Psalm 99
“Lover of Justice”
October 20, 2019 – Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
In Madison, Wisconsin last week, Marlon Anderson got fired from his job as a high school security guard for using the “N word.” The school district has a zero-tolerance policy for staff who use that word. The problem is that Anderson is African-American. He used the word only once to say to an unruly student, “Don’t call me [that],” after the student called him the “N word” multiple times. Anderson’s firing seems unjust.
Protests in Haiti flared again this past week as citizens of that country express their frustration with the corrupt president Jovenel Moise. He and his government seem to have stolen a huge portion of two billion dollars in energy loans from Venezuela. People are unable to buy fuel and the government responds to protests with violence and targeted assassinations. There are supposed to be parliamentary elections next Sunday, but it is very possible they will not take place. If not, the government may dissolve completely, leaving Moise completely in charge to rule by decree. It’s injustice on a larger scale.
As we read Psalm 99 just now, we heard the psalmist’s call for God’s people to praise a better kind of government, “The Lord is king!” He pictures God sitting on His throne amidst the cherubim, between the angels which symbolically decorate the Ark of the Covenant in Jerusalem’s temple. He sits there in majesty, “exalted above all the nations,” as the “nations tremble” and the “whole earth” quakes before Him.
A number of our hymns and praise songs pick up that image of our great and awesome God ruling over creation and specifically over His people and this world in grandeur and power. With ancient Israel and Christians down through the ages we praise our Lord’s “awesome name,” and proclaim to Him, “Your name is Holy!”
What we don’t want to forget is what the next verse of this psalm recalls for us. God’s holiness includes justice. In fact, God, the “Mighty King,” is the “lover of justice.” As the verse goes on to elaborate, fairness, justice and righteousness are the way His kingdom is meant to operate, the way the world is meant to operate. But the sad fact we know only too well, as the stories I started with tell us, is that justice is often in short supply in this world.
Like those Haitian protestors, like Marlon Anderson appealing to the Madison school board, we want what happened for Israel at the top of page 108, the middle of verse 6 in a standard Bible. “They cried to the Lord for help, and he answered them.” We get the same thought in today’s Gospel reading from the beginning of Luke 18. Jesus tells a parable about a poor widow who keeps coming to an unjust judge for justice. It’s a story meant, as Luke sets it up, to address our situation as people who cry out to God in prayer.
You could take Luke’s little introduction, “Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart,” to mean the parable was pretty much about any sort of prayer, whether for health or for income or for safe travels or whatever. Just keep praying and don’t give up. That’s not a bad thought, but listen to how Jesus tells it. First, the story was specifically about a petition for justice. Then Jesus concludes, “And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night?” Let us hear Jesus a little more carefully. His specific promise there is not for health or money or safety. It’s for God to bring justice to those crying for it.
Which means that you and I, and followers of Jesus down through the ages, are living in a kind of gap time right now. This psalm celebrates one side of that gap. God did in fact bring justice for His people. He listened to cries from godly leaders like Moses and Aaron, then later Samuel, and answered. He led Israel out of unjust slavery in Egypt with a pillar of cloud. Years later when they wanted Samuel to ask God for a king for them, God listened and gave them kings. The psalm says, “O Lord our God, you answered them.”
God answering ancient Israel to save them is one side of the gap. Jesus’ promise that God will still answer and give justice for His people is the other side of the gap. In the middle though verse 8 of Luke 18 hints it may be a long time until “the Son of Man comes.” That is, until Jesus returns. In the meantime, we are in gap, a justice gap.
British couple Charlotte Charles and Tim Dunn wanted justice when they agreed to come to the White House this past week. They hoped that diplomatic immunity would be lifted from Anne Sacoolas, the wife of a U.S. diplomat. She killed their son by driving on the wrong side of the road in England. They wanted her to return to the U.K. and be accountable to British justice.
After a friendly greeting from the president, instead of justice,,Charlotte and Tim received a surprise invitation to meet Sacoolas right then, to face the woman who caused their son’s death. Not surprisingly, they felt “ambushed” and declined the offer. The national security advisor continued to pressure them to do the meeting. Photographers were waiting. But they declined again and left the White House with no justice.
That’s just one very public story. You can tell your own, whether it’s about your personal experience with injustice from an employer or a teacher, or a public story about a birth center that should not have been closed or a person of color who should not have been arrested. People are crying out for justice all the time, all over the world, and that justice gap just seems to get bigger rather than smaller. Where is God in it all?
Our Old Testament reading from Genesis 32 is a very apt illustration of how we might feel when crying out for justice. Jacob the father of the tribes of Israel crosses a stream and lies down alone to sleep. But in the night he finds himself in a wrestling match, struggling with a “man” who we begin to understand is an angel or even God Himself. Jacob grapples there with the “man” until he finally relents and blesses Jacob. But in the process Jacob’s hip is wounded.
If we wrestle with God for justice, we have the promise of Jacob’s encounter and Jesus’ own word that He will respond. We will ultimately be blessed with that justice we’re after. But it may be a long struggle. We may feel wounded in the process. Yet this psalm says that our King is a “lover of justice.” It’s what He wants. And in the end, it’s what He will give to His people, give to this world.
In the meantime, I’d like to ask you to take note of another verse in our psalm for today, there on page 108. I mentioned the first part of it earlier, “O Lord our God, you answered them.” That’s what I’ve been saying, what Jesus said to His disciples, God will answer, even if it takes time and struggling. But there’s more to that verse:
You were a forgiving God to them,
but you punished them when they went wrong.
There is a good reminder, perhaps even a fresh lesson for us in that verse. It tells us something about what justice really is, how God’s justice is meant to work out in this world. God’s justice happens when His people do as He asks, when they do what the previous verse said Moses, Aaron, Samuel and the other Israelites did when God spoke:
they kept his decrees,
and the statutes that he gave them.
In other words, they obeyed God, they did as He commanded, and in the process they received His justice, and they received His forgiveness.
We need to read this text here and other Scriptures about forgiveness and understand that forgiveness is more complicated and more costly than we often imagine. We tend to think forgiving someone is just offering a free pass, like when someone bumps you on the sidewalk or interrupts you in a conversation. He or she apologizes and you just wave your hand and say, “No problem.” But real forgiveness, forgiveness when it truly matters, is much more painful, much more complex. And, it also still cries out for justice.
My African-American Covenant pastor friends have pointed out that complexity of forgiveness mixed with justice in relation to that moving picture a couple weeks ago. The brother of Botham Jean hugged Amber Guyger, the police officer who shot and killed Botham in his apartment, thinking it was her own apartment. What my black friends want me and other white people to grasp is that humble acts of love like Brandt Jean’s should not be what we expect of African-Americans. Such gestures especially should not be the closure of anger and outrage and protest against injustice constantly perpetrated against people of color. It should definitely not let us as white people off the hook, feeling like it’s all O.K. now, that we too have been forgiven and don’t have to think about it anymore, that we don’t need to worry about how we and police and government treat people of color.
The psalm says that God was forgiving to them, to Israel, but in the very next breath, the next line, says that He punished them when they went wrong. Forgiveness, even God’s forgiveness, is not meant to short-circuit justice. A crime may be forgiven, but it still may need to be punished.
That’s good news for you when you are trying to forgive someone. You don’t have to just wave your hand and say all the pain you were caused does not matter. You don’t have to give a free pass to someone who stole from you. It’s O.K. to try and get your possessions back. You don’t have to excuse and continue to live with a person who abuses you. It is better to leave and protect yourself from further abuse. You don’t even have to continue to be friends with someone who betrayed or insulted you. You can forgive in all those cases without letting go of justice in those situations. Forgiveness does not mean there are no consequences, no punishment for wrongdoing.
We may want to adjust our understanding of what God’s forgiveness for us means. Christians since the Reformation especially somehow get the idea that Jesus dying on the Cross for us means there are absolutely no consequences or punishment from God for our sins. Nothing could be further from the biblical truth. Both Jesus and Paul warn even disciples and believers that straying from what God commands, including justice, can bring trouble, even punishment for those who fail to do what God asks.
You can see how we may spin justice wrong in the translation of what Jesus asks at the end of the Gospel today. As He promises that God will bring justice for His chosen ones in the end, He asks about that time, “And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” It sounds like He’s wondering if anyone will still believe in Him when He comes back. But as you may know, the biblical word for “faith” can also mean “faithfulness.” So rather than asking whether He’s going to find any who still believe, He is asking rhetorically whether He’s going to find anyone who is still faithful, still doing what God desires.
This psalm tells us a big part of what God desires. He is “lover of justice.” That well-known verse Micah 6:8 confirms it by asking what God requires of us. The very first item on Micah’s list is “do justice.” God loves justice. That means you and I ought also to love justice. Just go back over what we have already read from Psalms and Proverbs this fall and count how many times you see the word “justice,” both in relation to what God does and in relation to what you and I should be doing.
We are blessed in the United States with a great tradition of justice, a tradition of the kind of equity or fairness with which the psalmist says God deals with people. The sad reality, though, is that we have lost our way in that tradition. We may not even realize that people are constantly left out of American justice. We certainly struggle with huge disagreements about what that justice really is, both in general and in relation to cases and situations which make the news and which affect us personally.
Let us not forget then, to cry out to God for justice, like Moses and Aaron and Samuel did according to our psalm, and like Jesus encouraged us to do in the Gospel parable about that poor widow. Let us cry out not only for justice for ourselves, but for everyone around us, regardless of their color or country, regardless of race or citizenship status, regardless of their age or gender. When it says that God loves justice, it doesn’t mean He loves it for just some people, but for everyone.
Let’s pay attention to stories which remind us of the need for justice. It may be painful or depressing, but let’s not skip over or change the channel when we hear news about Haiti or Yemen or Syria or Venezuela where people are crying out for justice. As Youth for Christ evangelist Bob Pierce said, “Let my heart be broken with the things which break the heart of God.” Injustice toward anyone breaks God’s heart.
As we as a congregation shared favorite books today, I wonder if anyone brought a murder mystery or legal thriller? As surprising as it sounds, those forms of fiction are based on divine justice, on this divine truth: individual lives matter. A detective or attorney will not quit until the truth is found, the culprit apprehended, and justice is done. As Stanley Hauerwas, drawing on mystery writer P. D. James, writes,
It is very reassuring to have a form of fiction which says that every form of human life is sacred, and if it is taken away, then the law, society, will address itself to finding out who did it. The attitude is not, “well, one more chap’s got murdered—hard luck.” Infinite pains and money are spent trying to find out who did it because we still have the belief that individual human life is sacred.[1]
That belief, that each and every individual human life is sacred, is a biblical belief, a Christian belief. It’s why any Christian conception of justice cannot allow for laws or social orders which let one group prosper at the expense of another. It’s why national security cannot trump individual rights. It’s why a just war that permits “collateral damage” to innocent civilians cannot really be just.
God’s kingdom is to be a kingdom of justice. That’s why when yet another African-American suffers injustice or dies unjustly we need to let that community protest that “black lives matter” without rushing to affirm overtop of them that “all lives matter.” Their specificity, their narrow focus on just those lives which are being ignored and oppressed is what we need to draw us back toward a truly Christian understanding of justice in the kingdom of God. The justice of our King is administered with an eye that sees and knows every individual personally and wants justice specifically for each single human life.
The psalm today ends,
Extol the Lord our God,
and worship at his holy mountain;
for the Lord our God is holy.
As we seek to do that each week here in a church service, or each day in our prayers, as we seek to “Extol the Lord our God,” let us not forget that the Lord our God is holy just because He is just. He loves justice. He wants justice for you and for me and for everyone. As we ask for our sins to be forgiven, let us remember that God’s forgiveness does not come to us apart from His justice. By the grace of Jesus Christ, He forgives us but expects us then to live justly, faithfully as people who treat each other as He treats us, with both forgiveness and justice for all.
Our God is the “Mighty King, lover of justice.” “And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him both day and night?”
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2019 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] In “McInerny Did It: or, Should a Pacifist Read Murder Mysteries?” in Stanley Hauerwas, A Better Hope (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2000), p. 207.