The Struggle for Justice (Rock Springs UMC)

Before I read scripture today I I need to issue an apology today

is APG 13 sermon I and and you'll understand why when I

read the scripture, nothing graphic but but some some mature

kinds of themes and I usually announce that in advance and I

forgot to mention that last week.

So I apologize for that. I don't think it's going to be,

you know, but just want to put that out there right up front.

So Genesis chapter 34 verses one through 7 is our scripture

Genesis 34 · chapter mention

reading today. Now Dinah, the daughter of Leah,

the I'm sorry. Now Dinah the daughter Leah had

born to Jacob, went out to visit the women of the land.

When Shechem son of Hamor the Hivite, the ruler of that area,

saw her, he took her and raped her.

His heart was drawn to Dinah, daughter of Jacob.

He loved the young woman and spoke tenderly to her.

And Shechem said to his father Haymore, get me this girl as my

wife. When Jacob heard that his

daughter Dinah had been defiled, his sons were in the fields with

the livestock. So he did nothing about it until

they came home. Then Shechem's father Haymore

went out to talk with Jacob. Meanwhile, Jacob's sons had come

in from the fields. As soon as they heard what had

happened, they were shocked and furious because Shechab had done

an outrageous thing in Israel by sleeping with Jacob's daughter,

a thing that should not be done. May the Lord.

Lent is a season of slowing down, of stepping away from the

villains to face what's really going on inside us.

Lent echoes the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness, a place

of hunger, testing and honesty before.

God. No crowds, just trust.

Lent reminds us that repentance isn't as much about shame as it

is about turning around, about laying down what distracts us so

we can pick up what gives us life.

It's a journey from ashes to hope, from the cross to

resurrection. A reminder that before Easter

joy there is surrender. As we continue our journey

together through Lent this year and this this pondering this

question of how are we, how can we be faithful in a system

stacked against us and situations where we lack power?

How can we be faithful to God and situations where we don't

have the capacity to do any meaningful strategic planning?

What can we do to be faithful to God?

And particularly today, we're looking at the question of the

struggle for justice. How can we pursue justice?

How can we go about engaging in this struggle for justice when

we're in a system where we seem to have so little power over so

many things? Preaching today from Genesis

Genesis 34 · chapter mention

chapter 34 and not next week, we're going to be looking at

Joseph and one of his early dreams and and how things worked

out for him. The week after that we're going

to be looking at at Tamar and for a couple of Sundays after

that, that the story of Tamar, which is just a couple of

chapters down the the road in the Bible here.

Both Dinah and Tamar are are are passages that I seldom, if ever,

have I heard preached on and taught on.

They're challenging, they are difficult.

They are are they? They raise some very serious

questions and they are. There's a lot of Gray area in

the scriptures in both of these passages as opposed to clear,

clean cut, easy answers to difficult situations.

We're going to take a look at those things because that's part

of this struggle. When we're in this struggle for

justice, when we're in a struggle to be faithful and a

system stacked against us, sometimes there aren't clear,

clean cut easy answers or, or, or easily identifiable answers

that are easily identifiable as right answers and right things

to do. So this is what this is.

Our challenge is our struggle in front of us.

We're looking at Dinah today and, and I want to tell you

before we get too far into analysis, I want to give you

the, the, the, a bigger picture of the story here.

Dinah, Jacob's daughter, as far as we know, his oldest daughter,

daughter born to Leah, his first wife.

And Jacob and, and Dinah's whole family, they are nomads in the

land of Canaan. They own no real estate.

They're very wealthy. We already know that Jacob's

wealth, he, God has blessed him with lots of herds, sheep,

goats, other livestock. He's got a lot of portable

wealth and he's got a very large household, which is also a sign

of and a part of his wealth, including having lots of sons

that he has. But Jacob doesn't own a single

acre of land. Well, they own, they own, you

know, a small plot of land where his grandparents are buried,

Abraham and Sarah, and that's the only land that his family

owns. They depend on the goodwill and

the grace of the people around them to allow them to graze

their livestock on their land, their economic arrangements that

are worked out. It's give and take.

You know, there's, it's not just they're not living on the

handouts. There's give and take going, but

they don't, they don't have a big ranch where they own the

land. They control the land.

They control the boundaries. And right now there's near the

city of Shechem. And the city of Shechem is named

after the person Shechem, who is a ruler of the city.

And the city of Shechem is a real city.

Archaeologists have found this city.

It was a fairly large city, and it was a fortified city in

Jacob's day. Shechem had power in that

region. Shechem had real estate, Shechem

had military, economic, political and regional power and

influence. And his father had even more

Haymore. And this Shechem, who was a

leader of the city, the son of the a leader of the city, with

all of this power and all of this position and all of this

influence, rapes Jacob's daughter, Dinah.

And all Dinah had done was go out to build some relationships

with women in the region, get to know people, make some friends,

engage with others. And she gets raped by a very,

very powerful person who then decides that he wants to marry

her, make her his wife. So the question then is where

can justice be found in this story?

How does Jacob pursue justice for his daughter?

How did how does Dinah pursue justice for herself?

How do Dinah's brothers pursue justice for their sister, for

their family? How can they do that?

The the you know, the Bible hasn't been written yet.

Moses has has not gone up on the mountain and received the law

from God. But even that would be of little

help to them Bible. And we got to be honest about

this. The Bible, particularly in the

Old Testament, is is gives very, I guess best possible way to say

it is challenging guidance on the question of rape.

There's one passage wouldn't which indicates that in some

circumstance, so when a man rapes a woman, the man should be

put to death, capital punishment.

There is another passage in the same chapter where if a man

rapes a woman, his punishment is that he has to marry her, so the

woman has to marry her rapist. But even if death penalty were

the thing, Jacob and his sons have 0 leverage to pursue the

death penalty against Shechem. There's nothing they can do.

Where they're going to go to the leader of the biggest city in

the area that's behind walls and demand that he surrender his son

to be executed. What can they do?

What can they do? They have very, very limited

options in the struggle for justice and no power whatsoever

to enforce the options. Well, maybe some power to

enforce some options. We'll see that in a minute.

What is Jacob going to do? Jacob chooses a particular route

in all of this, and it's a route that, as a husband and a father

of a daughter, makes me sick to my stomach.

Jacob chose appeasement and accommodation for the sake of

familial protection and prosperity.

He agreed to let Shechem marry his daughter as a resolution to

the issue. I think it's a very, very

important that we not engage in chronological arrogance to from

2500 plus years distance, point a finger and throw stones at

Jacob. Although I'd like to like to

throw a few big stones at Jacob. But think about Jacob's

situation. Jacob is a stranger and a

strange land. He doesn't have a military

force. He doesn't have a city with

walls around it that he can defend and find security behind.

He depends on Shechem and Hamor and other local rulers and

warlords like them to allow him to graze his livestock so that

he and his family can survive. Jacob has a daughter who has

been grievously wrong, horribly wrong, and he has an entire

family and household that he is responsible for.

And so Jacob decides that the pathway, the best pathway to

justice and his mind is appeasement and accommodation.

Not going to make waves and not going to insist and check and

was punished. We'll go ahead with the

marriage. Then our families will be united

economically and socially and politically, and our family as a

whole will be stronger because we're joined with this powerful

local family. Our family as a whole will be

safer because we're joined with this powerful local family.

This is Jacob's decision, his path to justice, and his

struggle for justice in a broken world where he cannot simply

demand that Shechem be punished. Jacob's sons choose a different

route. They're out in the fields when

all of this happens. They come back in when they find

out what happened and and they on the surface, agree to the

marriage that their daughter would be, that their sister

would be married to Shechem, the man who raped her.

But they have a plan. And they say to Shechem, look,

you know, it's, it's great you're going to marry our

sister. But culturally, religiously, we

have a custom and a tradition of every male in our family has to

be circumcised. So if you're going to marry our

sister, if you really want our families to be joined, and

there's Rib Jacobs of a wealthy clan in his own life, wealthy

household in his own right. There are benefits to Shechem in

this alliance and to Haymore in this alliance, if you want

those. In fact, we can marry,

intermarry our other other sisters and daughters with the

men of your city as long as all of you get circumcised.

So Shechem agrees. Maybe a measure of how much

power he has is that all the men of the city got circumcised when

Shechem decided they were going to get circumcised.

And then a couple of days later, when the pain is excruciating,

Dinah's brothers, Levi, Simeon and the others go in and they

kill every man in the city of Shechem and take captive the

women and children of the city of Shechem.

Their wives and daughters are specifically mentioned as being

taken captive. Jacob chose appeasement and

accommodation for the sake of familiar protection and

prosperity. His path to justice got to

protect my family the most. The best outcome in this whole

thing is that my family is not destroyed by a local warlord.

I'll choose appeasement and accommodation.

Simeon, Levi and the other brothers chose violent

retribution for the sake of revenge.

How dare you do this to our sister?

You hurt one of us, We'll kill a whole bunch of you.

You rape our sister. We'll take your wives and

daughters as our slaves. Violence and retribution, Jacob

said to them. We know Jacob was concerned

about safety because Jacob's response after this happened was

to say to his sons, you have made this a very dangerous place

for us. Do you understand how dangerous

this whole region is for us right now?

Because of what you have done, our family is at risk of their

violent retribution or the violent retribution of other

warlords in the area who may not want us around anymore.

We know that was his concern. We know the brothers concern was

revenge because their response to their dad was when were we

supposed to do nothing? Were we supposed to let him get

away with this? They wanted revenge and they

took far more than a pound of flesh.

And again, Full disclosure, as a husband, as a father of a

daughter, part of me says, way to go Simeon and Levi.

But when I think about all of those other men and all of those

other women and girls that are now being forced into a life

that they didn't want and we can't throw stones.

We can, but we shouldn't. What's the path to justice in a

broken world where you can't simply insist that the right

thing be done, that the criminal be punished in a way that is

appropriate for the crime? And everyone says yes, we agree

to that. This is the situation that that

Dinah and Jacob and Simeon and Levi and the other brothers

found themselves in. They couldn't.

They had no leverage just to insist that one person be

punished. So one chose accommodation, the

others chose revenge and a vastly disproportionate

reaction. This is not theory.

This, this story is, is not just an old story that's that's

tragic and heartbreaking. This story is, is is I don't, I

don't think it's any less relevant today than it was back

when it first happened. The vast majority of people in

this world do not have the power or the leverage or the strength

or the wealth to get justice for the wrongs that are done to

them. They are at the mercy of others.

And if systems that are beyond their control and systems that

are often stacked against them, our legal system and our justice

system in this country, not perfect, not perfect for sure,

light years ahead of what they had then, so much better than

what they had did, but not perfect.

We have very, we have, we have a very different justice system

for poor people and for rich people, very different.

There's two stories about that. One is, is the story I heard

years ago, and this was decades ago of a, of a pastor in

Chicago. And it was a time when, when

there were slumlords in Chicago. And it was, was when lead paint

came to be understood as a real issue and as a real problem.

And there were these slums in Chicago and these these

landlords, slumlords that had these, and there was lead paint

in the apartments and, and parents had their children.

And the children with, you know, chew on a window sill or flat

pit of paint painted flake off and they put it in their mouth

and LED LED. It apparently works so quickly

you can almost watch a child change when they've consumed

lead and they receive permanent brain damage.

And these tenants were suing their landlords and their

slumlords. The pastor went into court a day

when many of the cases were being decided.

And he said in case after case after case, the judge ruled in

favor of the landlord or simply dismissed the case.

And the pastor finally, at a break, stood up and said, your

honor, I don't understand. Is there no justice here?

And the response of the judge was this is not a Court of

Justice. This is a court of law.

If you want justice, change the law terms of wise jurisprudence.

That is absolutely true in terms of justice for the poor families

who had no capacity to change the law, and changing the law

would do nothing for their child and for their family.

It was a struggle for justice in which they had very few options.

It's another story I heard of a of a lawyer young man from the

South African American who graduated top of his class at a

prestigious Ivy League university.

I cannot remember which one. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, one of

those big ones. Columbia was courted by a lot of

large law firms for very high paying positions.

And he declined all of the invitations to go back and be a

public defender in his home city.

And when he was asked why, he said because we don't execute

criminals in this country. We execute poor people in this

country. I first heard that story.

I got upset. I was in law school at the time.

What do you mean? We just guilty people?

We got to have the death penalty for guilty people.

Do a little research, see if you can find any case where a

wealthy person has been given the death penalty.

In our country, we have a very different system of justice for

the poor and for the wealthy. Justice is a struggle today.

And I think of folks like the the people in Iran, women there

that for 50 years have been imprisoned, brutalized,

tortured, sexually, sexually abused simply for showing their

hair in public or too much of their face in public.

There's documented cases in past years of of women who who the

morality police, when they would see a woman that was exposing

too much hair, too much skin, would throw acid in their faces

permanently and horribly disfiguring them and scarring

them. It's difficult to know accurate

numbers, but some reports say that just just in this past

January, maybe 10s of thousands killed as they stood up against

their government struggling for justice and the response of the

government was to kill them. Struggle for justice is real and

and in that struggle for justice, sometimes our options

are limited in what we can do, Jacob said.

The best I can do for my family is to protect my family and

maybe make their situation a little safer and a little better

after this horrible thing that was done to my daughter.

I can make my family a little, the whole of my family, a little

safer and a little better off. Is that an evil thing to do,

Sons? The brothers said.

You know what? We don't care what the outcome

is for the rest of the family. We're getting revenge for what

was done to our our sister. Is that an evil thing?

Struggle for justice is challenging.

It's difficult, but it's important.

It is essential that we be involved in the struggle for

justice because part of the promise that we have from God

himself is that one day God and Jesus will as God through Jesus

his Son, God in the flesh, Jesus, they will establish true

justice on the earth. Prophet Isaiah said this about

the Messiah who we know is Jesus.

Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen one, and whom

I delight. I will put my spirit on him, and

he will bring justice to the nations.

He will not shout or cry out, or raise his voice in the streets.

A bruised Reed he will not break, and a smoldering wit he

will not snuff out, and faithfulness he will bring forth

justice. He will not falter or be

discouraged till he establishes justice on the earth.

Justice too, too often in in some traditions of Christianity,

particularly in the United States, justice and social

justice are treated like sort of weird, irrelevant side quests

for the church. Our goal is to save souls and

get people into heaven. And we this, this whole social

justice thing is just a distraction.

Justice is the core of God's purpose.

It's the heart of what God is going to do.

You got to Bible online that you use Bible Gateway or Bible Hub

or Blue Letter. Whatever you use, do a search

for justice and see how often justice comes up in the

Scripture as being God's quest, God's intention, God's plan, the

thing that God scolds his people for not doing, providing

justice. It's at the heart of who God is

and what God is doing in this world.

The promise that we have in Jesus is that one day he will

return and he will establish justice.

Three times in one verse or 4 verses about the Messiah.

We're told that the Messiah will bring justice to the whole

earth, to all the nations of the earth, and as Jesus, as

followers, that's part of our task.

Now we're never going to finish it.

We, I am firmly convinced I could be wrong.

Maybe I am wrong, but I am, I am firmly convinced that we as

human beings on our own do not have the capacity to establish

full and complete justice on earth.

I just don't think we're good enough.

I don't think we're smart enough.

I don't think we're wise enough. I don't think we can do it.

It's going to take Jesus coming back and establishing his

Kingdom fully and completely. But in the meantime, where we

lack the power to to to instigate a strategic plan to

bring global justice, we do have the power to engage in tactics

to attack injustice and bring a little more justice and places

and people's lives around us in this world.

And that's our call. It's the heart of what we're

doing as a church. Yes, yes, we want to see people

give their lives to Christ and live for an eternity with Jesus.

Part of that living for an eternity.

The central tenant of that living for an eternity is it a

Kingdom of God that is just that God establishes here on earth.

And so pursuit of justice is part of the call that we have as

Christians and as the church. And how do we do that?

How do we pursue justice when the system is stacked against

us? Where'd it go?

Wow, that was weird. Now I keep hitting the blank

button. First, we've got to recognize

the importance of justice. The, the, the, the, the, the

struggle for justice is not an irrelevant side quest.

The struggle for justice is is is at the heart of God's calling

on our lives. When Jesus announced his mission

on the earth at his first recorded public sermon in his

hometown in Nazareth, you can read it in Luke chapter 4.

Luke 4 · chapter mention

His announcement of his mission and his purpose was all justice

language, good news to the poor, recovery of sight to the blind,

freedom and release for the captive and the prisoners and

the oppressed. That's all justice language from

the Old Testament in the heart of Jesus's mission, and so the

heart of our mission. Second, then we have to

prioritize the care and healing and restoration of those who

have been wronged and those who are most vulnerable to

injustice. One of the, I think, most tragic

things about this story in Genesis 34 is that we never hear

from Dinah. No one ever says, Dinah, what do

you want? How would you like us to

respond? What would you like us to

pursue? We never hear that.

We never hear from the voices of any of the women in that story

involved. I I think that's telling in

terms of the mindset of the culture at the time where women

didn't have a voice and probably it never would have even

occurred to them to ask Dinah what she wanted done.

But the fact that the story is there, that silence Ling rings

loud in the absence of her voice, rings loud in the full

context of the Scripture where we see that Jesus values women

as much as he values men, that women are made the first

evangelists, that women are called into leadership in the

church as well, that women do have a voice.

But the simple reality is, and sometimes in places in the

history of this world and human civilization, including

sometimes in places right now, there are women or others who

have no voice in the justice that happens to and around them

or the injustice that happens to and around them.

They don't have power. They don't have muscle.

The the way to flex their muscles to, to arrange

circumstances, to initiate, you know, strategic plans to bring

justice for the people around them.

And God calls us to give priority to those voices, to

listen to the vulnerable people, the people that lack the power,

and to do what we can to bring more justice into their lives.

We'll never get it perfect. We will never get it perfect,

not this side of Jesus's return, but to do what we can to make

their lives safer, to make their lives better, to make their

lives more just. I think that's the best possible

outcome that can happen from the military action in Iran right

now. If if women and other vulnerable

people in Iran are a year and a or a decade from now, safer and

in a better position than they were a month ago, I think that's

the best outcome we could hope for.

I don't know what will happen, but this is the call that we

have to to give voice to those Jesus over and over again and

God over and over again talks about care for the orphans, care

for the widows, care for the foreigners, the strangers among

you, care for the poor, the people that are vulnerable among

you. This is how God measured the

justice of his people and the faithfulness of his people of

how well they prioritized those voices.

And then to be aware of both vengeance and self-serving

accommodation. It's a lot of Gray areas and the

struggle for justice because we can't always get true justice.

We often can't get true justice and sometimes, sometimes the oh

the best thing is going to seem like just getting as much

revenge and as big a pound of flesh as we possibly can.

We have to be aware of those tendencies to do that.

Sometimes self-serving accommodation is going to seem

like the best we can possibly do.

You see that a lot in our court system today and you hear about

non disclosure agreements in lawsuits so that we know someone

did something and they paid a lot for it, but we never know

the details because no one's allowed to talk about it.

And that may benefit the victim, but whether it brings justice to

the people around them, we don't know.

That happens. And sometimes that's the

sometimes that's the best folks can do.

But but to beware of settling for those things, vengeance or

self-serving accommodation, to beware of settling for those

things as true justice. They sometimes they're the best

we can do, but they're not true justice.

And we always need to be struggling for true justice.

But because sometimes that's the best we can do, we need to be

slow to judge those who choose a different path than we would

take in their struggle for justice.

Whether they fall onto the side of vengeance or fall on the side

of accommodation, Be slow to judge.

We'll pursue justice as we hear God calling us to do that,

recognizing that we're not the judge of our neighbors or our

relatives or other people around us, that they're God is their

judge. We will do what God has called

us to do as best we can and leave their judgement in God's

hands, and then never stop seeking after justice.

That whatever happens, we don't give up this quest.

We don't give up looking for opportunities to use the power

that we have to bring a little more justice into the lives of

people that don't have it. For whatever reason.

The struggle for justices is at the heart of God's call to the

church to, like Jesus, seek the recovery of sight, freedom for

the oppressed, liberation for those in prison, justice in this

world. We won't ever get it all

complete. We won't.

We won't. But to do what we can on a daily

basis in that struggle, in Jesus name, Amen.

Amen.