Pursuing Justice: The Call to Live and Die for Bigger Things
Pursuing Justice: The Call to Live and Die for Bigger Things
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
The message is as hopeful as it is fresh: when you discover a new meaning of the gospel and give your life away, you will find it — and it will be the best life you can imagine.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609816711 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Oasis Audio |
| Publication date: | 02/12/2013 |
| Edition description: | Library Edition |
| Product dimensions: | 6.50(w) x 6.70(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
PURSUING JUSTICE
THE CALL TO LIVE & DIE FOR BIGGER THINGSBy KEN WYTSMA D. R. JACOBSEN
Thomas Nelson
Copyright © 2013 Ken WytsmaAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8499-6466-4
Chapter One
REDEEMING JUSTICEWhat Justice Is and Why It Matters
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead
Justice, sir, is the great interest of [people] on earth. It is the ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations together.
Daniel Webster
God calls everyone to pursue justice—but how?
My friend is a police officer because he believes in upholding our country's justice system. I understand that conviction, and I wouldn't want to live without the rule of law.
World Relief, an international relief and development organization for which I have enormous respect, works on behalf of some of the most vulnerable people in the world. I am proud to partner with them.
Many of my spiritual mentors have demonstrated to me, year after year, a commitment to pursuing discipleship and righteousness. Their goal is to become more like Jesus in the way they think, believe, and act.
Another friend is a teacher in an English as a Second Language (ESL) program. She believes, as do I, that education is a way to provide equity of social access to people in a community who might otherwise be at a disadvantage throughout their lives.
The church I pastor, Antioch, organizes outreach and missions into the categories of food, shelter, and love. This lets us connect our people with others in the community who are already working in these areas.
I've been blessed to interact with colleagues who teach and write about justice, history, and ethics. They've helped me understand what the past can teach us about how we ought to live in the present, and how that can shape the future.
Several pastors I know work in countries that have been torn apart by generations of war, hunger, and political instability. They give their lives to help bring justice to suffering families and communities, and to help bring the perpetrators to justice.
I'm incredibly grateful to be surrounded by such a diversity of people pursuing justice. Their example challenges and inspires me. They, like so many others I meet in my congregation and at schools and conferences around the country, are daily giving their lives away on behalf of others.
However, this array of justice stories also presents a question, one you have perhaps asked yourself: If I want to pursue justice with my life, how and where should I start?
It's natural to want direction or a clear call. For most of us, however, that never happens. We aren't told explicitly to move to a certain city or take a certain job or study a certain thing ... yet the hunger remains to "change the world."
That's exactly why it's vital to consider the widest, most biblical definition of justice we can. Each of these applications of justice is good, but none is complete. Justice is something far broader than a single life can hope to capture, no matter how well it is lived. Justice can be messy on its borders and unclear in the exact ways it ought to be understood or pursued or applied—and that's a good thing!
It means that God, who is perfectly just, and who desires justice for all of His creation, can ask us to use our unique talents and passions and experiences to pursue justice. Wherever we find ourselves, we can make a difference—and that difference starts with understanding more about what justice really is.
A WIDER VIEW
Back when I was studying philosophy in graduate school, we learned to distinguish the difference between simple concepts with a single or easy definition, and complex concepts that required multilayered definitions. Often, for these more complicated concepts, a cluster of definitions was needed to fully capture their meanings.
There are many singular examples of justice, some of which we looked at to begin this chapter—but the wider concept of justice requires a cluster definition to fully capture its meaning. In a cluster definition, the parts of a whole are necessary, but no single part is sufficient. This is familiar to us—if you drove a car to work today, you drove a cluster concept. Many parts of a car are necessary—axles, a steering wheel, the brakes—but no single part is sufficient to define the whole car. You don't drive your engine to work, and neither could you drive your car to work without the engine. Similarly, no individual application of justice in the real world is, by itself, sufficient for understanding all of justice, even though each sphere of concern is important.
The biblical concept of justice has a lot of shared space with synonyms such as love, mercy, charity, the law, righteousness, and more. Justice is a sum of many parts, with many similar overlapping concepts, as the following illustration makes clear.
One of our most important tasks in this book will be to hold up justice and examine its many elements together. Like art students instructed to study a still-life composition at the center of the room, we will strive to see justice from many angles and appreciate its unique qualities. We need to consider its meanings, its theology, and its history. In our effort to understand justice, we must take as wide a view as possible.
This is one reason for the interludes I've included between many of the chapters in this book. I've learned from diverse voices, and I wanted to bring imagery, poetry, short meditations, and even interviews to help illuminate a brighter understanding of justice.
THE MOSAIC OF JUSTICE
When I was in Turkey recently, I toured the Hagia Sofia, a former church in Istanbul that was first dedicated as a Christian worship site more than fifteen hundred years ago. It was converted to a mosque in 1453, when Sultan Mehmed II sacked Istanbul (then called Constantinople), and reconverted by the Turkish government into a nonreligious museum in 1935.
Inside the museum is one of the most iconic and compelling works of religious art in the world: the Deësis mosaic, which dates from the mid-thirteenth century. In it, the figure of Jesus looks wisely and sympathetically at the viewer, making a sign of blessing with His right hand. He is clothed in a blue robe draped over a golden shirt, and a halo frames His head.
To create this mosaic, which is a picture formed from the careful arrangement of small pieces of colored glass, stone, or tile, an artist must have painstakingly added color and form, bit by gleaming bit, until the shape of Jesus began to emerge. Centuries later, visitors continue to take delight in the mosaic, every piece of stone working together in a stunning whole.
Here's a thought experiment. Suppose, when I was in Turkey, I had flipped open a pocketknife and, when no one was looking, pried away a single fragment of the mosaic. Then, upon arriving home, I set the piece of blue stone on the kitchen table and proclaimed to my family, "This is one of the most beautiful works of art in the world!" No matter how lovely that single shard was, in no way would it capture the glory of the whole.
Justice is like a mosaic. It's not only about single pieces—it's also about all the pieces working together in a stunning whole. All too often we believe that our desire to pursue justice can only be lived out or understood in a single shard. Criminal justice. International development. Creation care. Education. Anti-trafficking. Works of mercy and love.
All of these shards are vital parts of God's mosaic of justice.
SHARDS INSTEAD OF THE WHOLE
Many of us want to pursue justice. Even if we don't understand justice as a whole, even if we are thrown for a loop by the words social justice, we want specific injustices to be rectified. So we pursue a single cause, which is wonderful ... unless we allow that to be the sum total of our engagement and understanding. I may volunteer to help homeless veterans, and you may send money to build a well in Africa, in lieu of birthday presents. But if we let those good, necessary things become sufficient for understanding justice, we're neglecting far too much.
When we think a single shard of the mosaic of justice describes the whole, it's as if we're cataloging one particular butterfly and assuming we've understood every other species that swoops and sways through the sky.
In Francis Schaeffer's words, we "have seen things in bits and pieces instead of totals."
One of my fellow pastors once stated that it was fine for me to preach about justice, as long as I started giving equal time to other areas of the Christian life, such as marriage and spiritual growth. I realized I'd failed to communicate to my congregation the reality that justice is universal. We can study justice by itself, but we must also incorporate it when we study nearly every other subject, from marriage to spiritual growth.
In that sense studying justice is like studying grammar. We can learn how the structure and elements of a particular language work together, but we also need grammar to study nearly every other subject, from history to sociology to law. Grammar is laced throughout these subjects, and we cannot understand them apart from it.
We're familiar with how a concept can be thoroughgoing and foundational. Think of truth. We wouldn't suggest that truth was an optional add-on, a subject that should only be studied and preached about occasionally. Rather, we understand truth to be so crucial that it is a universal—it is upon the foundation of truth that we build our ideas about other subjects. Truth is not simply one valuable subject among many; it is, in a sense, the one subject that is part of all others.
I've come to see justice in similar terms. Through studying, reading the Scriptures, traveling, dialoguing with brothers and sisters around the world, learning how to serve with my life, and always trying to ask good questions, I've become convinced that justice is every bit as universal as truth.
Put simply, truth corresponds to what is; justice to what ought to be.
We understand truth is a universal, a paradigm, a lens through which we can look to see what is real. Justice, likewise, is a lens through which we can look to determine what ought to be in our relationships both with God and with others.
Truth and justice as lenses for perceiving reality.
Justice has many facets, but we can't lose sight of the fact that justice itself is never peripheral. Rather, it is integral to the way we think, pray, act, hope, believe, work, spend, live, and love.
This isn't really a book about how to do more justice. Pressuring people to act is, ironically, a good way to ensure that people burn out, and that less justice gets done. It can also potentially even create injustice.
Rather, this book is about recovering the full-orbed biblical concept of justice and inviting it back into our lives. When we understand that justice is rooted in the character of God and flows from the heart of God, we can begin to see that it permeates all of life.
The heart of this book is an encounter with the heart of God, and God's heart beats with justice.
AN ONGOING DEFINITION
Justice is the single best word, both inside and outside the Bible, for capturing God's purposes for the world and humanity's calling in the world. Justice is, in fact, the broadest, most consistent word the Bible uses to speak about what ought to be, and it has been used throughout the centuries by Christians and non-Christians alike to describe vital areas of human and divine concern.
To "do justice" means to render to each what each is due. Justice involves harmony, flourishing, and fairness, and it is based on the image of God in every person—the Imago Dei—that grants all people inalienable dignity and infinite worth.
Justice describes both our rights—what we are owed—and our responsibilities that we owe others and God.
Justice is broad enough to speak about truth, love, forgiveness, and grace, and it is woven consistently throughout Scripture. It conveys, through the prophetic images of Scripture, a picture of what God's kingdom will look like, and what it can begin to look like now.
During a radio address in 1933, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and pastor killed by the Nazis, offered three possible stances for Christians to address systemic or state-sponsored injustice: speak truth to and criticize the state; give aid to victims of the state; and directly engage the unjust system ... "not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a spoke in the wheel itself."
In this I see a spectrum of justice, moving from dialogue to works of compassion and mercy to actively attacking unjust structures. All are part of justice, and all can and should be done. Abolitionists in the 1800s wrote newspaper editorials, organized the underground railroad, cared for injured slaves, and boycotted the products of the slave economy—all while working to pass laws banning slavery. They didn't pit one aspect of justice against the others, but pursued justice along the whole spectrum as the building of God's shalom demanded.
A biblical understanding of how expansive justice is will carry us into a strong, broad, and deep appreciation of the fullness of God's heart for His creation.
A SCEPTER OF JUSTICE
Throughout history, a scepter has been a near-universal symbol of a ruler's sovereign authority—of his or her expansive responsibility and power. A scepter defines the kingdom, linking the ruler as a person to the kingdom as a whole. What happens to the kingdom happens to the ruler, and vice versa. When a pharaoh carried the scepter of Egypt, not only did he possess absolute authority over Egypt, but Egypt became his primary concern.
The psalmist said of God: "Your throne, O God, will last forever and ever; a scepter of justice will be the scepter of your kingdom" (Psalm 45:6). God's primary concern, His sphere of influence, is a kingdom defined by justice.
If we know the kingdom, we know the king.
To know God, we need to know His will for His kingdom, and to understand His will for His kingdom, we need to understand justice.
There are more than 2,100 verses in the Bible that mention poverty. Rock singer and humanitarian Bono called attention to this in his address to the National Prayer Breakfast in 2006, stating, "It's not an accident. That's a lot of air time, 2,100 mentions." By contrast, praying and prayer are mentioned less than a quarter of that.
Justice isn't a nice addition to God's otherwise perfect character. If we ignore justice, like ignoring love or truth, we create a caricature rather than the divine character we meet in Scripture and in our lives. Justice is a hallmark of God, a distinctive and pure feature of His character that defines Him and His will for the world.
Justice—a right and equitable relationship with God and with people—is truly a word worth redeeming.
HUNGRY FOR JUSTICE
That's part of what led me, along with a group of colleagues, to launch The Justice Conference. We wanted a way to gather people around a crucial conversation, to get twenty-first-century Christians talking about the word justice itself, carefully but with open hearts and minds.
"All virtue," wrote Aristotle, "is summed up in dealing justly." We need to begin pursuing justice by escaping fragmented causes and the latest social fads. We need, instead, to consider the big idea of justice, a theology of justice, and how it relates to God.
The most helpful conversation to begin with focuses less on specific actions and more on a deeper understanding of God's character. In Psalm 146:6–9, God's power as Creator is linked to His design for justice to be enacted in His creation, demonstrating that justice is an aspect of His character as foundational as love and truth.
He is the Maker of heaven and earth, the sea, and everything in them— he remains faithful forever. 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.
People are hungry for justice. They want justice for those they know who are suffering injustice. They want it for themselves and for their communities. They want to practice justice, experience justice, and know God through the universal quality of justice.
These things are what God wants too.
AN INVITATION
My race, gender, class, and education have shaped me to recognize some facets of justice and injustice more readily—and to be blind to issues that are clear to my brothers and sisters who are different from me.
Recently I tried to capture some of my understanding of justice in a poetic exploration called "Justice Is."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from PURSUING JUSTICE by KEN WYTSMA D. R. JACOBSEN Copyright © 2013 by Ken Wytsma. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction xvii
Chapter 1 Redeeming Justice: What Justice Is and Why It Matters 1
Chapter 2 Dynamic Art: Justice as a Way of Knowing God 17
Chapter 3 Advent: The Gospel and Justice 37
Chapter 4 Human Rights and Happiness: Recovering the Moral Value of Happiness 51
Chapter 5 Love as Sacrament: How Justice Informs Love 71
Chapter 6 Stained Glass: When Religion Gets in the Way of Justice 85
Chapter 7 Remember What You Saw: How Empathy Carries Justice 107
Chapter 8 PlayStations and Poverty: Growing Up (in) a Consumer Culture 125
Chapter 9 Compassion Can Kill: The Need for Wisdom and Accountability in Generosity 141
Chapter 10 Why Do You Call Me Good? Reflecting the Goodness of God 159
Chapter 11 God's Love Language: The Love of Others in the Love of God 169
Chapter 12 The Anatomy of Apathy: How We Settle for Less than the Golden Rule 183
Chapter 13 Justice in Society: Why Justice Is Always Social 203
Chapter 14 Rediscovering Worship: The Role of Justice in the Pursuit of God 221
Chapter 15 Debt to Society: Grace and Reconciliation in Establishing Shalom 235
Chapter 16 Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe: How Justice Surfaces the Need for Grace 247
Chapter 17 Learn to Change the World: Education and Knowledge in the Pursuit of Justice 261
Chapter 18 Give Your Life Away: Why It's Better to Give than Receive 277
Chapter 19 Live and Die for Bigger Things 293
Acknowledgments 305
Notes 307
About the Author 325
About D. R. Jacobsen 327
Interlude Authors 329