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I think we care a lot about Justice. Haven’t we watched as evidence is presented and I’m cheered or grieved as juries come back with decisions? Law & Order has been on since 1993 has had six spin-offs and a movie; not to mention the number of similar shows that have followed. And not to be reality has a little minute as well. There are a dozen judges who have response of their court cases and hundreds of True Crime movies, shows, podcasts, books; whatever you might need to scratch that itch for justice… maybe.
Maybe we like to see people reap consequences.
It’s hard though. Since 1993, we have been told the criminal justice system represents the people with police and prosecutors–it has been drilled into us. And yet, we also see in our real-world news that sometimes one or both of those groups don’t seem to be on the side of all the people.
Often our criminal justice system becomes retributive justice–sometimes eye for an eye, but sometimes you stole my goat, so you need to die… and I will probably take all of your chickens and cows. And if it’s on a tribal or national level, if there are extreme power imbalances, your family and everyone you know and everyone like you needs to die too.
All that is to say is that our day-to-day understanding of Justice has some problems.
This isn’t to say I don’t think there should be consequences for actions or that there are.. Are there truly evil people in the world who shouldn’t be on the streets? Maybe.
But sometimes there are desperate people who do the things they need to do to survive. We see it in ourselves when we’re in emotional trauma and are coping skills are not necessarily healthy in the long term, and someday we have to forgive ourselves and love ourselves for surviving.
Cole Arthur Riley writes about her father and children who grew up where and like he did, watching their mothers and their fathers work three or four jobs just to get by in this world. And jobs were scarce, and in Milwaukee, most of the manufacturing was moved outside of the city. And then crack was Unleashed on the streets and for a few minutes you could make the same amount that your mother made working all day. And she wouldn’t have to work like that, and you wouldn’t have to work like her, and what would you do? And if crack cocaine on the streets is too controversial, our hero in both the book and mostly the musical Les Miserables was a man who stole bread because he and his family were starving, and Jean Valjean and generations of young men were in prison out of their desperation.
Cole goes on to write: We cannot trust a society that makes judgments on the morality of a person without taking responsibility for how its own morality has instigated the condition that calls for such desperate decision-making… This is a society that will rarely demand justice in favor of the desperate but will always demand it in favor of the judge, the powerful. In the company of these tainted moral authorities, the most significant wrong will never be the one that caused all the others. p 121
“Justice is different from violence and retributions; it requires complex accounting” –bell hooks
For Cole and and for the God she understands and knows and loves, and me too, Justice isn’t about retribution or punishment is about dignity. Justice then is about recognizing an affirming the Dignity of all people whether victim or perpetrator and recognizing that someone can be both or neither. Justice demands a different world, demands that all of creation, be treated with the dignity bestowed upon it by the Divine.
Cole writes: Justice doesn’t choose whose dignity is superior. It upholds the dignity of all those involved, no matter whom it offers or what it costs.—there is no liberation without justice. Even when demanding retribution, justice does not demean the offender’s dignity; it affirms it. It communicates that what has been done is not what the offender was made for. They, too, were made for beauty. In justice, everyone becomes more human, everyone bears the image of the divine. Justice does not ask us to choose. p. 123
In our reading for today, Habakkuk is writing in the time of the Babylonian exile. In weariness and frustration, demanded God do something. Cole writes: the Christian story is the tensions between the promise of justice and liberation and the unjust and oppressive patterns in our daily lived experiences. p. 128-129
We use a lot of churchy words trying to make sense of the world around us and what we do or can do or can’t. We use the words mercy and justice. When I am asked what the difference is, and it’s arbitrary at best, but in my definitions could be a question and a response to the answer. Mercy asks what can I do for you right now and then does it, and Justice asks how did you get here and advocates and moves to change the situation, systems, and structures that lead to injustice– that work has not always been done but should always be done in connection and conversation with the communities that it is affecting. What does that mean? It is the Dignity of relationships and conversations and hearing somebody and recognizing what it is they need and being reflective enough to know that we are part of the systems that have led to injustice. It is advocating and protesting and voting and realizing the systems aren’t going to free us sometimes we have to make our own.
And that is liberation.
Cole writes: I believe that the individual, collective, and cosmic journey is the path of unearthing and existing in our liberation. But liberation is not a finality or an end point; it is an unending awakening. p 183
And Cole is not writing from the perspective of someone who looks like me. Liberation is often for other people because the system works for me a lot of the time. But the systems of white supremacy and patriarchy are damaging the people for whom it is designed for not just those for whom it is designed to oppress. The systems that tell little boys to not have feelings and then mocks grown men when they do, or say that dad’s babysit their own children when mom goes out box Dad too want to spend time with their children their babies their daughters playing with the things their daughters want to play with or mocking little boys for having a doll.
Freedom, liberation is possible. It is behind us and before us and beyond us. Liberation for all of creation is present and possible–to be free of systems that try to keep us small, that tell us we’re not enough, that tell us we would be enough if we just buy… , that tell us our feelings are too big, what we love or who we love is wrong, that tell us there is one way to live, one way to dress, one way to present ourselves, That tell us we don’t belong here, or there, that we have no reason to be angry or sad, that say our limitations make us less. That tell us there is no peace, there is no way forward, to accept the world as it is.
Too often we think that if we could just have the power, if we could set the rules, if we could change the system from the inside–and I guess that happens, usually slowly. But it is more often we find ourselves another cog in the machine. And that freedom can’t come at the expense of someone else, just like justice doesn’t come at the expense of another.
Cole writes: In pursuit of liberation, we do not need to pine after the power of our oppressor; we have to long for our own power to be fully realized. We don’t want to steal and dominate someone else’s land; we want agency in reclaiming and establishing our own spaces. We don’t want to silence the voices of our enemies; we want to be able to safely center our own voices and be believed. Liberation recognizes that I won’t get free by anyone else’s bondage. p 194
Liberation for ourselves and for all of creation for all of humanity will not come from the systems we have today, not from the way we have always done things. We have to learn to Forge New Paths–not with political power, not with weapons of war, not by taking away from others or seeking their power for ourselves.
My liberation as a woman, as a queer person, are wrapped up in the liberation of everyone else, in your liberation. In the liberation of every person of color, every transgender person, every Palestinian.
As Maya Angelou said: The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.
Your liberation, your dignity, your belovedness, your belonging–those are who you are, not because of anything you have done, earned, said–it is who you are because you are created and loved by God.
People think liberation is a future unfolding before us. But the path to freedom stretches out in both directions. It is what you’ve inherited, your first and last breath… Your dignity cannot be chained. p 195
Toni Morrison wrote in Beloved: Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
Living liberation is difficult. Living it for ourselves is a lifelong process, something we have to reclaim or remind ourselves again and again. But it is not my, or our, liberation alone.
Liberation for ourselves and for all of creation for all of humanity is discovered, affirmed, and given opportunity to be claimed through creativity, rest and storytelling, repair and joy; through feeling rage and lament and fear, and finding courage and compassion and movement; it is through belonging to each other and to all of creation, through Justice rooted in love affirming dignity of all.
It is through seeing the full Humanity and the full image of Godness in ourselves and loving it and feeling it and extending that to another.
To be human in an aching world is to know our dignity and become people who safeguard the dignity of everything around us.
To protect everything may seem like too great a call. But we will not survive without it. Everything should be called by its name.
So let justice roll down and twist and juke like movement. Let it march into your bones, into the seas of charred cane. Wash the earth in justice and watch what rises to the surface, Curses can’t breathe underwater. p 134