On Justice and Shalom: Sarah Bessey speaks [part i]

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Or maybe just the most hectic of times. Having just moved across to a newer fresher website and blog for Irresistibly Fish, i wrote two posts which really got people responding A LOT in the last 48 hours. The first being the provocatively titled, ‘Sodomy: A South African Love Story’ and the second the way more controversial [somehow] ‘The Passion of the Chris’ [which despite the tremendous push-back i received i have yet to have had one single person take issue withe the title. You just never know.]

So i was responding to comments online [in fifteen different threads and statuses and inbox messages] like a madman and also slowly working through the page-load of comments that had come directly to the blog and then suddenly it all got too much and so i ran away and made some coffee and grabbed a bowl of nuts and Sarah Bessey’s latest book, ‘Out of Sorts’ which i am almost finished reading, and headed for the sanctity of the lounge…

Only to open up to the most relevant and meaningful chapter in the book yet, which speaks to a lot of the things that have been on my heart these last two days and so i wondered maybe if i shared these from someone else’s voice and pen and heart, whether they might be differently received. Sometimes a different style of writing or speaking will have a different impact on a different person and i really thought a lot of what she shared here was excellent.

So here is an extract from Sarah Bessey’s ‘Out of Sorts’ from Chapter 11 which is titled ‘Beautiful Facade’ and subtitled ‘On Justice and Shalom’:

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On my most recent trip to Haiti, I saw a beautiful hillside of colorful houses. We pulled our van over and took pictures of the cheery homes: purple, orange, apple green, sky blue. It made me happy to see the colorful homes among the usual cacophony of gray cinder block in post-earthquake Haiti. I thought it must be a public art project. But I also wondered why not all the houses on the hillside were painted. There was a line, almost straight down the hill, dividing the tiny houses that were painted bright colors from the usual slums. But the painted houses were so pretty, and so I took pictures and posted them on Instagram. “I want to frame that and put it on our wall,” I said.

Then our translators and local friends told us the truth: it was Jalousie. A shanty town for the poor and destitute disguised with paint. There was no running water, no sewage system, no electricity except what is illegally tapped in. The government painted one exterior wall of these homes bright colors. Critics say that the homes of Jalousie were painted because their slum faces the rich part of town, the place where people like me come and stay in lovely hotels – a PR campaign to the tune of 1.4 million dollars.

After all, everybody knows that rich white folks don’t want to look at ugly gray cinder block shanties. It ruins supper on the terrace.

That entire story is pretty much a metaphor for my experiences in justice work. I’m well-meaning but ignorant. I only know the stories I’m told, and too often I long for a quick-fix happy ending. When I heard the truth of the painted houses of Jalousie, my stomach sank. Because I’d fallen for the beautiful facade. Again.

These moments remind me to keep my mouth shut, to listen, to dig a bit deeper, beyond the facades, to look past the shiny bright exterior and into the home, into the streets, into the truth. It’s easy to fall for the bright colors because we want so badly to believe in a good and resolved story. We want the good guys to win – quickly.

But spend any amount of time working towards justice and you learn to become distrustful of the shiny, pretty, easy answers. You become a bit suspicious of the facades. You learn to peek behind the story and poke it with a stick. You learn to ask real questions of the real people, not the PR team. You grow tired of short-term quick-fix thinking in lieu of investing in the long game with preventative measures of community and economic development.

It’s hard to settle for more dingy, half-peeling-off Band-Aids when you’re longing for a full healing.

There isn’t much room for romanticism in the real world of justice and peacemaking.

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‘For someone who grew up memorizing and reading the Bible, I was quite ignorant of God’s heart for justice. Whenever I get sniffy about how much I know the Bible, I remember how long it took me to realize that God made this whole do-justly-love-mercy thing pretty clear yo us throughout the Bible, and yet I missed it for so long.

Perhaps that’s the problem with cherry-picking Bible verses for our personal lives: we miss the bigger and more beautiful story of what God is doing in the world. We make the story about ourselves instead of seeing ourselves as part of the big story.

It wasn’t until I relearned how to read my Bible and learned about the Kingdom of God that I began to see God’s love for the oppressed, the hopeless, the marginalized, the forgotten, the least powerful, the widow, the poor, the immigrant.

Ken Wytsma defined justice as the “single best word, both inside and outside the Bible, for capturing God’s purposes for the world and humanity’s calling in the world. Justice is, in fact, the broadest, most consistent word the Bible uses to speak about what ought to be, and it has been used throughout the centuries by Christians, and non-Christians alike to describe vital areas of human and divine concern.”

I’m a social justice wannabe. My heart has awakened to God’s heart fr justice, but I’m still figuring out what that means in my life and what my life might mean in the world. I am learning, painfully, just how complicated and nuanced these conversations can be.

Justice is a bit of a buzzword in the Church these days. We can sometimes fool ourselves into thinking that we’re actually doing justice simply because we’re talking about justice. We like to talk a lot about justice because the actual doing of it is terrifying. And tiring. And ordinary. And inconvenient. And countercultural.

Justice is often born in the quiet and ordinary moments long before it’s seen by anyone else. Sometimes it’s as simple and as difficult as listening, as learning, as laying down our excuses or justifications or disguises, as forgiveness, as choosing the hard daily work of restoration, as staying resolutely alive when everyone else is numbing themselves against it.

Keep caring. Let yourself be angry. Let your heart be broken. Let yourself be uncomfortable.

Eugene Cho writes that, “God invites and commands His people to not just be aware of injustice but to pursue justice. Not just to pursue justice but to live justly. These two acts are not the same, but they are inseparable. To be followers of Jesus, we are required to pursue justice and live justly at the same time.”

It was precisely because I reoriented my life around Jesus and following Him, apprenticing myself to His way of life, that I woke up to God’s heart for justice and redemption. After all, God’s heart for justice doesn’t start and end with me or you: it includes the entire world, and we’re missing it mightily if we reduce the Gospel to a personal salvation experience.

The funny thing about justice, about having your heart awaken to God’s heart for humanity, is that you set out to change the world and run smack into the truth that you yourself need to be saved too.