Rector's Blog: Love and Justice

I am consistently shocked by my own discomfort with Love when it is inconvenient to me. When I can sense that Love will require me to make changes in the way I live, in what I believe, in how I view and treat others – when Love gets scary - I quickly lose interest and change the subject. When Love comes at me with warmth and comfort, when Love makes me feel valued, when it tells me I belong to God no matter what – I run towards it with reckless abandon. But when Love tells me that my belonging to God means I belong to others and they belong to me? When Love tells me to recognize the presence of Christ in every person I meet? When Love requires that I serve and care for my neighbor as if I were caring for Christ himself? I am at a loss.

Love is not confined to warm feelings and happy thoughts. We undersell and underestimate Love when we treat it so narrowly. Love is fully capable of carrying within it anger and sorrow, grief and expectation. It is only our shallow imagination and spiritual malnourishment that keeps us from recognizing the height, depth, width, and breadth of Love.

This is why, when God gets angry in the biblical narrative, we state our preference for the “loving God”. We shy away from what we call the “Angry God”. We act as if we’re simply being reasonable and enlightened. What we’re really doing is giving into convenience and ignoring the fullness of Love on display in the life of God. In our Scriptures God’s anger is directed at injustice – at our refusal to live with and for one another, at our gleeful dismissal of our interdependence, on our callous indifference in the face of oppression, marginalization, and abuse of power.

As the Rev. Dr. William Barber II preached this past Sunday at the Washington National Cathedral, God sees injustice as death. Our choice to accept, and even defend inequity is our choosing death. God’s love gives life. And God’s love seeks justice: “If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday!” (Isaiah 58) Justice - the choice to live in service of one another – is Life. And we keep choosing Death.

God’s anger, then, is a natural and authentic part of God’s Love. When the God of Love sees us prop up a violent, oppressive system, should we expect divine apathy? Right now life requires us to take Love seriously, and to take Love seriously means to stop ignoring the fullness of Love’s power. Love requires us to turn toward one another. Love requires us to see God’s presence in each other. Love requires us to act.

I want to be clear about what I mean when I say Love requires something to you.

For you to be loved requires absolutely nothing from you. You are magnificently and lavishly loved right now exactly as you are. The Gospel tells us that you were literally created by Love, that your belovedness and your belongingness to God are utterly unconditional and irrevocable. You don’t have to opt into being loved, and you can’t screw it up. It’s just something that’s true about you. Zero requirements.

Now look around at your world. This is also true about every other person you see. Literally every single person you know, every person you are thinking of right now is passionately loved by and essentially belonging to God. Are they being treated as if that is true? Does this culture value them the way it values you? Does our legal system protect them and serve them the way it protects and serves you? Do they have the same protection from COVID-19 that you do?

When I answer these questions honestly right now, the answer is no, across the board. Not everyone is as safe, as protected, as cared for, as supported and valued as I am. This is not God’s justice. And it’s not enough for me to shrug my shoulders and say, “Well nothing’s perfect.” Can you imagine standing before the God of Love and shrugging your shoulders?

So, what does Love require of us? If our goal is simply to be loved, nothing is required. But do we want to experience Love? Do we want to respond to it? Do we want to know Love? To know it intimately? Do we want to live in Love? To walk in it? Do we want to participate in it and grow into the fullness of the Love for which we were made? Then we have to work for justice. Not so that we might receive love as a reward – no! But because justice and love belong to each other just as certainly as you and I belong to each other.