God’s Work in God’s Ways
When I heard their complaints, I was very angry. After thinking it over, I spoke out against these nobles and officials. I told them, “You are hurting your own relatives by charging interest when they borrow money!” Then I called a public meeting to deal with the problem. At the meeting I said to them, “We are doing all we can to redeem our Jewish relatives who have had to sell themselves to pagan foreigners, but you are selling them back into slavery again. How often must we redeem them?” And they had nothing to say in their defense. Nehemiah 5:7-8
Some Forms of Injustice are Worse than Others
All injustice is bad. Let’s get that straight right here at the outset. It is always harmful and should always be pushed back against. But not all injustice is unexpected. There are some places and some circumstances where we just know there is going to be rampant injustice on a regular basis. In some scenarios, it is the norm. That doesn’t make it good; it just makes it predictable.
Some governments and communities, through their specific leaders, have proven themselves to be without any compassion, without any moral compass. From them, we have just come to expect injustice. But there are some places where the very presence of injustice is surprising. In some settings, we just expect justice to be the prevailing wind, the normal outcome. Indeed, in many of those places, injustice is by definition contrary to their “brand”, i.e., the opposite of their stated mission and purpose.
Gatherings of Christ followers (what we might call local congregations) are such places. When we run into injustice in those places it catches us off guard (at least it used to). It is especially painful, because we often did not anticipate it. It is the last thing we expected to see in those settings. At least in that particular way, injustice in the church is worse than injustice in the world.
The Heart of Injustice
Of course, situations involving abuse (spiritual, sexual, and any other form) are the easy examples to cite. If we are looking for forms of injustice that will fan the flame of outrage against the church, those are the low hanging fruit. Every decent person agrees those forms of injustice have no place in our society, let alone among God’s people. But injustice, as a concept, rarely begins with an overt need to abuse someone. It begins with the very counter-Christian attitude of “I get what I want at the expense of what you need.”
And, more times than not, it involves a power imbalance. Those with power take advantage of those without power. Again, there are easy, clear examples and then there are the more insidious, harder-to-see instances. In Nehemiah’s case, it was economic power. Those with money were loaning money to their less fortunate brethren at usurious interest rates (think, payday loan services) and then sending them into debt slavery when they could not repay the loans. Nehemiah’s outrage was on target: “after all this time and energy getting our people OUT of slavery, now you are putting them right back in!”
It happens within the church today as well, though perhaps not so overtly. Again, remember the heart of injustice: “I get what I want at the expense of what you need.” When those carrying power in the church, whether economic or social or political (or any other of the world’s forms of power), use that power to get what they want, we risk injustice. When we take from others (whether or not they know we have taken from them) solely to further our own selfish desires, we risk injustice.
Nothing Fuels our Culture Wars like a Good Tragedy
At the time I am writing this, communities around me are still recovering from devastating floods. I happen to live in a “red” state. So, many of my Christian brothers and sisters who fight the culture wars from the left have taken advantage of this tragedy to score points against the “heartless conservative government” who is surely to blame for this tragedy. Not many weeks ago, there were horrendous forest fires destroying huge swaths of communities in a “blue state”. Many of my Christian brothers and sisters who fight the culture wars from the right took advantage in order to score points against the “incompetent progressive government” who was surely to blame.
Is this not the very heart of injustice? If I choose to use YOUR tragic circumstances in order to score points in MY culture war, am I not taking from you in order to get what I want? What if, in the immediate aftermath of a natural (or even manmade) disaster, Christ followers just quietly pitched in to help in the recovery rather than participate in a social media campaign to destroy the “other side”?
The nobles and financial leaders of Nehemiah’s community surely had no sense at all that they were doing anything wrong. They were merely taking advantage of a business opportunity. Indeed, they probably convinced themselves they were actually DOING GOOD by lending money to their less fortunate neighbors. Indeed. Helping.
My Church/God’s Church
If the heart of injustice is getting what I want at the expense of what someone else needs, then perhaps a good place to start working is in my own heart. After all, why is what I want even relevant to the work of the church? If it is God’s church, then the only question that ever really matters is, “what does God want?” But we live in an age of democracy. Did you know there are only six countries in the entire world who do not at least claim some form of democracy as government? The vast majority of people agree that democracy is a moral good and should be pursued.
And therein lies the problem for the Christian church. It is not a democracy. It never was. You see, in a democracy, the highest value (the deciding factor) is the will of the people. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address captures it best: “a government of the people, for the people, by the people.” But that is not the church. Among God’s people, the highest value is not the will of the people. God’s story is replete with horrible outcomes of that thinking. In the church, the highest value is the will of God, i.e., “what does God want?” As Christ followers, we spend our entire lives exploring that reality. Some of us take longer to learn it than others.
When it comes to doing God’s work. i.e., the work of the church, it is never about what I want. It only matters what God wants. The more I learn the difference, the less likely I am to promote injustice among us. This is because I am learning the mind/heart process of discerning between what I want and what God wants. As I learn that, I stop using my power to get what I want. As with the leaders around Nehemiah, stopping injustice among us doesn’t begin with confronting “those people”. It begins with addressing my own heart.
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