Grace & Justice

City Series M-8
November 25, 2012
Speaker: Ken Shigematsu
Title: Grace & Justice
Texts: Deuteronomy 10:16-19, 15:1-11, 24:19-22; Matt 25:31-46

BIG IDEA: In response to God’s grace we are called to generously give and work for justice in the world.

When someone is introducing you what do you want said about you? Or, if you are introducing yourself say in 140 characters or less as in Twitter bio, what will you say about yourself? In my little intro I’m a pastor of Tenth Church in Vancouver and I am husband to Sakiko and father to Joey.

How we introduce ourselves tells others what we do, what we value, who we are in relationship with. When God introduces himself in the Scriptures, he calls himself a “The Father to the fatherless and the defender of widows” (Psalm 68:5).

One of the most important things God does in the world is to take up the cause of the poor and powerless. And, as we noted in one of the earlier messages in this series, this particular bio for God is remarkable. In the ancient world, as we’ve seen, the gods were capricious, cruel, self-serving, and favored the rights of the rich and powerful and gave virtually no rights to the poor. Whereas the living God regards all people, even slaves, as human and sacred. The bias that the Living God has, not in favor of the powerful, but the powerless, as historian Thomas Cahill points out, is unique not only in ancient law but in the whole history of law. God certainly loves both the rich and the poor, and in the Bible, while there are texts that call for justice for members of the well-to-do classes, his calls to extend justice to the poor outnumber those passages by about a hundred to one. And this emphasis has led some, like Latin American theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, to speak of God’s “preferential option for the poor.”

When a person reflects the compassion, generosity and justice of God they are called righteous.

Take Job for example:

The character Job in the Bible was described as righteous.

In Job 29:12-17, Job says:
12 For I assisted the poor in their need
and the orphans who required help.
13 I helped those without hope, and they blessed me.
And I caused the widows’ hearts to sing for joy.
14 Everything I did was honest.
Righteousness covered me like a robe,
and I wore justice like a turban.
15 I served as eyes for the blind
and feet for the lame.
16 I was a father to the poor
and assisted strangers who needed help.
17 I broke the jaws of godless oppressors
and plucked their victims from their teeth.
Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke, who taught for many years at Regent College here in Vancouver, points out that the righteous persons like Job in Scripture are willing to disadvantage themselves for the sake of the community. The wicked, conversely, according to Waltke, are willing to disadvantage the community to advantage themselves.

In this final sermon in the Deuteronomy series we’re going to look at several texts in Deuteronomy that show us how we can become a person who is just and part of what it looks like to live this way (2x).

So first, how do we become a person of greater justice?

It's true that because of the sin virus that has affected us all so like the gods of the ancient world we can be selfish and self-serving.

But we are also made in the image of the Living God who is compassionate and just.

As human beings who are made in God's image each of us has at the very least a dormant seed of compassion and justice (use prop).

And as we are drawn into a relationship with the Living God, and experience his redeeming grace, the seed of compassion and justice within us is watered and the shoot of God’s love and mercy begins to grow out from us (use prop).

And Moses understands this is so as he preaches on the banks of the Jordan River and he calls his people – who are first made in God's image and then were redeemed by God's grace as they were delivered out of Egypt that land where they were slaves -- to become who compassionate and just.


In Deuteronomy 10:16-19:
16 Therefore, change your hearts and stop being stubborn.
17 “For the Lord your God is the God of gods and Lord of lords. He is the great God, the mighty and awesome God, who shows no partiality and cannot be bribed. 18 He ensures that orphans and widows receive justice. He shows love to the foreigners living among you and gives them food and clothing. 19 So you, too, must show love to foreigners, for you yourselves were once foreigners in the land of Egypt (Deut. 10:16-19).
Pray
Moses reminds the people of God that they had been slaves in Egypt, poor, and oppressed. And if they had been poor and oppressed people in Egypt, and then experienced God’s grace, God’s pure gift, as he sprung them free from their land of slavery, they in turn were to respond by showing God’s mercy and justice to the poor by loving the orphan, the widow, and the poor immigrant in your midst.

And all of us here are made in God’s image—so the seed of compassion and justice is at the very least dormant within us—and many of us have experienced the grace of God in a way that is even deeper than for the ancient children of Israel at the time of Moses. Many of us here have experienced God’s redemption, not physically but from a far more pervasive spiritual slavery to sin and a self-centered way of life, and we've been brought into a friendship with the Living God.

And if this has been our experience, we can express our gratitude to God by living lives of generosity, compassion, and justice.

But what specifically does it look like to live with generosity, compassion, and justice?

In Deuteronomy, Chapter 24:19-22:
19 “When you are harvesting your crops and forget to bring in a bundle of grain from your field, don’t go back to get it. Leave it for the foreigners, orphans, and widows. Then the Lord your God will bless you in all you do. 20 When you beat the olives from your olive trees, don’t go over the boughs twice. Leave the remaining olives for the foreigners, orphans, and widows. 21 When you gather the grapes in your vineyard, don’t glean the vines after they are picked. Leave the remaining grapes for the foreigners, orphans, and widows. 22 Remember that you were slaves in the land of Egypt. That is why I am giving you this command.
Doesn’t this passage reveal God’s heart of generosity? It’s clear in this passage that God doesn’t want the farmer to take the entire harvest for himself and his family, but to leave some of the harvest on the ground for the foreigner, the fatherless, and the widow. In God’s view, the poor had a right to some of the farmer’s produce. Now most of us are not farmers, so what is the application here for us? It means that if we are God’s children and recognize how gracious God has been to us, and we want to walk in His ways as people who are righteous, then again to quote Bruce Waltke, as righteous people we will be willing to disadvantage ourselves for the sake of the community. The wicked, according to Waltke, are willing to disadvantage the community to advantage themselves. But the righteous, are willing to disadvantage themselves for the sake of the community.

So what does it look like to become like God and to be willing to disadvantage ourselves on behalf of someone else? What this means is that we take a more generous posture of life.
A couple of examples from life, and then one from a business owner, and one from how it applies to life in the larger world:
First, there is something I do a weekly basis that reminds me of the passage in Deuteronomy 24 that calls us to leave something for others when harvesting. It’s such a small thing, and I feel a little sheepish talking about it. Each week it’s my job to take out the garbage and recycling. It’s a very small thing I do, but it reminds me of this passage We always put bottles and cartons in the recycling blue box that we could cash in. But we always, actually it’s almost always my wife who rinses any of the bottles that we’ve used, because we know that they are going to be picked up by someone in the back alley. And if I bump into someone in the back alley as they are pushing their shopping cart and picking up bottles and cans that they can cash in for a small refund, I always thank them for helping us recycle.
And here’s something else we do that’s more substantial for us, but again not all that heroic. It was just something that my wife and I are completely on the same page. We want to honor God’s call to tithe, to set aside, the first tenth of our income on a regular basis for God’s work to our local church, but we also want to offer substantially more to God’s work with poor, particularly God in the developing world. We’ve had the privilege of directing money to help support a school for orphan children in the Sudan or a center that helps children and women recover from the trauma of being trafficked into the sex trade.
A couple of years ago our new accountant said, “You’ve given away money to charities to the point where it’s not a benefit to you financially. From a financial perspective, I would advise you defer some of charitable giving to future years.” We talked it over and said, “We appreciate your advice. We can’t foresee the future. We’re hoping, aiming to continue to give at that rate.”
It’s not done out of a sense of guilt or obligation. We know that God loves us as we are, but out of gratitude as we are able we want to give and to live more generously.
As I was discussing this sermon with my colleague Jade this week, he hesitated for a moment and said, “I have a personal story.” Jade said, “my dad is a frugal guy – is very careful with his money. My dad was a high school teacher—he earned a modest salary. When we were growing up, we would go out for dinner. I remember we always ordered the small portions of things. And his thriftiness at times bothered me. But as I grew older, I saw that he was very careful about spending money on himself. When we'd be in a store and we would say you should buy this shirt it would look good on you, he'd say maybe but I have a shirt. He was very careful about spending money on himself, so he could be generous toward others. He’d get a gleam in his eye because he had an opportunity to give to an impoverished single mother at church. He was quietly able help a number of refugees who used affectionately to refer to as his “boat boys” while getting established in Canada. And after they were able to establish themselves, every year at Christmas for about 12 years they would show up at the Holownia’s door with Christmas gifts as a way to say thank you.
Mr. Holownia is person who is willing to disadvantage himself and, in a relative sense, his immediate family for the sake of other families. Biblically, he’s a righteous person.
Second, if we are business owners, or in some kind of management position, the gleaning laws in Deuteronomy 24 show us that God doesn’t want us to squeeze every cent of profit we can out of people.
While profit is obviously is a necessary part of business, we can also advocate for practices that don’t try to charge the highest possible price to customers and pay the lowest possible wages to people.
Don, a friend and a follower of Christ, owns a series of car dealerships in North Carolina. He’s a friend of my mentor Leighton Ford who also lives in North Carolina. As I’ve shared before, through a self-study of his business, he discovered that men were getting better deals than women, and that Caucasian males were receiving the best buys on cars while black women were getting the worst deals. He realized that black women, many of whom were on lower incomes, were in effect subsidizing the car purchases of the relatively wealthy Caucasians males: by paying more than the market value for their cars, these minority women were enabling others to get away with paying less than the market value.

Don, a business leader who follows Jesus, knew his company was violating God’s call to act justly. Appealing to the consciences of his employees, he made the case for stopping discrimination against car customers and for fixing a fair market “price is price” sales policy on cars. Don said, “As a Christian, I believe we have to be willing to sacrifice some of our financial profits [for the sake of justice].” His employees, even those who were not religious, agreed.

He’s disadvantaging his business to advantage the community.

This week in response to last week’s message a person shared this story with me.

Bob Moore owned a thriving whole foods company. It was growing by 20 or 30% each year and company was generating millions of dollars in revenue.
(show slide)



​ Bob Moore

When he reached his retirement years, he thought about the possibility of selling the company. He had many offers. He could've become instantly rich.

But then he thought about how his 200-300 employees have given so much of themselves to the company. He thought how generous Jesus Christ had been to him. He decided to split the company into shares and over a couple of years give the company a way to its employees.

The employees were just blown away.

One employee who doesn’t believe in God wrote this, “Now as an agnostic – I do not share the same religious viewpoints, but I find Mr. Moore’s example inspiring. Seeing a real life example of what I envision non-hypocritical Christianity to look like is quite humbling and Mr. Moore’s ability to lead by example is wonderful to watch.”

Bob Moore is disadvantaging himself for the sake of the community. He’s an example of right living.


In our personal life and in our work life, as we looked at during last Sunday’s sermon and, third, wherever we can on we call global scale; we work to forward God’s vision for a world of greater mercy and justice. We see God’s heart for the poor, not only in the gleaning passages but throughout the book of Deuteronomy and the Bible.

For example, in Deuteronomy 15:4-5 we read:
4 “There should be no poor among you, for the Lord your God will greatly bless you in the land he is giving you as a special possession. 5 You will receive this blessing if you are careful to obey all the commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today.
And then in Deuteronomy 15:1-2 we read:
“At the end of every seventh year you must cancel the debts of everyone who owes you money. 2 This is how it must be done. Everyone must cancel the loans they have made to their fellow Israelites. They must not demand payment from their neighbors or relatives, for the Lord’s time of release has arrived.
Any Israelite who fell into debt had to be forgiven those debts every seventh year. Creditors could no longer demand payment and they even had to return the pledges of collateral taken for the debt itself. The whole purpose of this law Tim Keller, a pastor and former teacher who has taught me much about justice, observes, was to remove one of the key factors causing poverty—long-term, burdensome debt. Every seventh year was called a Sabbath year in which debts and slaves were freed (Deuteronomy 15:1-18). But every seventh Sabbath year, that is every forty-ninth year, was declared a year of jubilee. In this year not only were debts forgiven, but the land was to go back to the original families as it was distributed in the Promised Land after the Israelites entered.

Bible scholar Craig Blomberg says, “This is the ultimate realization of private property. On average, each person or family had at least a once in a lifetime chance to start afresh, no matter how irresponsibly they had handled their finances or how far into debt they had fallen.”

Global debt – it’s a massive problem in our own world. When Jimmy Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his accomplishments after his post Presidency years fighting poverty and disease, he spoke about what he regarded as the most pressing problem in the world:
Interestingly he didn’t speak about terrorism, or religious extremism, or climate change—as significant as these are.

Here’s what Carter said:

At the beginning of this new millennium I was asked to discuss, here in Oslo, the greatest challenge that the world faces. Among all the possible choices, I decided that the most serious and universal problem is the growing chasm between the richest and poorest people on earth. Citizens of the ten wealthiest countries are now seventy-five times richer than those who live in the ten poorest ones, and the separation is increasing every year, not only between nations but also within them. The results of this disparity are root causes of most of the world’s unresolved problems, including starvation, illiteracy, environmental degradation, violent conflict, and unnecessary illnesses that range from Guinea worm to HIV/AIDS.

Of all the problems facing our planet, Carter chose to speak of “the growing chasm between the richest and the poorest people on earth” as the root cause of many of the other problems in our world including, starvation, illiteracy, environmental degradation.

N.T. Wright is one of the most respected theologians in our world today and he similarly says:

As far as I can see, the major task that faces us in our generation, corresponding to the issue of slavery two centuries ago, is that of the massive economic imbalance of the world, whose major symptom is the ridiculous and unpayable Third World debt. I have spoken about this many times over the last few years, and I have a sense that some of us, like old Wilberforce on the subject of slavery are actually called to bore the pants off people by going on and on about it until eventually the point is taken and the world is changed… I… want to record my conviction that this is the number one moral issue of our day. Sex matters enormously, but global justice matters far, far more. The present system of global debt is the real immoral scandal, the dirty little secret – or rather the dirty enormous secret – of glitzy, glossy Western capitalism. Whatever it takes, we must change this situation or stand condemned by subsequent history alongside those who supported slavery two centuries ago and those who supported the Nazis seventy years ago.

When people object to N.T. Wright by saying that while the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, that wealth is not finite, and that canceling debt and giving “handouts” literally strip the poor of their human dignity and vocation to work, all this will encourage the poor toward a sinful envy of the rich, slothful escapism.

Wright says:

“I want to take such commentators to refugee camps, to villages where children die every day, to towns where most adults have already died of AIDS, and show them people who haven’t got the energy to be envious, who aren’t slothful because they are using all the energy they’ve got to wait in line for water and to care for each other, who know perfectly well that they don’t need handouts so much as justice” (p. 218).

When you look at Carter and Wright’s passion for decreasing the gap between the rich and the poor of the world, and as we contribute in some way to this cause, we are reflecting the heart of God as we see it in Deuteronomy -- to care for the foreigner, the poor, the widow, the alien, the orphan, a heart that loves to see spiritual debt (sin) and financial debts forgiven.

When people, companies and nations disadvantage themselves in some way for the sake of the greater global community, it will be seen as a righteous act in God's sight.

When you listen to a message like this, perhaps you feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of the need, even if we’re involved in some work of justice, particularly so, it can feel like a drop in the ocean.

And so I want to close with this application and invitation in giving or leading businesses. Some time ago I had coffee with Mike Yankoski. He has spoken here a couple of times (as you may recall he voluntarily spent five months living as a homeless person to get a sense as to what that experience is like). “Do you have any advice for me as I speak on issues of social justice to young adults? Seems like your church has a lot of them.” And I can’t remember what I actually said—nothing note worthy, but then I asked Mike “Do you have any advice for me when I speak on these topics?”

And he said “Yes. Because the needs are so vast in the world, I encourage people to focus on one issue. For Danae and me our passion is to help provide clean water.”

As you may recall when Mike spoke here, Mike shared about how he and Danae had the opportunity to partner with several organizations drilling wells and providing clean water in Uganda. One afternoon as they walked past a family’s hut they noticed ten graves, one for an adult and nine for children. All of them had died because they didn’t have safe drinking water. A week later, they were walking toward a neighboring village and suddenly the hot afternoon silence was pierced by cries of joy, whooping, and singing. From a cluster of nearby huts several women came running at them later and they were singing and dancing, and they had no idea what the women were singing, but they were singing, “Praise God, for clean water has come.” Singing because they were so happy they are no longer sick, their children would no longer die from diarrhea. For Mike and Danae it is unclean water; for you it might be trafficking.

A number of us here have been involved with the anti-sex trafficking movement, others with refugees, others with hunger, others with education, others with HIV/AIDS, others with racial, gender, or economic inequality, others care for the earth. Pray, expose yourself to some needs in the world, discern how God has gifted you and channel your response in expressing God’s compassionate, generous, and just heart for one cause in the world.

And our ultimate motivation, as we have seen in Deuteronomy and in Jesus Christ, to disadvantage our self to serve the poor and those in need, isn’t guilt or obligation, but gratitude for all that Christ has done for us who, being in very nature God did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
by becoming obedient to death
even death on a cross so we experience the joy of God’s life now and forever
Philippians 2:7- 8

In the early part of the 19th century, a young Scottish preacher named Robert Murray McChenyne preached a sermon on the text: “It is more blessed to give than receive” and he said, and I close with these words:

Now, dear Christians, some of you pray night and day to be branches of the true Vine, you pray to be made all over in the image of Christ. If so, you must be like him in giving…”Though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor”…Objection 1. “My money is my own.” Answer: Christ might have said, “My blood is my own, my life is my own”…then where should we have been? Objection 2. “The poor are undeserving.” Answer: “Christ might have said, “They are wicked rebels…shall I lay down my life for these? I will give to the good angels.” But no, he left the ninety-nine, and came after the lost. He gave his blood for the undeserving. Objection 3. “The poor may abuse it.” Answer: Christ might have said the same; yea, with far greater truth. Christ knew that thousands would trample his blood under their feet; that most would despise it; that many would make it an excuse for sinning more; yet he gave his own blood. Oh, my dear Christians! If you would be like Christ, give much, give often, give freely, to the vile and poor, the thankless and the undeserving. Christ is glorious and happy and so will you be. It is not your money I want, but your happiness. Remember his own word, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

Invite Christ who gave it all for you to cleanse and make you new and make the world through you a more just place—and you’ll know from experience the words of Jesus:
“It is more blessed to give than to receive.”


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