Evidence of Hope: Grace and Truth in Social Issues

By Paul G. Johnson

Social issues shape the news. Yet pulpit and pews maintain an awkward silence about them. One layperson said, "I have been a member here for twenty-five years, but I have no idea what any member thinks about any social issue."
 
Op-ed pages and sound bites cause people to wonder if friends are "red" or "blue" on social issues, but in this book, content dips below the surface where the water is a bipartisan calm. Here is one example: for genuine competition to occur, the sides have to be fairly even. We do this in sports. Another example question is, why is health care so high when the healing is free?
 
Hope is implicit in "Thy kingdom come . . . on earth," recited by many churchgoers on a weekly basis as part of the Lord's Prayer. Hope becomes explicit when practical theology and applied sociology are joined, because they point to the same Source: "the hidden pressure for justice and peace at work in the world." 
 
This Source allows grace and truth to be discovered in social issues. Indeed, the grace of God generates compassion, a prerequisite for multifaceted social justice. Wrath has no capacity to foster anything but fear of being left behind.
 
There are single-issue books of three-hundred-plus pages, but there are no books that speak to a variety of social issues. This one does speak to a variety of social issues with clarity, readability, and economy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Jan 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9781498275859

Paul G. Johnson

Paul G. Johnson is a retired Lutheran pastor. He has a doctor of ministry degree in practical theology and teaches sociology in the Boston area. For ten years he was the project manager of studies for the parish services division of the former Lutheran Church in America. He has published a number of books and articles.

Book preview

EVIDENCE OF HOPE

Grace and Truth in Social Issues

Paul G. Johnson

2008.WS_logo.jpg

EVIDENCE OF HOPE

Grace and Truth in Social Issues

Copyright © 2008 Paul G. Johnson. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock, 199 W. 8th Ave., Eugene, OR 97401.

ISBN 13: 978-1-55635-493-9

EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-7585-9

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Prologue: Parable of Red and Blue Pews

Part One: Unsaid but True

Chapter 1: Two Kingdoms in One

Chapter 2: Pledging Allegiance to What?

Pat Two: Creation Connections

Chapter 3: The Great Silence

Chapter 4: Creator, Yes—Six Days, No

Chapter 5: The Healing Is Free

Chapter 6: Gays and Penguins

Part Three: Social Justice for All

Chapter 7: Two Parties: Wrath and Mercy

Chapter 8: Crime and Punishment—Why?

Chapter 9: Pot, Police, and the ER

Chapter 10: Vision for Daily Work

Part Four: Leveling the Playing Field

Chapter 11: Leaving No One Behind

Chapter 12: Viewing the Female Gender

Chapter 13: Racism in the Author?

Chapter 14: Airplane Seats

Bibliography

To Miriam, who worked with children from inner city schools for over twenty years, and contributed much to this book through frequent conversations.

To Seth and Rebecca, our grandchildren, who will be serving the ball into the court of fair play for a generation.

Acknowledgements

In twenty years of teaching sociology, I have noticed a change in the material that I have presented to the class. Over the years it seems to have moved more beneath the surface of issues. Perhaps I have grown in the process. What is that process?

I think it is the result of student responses, both raising questions and sharing their observations. Academics call it collaborative learning, meaning that students bring knowledge and insights with them to class that are just waiting to be tapped. Not all students are equal in putting these responses into words, but those who do move all of us to new levels. In subsequent sessions and semesters these can become starting points.

It appears that the mind can start anyplace; that thought rests at levels, and can be reached anytime. Perhaps such is the nature of sociology, and other subjects. All students bring experiences from life with them to class and these provide them with inner resources for thoughtful participation.

I not only acknowledge students’ contributions, but celebrate them and, of course, thank them. The implication in this process is that any group of people willing to consider the issues in this book will have a similar experience. Everyone who is open will grow. Have fun!

Prologue

Parable of Red and Blue Pews

It was puzzling for people to enter the church for worship and be greeted by some pews painted red and others painted blue. Fearing the paint might rub off, they avoided them and sought the regular wood-stained pews. However, the meaning of the pew colors, what the colors stood for, was already implanted in their minds. The pastor learned from several polls that two-thirds of those who attend weekly services are red (conservative), and one-third blue (progressive). He had applied the paint as an illustration of what he had come to sense over the years. His deed may seem far-out, but parables are like that.

Shortly after the sermon, a college student who was home for Thanksgiving slipped out of the building and strolled down to the nearby riverbank. He was reflecting on the sermon when suddenly something strange caught his eye. What was that moving toward him on the water? It looked like a small raft with a baby on it, and as it got closer he was sure his eyes were not deceiving him. He waded into the shallow river and pulled the raft and its occupant to shore. With water dripping from his clothes, he carried the infant into the church narthex just as the benediction was being pronounced. When he explained what had happened, people were incredulous, but the infant was real.

The next day, in this contemporary parable, he returned to the river to think about his unusual experience. When he again looked out, he saw two rafts, each carrying a newborn child. Amazed, he waded out and pulled them to safety. Word traveled fast in the congregation and throughout the community, and the next day people assembled on the riverbank. When as if on cue more infants on rafts appeared, people were energized. They organized round-the-clock shifts. Teams formed to get blankets, infant formula, and diapers. One sought foster homes and another began planning for an orphanage. As the number of babies increased, not all could be saved; some fell off the rafts and drowned before help could reach them. However, the people felt they were doing all they could, until the college student raised this question: Why don’t we go up river to find out where the infants are coming from? Some agreed, but most felt they needed all hands to help retrieve the rafts. Fear of infants drowning was the factor.

He persisted, arguing that if they could find out why this was happening, they might solve the problem and none would drown. Again some agreed (about one-third), but those who resisted prevailed, so they all stayed on the shoreline waiting to perform their emergency service.

Parables have a point and this one is no exception. The majority assumed they already knew why this was happening. They cited a breakdown in family values somewhere around the bend. However, the number of infants rescued increased, as did the drownings. The minority and the student concede there is an emergency, but what haunts them is the idea that finding out why a problem happens is the gateway to solving it. They believe the community is settling for triage that focuses on symptoms, not causes. The problem is deeper than rafts in the water; thus, red and blue thinking surface at the water’s edge.

Family values? Perhaps. But the words are but a symptom, a label on a package. What caused the breakdown in family values?

The infants-in-the-river portion of this parable is an adaptation from a story originally told by Kip Tiernan, founder of Rosie’s Place, a shelter in Boston, Massachusetts for homeless women and their infants. She shared it when she first began raising money for the shelter. However, she was trying to work herself out of a job by making people aware of the need to ask why things are the way they are, and then be motivated to do something about it.¹

There are many situations in society to which this story relates. Indeed, this book is a journey up the river. It is a case for common sense, in which sociological themes, along with religious commentary, are illustrated by events in real life. Practical theology and applied sociology are on the same pages, and neither suffers from the association. Indeed, both gain something that renders a social issue more meaningful than had they been forced to take separate institutional paths.

1. Harris, http://apesmaslament.blogspot.com/2007/06/kip-tiernans-river-babies.html.

PART ONE

Unsaid but True

1

Two Kingdoms in One

Three thousand three hundred and eighty. That’s the number of times I have recited the Lord’s Prayer, beginning at age ten, when I assume I joined in each week. (My father was a pastor and I was in church every Sunday.) Today, when the moment comes to pray Our Father, who art in heaven, I often don’t mentally get into it until we reach the words, Thy kingdom come . . . on earth. Then my years of teaching sociology come into play.

In this prayer introduced by Jesus, we are acquiescing to the Creator’s part in bringing about an earthly version of God’s eternal plan, one kingdom not two.

The meaning in these words is not that eternity breaks out on earth, removing the need for funeral directors, but that God’s priorities influence life in our everyday world. Oddly enough, the organization representing these priorities—the church—is inclined to shift the kingdom back up to heaven even as it recites the prayer for its emergence on earth.

Our Upper Story Heritage

One such moment in time was the Sixteenth-Century Reformation when one of its luminaries, Martin Luther, wrote in his commentary on Galatians: To divide Law and Gospel means to place the Gospel in heaven, and to keep the Law on earth. In relation to society, obedience to the Law is severely required . . . Gospel, grace, forgiveness of sins and Christ himself, do not count, but only Moses and the law-books.¹ This led to his view of two separate kingdoms.

The level of the reformer’s commitment to law and order in the earthly realm was bluntly dramatized in a scene from Luther, Hollywood’s 2004 film. It showed the hovel of a sixteenth-century peasant. The camera panned the door and windows and then focused on the floor, which had become wall-to-wall corpses. This was the domestic setting for the slaughter of German peasants performed by the soldiers of Duke Frederick, and encouraged by Luther in 1625. Other bodies lay in fields and town roads, bringing the estimated total number to one hundred thousand. Economic cleansing some today might call it.

The peasants had submitted a list of grievances to the duke, having drawn the conclusion from listening to Reformation sermons on unearned grace, that such a God would not leave them behind in economic misery. There was no middle class then, just ruling gentry, some merchants, and a plethora of poverty-riddled peasants.

Those familiar with the period will recall how Luther at first sent a letter to Frederick supporting the peasants, but when they grew restless and revolted, he wrote to the duke: strike, smite, and stab them until the insurrection has ended.² In a church history class, I recall a professor referring to this but with little commentary, or perhaps I could not bear to hear it. I do not recall any other professor referring to it.

It would be inaccurate to say that Luther changed his mind. The rebellion merely brought out his deep-seated, theological convictions about the locations of law and grace. The war on the peasants lies in the annuls of history as proof of how much he remained committed to law and wrath here on earth, despite the biblical concept of unmerited grace having dented the pope’s sale of indulgences.

The movie and history further illustrate that laws often protect the wealthy more than encourage social or economic justice. Such justice was not on his mind; selling and buying salvation were. Still, social justice gains impetus from modeling an earthly society after a heavenly image, not from keeping these two kingdoms separate. Neither God’s realm nor God’s undeserved grace is a heavenly arrangement designed to bypass earth. Compassion is a kingdom dynamic that leaves no one behind in either location.

But this awareness dawns slowly. In 1893 the Chicago World’s Fair opened after two years of construction. To build it, the city hired unemployed men living in slums or homeless conditions on the edge of the fair property. One of their tasks was to construct a house for every state in the union. When the fair closed, the men returned to their nearby slums and the fair buildings were burned to the ground, including most of the houses representing the states.³ Apparently no one in authority thought of allowing the men who built them to move into them with their families. A social consciousness was not on display at the World’s Fair. It was assumed the men were hired just to construct buildings and later destroy them.

In New Orleans in 2005 the poor were closeted in Ward 9—well below sea level. When Hurricane Katrina broke the levees many were left homeless, but a number of the nation’s citizens responded with a social consciousness. Homes across the nation opened up to the victims. Jobs and schools became available. This was a departure from the deeply entrenched belief that people were poor because they were lazy. A combination of social ministry (emergency relief) and social justice (systemic causes) put in a cameo appearance fueled by compassion.

Texts for Our Times

Due to the Lectionary cycle of worship, Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount (Luke 6:17–26) becomes a pulpit text once every three years. In it Jesus pronounces the poor blessed for yours is the kingdom of God. The poor refers to those economically left behind, because a few verses later woe is pronounced upon the rich, for you have received your consolation. It looks like a tough text until we recall how, in that century, there were but two classes of people, peasant and wealthy. Minus a middle class,