St. Paul’s United Church Sunday, October 23, 2011

Justice For All – Rev. David Mundy

Leviticus 19:1-4, 15-18 Matthew 22:34-40

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So, have you got it figured out yet? For the past couple of weeks the media have force-fed us the story of an unlikely protest movement which began in the heart of America’s financial district, the Wall St. area of New York City. The movement has the simple name of Occupy and that is what the demonstrators have done. Thousands of them have occupied the streets around the New York stock exchange and are camping out in a nearby park. They don’t seem all that organized and it will be interesting to see what happens when the cold weather comes but for the time being this peaceful protest has done exactly what it was intended to do, capture the public’s attention.

At the heart of it all, at least in the United States, is the massive unrest amongst people who feel that the economic downturn of the past three years has punished the average citizen, causing millions of jobs to vanish, and pushing hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes. The motto is a simple “we are the 99%.” The 99% are all those everyday people trying to make a living in tough times. The 1%, they argue, is the tiny, select group of people who move the money around and seem to make a profit no matter what the state of the economy. The protesters are frustrated and angry that those who created the global financial crisis in the first place have not been held accountable. If anything, they have been rewarded with bailouts totalling trillions of dollars, and some of that money has been used for bonuses to those who created the mess.

Where is the justice in the country whose pledge of allegiance contains the words:

“one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty, and justice for all?”

As you well know, the Occupy Movement went global last weekend, with demonstrations in cities around the world, including Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. If you Google the word “occupy,” you will immediately get hundreds of articles on the movement.

Have you figured it out yet? Is this just some goofy, ill-defined protest which is “here today and gone tomorrow? It does seem as though the movement has become a catchall for every concern imaginable and the lack of organization will probably be its downfall.

At the same time it is a grassroots movement which gives a voice to people who may seem all over the map with their issues but share the common thread that the system is stacked against them.

You might be interested to know that in New York religious leaders have got involved with the Occupy movement. They have joined in the marches and in one they carried a Golden Calf. Why? Because the symbol of Wall Street is the bull, but in the story of Moses in the wilderness on the way to the Promised Land the calf is the false idol which the people of Israel create while Moses is up the mountain getting the Ten Commandments. There were also signs saying that Jesus supports the 99%.

These religious leaders want to remind people in the Promised Land of the USA that the God of the bible is big on justice.

Did you hear God’s call for justice a few moments ago in the passage from the Old Testament book of Leviticus? I have to admit to you that there are books of the bible which really speak to me, while others, well, not so much. Leviticus is in the “not so much” category. Truth be told, there is a lot of tedious stuff in Leviticus and other things that seem downright weird to our modern sensibilities. For instance, elsewhere in the chapter we heard from today, chapter 19, we’re told not to wear clothes made of two different materials, and not to trim our beards, and not to have sex with our slave girls if they are engaged (okay, that one is not so hard) and not to have tattoos. Did you know this stuff was in the bible?

But we could miss that there are also powerful statements in Leviticus, passages which can speak to our hearts and consciences, or should speak to them. There is a call to allow the land to rest so that it can continue to be productive. God’s people are told to welcome the stranger in their midst.

And according to what we heard a few moments ago we need to be careful about idols taking over our lives and to make sure that the rich and the poor are treated equally because that is what God requires of us. Really, this passage is saying that God loves 100% of us, the poor and the rich alike, but there is no mistake that those who are the wealthy few should not exploit those who are struggling. We are to love our neighbours.

There is no doubt that there is always the danger of the rich getting richer on the backs of those who do not have access to the mechanisms of wealth. In January this year I was on a flight from Vancouver to Toronto and I decided to watch the award-winning documentary film The Inside Job which won the Oscar for best documentary last year. It is about the financial collapse of the monetary system in the United States and those who profited from it. The evidence is deeply disturbing. Some CEO’s essentially bet against their own financial institutions in order to profit in the millions, even as their businesses went bankrupt. Not one of the elite few who were responsible for the economic collapse have been brought to justice, while millions have suffered. None of them has gone to jail nor have they been required to pay back any money.

No wonder people have invaded Wall St. They have seen that this group has no regard for their neighbours and they have become plunderers of the worst kind.

The danger we face is that we will become so preoccupied with our own concerns that we will be numb and indifferent to the injustices around us even when they impact us. Yet as part of baptising three beautiful children into Christ this morning, we were asked the question: Desiring the freedom of new life in Christ, do you seek to resist evil, and to live in love and justice?

We responded: I will, God being my helper.

Now, the book of Leviticus was written for the people of Israel, so do we really need to pay attention to what it says as Christians in the 21^st century?

Well, in our gospel reading today, Jesus quotes directly from Leviticus and those words “love your neighbour,” although he expands upon them. The Pharisees ask Jesus what he thinks is the greatest commandment of all and Jesus begins by saying that we are to love God passionately, totally, with all our being. Then he says that this love has to be connected to how we live day to day within all our relationships. We are to love God and to love our neighbour as ourselves.

It is clear in Jesus` teaching that our ``neighbour`` isn’t just the person in the house next to us or our own family members. In another gospel, Jesus is asked, “who is our neighbour?” and he tells the parable of the Good Samaritan, the stranger who shows compassion when the supposedly religious people pass on by.

So our neighbour is the person who shows up on a Friday evening for The Gathering Place meal, the same person we might otherwise walk past without noticing on a downtown street. Our neighbour is the person in the next generation, or two generations along, who will either thank us or curse us for the decisions we make now about our lifestyles and the way they affect the well-being of the planet. Our neighbours may not even be human, as we realize that all creatures deserve respect in God’s magnificent creation.

When we choose “Jesus, crucified and risen, our judge and our hope,” we choose to be different people, changed people who, by the grace of God, will have a passion for justice that guides us through all our decisions and in every day. When we come together for worship as we do today, we seek the strength God can give us to live our faith in the other six days of the week.

And even though we are living in an increasingly secular and self-centred society, there are still moments when we awaken and rediscover who we want to be.

A couple of months ago the leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada, Jack Layton, died of cancer. We were shocked that this fiery, seemingly indestructible man had succumbed to his illness. We probably all assumed that there would be a polite recognition of his passing. Instead, there was a massive public response which presumably included a lot of people who would never have voted for the NDP. Somehow though, when Layton died it provided an opportunity to reflect on what is truly important in our society, the values we hold, many of which are rooted in our Judeo-Christian tradition.

During a CBC radio phone-in at the time, a minister, a clergyman, called to say that when, as a teen, he and several others had been deeply influenced by Jack Layton’s father, who was also a politician, which led to them entering the ministry, so faith was obviously part of his upbringing. You may not know that Jack was a member of the United Church of Canada and it seems to me that the commitment of our denomination to issues of social justice were reflected in his passionate life and in the letter which was his gift in death. In his farewell letter he concludes in this way:

And finally, to all Canadians: Canada is a great country, one of the hopes of the world. We can be a better one – a country of greater equality, justice, and opportunity. We can build a prosperous economy and a society that shares its benefits more fairly. We can look after our seniors. We can offer better futures for our children. We can do our part to save the world’s environment. We can restore our good name in the world . . . My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So, let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.

As those who are baptised into Christ we are called to live justice and to change the world. For this we can say, thanks be to God.