with his hands. Together, they put the dirt in the jar.
She noticed tears on the man’s face, and asked if he was okay. He said he feared his ancestors may have participated in the very lynching she was memorializing.
She cried with him. They took photos of each other, holding the jar, memorializing a moment of digging the same blood-drenched ground with one another. Of walking humbly together with their God.
“What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
Be that lighthouse of justice: shining forth. Unmoveable. Unshakeable.
Piece together on the underside of the world’s injustices a map of loving kindness.
Walk the humus with God and with one another: grounded in the dirt of a troubled heritage we all share.
Of Lighthouses, Maps, and American Dirt.
Thanks be to God.
