SermonStudio

God cares about justice! Hardly a startling statement. That has been a bedrock principle of religion for centuries. For some folks, that is God's most important attribute -- if you get out of line, God's gonna get you! Justice, after all. In fact, it is precisely that kind of thinking that gives some dear hearts great comfort -- an assurance that, one day, God will make everything right: "the wrong shall fail / the right prevail," the upside down will be made right side up, the good will be rewarded and the evil will pay.

We find evidence of God's concern early on in the pages of scripture in the divine dealings with the covenant community of Israel. The most prominent statement on God's set of standards for justice is the Ten Commandments.

The Decalogue is often misunderstood, and particularly as it has been caught up in the "culture wars" of recent years. Most notoriously, Alabama Judge Roy Moore was sued by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Alabama Free Thought Association for displaying the Ten Commandments on his courtroom wall. Judge Moore's contention was that these rules formed the basis of western jurisprudence and they would be a good reminder of where we have all come from. Moore lost that case, but used the fallout to mount a campaign for the State Supreme Court, a race that he won which eventually led him to the lofty position of Chief Justice. From that perch, he decided to up the ante by, instead of simply posting the commandments on the wall, having them engraved on a two-and-a-half ton hunk of granite, then late one night, installing it in the courthouse rotunda. Another legal challenge ensued, and this time, the judge not only lost the case, he lost his job.

A good deal of misunderstanding has burdened the interpretation of the Decalogue. These are not laws -- they have no penalties attached for breaking them. In the Hebrew Bible, they are known simply as the Ten Words, God's words for the establishment of the kind of society in which we would all like to live.

It would be wonderful to say that our twenty-first-century society has taken them seriously and tried, as Judge Moore in his rather unusual way did, to use them as the basis for our life together. Sadly, we know such is not the case. In fact, it is so not the case that we have every right to be angry, the righteous indignation that Jesus himself felt when he saw things that ought not to be.

• We can be angry that a nation that prides itself on providing "equal justice under law" provides it depending on the color of a person's skin or how much money he or she can afford to pay a legal "dream team."
• We can be angry about the perpetuation of a system that offers medical treatment, not on the basis of need, but on the basis of how much money someone has. The people who have no money and the people who have a lot of money get care -- those in the middle may not.
• We can be angry about a society that allows a ready supply of deadly weapons to almost anyone with the result that, of all the technically advanced nations of the world, we have an exponentially higher murder rate than any other.
• We can be angry when women, though working every bit as hard as any man, still face discrimination, abuse, harassment, and unfair pay.
• We can be angry when white-collar criminals in corporate boardrooms pay themselves fat salaries and bonuses, looting companies into bankruptcy, and leaving workers and retirees to fend for themselves.
• We can be angry at national priorities that allocate hundreds of billions of dollars to defense every year, equaling the amount allocated in total by all the other nations on the face of the earth, almost 200 of them -- when there are people right here in our own backyard who go without food, clothing, medicine because they need our help to get them.

Remember, God cares about justice.