To Prophesy Justice

 This is the text of a sermon I gave at Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ in Monroe, Washington, USA, on Sunday, July 13, 2025

To Prophesy Justice

For

Monroe Congregational UCC

July 13, 2025

 

Scripture: Psalm 82

 

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

 

You’ve all heard it before. You all know it. We live in hard times. There are lots of things going on in the world that make times hard. There are wars in various places around the world. There is hunger, starvation even, in places around the world. There is political oppression in various places around the world. Because of what I did in an earlier stage of my life (get a PhD in Russian history), the oppression and the war that hit closest to home for me all have to do with Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s Russia. That country keeps committing crimes against humanity in Ukraine just as Israel keeps committing crimes against humanity in Gaza.

There are hard times in our country today too. Since January 20, 2025, we have lived under a presidential administration that is creating hard times in our country perhaps more than any presidential administration in our country’s history. I won’t go through all the specifics of the harm our federal government is doing these days. You all know those details at least as well as I do. Suffice it to say that our federal government has allied itself with the wealthy against the poor and with authoritarians against our American democracy. I know that many of you are as appalled about what’s going on in our country as I am, and that is deeply appalled indeed.

Now, I assume that at least most of you here identify yourselves as Christians, at least to yourselves if not so much publicly. And I assume that for at least most of you being Christian has consequences for your life. I assume, and hope, that it has consequences for how you live your personal, private lives. And, as I’m sure you already know, being Christian has consequences for our lives as citizens of this nation and of God’s world too What are those consequences? There are lots of them, and we see some of them in our scripture this morning, Psalm 82.

Psalm 82 sets a rather odd stage, doesn’t it. It gives us God speaking to a “divine council.” It says God speaks “in the midst of the gods.” There is, of course, only one God, but, as you may or may not know, it took ancient the ancient Israel from which this text comes centuries to discern that truth. Here we have what seems to me to be asort of a halfway house on the road to monotheism. God is upper case G God, but here there are also lower case g gods over whom upper case G God presides. Hebrew scripture never makes it clear who these lower case g gods are supposed to be, but clearly they possess some sort of ruling power over God’s people. Otherwise, why would God say to them what God says to them in this Psalm? This passage isn’t about individuals doing charity. It is about those in power doing justice.

God says to these so-called gods: “How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? Give justice to the weak and the orphans, maintain the right of the lowly and destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy.” Psalm 82:2-4. These three verses are among the Bible’s most terse, most direct statements of God’s demand for justice and of what that justice really is.

First of all, God is clearly demanding that “the gods” do God’s justice. It seems that they haven’t been doing that, and God has had it with them. God accuses them of judging unjustly and of showing “partiality to the wicked.” Here God is telling them to knock it off. To stop doing what they have been doing. But God does more than tell them to stop doing things wrong. He gives them an order to do something too. And that order is all about justice.

Now, here’s the thing. God isn’t concerned about justice for God. God far transcends any need for concepts like justice to apply to God. No, God is concerned about the people Jesus called the “least of these.” See Matthew 25:40. Here God calls these people “the weak, the lowly, and the destitute.” In other words, God is telling the lower case g gods to do justice for people in need. People who don’t have enough to live on. People the wealthy and powerful ignore at best and oppress at worst most of the time. God is saying to them: If you’re going to use your power to rule over people, you must do it by doing justice.

Hebrew prophecy was mostly about speaking God’s truth and, in particular, speaking it to power not about predicting the future. It was about speaking truth to power, which at least some of the ancient Hebrew prophets did as forcefully as they could. They excoriated those with economic and political power for oppressing the poor and the vulnerable. Amos put it this way: “Let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Amos 5:24. Ancient Israel needed prophets like Amos because her rulers often ruled very unjustly. And we certainly need prophets like that today for the same reason, don’t we? Yes, we do. There’s an awful lot of unjust ruling going on among us, isn’t there.

We need prophets today. We need lots of them. So let me turn your attention to another passage from Hebrew scripture about prophets. This story is set in the wilderness of Sinai after the people have left Egypt but before they make it to Canaan. Moses selects seventy elders. He takes them to “the tent” outside the people’s camp. There “they prophesied.” Two men, one named Eldad and the other named Medad, weren’t among the seventy elders that Moses chose. Rather, they were back in the camp; yet they too prophesied. A young man from the camp runs to Moses and tells him that Eldad and Medad were prophesying back in the camp. Another man tells Moses to make them stop. Moses doesn’t. Rather, he says: “Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets….” You’ll find that verse at Numbers 11:29.

“Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets.” Given what we’ve learned about what a prophet is, what does that mean for us? What would all God’s people do if they were prophets?  Folks, what we’d do if we were God’s prophets is we’d denounce our country’s unequal and unjust distribution of wealth. We’d denounce our country’s racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, militarism, and all other kinds of injustice and violence. We’d demand that our country do justice for those in need in our country, and there are millions of them.

Folks, we need more prophets, and that means that the answer to our dearth of prophets speaking truth to power is for us, each and every one of us to be a prophet. I am convinced that today God calls all of us to be prophets. That means, for each and every one of us to become people who speak God’s truth to power. That means speak God’s truth about God’s demand of justice for the poor and the weak. That justice isn’t due process of law, or at least it isn’t only or primarily that. It is rather what theologians call “distributive justice.” The best way to describe distributive justice is to say that it a system of human organization in which everyone has enough because no one has too much. That is what God is calling each and every one of us to proclaim to those in power in our nation.

I can’t tell any of you how you can do that. None of us has a big public microphone with which we could prophesy to large numbers of people. But we can all so something. We can all call our congressional representatives and tell them to do what is right not what is wrong when proposed legislation comes before them. We can all write letters to the editor of our local papers, something yours truly has done on occasion. We can all talk to our friends and family. Sure, they probably aren’t in power, but they too can talk to people who are.

We all have different skills and different abilities, so we must all decide for ourselves how we are going to prophesy. The thing to learn this morning is not specifics about what we are to do exactly. It is to learn that God calls each and every one of us to be a prophet. To speak truth to power however we can. To demand that those in power do justice for all people in need. Doing that isn’t always easy. It’s not likely to make you popular, but then the ancient Hebrew prophets weren’t popular either. And it got Jesus crucified.  But they all spoke God’s truth anyway. That’s what God calls us to do this morning. So let’s get on with figuring out how we’re going to do, then let’s go do it. OK? Amen.