The Struggle for Justice (Chester UMC)

I want to apologize just up front.

This is one of those I I normally a week or so before

preaching a sermon on an adult theme, I all announce that it's

going to be APG 13 Sunday. This is APG 13 sermon today and

I did not announce that last week.

Nothing graphic, but clearly from the reading that Brent just

read adult themes going on here in this story this Sunday and

then two Sundays from now, not next Sunday, next Sunday is on

Joseph and in one of his dreams. But the two Sundays after that

and then for a couple Sundays, we're going to look at the story

of Tamar as well. And some of those are going to

be PG13 sermons as well. So just a heads up, Dinah and

Tamar are, are two people that I don't think I have ever heard

preached about in a Sunday morning sermon.

And, and as we've, you've read the passage today and when we

get to Tamar, I'm sure you'll, you'll realize when we're there

as well, if you don't know that story already, that there's a

reason why these passages don't get preached on.

These are very difficult subjects.

They, they are not child friendly subjects, but there are

very important subjects. And these two women, Dinah and

Tamar, have their names highlighted and emphasized in

the Scripture, and I think it's important for us to attend to

their stories. Dinah Tamar is mentioned along

with a few other women, as part of the lineage of Jesus.

When we get into the Gospels, particularly in the Gospel of

Matthew, Dinah is not. We don't hear much about Dinah

after this. We don't hear about her

children. We don't hear about her

descendants. She's not mentioned as an

ancestor of of Jesus in the lineages that come.

And, and I think that does not mean that Dinah's insignificant.

I think what that means is, is that this story is here because

Dinah as a person herself, who she was, not based on who she

was married to, not based on what children she had, not based

on what her descendants did, but Dinah herself and this

experience are important and meaningful and worthy of our

attention. And so that's how we're going to

treat this and we're going to deal with this, how the people

around Dinah responded to what was done to Dinah is the, the,

the, the rest of the chapter that that Brent read.

And we don't have time to read the whole chapter, but I'm going

to give you that story as, as we go along here.

But Dinah as, as the passage mentioned, well, again, we're

getting into the details of it. This, this the theme for the day

is the struggle for justice. How do we, when we're in a

system which is stacked against us, that is to say, when we're

not the powerful people in a particular system, how can we

pursue justice when justice desperately needs to be pursued?

What can we do when our options are limited, when our power is

limited? And this is the situation that

Dinah found herself in and Dinah's family found themselves

in. And so we're going to talk, I'm

going to give you a little bit more about Dinah's story and,

and, and the struggle for justice in the broken world in

which they lived at the time, the ancient Middle East.

And Jacob, Dinah, Jacob's daughter, as far as we know,

Jacob's oldest daughter, born to Leah and, and, and, and so Dinah

and her family, along with Jacob, They are strangers in a

strange land. Jacob is wealthy.

We already know that God has made him wealthy.

Jacob has a household. Jacob has lots of flocks.

His his wealth is a mobile wealth.

Jacob owns no real estate, except if you want to count his,

his family owns a plot of ground in which his grandparents are

buried. They own a small graveyard, is

the only land that they own and say they are visitors in this

land of Canaan. And they are near the city of

Shechem. And you'll notice that the city

named Shechem is named after the man who raped Dinah.

Shechem is a known city. Archaeologists have excavated

that city. It was a large city, a fortified

city in the day, and it was named for the person who raped

Dinah. Shechem was a person of power

and influence. Shechem's father had even more

power and influence in that region.

They had military power, they had economic power.

They had the power of real estate, the power of ruling a

large and fortified city in the region.

And so when Shechem raped Dinah, there was very little that Jacob

and Dinah's brothers could do. Jacob, Dinah's father, and

Dinah's brothers and Dinah could do.

They could hardly go and demand justice from Hamar.

Justice. And again, it's weird.

The Bible is weird on this subject of rape, and I don't

think it does any good to try to pretend that it isn't weird.

There are some places in the Scripture where it suggests that

when someone rate when a man rapes a woman, the man should be

stoned to death. There are other places in the

scripture very close to that place, the same chapter in fact,

that suggests when a man rapes a woman, the punishment is that

the man then has to marry the woman.

The woman has to marry her rapist.

The the culture was different, the ethics were different, and

certainly not different in a good way in terms of favoring

women. I cannot imagine what it would

have been like to be Dinah in a situation where she's gone out

to build relationships, to establish connections with the

local women of the area, and instead find herself being

raped. And then to have a rapist ask

her father for her hand in marriage and her father consent

to it, which is what Jacob did. The struggle for justice

happened does not happen in a vacuum, and it seldom happens in

a perfect world. The struggle for justice happens

in an imperfect world. And what do we do in an

imperfect world? When a grave wrong has been done

and we have little or no power to pursue true justice, What do

we do? What do we do?

And this is not a, an abstract question.

This is not an ivory tower philosophical question.

This is the real world situation of most people in this real

world. I, I think of the women in Iran

for the last 47 years who who have been at times brutalized.

There was a few years back there were documented cases of women

because they showed too much hair, had acid thrown in their

faces and were permanently disfigured.

Women arrested and brutalized for for for not wearing the

hijab, for showing too much skin, too much hair.

We don't know for sure, but some reports indicate that in January

10s of thousands of people, including women were murdered by

the current government in Iran. What do you do when to stand up

and protest and call and demand for justice could very well mean

your imprisonment, your death, you're being brutalized.

What do you do? How do we pursue justice in a

broken world? Jacob took one route.

Jacob chose appeasement and accommodation for the sake of

familial protection and prosperity.

We don't get any interior dialogue from Jacob on.

We get, well, a tiny little bit toward the end.

Dinah's brothers chose a different route.

We'll talk about that in a minute.

And the route that they chose, what the, the, the insight we

get, the clear insight that we get into Jacob's interior

dialogue when, when Dinah's brothers chose violence and

vengeance was for Jacob to say, you have put us in a very

dangerous position. We are strangers here and we are

surrounded by people who are now our enemies because of you.

And I think it's reasonable to infer from that that Jacob's

primary concern was the protection of his entire family.

What can I do to make sure that my family, that our guests, that

our, our, our visitors don't get overwhelmed and destroyed by our

more powerful neighbors, the people whose land and whose

grace we depend on for our survival?

And so Jacob chose appeasement. Shechem asked to marry Dinah,

and Jacob said yes. Build an economic tie between

his family and the most powerful family in the area.

It builds political ties. It builds ties and obligations.

The family Family ties were incredibly important and

significant that to to become allied and joined with a family

of that level of power and significance would have would

have offered a great deal of protection and security for

Jacob and his family. And Jacob, in a broken world

with limited options, shows familial protections and

prosperity at what must have been the expense of the mental,

emotional and physical safety of his daughter.

I don't. It's easy to throw stones when

you're not in the position of making the decisions, right?

I would like to smack Jacob upside the head and say I would

never put my daughter through that.

I've never been in Jacob's position.

I don't know what it means to have to choose the safety of one

child over the safety of your entire family.

I don't know. I've never been there.

I like to think I know what I would do in that situation.

But that's the situation Jacob was in, and that's the route he

chose, the path to justice that he saw.

And that broken world was what can I do?

How can I take a horrible situation and turn it into a net

positive for my family? And that was appeasement and

accommodation. Jacob's brother, Jacob's sons,

Diana's brothers, chose a different route.

They agreed on the surface for their sister to marry Shechem.

But they said Shechem culturally, religiously, for us,

for our families to be joined together, if you're going to

marry our our sister, you have to be circumcised.

And in fact, our our whole clan, our whole how we can intermarry

with folks from your city if all the men of your city get

circumcised. And Shechem agreed to this.

It's like, OK, I mean, that's that'll hurt.

That'll be painful, won't be a pleasant experience.

But he, too, apparently saw benefits to be gained from

uniting with the family of very of a very wealthy nomad in the

area. And so all of the men were

circumcised in the city of Shechem on one day.

And two or three days later, when they were still in great

pain, Dinah's brothers killed him, every single one of them,

and took their wives and their daughters as hostages into their

own camp. Simon and Levi were the two

brothers that were named, but Jacob, the other brothers were

indicated. Those were the two that were

named chose violent retribution for the sake of revenge as their

path to justice. We'll give you justice for what

you've done to our sister. We will kill you and we will

kill every male in your city. And we will take your women and

your children. Not exactly a net gain for the

women of the area. Again, Full disclosure, part of

me says yeah, my daughter, my wife, yeah, that sounds about

right. But is it really right to kill

every male in the city for the wrong committed, even an

egregious wrong committed by one man?

Is it right to take other women and make them your property

because of what one man did to your sister?

To your daughter, again, I'm not in that situation.

Simeon and Levi and Dinah's brothers, they looked at the

situation and they said we don't have the power.

There's no way the ruler of this city is going to give the death

penalty to his son for something that his son and he don't even

think was wrong. There's no, there's no legal

path to justice. So we will pursue revenge and we

will punish them and with overwhelming force.

We will say don't ever mess with us and our family again.

Not surprisingly, Jacob said you have put us in a very dangerous

position. We are now surrounded by enemies

rather than friends. And their response was, should

we let him get away with it? These are hard questions.

The struggle for justice in a broken world is a very, very

difficult struggle. It's a very difficult thing to

pursue when the powers that are out there don't help you pursue

it. Our country is not perfect. the

United States of America is not perfect.

I don't know anyone who thinks that we're perfect, but our

system of justice and our system of justice is not perfect

either. But it's so much better than

this. It's so much better than this.

We got a long way to go to the Kingdom of God, but it's so much

better than this. Even in our system, there are

people that feel like they can't get justice here.

Does a preacher tell the story years ago of having been in

Chicago and there was a situation where, and again, this

was decades ago where tenants were suing slumlords because of

the lead based paint in the apartment buildings and the

slums that they lived in. Their children would chew a

window sill or get a flake of paint off and put it in their

mouth. And, and, and apparently the

transformation is very quick when a child consumes lead.

You can almost watch it happen on their faces, the damage it

does to their brains. And the tenants were suing their

landlords. And a pastor in the area went to

court on the day when some of the decisions were being made.

And he was sitting in the courtroom as the judge dismissed

or found in favor of the landlords in case after case

after case. Pastor at one point stood up and

said, your honor, is there no justice in this courtroom?

And he said the judge's reply was this.

This is not a Court of Justice. This is a court of law.

If you want justice, change the law.

Great jurisprudential philosophy that did nothing to help the

tenants whose children's lives were so horribly damaged by the

neglect of the slumlords and the indifference of the slumlords.

As good as our system is, we have a very different justice

system for people who are wealthy and people who are in

poverty. Very, very different.

I heard another attorney, someone who graduated from a

prestigious law school that top of their class, I don't know

what Harvard, Yale, it was one of the Ivy Leagues and he was a,

a, a black man from the South. And this again, this was decades

ago. And he was offered positions at

several major law firms and he turned them all down and he went

back to his home city to be a public defender.

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

criminals in our country, we execute poor people.

My initial reaction to that was all well dominated.

They wouldn't but go back and check and see how many wealthy

people have received the death penalty in our country.

We have very different systems of justice for the poor and for

the wealthy, very different. This struggle for justice is a

real thing, and it's an important thing.

One of the things that we have and that we hold onto as

followers of Jesus is the promise that one day Jesus will

bring true justice. Aubrey read that passage already

this morning. I'm going to read it again

because it's it's important. And I want to highlight this.

This is a prophecy from Isaiah that that was very quickly

seized upon by the church in the early days of after Jesus

resurrection to say this prophecy.

Isaiah was talking about Jesus. Isaiah was talking about Jesus

the Messiah here when he said, here is my servant whom I'm

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

in. A smoldering Wick.

Wrong button, a smoldering Wick He will not snuff out and

faithfulness. He will bring forth justice.

He will not falter or be discouraged till he establishes

justice on earth. Three times in 4 verses we're

told that God's Messiah will establish justice on earth.

This is the promise that in the Kingdom of God, true justice

will be there and that Jesus will bring that justice, and not

by violent revolution. You know how ultimately Jesus

works this all out? We don't know.

But if he's not, he's not even shouting in the streets, but

he's bringing justice. This is the promise that we

have. This is the hope that we have,

that one day there will be true and equal justice for all, for

rich, for poor. No matter the color of your

skin, the language you speak, the part of the world you're

from, you will receive justice. That there will be a reversal

when those in power finally find themselves to be without, and

those without power find themselves to be blessed and

favored. That day has not arrived yet.

Jesus's life, death, and resurrection inaugurated that

Kingdom, but that Kingdom has not been fully and completely

established. And what are we to do in the

meantime? How are we to live and respond

and and seek justice and support those seeking justice in the

meantime? There are lots of voices ready

to answer that question right now.

Some of those voices calling for violent revolutions, some of

those voices calling for they're on sofa.

You know, a lot of different people have a lot of different

pathways to true justice. Most of the voices that I hear

in this world calling for justice, their pathway to

justice involves killing a lot of people.

A lot of people. Stalin, Hitler and Mao all

promised justice and killed a lot of people.

Western nations have promised justice and killed a lot of

people too. How do we get there?

I don't know. I don't.

I don't have that answer. I don't know why God would give

it to me anyway. Why would he tell us that?

What can we do about it? What we can do, again, in the

absence of a strategy to bring about true justice on the earth

as a whole, what tactics can we live by?

What things can we do to enable justice and to weaken injustice

where we find it? That's just what I want to walk

through today. How can we pursue justice when a

system is stacked against US? One of the things we have to do

is recognize the importance of justice, that it really does

matter. Too often in in some branches of

the Christian Church, particularly in the West,

justice has been Pooh poohed and dismissed as as some sort of,

you know, fringe left wing political, you know, the social

justice gospel as not really true Christianity.

Three times and four verses about the Messiah, we're told

how important that justice is. The central thing.

Jesus, when when he launches his career with his first sermon in

his hometown of Nazareth, launches his public ministry

there. Jesus quotes from passages that

talk about the Messiah bringing justice.

Doesn't use the word but, but it's all of the language, the

justice language of the poor and the oppressed and the imprisoned

being set free and lifted up. Justice is of central importance

to God. Simply saving people's souls for

pie in the sky when we die has never been the mission of the

Church. But helping improve people's

lives and circumstances in this world as we wait for Jesus to

return is at the heart of the mission of the Church.

In addition to sharing the good news that saves our souls,

seeking justice is what Jesus said He came to do to set the

captive free free to set the oppressed free, to be bring good

news to the poor, to give sight to the blind and strength to the

lame. All of this is the language of

justice that we hear throughout the Old Testament over and over

and over and over again in the New Testament or in the Old

Testament. In the New Testament we hear of

God's call for and desire for justice.

Read through the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel,

Daniel, and and the others and hear over and over again God's

call for justice from his people.

Justice for the poor, justice for the weak, justice for the

oppressed. If we don't recognize that this

is a a central thing for God and not some some sort of side

fringe issue, we will never make a meaningful impact on justice

in people's lives around us. We have to realize this is

important to God and so needs to be important to us.

Then we need to prioritize the care, healing and restoration of

those who have been wronged and those who are most vulnerable to

injustice. That that we we put our focus on

the same folks that Jesus put his focus on the poor, those

imprisoned, those suffering, those who are vulnerable, the

orphans, the widows, the foreigners, the strangers, the

most vulnerable people among us. One of the tragic things about

Genesis chapter 34 is that we never hear from Dinah.

Genesis 34 · chapter mention

We never hear Dinah's voice. Jacob doesn't ask her.

Her brothers don't ask her. They speak for her, they stand

in their minds for her, for their family, but we never hear

from Dinah. What did Dyna see as a just

response to this? I wish we knew.

We don't. And I think that's part of the

story and an important part of the story as well.

And that, that, that, that the absence of that question being

asked, Dinah, what do you want? Dinah, how can we best respond

on your behalf? Speaks volumes about the

brokenness of the world at that time and this time, and speaks

volumes about the struggle for justice in such a broken world.

A world so broken that a young woman being raped has no say in

how to respond to her rapist, to give priority to those voices,

to listen to those voices. There is a, a version of

Christianity which says that God favors the poor, that God is on

the side of the poor against the rich.

I think that can be overstated. There's scriptures that support

that and there's a, there are theological streams that are out

there that, that dive deep into that.

I think that can be overstated. I, I don't think God wants

anyone to suffer or to be punished.

And, and while I could not say in any absolute sense that God

is always on the side of the poor against the rich, I can say

that the testimony of Scripture is very clear that as we are

seeking and pursuing justice, that we have to listen to and

prioritize the needs of those who are most vulnerable.

Whether that's economic vulnerability, vulnerability

based on their gender, their, their nationality, their

language, whatever, whatever that vault, whatever the source

of that vulnerability is. To guard those who are

vulnerable. To prioritize their care, their

healing, and their restoration. To beware of both vengeance and

self-serving accommodation. Beware of those tendencies the

the those can crop up in in in very easy ways for people who

are particularly those who who are not directly affected.

They're observers to the injustice.

Or maybe they are directly affected, but but that that

desire for for appeasement, self-serving accommodation.

It won't make the world just. But how can I profit from this?

It won't make the world a better place, but how can I get, you

know, myself in a better place from this?

Sometimes there may be there's a place for that.

The entire system of non disclosure agreements and court

cases is built on self-serving accommodation at times.

Sometimes that's the best option a person has.

I can't change the system. The best I can do is get paid

for the harm that's been done to me and my family.

Sometimes that's the best option we have.

But it's important to remember that that really doesn't move us

closer to justice, and that can't be the final say in the

pursuit of justice, just like vengeance can't be the final say

in the pursuit of justice. Punishing a person who was

guilty of a horrendous crime? Absolutely.

Punishing an entire group of people for what one person has

done, that feels like it's gone too far.

Jesus said, you've heard it said an eye for an eye, a tooth for a

tooth. It's not a bad rule.

It's in the Bible. It was about purport.

It was it. That rule that's in the Law of

Moses was against exactly the sort of thing that Simeon and

Levi and and Dinah's other brothers did here, this

disproportional vengeance that leads to generational blood

feuds. Well, you did to us.

Now we'll do back to you worse. Now we'll do back to you worse.

And then it just goes and goes and goes an eye for an eye to

truth through A2 says let the punishment fit the crime.

Let the punishment be proportional to the crime that

was done. When we want to go beyond that

and fall into that path and that that mindset of vengeance, we

need to be aware of that just as much as we need to be aware of

beware of self-serving accommodation and we need to be

slow to judge those who choose a different path.

It's easy to throw stones at Jacob and at Simeon and Levi

from 2500 years distance and and our situation and our setting.

It's easy to throw stones. It's easy to throw stones at

people on the other side of the world and their struggle for

justice and criticize and condemn.

It is much harder to say, well, how do we get justice?

So in all things, as we're struggling for justice, we keep

that mindset of humility. We talked about it last week,

the one that Paul said have the same mind that Jesus had, who

even though he was God in the flesh, didn't cling to his

priorities and privileges, but humbled himself and became a

servant to others. Taking that attitude as we

struggle for justice in this world and never stop seeking,

never stop seeking. Our system is so much better

than it used to be. The one in the United States is

so much better than it was in in Jacob's day, in Dinah's day.

It's so much better than the system in in some countries in

the world today. But it's not perfect and there

is room for improvement. And, and never let, never let

good enough be good enough when it comes to seeking justice in

the world. Always looking for ways to make

it better, more fair, less favoritism based on economic

position, more just these are the things we can do along the

way only if only if we recognize how important justice is to God

in this world that we live in now.

The struggle for justice is real.

I I believe that the struggle for justice will continue until

Jesus returns and establishes his Kingdom fully and

completely. I don't think we're ever going

to get there on our own. I don't think we have, as human

beings, the capacity for perfect justice.

I think we are, we are too far gone to sort that out by

ourselves. I believe one day Jesus will

establish it. Until then, we'll struggle with

it, and we'll struggle for it, and we'll seek it and we'll

pursue it, recognizing that we're in a broken world and

sometimes the best we can do is the best we can do.

Let's do it in Jesus name, Amen.