It’s Complicated
The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
July 31, 2011
It’s Complicated
Micah 6:8
He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God
A letter dated March 30, 1978:
“Dear Mr. Ferguson:
We regret to inform you
that we will not be able to offer you
a place at Harvard Law School
in the class of 1981.
We would like to explain our decision.
There once was a day when young men like you
were the ones we routinely admitted:
men from New England and the Northeast;
educated at prep schools and Ivy-League colleges;
Protestant;
White;
men who, when they heard the word “squash”,
thought of a sport rather than vegetable.
But those days are gone.
Over the past few years
we have witnessed an explosion of applications
from an increasingly diverse pool of applicants.
We now realize we need to respond
by seeking a diverse class that better represents
the demographics of the world
into which we send our graduates.
We now actively seek candidates from less well-known schools;
candidates from states in the south and the west;
candidates who are African American,
Native American,
Asian American,
Latino;
candidates who may be the first in their family
to have graduated from college;
candidates who may not present grades and test scores
that are competitive,
but who display other qualities,
including having overcoming adversity,
that indicate their potential to be outstanding lawyers.
It was barely a decade ago
that we routinely denied admission to women,
on the assumption that any woman in the class
did not intend to make a life-long career in law
but would leave practice within a few years of graduation
to get married and raise a family.
Were this 1968 rather than 1978,
we would be acknowledging your application
with an offer of admission.
But one of the few constants in the world is change
and we have to adapt to the transformations
we find all around us.
More important,
we believe that we are called not only to teach justice,
but also called to do justice
by removing artificial barriers
we had erected in our admissions policies
over the past 100 years
and reach out more broadly, deeply, and purposefully
to assure that our graduates reflect
the rich diversity of our nation,
and indeed, the world.
We are confident you will find your place
at an outstanding law school
and go on to an exemplary and fulfilling career as a lawyer
and we wish you every success in the future.
Very truly yours,
The Admissions Office of Harvard Law School”
This was not the rejection letter I received
from Harvard Law School back in 1978
after I had applied,
but it might just as well have been.
Admission standards at colleges, law schools,
business and medical schools
had changed drastically over the previous ten years
as schools sought to open their doors wider
to a broader, more diverse group of students,
For Harvard Law School
there were too many WASPs from the Northeast
just like me in the applicant pool
and some would have to make way
so the school could create a very different class
from what had been the norm for decades.
I knew it was the right thing to do,
that Harvard and other schools were attempting to correct
for injustices built up and built in over the years.
But still, where was the justice if I was penalized
for a situation over which I had no control,
for attitudes I had no part in creating,
for mindsets that existed long before
I was even born?
Was showing a preference to one person
at the expense of another person,
showing a preference to a person
with lower grades and scores
just to respond to the need to diversify,
was that fair,
was that just?
Or was it, as some argued at the time,
“reverse discrimination”?
No more just,
even if well intentioned.
At age 23, I was beginning to learn that
this justice business was and is complicated!
We heard in our lesson such simple, direct words:
“what does that Lord require of you
but to do justice.”
But what does that mean – to “do justice”?
In this context, it isn’t just a legal term,
a term applied only in a courtroom.
To do justice is how we are called to live
in every part of our lives
as children of God and disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The word “justice” appears almost 200 times in the Bible,
references scattered within books of both
the Old and New Testaments.
The command is always the same:
God calls us to seek justice,
to work for justice,
to do justice,
in the same way we are called to seek peace,
work for peace.
Justice is at the top of God’s list of things and behaviors
God considers not just important,
but essential for his world, his Kingdom.
And conversely,
injustice has no place in God’s world,
God’s kingdom.
God’s justice is broad;
it is to be sought everywhere:
it is social justice,
it is economic justice,
it is environmental justice --
pick the arena and simply apply the term:
seek justice,
do justice.
Do justice because,
as the Psalmist reminds us,
“God loves justice”.
(Psalm 11:7)
So, when God tells us
we are to “give justice to the weak and the orphan”
(Psalm 82)
we cannot be satisfied that our work is done
if we know the weak and the orphan
can find free advice at the local legal aid clinic.
To give justice to the weak and the orphan
is to assure they are fed,
assure they are housed,
assure they have access to the same level of medical care
that you and I have.
It is to assure that they don’t live in fear,
but have lives grounded in confidence and hope,
for that’s what God wants for all his children:
lives filled with hope.
As he spoke of the Messiah who was to come,
the prophet Isaiah gave us a model
for how we are to do justice:
“He shall not judge by what his eyes see,
or decide by what his ears hear;
but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,
and decide with equity for the meek of the earth.”
(Isaiah 11:3)
We are to do justice leading with our hearts,
in the same way Jesus does justice.
The world in which Jesus lived in two thousand years ago,
was one in which a small group sat at the top of society,
owning most of the land and other assets,
possessing most of the wealth, most of the power,
showing little concern for the poorest, the neediest.
We are little changed two thousand years later
as every economic indicator shows that the gap
between the wealthiest one percent
and everyone else in our country has grown every year
for the past two decades:
“The richest 1 percent possess
over a third of the country’s wealth;
more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent
of American families.
The top 10 percent of American households
take in 42 percent of all income
and hold 71 percent of all wealth.”
(Michael Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?)
Our reaction to these statistics may be
that that is simply how the free market works.
Or, our reaction could even be a bit of Gordon Gekko:
as we try to figure out what do we need to do
to claw our way up out of the lower 90 percent,
up into, if not the top one percent,
at least the top ten percent.
But, if we seek justice,
if we want to do justice,
then our first reaction to statistics like these
should be to ask, is such a situation just?
Is it just that chief executives of top businesses
are taking home salaries of $5 million,
$10 million, $15 million, even more,
when so many are out of work?
Is it just that the typical chief executive officer
of a large business in this country
earns a salary 400 times that of the lowest paid employee?
Four hundred times!
As the debate has raged on
about the deficit and budgets,
have you heard anyone from any party
speak up for the elderly,
for children,
for “the weak and the orphan”.
for the more than forty million men, women,
and children in this country
who struggle just to put food on the table?
Where are the voices speaking up for them?
Where are the voices demanding that they too
are assured of justice?
Where are their lobbyists?
Jesus would say that’s our job,
to lobby for them,
to assure justice for them.
You may have seen in the paper
that an extraordinary event took place
this past week right in the Capitol
when an ecumenical group of clergy,
including a representative from our Presbyterian Church (USA),
gathered to make just that point –
that nowhere in any of the debates
where they finding concern for justice for the poor,
the weak, the elderly,
the jobless, the homeless.
The group argued that we may well be concerned with
leaving our children a legacy of debt,
but we cannot resolve that issue by substituting
a legacy of poverty,
of indifference,
of neglect of our most vulnerable.
That is not just,
and no matter how appealing some may find it politically,
we can be certain that God will not let
such a situation stand,
for God loves justice.
for God loves justice.
Three years ago the PC(USA) adopted a Social Creed
to help us to learn more about what it means
to do justice, to seek justice, to live just lives
as we weave justice into all parts of life.
The idea came from a creed adopted 100 years earlier,
a time not all that dissimilar from now,
a time when the rich, the corporations ran roughshod over society,
and the poor, the elderly, the most vulnerable
were cast aside, “collateral damage”
of free market capitalism.
I’ve put a copy of the Social Creed in your bulletin;
http://gamc.pcusa.org/ministries/acswp/social-creed/
take it home and read through it.
Talk about it with your family, discuss it over dinner.
Find one point that particularly resonates with you,
some part of life that you’d like to work on
to help bring justice and root out injustice.
We are certainly not the only church with a Social Creed.
The Social Teaching of the Roman Catholic Church
begins with the lesson that the measure of just society
“is how it treats its most vulnerable members.”
This sums up perfectly and pointedly
the teachings we find in both
Old and New Testaments
of what it means “to do justice”.
“The basis of our work is God,
not ourselves”.
(Rigby)
Whether we like something,
whether it fits our politics,
our ideology,
our economic theories –
none of that matters to God.
What matters,
all that matters,
is whether we are living justly by
doing justice,
seeking justice,
bringing justice
as we root out injustice.
For what does the Lord require of us –
require of us,
expect of us,
demand from us:
but to do justice.
It really isn’t complicated.
AMEN
posted by Rev. Dr. Skip Ferguson @ 11:00 AM
