Leviticus 19:15-18

“You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not stand idly by when the blood of your neighbor is at stake: I am the Lord.

“You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.

Sermon Text

Fairness is a word that gets thrown around a lot. We simultaneously strive to be people who are fair, while acknowledging that life is often unfair in its application of good things and bad. When we strive to do what is right, to be even-handed in all that we do, we are often fighting what seems to be a losing battle. In striving to do what is right, we feel like Sisyphus rolling his boulder – every step seems to be toward something that will eventually be washed away all at once. The work of the Church, of every Christian, for a fairer world, is never ending.

I do, all the same, have a fundamental problem with people who claim that life is unfair. Life is currently unfair, that much I am willing to agree with, but it does not have to be unfair. If you think of the way that “unfairness,” manifests, only some things come about because of intrinsic aspects of life. We cannot account for droughts or storms, for an illness that strikes when we would never expect it, nor can we know what specific things will come about in the days, weeks, or years ahead of us. However, these are ultimately aspects of natural life, they are neither fair nor unfair, they simply are. Though they complicate our life, they cannot be given the same weight of “fairness,” that we inject into other aspects of life.

The real source of any unfairness in our world requires us to look no further than the mirror. Human beings are the only thing capable of being unfair in all of creation. We are the ones who set up the systems of this world and we are the ones who tirelessly work to weigh the scales in our favor. In our modern democracy, it is easier than ever to work and bend the world to our will, casting a ballot that allows us to elect people who will make sure that what we want for ourselves becomes the law of the land, oftentimes without a second thought for what impact is made on other people. When we all have a hand in who rules, we all become little rulers ourselves.

The mechanics of electoral politics are, however, set up unfairly as well. The funding that is permitted for candidates allows those with the most money to skew public perception of their platform and personal character. It would be very hard, pretty much impossible, for even a moderately wealthy person with perfect morals and platforms to take office anywhere in government when their opposition is funded by personal and political accounts with billions to leverage against them. The wider system then becomes a horrendously unbalanced leviathan – the powerful hold the very keys to their accountability on a golden chain that leads straight into their bank accounts.

No society has existed on earth that was free of this kind of trouble, this prolific corruption rooted in human sin and greed. We often like to imagine that the era we live in is the worst of all time, but we can find the same sorts of issues stretching back to the creation of hierarchical societies ten thousand years ago. We are the inheritors of problems, some of them as old as human civilization, some specific to our own nation, and some to the past fifty years or so of global capitalism and American democracy. We are stuck in a system where the scales are weighed by many powerful hands, pushing down always toward their own interests, employing social media and advertising to maintain their power and promote their wishes.

In the past year, there has been an uptick in advertisements from one group in particular that I find fascinating. I will refrain from mentioning their name specifically but “let the one with ears to hear,” understand. Their advertisements proclaim that the American people are tired of political theatre that fails to get work done. They say that they are a coalition of people pushing for real change and that by working with regular everyday people they have come up with a list of things that will fix this country. Sounds good, right? Until you look at their founders and where they get their funding, and find that it is rich businessmen and politicians that set their agenda – the everyday needs of the people is just a smokescreen to cover AstroTurfed advocacy.

In a world that is stacked against authenticity, where it seems impossible to make real change when the people working against the good of all people are so well-equipped and so well-funded, what is the average person to do? The answer is seemingly antithetical to the idea of fairness. In a world where so much is stacked against people in need, the only way to establish fairness is to work tirelessly to elevate the poor, oppressed, and marginalized. Liberation Theology calls this, “God’s preferential option for the poor,” and it is foundational to our work in our communities and our world.

Our scripture tells us to be impartial toward the rich and the poor, and to judge with justice. This is the foundation of a fair society, and we cannot abandon that. However, when the rich have lawyers to argue them out of anything, and the homeless who are arrested for living in an inconvenient place must hope they have a good public defender, then we must see that this imbalance requires more attention to one than the other. When we are trying to help people get into housing, we have to acknowledge that we will pour infinitely more time and energy into equipping the poor to live in a world that wants to crush them in the wheels of industry, than we ever would to help a wealthy person.

For too long, the Church had enough money and influence that it could pretend it was part of the world around it. For fifteen hundred of our two thousand years, we were seated alongside the powerful and bringing in money and selling our influence. Church was where well-dressed people, put together as much as they could be, came and showed the world that they were model citizens just like everyone else. We pushed those who were not like us away, whether we acknowledged it or not, we made our sanctuaries into private rooms, for us alone.

Now as the Church has experienced a decline, now as the cry of the needy that has been building up outside our doors is leaking in through the cracks in the perfect persona of American Christianity, we cannot help but come to an inflection point. Will we stand for the plight of the needy, for the people who are pushed out again and again and again, or will we side with the powerful people telling us that they are our enemies? Those who would have us question people of other races, who were born in other countries, of other sexualities and gender expression than us – do you not think that they are benefiting by making us fear one another? People on both sides of the political aisle will accept such a truth, but only if it confirms their own beliefs. We doubt the pain others feel if we may have had a part in it, and we support anyone who absolves us of culpability for the many problems that face our neighbors.

The call of our scripture is clear – love your neighbor, rich or poor, gay or straight, trans or cis-gendered, immigrant or national. Our unfairness adds another layer, sometimes that means fighting hard for the people who are unlike you, against a world that would gladly see them erased from the surface of the earth. Yet, we are not to lose our compassion even for those who have proven themselves to be enemies of the downtrodden. Our command goes on to not hold a grudge and to not seek vengeance. More than that, we are to correct our neighbors when they fall into the world’s trap, the cycle of fear and loathing that only can lead to death. We who are so intent on bringing others to faith and to the foot of the cross, can we accept that we all must repent of power and pride and this world’s unfairness if we are to find ourselves truly at home there?

I leave us today with more of a heavy task than I usually try to pack into a Sunday. We have all the world against people being treated fairly, we have talking heads constantly trying to pull us to a mutual mistrust of each other. How can we ever overcome the immensity of it all?! Together, people of God, together we can do it. We have God with us, why would we not be able to do it? We have the Church, the people in this room and in our charge, in this parish and this conference. We may only be able to make a difference locally, maybe only in the life of a single person, but sometimes that is all it takes to change the world. Can we, through our work here, make one person look out and see, “The World is unfair, but God is not.” I hope we can because Heaven is an abundantly fair place, and if we are going to do God’s will here on Earth, then we need a whole lot more people to see with their own eyes and feel with their own hands, just how good God is to the people of this Earth. – Amen.