Cultivating Justice

Saturday at Cultivate I had a few minutes to share some thoughts on Justice. It's interesting, because today I had some confirmation on what we talked about just two days ago.

First, here's a brief synopsis on Saturday's thoughts:

I started with The Lord's Prayer For Justice (download a .pdf file here), which Jared attributed it to me. To be fair, I didn't write it. I couldn't tell you where I got it, and each time I use it I tinker with it, but I don't know who wrote the original. Besides Jesus, I mean. This works well as a two-person (or more) reading, so I got Pernell to help me out with it.

Our Father... who always stands with the weak, the powerless, the poor, the abandoned, the sick, the aged, the very young, the unborn, and those who by victim of circumstance, bear the heat of the day.

Who is in heaven... where everything will be reversed, where the first will be last and the last will be first, but where all will be well and every manner of thing will be well.

Holy be Your Name... may we always acknowledge Your holiness, knowing that your ways are not our ways, your standards are not our standards. May our reverence for You pull us out of the selfishness that prevents us from seeing the pain of our neighbor.

Your kingdom come... help us to create a world where, beyond our own needs and hurts, we will do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with you and our neighbors. Teach us our own poverty, and to receive Your kingdom as a gift by the power of Your Spirit.

Your will be done... open our freedom to let you in so that the complete mutuality that characterizes your life might flow through our veins, and thus the life that we help generate may radiate your equal love for all and your special love for the poor. Teach us to partner with you as you renew and redeem creation.

Give us this day... give us life and love; teach us to receive Your life so that we may in turn give it away. Give not just to our own but to everyone, including those who are very different than the narrow “us.” Give us this day and not tomorrow. Do not let us push things off into some distant future so we can excuse our passivity or our apathy. Unveil to us the Presence of Your Kingdom.

Our daily bread... so that each person in the world may have what they need, enough food, clean water, clean air, adequate health care, and access to education. So that we may learn how simple are our true needs, so that we may work for a sustainable world.

And forgive us our trespasses... forgive us our blindness toward our neighbor, our self- preoccupation, our racism, our sexism. Forgive us our capacity for blindness, for believing the lies about progress, for adopting a consumer lifestyle.

As we forgive those who trespass against us... help us to forgive those who take advantage of us. Help us to forgive imperfect parents, impersonal corporations and the systems that wounded them and us.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, For Yours is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory, forever... Amen.

Then we talked a little about the difference between Justice and Mercy. I started out with the story I first heard from Brian McLaren last year in Banff. (Go and read it. I'll wait.) I expanded a little on the critical differences: When we talk about mercy, we refer to incidents; with justice, its about actions. When we talk about mercy, we see victims; with justice, its about systems.

This idea of systems is important, and controversial. I cautioned the group that as communities of faith we need to decide how far down this rabbit hole we want to go. Lots of people love to do mercy, and it's important. But when you start talking about justice and systems, it starts to sound political. And it is. (Again, we need to make an important distinction between political and partisan.) This should not frighten us, as our faith should inform our politics, and not the other way around. But sadly, that's not always the case. After all, the two things we don't talk about in church are money and politics. (And don't get me started on money...)

Standing in opposition to systems of injustice is a vital part of being a follower of Jesus, and yet we hide from it. We are to be his hands and feet, and I would add also his voice. In the discussions that followed my presentation on Saturday I said that I believed simply remaining quiet was the same as supporting the policies in question. If we don't speak up, it's assumed that the status quo is OK, and the system marches on.

Anyway, you get the general idea. So today in my email I see this from Sojourners:

Tell McDonald's to Ensure Fair Wages for Farm workers

"I will be swift to bear witness ... against those who oppress the hired workers in their wages, the widow, and the orphan, against those who thrust aside the alien, and do not fear me, says the Lord of hosts" (Malachi 3:5).

Dear Mike,

Farm workers who pick tomatoes for McDonald's sandwiches earn 40 to 50 cents for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes they pick, a rate that has not risen significantly in nearly 30 years. Workers who toil from dawn to dusk without the right to overtime pay or any benefits must pick two tons of tomatoes to earn $50 in one day. Worse yet, modern-day slavery has reemerged in Florida's fields; since 1997, the U.S. Department of Justice has prosecuted five slavery rings, freeing more than 1,000 workers. As a major buyer of Florida tomatoes, McDonald's high-volume, low-cost purchasing practices place downward pressure on farm worker wages, putting corporate profits before human dignity.

+ Click Here to Tell McDonald's to Ensure Fair Wages for Farm Workers

And it goes on from there.

Already I sense some of you starting to twitch nervously.

"Surely he doesn't expect me to sign anything, does he?" Yes, I do.

"But I don't do that kind of thing. I'm not an activist." Doesn't matter. I'm not an activist either. Get over it.

"That kind of thing sounds a little like socialism to me..." Oh really? So does the verse from Malachi. What are you going to do with that?

Anyway, sign the petition or not--that's your business. My point is this is a system. And if you ignore the system, you are giving tacit approval to it--and that's before we even talk about actually eating at McDonalds. Run a word search on your favorite Bible software for "justice" and "mercy", and you'll quickly find that God talked a lot about unjust systems. We need to do the same.

Enough said. Feedback welcome as always... How does all this talk of unjust systems make you feel? We need to talk about it because we need to figure out how to overcome our hesitation. Or, we could go back to pretending those verses aren't really there.

Comments

[Gideon Strauss]

Another option for action is joining a union. CLAC has "solidarity locals" that consists of people who support its aims and take part in solidarity projects with workers in Canada and elsewhere (Cuba, China, Guatamala, Colombia, etc.). Solidarity Local 19 in Hamilton is quite active ... and recently presented an event at the FRWY Café!

[wilsonian]

I tend to think the more this gets talked about, the less strange it will seem to take action. And I can't help thinking that the more we take community seriously, and the more we identify with our brothers and sisters globally, the more convicted we'll be to act. If we find it hard to love strangers, we'd better start widening our circles. Because this is absolutely a faith matter. Your comment on being complicit is bang on.

[Tim]

In fact, this is the new global class system.

I get a little cynical (as a Brit by birth) hearing people in the New World speak smugly about the evils of the British class system. In those old days, landed gentry lived lives of ease and wealth, and they paid servants low wages to do all the menial labour for them. Sometimes the system even looked friendly, and many of the servants were glad to have the jobs, because the alternative was starvation, but let's not kid ourselves that it was an equitable system.

And let's not kid ourselves that it's over. Nowadays it works on a global scale. The rest of the world gets paid a pittance to make my jeans and my electronic toys, and the people who speak smugly about the evils of the British class system benefit hugely from this new system.

Including me, of course. We're all implicated. The easiest thing to do is to do nothing - and that's what I do, far too often.

Of course, signing an online petition is relatively painless. Actually changing my way of life so that I don't participate in this global exploitation - that takes a lot of thought, a lot of prayer, a lot of self-sacrifice. I'm not slamming your petition, Mike. I'm just saying, I wish it was that easy to change the system.

[Susan]

I was directed here by signposts.org.au where the pray has been posted. I like it. Yet I agree with Tim how do we live it. It does take self sacrifice. Are we willing not only to count the cost but actually pay the price. What will it take to move us from a lazy empathy to loving action.

[Cathie]

Take a look at signposts.org.au, mentioned above by Susan. The blog entry titled abandoning their posts, really hit home for me.

[Mike]

Good comments so far. Keep 'em coming.

A clarification: Signing a petition will not change a system. It's an act. More to the point, if we're not willing to demonstrate our unhappiness with an unjust system by simply putting our names on a list, we have no intention of actually trying to do anything about it, and all the talk in the world is simply avoidance behaviour.

With the MacDonalds example, I didn't sign the petition thinking I was going to change the world. I signed it to say "I don't agree, and I refuse to be complicit in this injustice."

[Pernell]

Mike - great job on Saturday. I have used that prayer too: http://www.pernellgoodyear.com/2006/07/prayer-for-justice.html

It was adapted from Ron Rolheiser in "The Holy Longing".

Just so you know.

[Sheila Stam]

Hi Mike, Although I've put my name on a gazillion petitions (and will continue to do so), I'm not sure they count as acts. I think that too often we say, "well I've signed the petition" and left it at that. In the case of the McDonald's tomatoes (for example), wouldn't a more significant act (relatively speaking) be to stop eating at McDonalds and to tell both your local restaurant and corporate HQ why you have done so? It doesn't require much more effort than sticking your name on a list, but if enough people did it, I think there is a better chance of the corporate giants acknowleging the issue.

Just my two cents worth - coming from a country where there aren't any McDonalds! By the way, I love your blog, thanks for doing it.

[Mike]

I hear you, Sheila. Although, I must admit I still think most of the Christians I know wouldn't even sign! Thanks for the comment.

[robert]

I like Sheila's point. Petitions are fine symbolic gestures, boycotts hit where corporations live.
I will just add the tomato thing to the list of reasons I will never eat at McDonald's again. Man, that's getting to be a long list.

[Tim]

Mike, just to clarify, I wasn't slanging the Sojourners petition; I just think it's important to go further.

The problem is, once you start boycotting, where do you stop? I boycott Wal-Mart because of its employment practices, but what big box store doesn't have those same practices? If they don't, how do they compete? Answer: they can't, at least not at the same price. That means those of us who want to make the world a better place must be prepared to pay more for the same goods - and thus have a lower 'standard of living'. Fair Trade coffee, for instance, is two or three times the price of Nabob. For more information about Fair Trade, see Transfair Canada at http://www.transfair.ca/en/

By the way, in the Edmonton Journal recently I read an article about a politician who had been making decisions on a particular issue, based on letters and emails sent to him. His secretary made it clear that he had been instructed to specifically exclude from the count the 'mass-produced' emails such as the one from Sojourners (which, by the way, I signed and sent yesterday). Politicians are getting wise to how easy it is to sign and send those letters. If we want to be noticed, we have to make up our own individual letters.

[Mike]

Pernell - maybe your site is where I got it from! If so, thanks.

Tim - Yup, it ain't easy. As I said to a friend today at lunch, maybe this is why there are those episodes in the Bible where the people got up and left because Jesus' words were too hard.

[beim]

That prayer will be making its way into our opening assembly on the first day of school. That is good stuff.

The definition of "Not good stuff" is anything at McDonalds. McDonalds and Wal_Mart are the kind of places that makes me wonder if all of God's creation is really redeemable.

If hell exists, maybe when someone gets there they are met by someone wearing a Wal-Mart vest and they ask you if you want it supersized.

[wilsonian]

Anybody know where I can find info related to McD. Canada?

[thebizofknowledge]

I stumbled upon this site as I was in the process of doing some online research. Beautiful rendition of The Lord's Prayer - glad to have come across it.

[jim]

1 problem that is not addressed is the idea of taking a political/life/cultural system such as was the nation of Israel in the 1st Covenant and attempting to mate that system to a nation that does not have any such covenant with Yahweh and neither do the vast majority of Americans, Brits, Canadians, etc. To attempt to say that we should have a system set up that follows the biblical system of ancient Israel without having a mandate or covenant to do so is dangerous.
The question is to what degree are those who are not in covenant with Yahweh supposed to be forced to live up to theIsraeli covenant, or any other covenant?
Jesus came and did not set up a covenant for nations but individuals who choose to follow him. WE are to live up to those expectations because WE are the ones who claim to be in covenant with Jesus so WE are expected to act as such, the 'world' is not. Jesus did not and does not force his covenant on others and we should not attempt to do so or we run counter to his wishes and SOPs.
Jim