Pastor’s Corner – December 17, 2023
I, the Lord, Love Justice
Isaiah 60:1-4, 8-11
What is justice? We don’t have to read from Webster’s definition to understand what we mean by justice or have intellectual exercises to grasp the nature of justice or injustice. It’s innate in our human experience and consciousness. As children we feel it when things don’t seem fair, in the playground, in sharing, and in our relationship with people around us. We know this immediately because injustice is felt as pain and suffering. This may seem simplistic and naive but it’s not. When you see a father holding a dead child from bombing, in anguish and grief, it speaks to all of us that this is wrong and such violence must stop. It’s easy to trivialize such horror by saying how complicated things really are historically or politically. No, you don’t have to know the historical or political context of such violence to know that there is a moral imperative to stop the killing and violence. Such violence and oppression was never right then and it is not right today.
The prophet Isaiah’s message for us is one of hope in the midst of destruction in our world. The Advent message is good news. In the end, God will come through, “God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations!” “For I the Lord love justice!”
This coming Sunday we hear the good news of deliverance. “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; to provide for those who mourn in Zion.”
We continue to pray for a ceasefire in Palestine and Israeli government IDF to stop the massacre of innocent people. We hold our US government accountable for enabling and directly providing the Israeli government with weapons and billions in financial and military support. While the vast majority of nations support UN resolutions for ceasefire and restoring peace, our government has not.
Come let us worship God as a form of protest against injustice in our world that God who loves justice may be glorified. What this means is that we need to find peace within ourselves, reaffirming our identity as God’s beloved children as Jesus did, before he announced the good news to the world. See you all Sunday morning. Amen.
Pastor Dae