Righteous Indignation, Ch. 4 (p 31-37)

Righteous Indignation, Ch. 4 (p 31-37)
Preaching What I Practice -- Margie Klein (Ed.)

I really appreciated the mixture of personal experience and biblical teaching in Klein's essay. I do enjoy a good story of someone's journey now and again.

(1) "How could I move from direct service, with its focus on mitigating an individual's hardships, to social justice, which would address the source of those hardships?" (p 32).

I believe that this is a central question many of us are asking. What's your story? How have you made the jump? Or, what is keeping you back from working at the structural level (I can think of a number of good and not-so-good reasons)?

(2) "Justice, justice, shall you pursue" (Deut. 16:20, read in NIV here).

In all that I do, am I seeking justice? In the grocery store, at work, with my spouse and family, in my free time... am I committed to creating a more just world?

(3) The section titled Sanctifying Our Work was powerful for me (p 33-34). My wife and I keep moving (geographically), so it has been hard to build up a community of co-conspirators. And even back when we had one, I encountered this same spiritual issue--our friends who were active in local nonprofits were our tightest community, and our friends from church had little interest in any type of volunteering or even attending our social issues movie nights. So I love this story of sharing Sabbat dinners.

(4) "King and other religious leaders of the civil rights movement taught that emulating Jesus meant caring for the poor and marginalized in society and working to change the systems that dehumanize them. In Jewish terms, if every person is created in the Divine image, then mistreating a worker is a desecration of God" (p 35-36).

Do you believe you are created in the image of God? Do you believe that everyone you see is created in His image? How might this realization affect how we live, drive, shop and eat if we were to always keep this in mind? I think it can provide a deep, lasting and meaningful motivation for service and social action.

(5) "...like the great prophets in our tradition, we must cultivate a vision of redemption. In the midst of the darkest times, we must likewise envision a better world and prepare to make it so, even though it seems irrational to believe in transformative change" (p 36).

Again, this reminds me of Thomas Merton's Letter to a Young Activist.

Redemption. To redeem. To save. To heal. To mend. To restore. There is no action for change where there is no belief that redemption is possible. We must hold on to our belief in redemption and repentance if we are to do our work for today. What do you turn to when you lose hope?


Just as in every chapter, I have many more passages underlined and starred than I'm able to comment on in this post. Maybe it's more important for me to ask questions than to add commentary.