Sermon: Doing Justice

by Carol Estes

February 10, 2007

I’d like to begin our thinking about “doing justice” with a true story. It’s not a story with a tidy moral or answer. It’s a problem, instead, where none of the possible answers is clearly right or wrong. What it does offer, I hope, is a chance for us all to clarify our thinking about what is just, and what is kind in a world where the choices are not always clear, and where claims for justice compete and overlap.

So. I live in Suquamish--not the part by the water where the expensive houses are, but up the hill. A mixed neighborhood, not the safest, or cleanest. Not particularly a “community.” The kind of place where the guy across the street moves in a manufactured home and rents it to people who all seem to be 18 with about 8 cars among them. Next to them, the kid across the street seems to be in trouble with the police--it was common to see a police car over there.

I should mention that around the time this incident occurred, it was several years ago, I was teaching the Treefrog Chorus a song called … Sweet Honey and the Rock. Would you harbor a Christian a Muslim a Jew a heretic convict or spy? Would you harbor me?

It was March. About 2 a.m. I woke to my dog barking and barking. And the neighbors’ dog, who had adopted us and lived on our porch, was barking too. I went down the hall and looked out the window. A blue light from a police car was flashing down the street in the next block. Nothing unusual.

I went downstairs and got the dogs inside.

Funny, I smelled cigarettes. Nobody in our house smokes.

And I noticed that both dogs were standing in the door of our downstairs bathroom, wagging their tails. I turned on the bathroom light. There was a African American woman, hiding, wedged between the toilet and the wall. She was breathing hard, and disheveled, a little blood in her hair.

You always wonder, don’t you, what you’ll do when you find an intruder in your home. Scream? Run? Freeze? To my surprise, I was pretty calm. What I did, was say very matter-of-factly and somewhat sternly, “What’s going on?”

She said, “Please, turn off the light! The police are chasing me with dogs!”

She looked scared. She told me, breathlessly, that she had been with her boyfriend, who had stolen a car, and they were trying to outrun the police and had an accident, and she had hit her head on the car. Then both of them had taken off running. She had hidden in my house, she said, because the door wasn’t locked.

Note to self…

“Turn off the light! Don’t turn me over to the police.”

“I don’t think I can do that,” I said. I am a crime victim. This is what they call a “home invasion” these days--the kind of thing that can get a homeowner shot by a scared criminal caught in the act or, if you’re the criminal, shot by a scared homeowner. There has been a car theft, apparently, and who knows what all else--or how much of what she said is true? I’m thinking, I’ll probably be some kind of  an “accessory” if I let her hide in my house. But this woman wasn’t threatening me. She didn’t have a gun--as far as I could see. She mostly seemed afraid.

“They’ll send me to prison! Please! I didn’t know the car was stolen. Please.”

So there I am. It’s two in the morning and this situation has dropped into my lap. The moment of decision. What rules apply here--law and order? good citizenship? Christian values? All of the above? Would you harbor me?

#####

You know that old saying, “the world isn’t always fair”? My parents used to say that to my sisters and me when we came to them to tattle or whine that “That’s not fair!” I used to say it to my kids, too, who hated it, of course--and rightly so. It’s a non-solution. It’s the same as a shrug of the shoulders: “That’s just the way it is.”

It’s true, of course: the world isn’t always fair. But that bothers us human beings, because we believe things should be fair, and we know somewhere deep down, that they could be fair. The amazing thing is that this belief is innate. Research has shown, as some of you may have read in a recent New York Times article, that this particular moral sense--a sense of justice--is innate in human beings. Isn’t that remarkable--a biological imperative for justice. The Quakers say that “there is that of God in every person.” Maybe this is it--this innate sense of justice programmed into our very bodies--maybe this is the part of God that is in us all.

Consider for a moment how strong this drive for justice is. Have you ever been unjustly treated? I bet you can come up with a couple grievances that are years old, because the smoldering anger over unfairness lasts a long, long time. This is the same strong impulse for revenge, for redress that plays itself out on battlefields. Think of Palestinians and the great sense of injustice that smolders there, because the world decided to take away their homeland and give it to somebody else.

So, politically, this injunction to “do justice and to love kindness” is one of the most important, exciting, and radical messages of  Christianity. It upends existing social hierarchies. It questions the unequal distribution of wealth into haves and have-nots. It doesn’t ask, is this legal: it asks, constantly, is this just? Is this kind? Christians are not allowed, Micah says, to shrug their shoulders and say, hey, the world is not always fair. We are required, he says, to do justice. Justice is our primary work, Micah tells us, --the first thing on our “To Do List”.

And he doesn’t say be just; he says do justice. The difference is crucial.  Being just implies sitting around on the couch waiting for a justice emergency to come knocking at the door; doing justice implies getting out in the world, looking injustice in its ugly face, and working to erase it on behalf of those who are treated unjustly. And Micah says, this is not optional, it is required.

This requirement resonates with me. We all want different things from religion, I think. Some people seek comfort or reassurance. A safe harbor. A sense of community. Those are all lovely things that I appreciate, too, but they are not primarily what I am looking for.  What I have wanted is a faith that asks a lot of me, demands a lot of me--one that stretches me beyond what it is comfortable to give, asks me to become braver than I am, to give more, to risk more.

I don’t want a religion that gives me an excuse for inaction or conformity, but one that pushes me outward into the world on a path that’s not always clearly marked, that leads into places where it isn’t easy to go, and gives me a lodestar to navigate by. That star, to me, is justice. 

I have had the good fortune to become involved in a number of things over the last decade that centered around justice.  I was a UN election observer in East Timor in 1999--a country where a genocide was in progress. In Minnesota I helped run a Catholic Worker house for homeless men. And for the last seven years, I’ve run an all-volunteer program called University Behind Bars at Washington State Reformatory, a close-security men’s prison in Monroe. We offer college courses to the prisoners there. My day job, when I’m not being your choir director, is lobbyist for the Quakers, helping to get laws passed on matters of criminal justice reform, peace, and economic justice.

What I’ve learned from the people of East Timor, the homeless guys, the men in prison in Monroe has been truly life changing. I want to share a couple of them with you.

There is no them--there’s only us. Are there any offenders here to day? Studies have shown that 90% of us have done something that would get us jail or prison time if we’d been caught. That any of us can commit murder under the right circumstances. You might think this is a frightening result--that we can’t tell good and bad people apart. But it really means that we are all more alike than we thought. It’s a good thing we’re instructed to “love kindness,” because we’ll all need it.

My world has been enlarged way beyond the narrow, middle-class slice where I grew up. I asked my prison writing class to write about a memory, once, for a warm-up. One man wrote about being shot at point-blank range and left for dead by his best friend. What! I said. How many of you have been shot? Most of the class had been shot at least once--they started showing scars. When I grew up, I never knew anyone who was shot. I never knew anyone who was in foster care. I never knew anyone on food stamps. I never knew anyone who went to prison. What a big chunk of the world I was ignorant of.

My view of our country and our government is less naïve and more accurate. I’ve had to surrender some of my favorite beliefs about our country, like the notion that we are the land of the free. We put more people in prison than any other country in the world by a long shot, and men in American prisons are commonly put in solitary confinement for years at a time, even though we can show that it sometimes drives them crazy. I have learned that the gulf between who we Americans tell ourselves we are and who we really are is wide. But I also believe that that realization is the first step in becoming the nation we want to believe in. 

I have seen, again and again, the beauty and resiliency of the human spirit. As a young prisoner, Kimonti Carter, says, “No child grows up wanting to be a criminal. Every child dreams of being a success.” The poet Langston Hughes, you’ll recall , wondered what happened to a dream deferred. Does it dry up, like a raisin in the sun? Fester like a sore, and then run. … Or does it explode? Sometimes it does explode. Sometimes it dries up and withers away. But in my experience, it’s hard to extinguish a dream. It smolders, like a spark in ashes, can still catch fire when justice and kindness blow across it.

####

So, as I face the woman in our bathroom that night several years ago, I am less afraid than I would have been a decade ago because of these experiences, and I am confident that we are not so very different.

But what to do? I’m a good citizen, supporter of law and order, of the police trying to do their job, of the person whose car was stolen, the person whose car they ran into. And what about Christian values--are they relevant here in real life? Do good to those who harm you? Turn the other cheek. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you …  Jesus says, “I have come to release the prisoners … “

Would you harbor me?

I turned off the light and told her to come upstairs. I gave her a pillow and she slept on the floor of my room that night. I didn’t sleep a wink, but she did. The next morning I woke her up and I dropped her off at the house where she said she wanted to go on my way to play at church.

Was that the right decision? Everyone I’ve told about the story has had a different reaction. “You were incredibly lucky!” “Incredibly stupid!” “What if it was her boyfriend instead of her?” “What if she had a gun?” and “You have a remarkable ability to overcome your socialization.”

One friend of mine whose opinion I particularly value on these kinds of things is Robert Jeffrey, an African American pastor in the Central District who does tremendous work with gang prevention. He said, “I guess you’ve chosen sides.”

Perhaps I have.

In the end, I feel okay about my decision. I learned that a bad situation doesn’t have to end the way it does on the nightly news--with somebody in handcuffs, headed off to prison. I, one of the victims, had some options--in this case at least.

Since then, I have wondered, would Jesus have said “No. Sorry. Get out. You can’t stay here.” I don’t know, of course, except that he did hang around with some pretty unsavory characters, seemed to prefer them to the “bigwigs” and important people, and even some of the “good citizens.” 

So doing justice and loving kindness. It is the path into the world, into uncomfortable, murky territory, hard questions, even harder answers. But that’s the place where we have a chance to act on our innate longing for justice, to show kindness, to do what god requires of us. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”  Thomas Paine