My hands were shaking and I was slouched down in the back seat of a 9-passenger van, hoping that the man driving wouldn’t make eye contact with me as I ducked my face down behind Em’s head rest. Somewhere in the Bulgarian countryside close to the Danube River, Raul* finally looked in the rear-view mirror and said, “Texas girl! Describe yourself in one sentence.”
Slowly, falteringly, I said, “Um… well… I’m passionate about writing and justice, so that gives me a lot of questions about Jesus, but I still believe that he is good. So… I guess that describes me.”
Raul nodded and smiled, and asked, “Who do you want to defend?”
He thought that I meant I wanted to be a lawyer. But his question hit a space that has been opening in my heart in just the right way to crack me wide open.
“The people who can’t defend themselves,” I said, and sunk my head behind the headrest again and let his words echo in my mind for a moment: Who do you want to defend?
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This month in Bulgaria, there were so many moments that brought me to my knees. Watching sweet children play on a concrete soccer pitch, all skinny limbs and sunken ribs. Drinking coffee with a woman who was married at 14. Holding a Roma baby with tiny gold studs in her earlobes and hearing all of the slurs that will be hissed at her in the back of my mind.
These moments have been pressing against my rib cage, making it hard to breathe. I so desperately pray for justice, but my hands aren’t big enough to hold all of the brokenness I’ve seen or heal all of the hurt that is just on the surface, floating like oil on water.
Amos 5:24 has been the refrain of my prayers this month, the verse I doodle in the margins of my journal and what I hear before I go to bed at night. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
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This month I have learned about justice, about my hunger for it and the world’s need for it, and how desperately I want to defend those who cannot defend themselves. I could expect the World Race to solve all the world’s problems. But I have also learned what that means for me, a white American missionary in a culture for four weeks at a time. I could easily become paternalistic, pointing out the flaws in other cultures without ever looking clear-eyed at my own.
It’s true, I am passionate about justice. The kind of justice Jesus doles out, that looks a whole lot more like mercy than vengeance.
The kind of justice which means opening borders and homes to refugees and immigrants regardless of their skin color or religion. It means pouring out our excess into the great dearth of resources created by capitalism and communism and every other broken form of economic inequality. It means digging my hands into the muck of injustice woven deep into my society, my community, my own soul. Sinking my fingers into the privilege of my white skin, my upper-middle-class upbringing, and my American passport.
Justice like Jesus brings isn’t propping up the status quo by doling out cheap grace which absolves me of my sins of omission, like when I stay silent instead of saying black lives matter; when I share a link about Syrian refugees but not the crisis at the Texas border; when I participate in missions without considering the burden of colonialism on the countries I’m going to. When I ignore Jesus’s commandment to go and make disciples of all nations.
Because how can disciples be made when we won’t look people in the face and let ourselves be burdened with our complicity in their suffering?
What mercy can we give before we recognize our corporate need for the justice that cleanses, that looks like mercy and acts like grace and tastes like bittersweet wine?
Justice means defending those who can’t defend themselves. Looking at our own society from the wrong end of a telescope and tracing the wounds that haven’t healed and that those in power desperately try to ignore. It’s not “making America great again” or playing at persecution.
It’s mercy.
It’s a new covenant cleansed in living water.
It’s communion, at a table that has been split so there can be not seats around it, only the children of God standing shoulder to shoulder in an unbroken, eternal song of hallelujah.
