Recently I have been stirred up about justice, for many reasons.

I went for a walk down by the river at sunrise last week and saw many homeless people sleeping out on the grass. Most of them had someone to snuggle up next to, and there was one large family with children. I couldn’t help but think that this was how Jesus lived, at times. He had no place to lay his head.

The large family I saw sleeping on the grass were likely of aboriginal decent, based on my admittedly superficial view of the tops of their heads. The natives, called aborigines here, were displaced from their land generations ago by the brutal force of colonization. Now colonization is nothing new or surprising in the least. Some may argue that conquest is in men’s genes. But what is appalling to me is when the name of Jesus is in any way attached to this conquest.

Here’s the bitter reality of what happened in Australia. If you Google “Stolen Generation facts” this is what you find:

“Between one in three and one in 10 indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and communities between 1910 and 1970. – The children were at risk of physical and sexual abuse in institutions, church missions and foster homes.”Feb 12, 2008

The church was right alongside the government in this injustice. That’s what makes me sick.

Now the way Australians are trying to right this wrong is noteworthy. Many acknowledgements of the injustice are very visible to outsiders like us. For instance, all the talks Chris has heard on campus have begun with a statement acknowledging that these lands were forcibly stolen from aboriginal people. Many individual houses in our neighborhood have signs in their windows acknowledging the injustice. The government also gave millions of dollars to the victims of the stolen generation. It’s respectable to put your money where your mouth is, but I can also see Jesus teaching his disciples that the widow’s penny outshines what the wealthy will never miss. You can’t buy dignity.

There is a beautiful memorial wall in Muskgrave Park that teaches all the aboriginal names for places around here. I find it ironic, because I’ve also heard that it’s unsafe to be near that park at night because many aboriginal people hang out there.

Chris and I have started listening to a new book called Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. It’s exposing the way the church in America has perpetuated racial injustice since the start of slavery in America.

I am so thankful for this book in a very personal way, because I feel like I have been trying to rationalize all the awful things that have been done in the name of Jesus for decades and have never found any peace with it. Things like The Ku Klux Klan, comprised of church going white men, who tried to undo any dignity gained from the government with unimaginable hate crimes against African American individuals. And the assimilation of Native Americans, essentially the same as the Stolen Generation in Australia, that stole children from families to Christianize them. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

I know that all these injustices are wrong, and yet I haven’t wanted to denounce or badmouth the body of Christ, so I have quipped some pretty lame things about everyone being sinful, while wrestling with how on earth this could happen. While it’s true that we are all sinful, this book is showing us how much of what Jesus was doing was reconstructing the religion of his time, calling out injustice. The church in America is undoubtedly in need of reform, and it gives me hope to hear a white pastor from the South working so hard to show us our racial blindness.

When I admit that our religion needs a complete overhaul, yet again, just like the religion that Jesus unashamedly criticized, I can finally dare to look at some of these awful injustices without feeling bad for being critical of the church.

This week I have seen infractions that my children have made on each other spiraling quickly into defensiveness. I jumped in and said, “Hold on a minute. The ONLY productive thing you can say to start this off is ‘sorry’!” Of course I need to learn it myself too, but I feel like this scales up to all these cultural injustices. It’s easy to say, ” I had nothing to do with it.” But it leaves victims stuck in their pain when we don’t acknowledge it with anything more than defensiveness. There is much that needs repented of, as a nation, as the people of God. In the Old Testament it seems like God was often, if not usually, addressing his people as a community, not individuals. This is hard for us to understand when our American culture is so steeped in rugged individualism.

Another thing I have been grappling with lately is how the Word of God can so easily become a weapon in our sinful hands. It’s scary how right people feel they are in these awful injustices. And it’s scary how I can kind of understand it. My own husband has noticed that more time in the Bible doesn’t always make me a better person. He’s not just talking about how I feel about myself, as I see my own sin. He has valid criticisms of how I treat people that I have to face.

I am just beginning to examine this, but I have little glimpses. This is what it might look like: I check out when my kids just want to talk to me about video games because I impatiently label their pursuits as worldly, or I get overly frustrated with my husband because he is not spending his time in ways I think would be better. When I am sitting in the midst of God’s ways, I have a lot of trouble not applying my limited interpretation of them to others more than myself. The fault is obviously with me and not God’s Word, but it is a real problem that sadly helps me understand how people use the Bible to abuse.

I have been musing about this image. God’s ways, revealed through his Word, are like the ocean, and I have this little jar that I am running around trying to catch some of it in. When I catch some I want to share it! But my desire to share is a complicated thing. It is partly honest love and excitement, and partly insecurity, or needing others to share my excitement, which is, in fact, a lack of faith. I am saddened by the reality of how hard it is to truly love and invest in someone who does not share my core worldviews. I am fascinated to learn about new ideas, initially. But fascination is hardly love.

John Wimber, an ex-rock star who started the Vineyard Church movement, said, “The Bible is the menu, not the meal.” This has helped me to remember that the Bible shows us the kind of relationship God wants to have with us. It’s an invitation into an incredible, living relationship. When I think of it that way it’s a little bit harder to abuse people with it. And a little bit easier to pray that those I love will embrace the invitation, on God’s terms, not mine.

I have also been re-reading one of my favorite books of all-time, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence, and Spirit by Brenda Ueland. There’s a long quote she shares from Vincent Van Gogh that I feel touches the heart of injustice and its cure.

 

“Because there are two kinds of idleness,” he wrote to his brother, “that form a great contrast. There is the man who is idle from laziness, and from lack of character, from the baseness of his nature. You may if like take me for such a one…

Then there is the other idle man, who is idle in spite of himself, who is inwardly consumed by a great longing for action, who does nothing because he seems to be imprisoned in some cage, because he does not posses what he needs to make him productive, because the fatality of circumstances brings him to that point, such a man does not always know what he could do, but he feels by instinct: yet I am good for something, my life has an aim after all, I know that I might be quite a different man! How can I then be useful, of what service can I be! There is something inside me, what can it be!

This is quite a different kind of idle man; you may if you like take me for such a one. A caged bird in spring knows quite well that he may serve some end; he feels quite well that there is something for him to do, but he cannot do it. What is it? He does not remember quite well. Then he has some vague ideas and says to himself: ‘The others make their nests and lay their eggs and bring up their little ones,’ and then he knocks his head against the bars of the cage. But the cage stands there and the bird is maddened by anguish.

‘Look at the lazy animal,’ says another bird that passes by, ‘he seems to be living at his ease.’ Yes, the prisoner lives, his health is good, he is more or less gay when the sun shines. But then comes the season of migration. Attacks of melancholia, –‘but he has got everything he wants,’ say the children that tend him in his cage. He looks at the overcast sky and he inwardly rebels against his fate. ‘I am caged, I am caged, and you tell me I do not want anything, fools! You think I have everything I need. Oh, I beseech you, liberty, to be a bird like other birds!’

A certain idle man resembles this bird…A just or unjustly ruined reputation, poverty, fatal circumstances, adversity, that is what makes men prisoners…Do you know what frees one from this captivity? It is very deep, serious affection. Being friends, beings brothers, love, that is what opens the prison by supreme power, by some magic force. But without this one remains in prison…

And the prison is also called prejudice, misunderstanding, fatal ignorance of one thing or another, distrust, false shame…But I should be very glad if it were possible for you to see in me something else than an idle man of the worst type.”

 

I share this long quote just as Brenda Ueland did so you can hear his voice. What I love about this is that she did not share it to evoke pity for Van Gogh. He was in fact scorned by most as a mad man, and suffered from malnutrition. His paintings were not appreciated until after his suicide. But you can hear his struggle to hang on to the dignity of human life in the face of injustice.

When I first read this it felt very personal. I wanted to say this to the world on my own behalf, that ‘I should be very glad if it were possible for you to see in me something other than an idle woman of the worst type’. I am a spoiled rich girl, but I know something of the cage of false shame that keeps us quiet. And of the love that frees us. Van Gogh is speaking so honestly that it struck a deep chord in my own heart. I believe most of us long for this kind of grace from one another, no matter what our circumstances.

What I love about Brenda Ueland is that she shared this quote to illustrate that everyone has a dormant poet inside them, including Van Gogh. She was not lamenting the tragedy of his life, but giving dignity to it. She believed that, “everybody is talented, original, and has something important to say,” and she gave her life to proving this. She was a rich woman too, who worked passionately to teach caged birds to sing, whatever their circumstances.

One of the saddest things I have encountered in Reconstructing the Gospel is a single comment revealing that many in the church criticized Martin Luther King, Jr. and the leaders of the civil rights movement for abandoning their spiritual calling. The meager juvenile reading I have done about the movement and its leaders has been a light to my soul. They were not merely standing up for their own rights, but for the dignity of each person. They fought hate with love to free their enemies from racial blindness as much as to free their fellow African Americans from injustice. The folk songs of the civil rights movement, sung by interracial groups, stir my heart more than hymns in church.

I was glad to leave the current mess of our nation behind when we came here to Australia. Politics being the obvious mess, but I am speaking mostly of the mess in the church. Yet today I found myself telling a young woman I met at the beach that I am eager to return and dive into the mess however I can. I care a lot about what’s going on back home.

I agree with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, that these interruptions from Jesus, in the form of “the least of these,” are what can save us from religion. It’s actually something I’ve been mulling over for quite awhile. Because I hear Jesus warning me that many will come up to him on judgement day wanting to impress him with all they’ve done in His name. And he’s going to say: Get out of here. I don’t know you. All you did was use me to make yourself feel important.

I really don’t want that to be me.

James, Jesus’ brother, defines real religion, the kind that passes muster before God, as this: to reach out to the homeless and loveless in their plight and to guard against corruption from the godless world. I am beginning to think that this is not a list, but an interdependent relationship–that the way to actually guard against corruption from religion, or our own appetites, or whatever else corrupts, may be to reach out to those caged by injustice. Not to offer our way of life, but because we need each other by design.