Delight

“What are you choosing that brings God delight?”

This was a question I posed a couple of weeks ago in our Growing in Wonder group. We shared many things, including early memories and experiences of wonder and delight. We shared things like:

A fresh bouquet of flowers

A child’s hand print sliding through finger paint

Going on a walk

Lingering over a gourmet meal

Spending time in my garden on a sunny day

Riding theme park rides with my kids

Standing inside a giant cathedral

Whispering on the edge of the Grand Canyon

How do we recognize delight? Think about moments that give you goosebumps? When your breath is taken away? When you can’t fully explain it but you have a deep sense that a longing is being filled within you, a moment when all seems right and in place.

I have been thinking a lot about delight this week, asking myself “God, what am I choosing that brings you joy? All of the things I mentioned above certainly delight God. And those things are important for our souls that fill us with joy. And yet, over and over again the refrain from Place at the Table would play in my head saying “And God will delight, when we are creators of justice and joy.” Maybe the streams and rivers of delight that we drink from are the streams of justice and joy.

Justice. We hear it a lot lately. It’s being fought over. Sometimes it is championed and at other times forsaken.

When we look at the passage in Micah telling us to seek justice. But what kind of justice are we to seek?

Do we seek to make sure everyone gets their fair share, or what is known as distributive or economic justice?

Do we seek to ensure that there are fair procedures for handling disputes like mitigation, negotiation, and arbitration? Should we seek procedural justice?

Are we to seek to ensure that those who don’t play by the rules are duly punished where the punishment fits the crime? This is retributive justice.

Or do we seek restoration over revenge? This kind of restorative justice is “concerned with healing victims' wounds, restoring offenders to law-abiding lives, and repairing harm done to interpersonal relationships and the community.”

What kind of justice are we to seek?

“Seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God” we are told. Another way to say this is to “live justly, love kindness, and walk with God in all humility.” How can we seek justice and love mercy? Aren’t they opposites? “John Dominic Crossan, a biblical scholar, points out that in the Bible, the opposite of God’s justice isn’t mercy, but is human injustice.” I’ll say that again. The opposite of divine justice isn’t divine mercy. It is human injustice in general and injustice towards the widows, orphans, and aliens in particular. In other words, injustice towards those who cannot advocate or fend for themselves. Those groups that are easy to sweep aside and strip their rights because they don’t have the power to fight back.

“The image of a just society throughout Scripture is the society in which the weak and voiceless ones have been brought into the community so as to enjoy its goods. The contour of biblical justice is providing the poor with access to the means of life.”

Hebrew law was set into place for this reason. The law of God in the Old Testament and as expressed in the Ten Commandments was about our relationship with God and with neighbors. The Hebrew concept of divine justice sought to answer questions like:

How is the stuff that belongs to God, such as land, going to be distributed fairly?

How do we guard against one group accumulating wealth and power at the expense of others?

How do we protect the weakest members of society?

How do we make sure that everyone has access to sustenance and shelter?

You see, these are questions that go beyond charity. These are questions that seek to set things right, to be creators of justice and joy.

The role of the prophets all throughout the Old Testament and throughout our history have called us back to justice. Richard Rohr says we need these prophets now more than ever to help stir up holy disorder in the spirit of truth-telling.

“But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5:24)

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness, who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter (Isaiah 5:20)

A later prophet in his own right, Martin Luther King, said “We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be beaten and robbed as they make their journey through life. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it understands that an edifice that produces beggars needs restructuring.”

And God will delight, when we are creators of justice, justice and joy.

It was 1998 when Shirley Erena Murray wrote this line. In the 1970’s her husband was struggling to find traditional hymns that matched the themes of his sermons, and she began writing hymns for him to use. In her hymn A Place at the Table, she said “I couldn't find anything to reflect a broad overview of human rights in any hymnbook. You can see that I have used some of the very basic ideas of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – the right to shelter, safety, food, and later, the right to a job, to freedom of speech and worship. In her hymn, she begins to really flip our understanding of what the table here really means. “The table” of abundance and equality is the prophetic expression of God’s will manifest in creation.”

A table in which everyone has a place is God’s table, and human rights and wholeness is something Jesus seemed to care very much about.

In the summer of 2023 in Atlanta, Rev. Chuck Poole gave the address for the 20th anniversary of Together for Hope in conjunction with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Chuck is a well-known Baptist minister who spent 45 years of pastoral ministry in Georgia, North Carolina, Washington DC, and Mississippi. I would like to share a portion of it with you.

In preparation for his address, he shared that he read through all four gospels in one weekend. While he had done this before, this time he went through marking any time that there was mention of healing and health. 68 times he said.  Sixty-eight times in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, those who are sick and suffering are healed and helped.

Then he says “once you add that many healing moments to all the times Jesus fed people who were hungry, welcomed people who were strangers, and intentionally sat down with and stood up for persons who had been stigmatized, ostracized, marginalized and demonized, you can see why working for a more just world is so important to so many people of faith. We don’t work for social justice because we have made an ideological decision to be progressive; we work for social justice because we have made a spiritual decision to follow Jesus.”

Indeed, while I cannot speak for anyone else, it is to me a wonder that the same Christianity which finds its beginnings in the Jesus of the four gospels eventually had to create a carve out for justice work, and name it the social gospel, as though working for a more just world for all persons is something other than the main gospel. If the four gospels are a trustworthy record of the words and works of Jesus, to live in solidarity with whomever is most voiceless and vulnerable, stigmatized and ostracized, marginalized and demonized is central to, not extra to, the gospel.

Which is why I no longer use the phrase social gospel... to say social gospel is as redundant as saying hot fire, cold snow, Holy Bible or radical Jesus. I cannot speak for you, but in my experience, to read the four gospels is to see that there is no extra, on-the-side, special category, footnote-to-the-real-gospel, social gospel. There is only the gospel, and it is social.

We have enough of the Jesus gene in us to know that if Jesus were here, Jesus would say that all cannot be fully well for any of us until all is finally well for all of us. We have enough of the Jesus gene in us to know that if Jesus were here Jesus would call us to work for a more just world for all persons by letting the love of God which has come down to us go out through us in a life of intentional, public solidarity with whomever is most voiceless and vulnerable, stigmatized and ostracized, marginalized and demonized, sick and suffering, left out and outcast, hurting and alone.

We have enough of that old Jesus gene in us to know that all of that is absolutely central to the gospel—not the social gospel, just the gospel Gospel.

Or, as Peter Storey much more memorably put it, “Whenever we ask Jesus to come into our heart, Jesus always answers, ‘Only if I can bring my friends.’”

Last Friday night, Senator Chris Murphy held a town hall meeting in Greenwich, Connecticut to a packed auditorium of over 1200 people.

The last comment was from a grade school age girl, Charlotte, who stood up and said she was worried that free lunch in public school would end and that other children would go hungry or be embarrassed to tell their teacher or the lunch lady. Here at a town hall meeting, a young girl stood up and spoke out for.

“That was the most beautiful question because what you said is that you’re thinking of other kids. And kids who might not have it as good as you. We exist in this world to help other people, don’t you think?” Murphy asked.

And God will delight, when we are creators of justice and joy. God delights when we sit with and stand for. We sit with and stand up for because Christ sat with and stood up for. That is our call. It isn’t the cry of our party or our President but the call of Christ our King, Jesus our Lord, the Messiah our Savior.