"Promotion of Social Righteousness"

Fifth in a series on The Great Ends of the Church
First Presbyterian Church
Peter S. Buehler
November 11, 2007
Isaiah 58:1-11; Matthew 5:6-12

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled, says Jesus. Or blessed are they who "are famished for the works of righteousness," as one person translates it. We imagine going without food and water for hours, for days: when Jesus speaks of righteousness he means wanting it more than anything else, needing it with a single-minded focus. Blessed are those who crave righteousness, for they will be filled.

Yet when we hear the word "righteousness" we don't feel nearly so passionate; it's something we have difficulty connecting with. Righteousness is an abstraction -- what does it mean? Goodness? Decency? Impeccable morality? Does it refer only to people who never do wrong? If that's true, righteousness sounds like a moral standard we can't attain; frankly, we're not sure we're interested in trying.
We know it's a good thing, nevertheless if someone used the word to describe us -- that we're the most righteous person they'd ever known -- we'd not be flattered.

Writer Kathleen Norris speaks for a lot of us when she says that for years she avoided the word altogether; she didn't want to use righteous because the only times she ever heard it was when it was a strong negative, a description of the kind of person no one liked, a judgmental person, someone who was self-righteous.

Columnist William Safire tells a tale on himself. He is known for his scrupulous syntax and speech, for correcting people when they say things or write things incorrectly. Once he ran into an old friend who clapped him on the shoulder, saying, "I miss not seeing you!" Safire corrected him, "No, you miss seeing me; not seeing me is what you've been doing." His friend thought for a moment, then replied, "I meant exactly what I said, but until this moment I never realized why."

Self-righteous people are those who are never wrong, which is why they are wrong. Even Jesus says so. In his parable about the Pharisee and the tax collector the point is clear: self-righteousness is a contradiction. The Pharisee goes to the temple to pray and says, 'God, I thank you that I am not like other people; thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.' The tax collector, however, stands far off, not even daring to raise his head, but beating his breast, cries out 'God, be merciful to me, a sinner!' Jesus says, "I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted" (Luke 18:9-14).

Which is the spirit of the Beatitudes, and the fourth Beatitude, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Nothing about deserving, nothing about being entitled to God's blessing, God's favor. In fact, what this scripture focuses on us people who care passionately about others, especially the poor, those who are at the bottom of society, those no one cares anything about.

This is important, because it's so easy to get righteousness wrong. The Lord does not say, Blessed are the righteous. He does not say, When you finally get life right -- when you become a morally upstanding person -- you will be blessed.

It always amazes me how uninterested Jesus is in the kind of morality that the moral people of his day were interested in. He'd much rather hang out with sinners, it seems. Not because he approved of their lifestyle, but because he knew they were interested in what he had to say -- way more than the upstanding folks.

Maybe it's not so surprising. Jesus is, after all, the Savior of the lost, the Good Shepherd who goes after the one in a hundred who wanders off into trouble.
It's why people in trouble, when they meet Jesus, love him so much. It's why we, when we've been in trouble, love him so much.

So the Beatitude is not about people who don't need a shepherd. Nor is righteousness about always getting it right. Surprisingly, the biblical word, both in the Old Testament Hebrew and the New Testament Greek, is not about some impossibly high ethical standard or norm; it is not about attaining God's approval; nor does it describe a person who is always impartial, someone who is above being influenced or tempted.

Rather the righteous person is one who is intent on doing what is right for others, plain and simple. The righteous person cares about people in need, passionately -- because he/she understands that what God wants is for people to live in a world where all are treated justly, where all have what they need for happiness.
Righteous people act on God's behalf. Maybe that's why they find themselves getting in trouble from time to time. If the Beatitude promises that in the future these men and women who hunger and thirst for justice will be filled, it is because in the present they are unsatisfied as long as others are suffering.

Steven Spielberg's 1993 movie, "Schindler's List," is about a man who undergoes a huge transformation. He becomes a righteous man. He does not start out that way. Profiteering in Nazi Germany, using Jews as slave labor in his war supplies factories, he amasses a personal fortune, but then begins to care about the people the Nazis are exterminating.
It is an unforgettable film. Meeting Schindler in the first part of the movie you cannot imagine that he was an individual with a conscience. Played brilliantly by Liam Neeson, he is greedy, clever, charming, arrogant, and not so much immoral as amoral. No one mattered but himself; nothing mattered but his profits. But then a trusted accountant, Itzhak Stern, played by Ben Kingsley, begins to convince Schindler that his money can be used to save lives. We see righteousness taking hold in him, then it takes over, and Schindler spends everything he has to save every life he can.

At the film's end, the once-powerful Oskar Schindler is bankrupt and on the run.
A fugitive, he faces the group of people he chose to help. He is given a letter by one of his workers which, the man tells him, will help explain to the Allies, if he is captured, what he had accomplished. The man tells him that every single worker signed the letter. Stern then tells him a Hebrew saying from the Talmud, the revered collection of ancient Rabbinic writings, "Whoever saves one life, saves the entire world."

We assume Schindler will reflect on his actions and be profoundly gratified, filled up; we assume he'll say It was all worth it. Instead, as you know if you've seen the film, he breaks down, saying over and over, "I could have got more. I could have got more." Stern tells him that there are eleven hundred people alive because of him. "Look at them," he says. But Schindler is grief-stricken, "I didn't do enough!" He looks at his car: it was worth ten people, why didn't he sell it? His gold pen -- two people, one at least. "(One) person, Stern. For this. I could have gotten one more person… and I didn't! I didn't!"

The fifth Great End of the Church is the promotion of social righteousness. One way of remembering it, and Jesus' teaching about hungering and thirsting for righteousness, is Schindler before and Schindler after. For people change; compassion costs. Those who care about the life of even one person care about the entire world. So we promote social righteousness -- the church raises up, we advocate for, we want and work for -- right relationships among all people, fairness and justice for all people, particularly those at the bottom of society, because this desire in our human hearts is what is best in us, most noble, most decent, most right, most godly. When we start caring about other human beings -- when we stop thinking that the way the world is is the way it's supposed to be, that some people just have it better than others and that's just the way things are -- when we see people not as a foregone conclusion but as those Jesus loves, people who are not members of a class or a group or a category but people who are just like us -- they are us:they are our family, they are our friends -- then we are grasping the meaning of righteousness and we are ready to promote it.

I wonder if righteous people aren't those who are simply willing to get involved.
To get their hands dirty. For the same reason, I wonder if we sometimes opt out of helping others because we know we can't fix them. What they're dealing with is too complicated, too overwhelming, too messy, and we know we can't make enough of a difference, the kind of difference that really ought to be made.
But here again Jesus speaks to us. Because the healing he calls us to be a part of is something much bigger and more wonderful than the curing and fixing we assume we're in for if we get involved in another person's life. Hungering and thirsting are different. Letting ourselves feel compassion, not letting ourselves get discouraged.

It's easy today to become discouraged. According to UNICEF, every single day 30,000 children die of hunger, disease, and other consequences of poverty.
A majority of people in the world live on less than $2 a day. There is great poverty in our own country. We don't see it; maybe we don't want to. Then we witness something like the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the kind of human desperation we thought existed only in third world countries, and we find ourselves shocked and discouraged.

Yet the promotion of social righteousness, this great purpose which God has given to the church, begins with refusing to give in to guilt and cynicism and every other emotional temptation that results in people pulling away from people.
Sometimes it takes all we have, all our goodness, all our faith, all our love, not to give in. Not to throw up our hands.

It must be very tempting for the people who work at the Santa Barbara Rescue Mission to give up and stop trying to rebuild the lives of men and women who have spent years battling drug and alcohol addiction, living on the street, living in despair. Thanks to one of you, I joined others some weeks ago and took a tour of the Rescue Mission. We heard the testimony of one man who had been through the program, what his life had been like, what it took to get him clean and sober.
We heard about his relapses, about the people who wouldn't give up on him. This same man is on the staff now, himself not giving up on people trying to put their lives back together. I was particularly impressed with this man's Christian faith, which struck me as so transparent and pure. It was just amazing to me how a person who had experienced such despair and desperation could be so happy.
But then resurrection is like this, surprising those of us who need to be reminded that Jesus is our joy, our hope, and our righteousness.

There are so many issues facing the world -- poverty, hunger, disease, oppression, greed, war, the degradation of the environment, climate change, despair, addiction. They threaten our world, they also threaten our belief in ourselves. Like others in our society, we are tempted to stop listening, to stop believing that we can make a difference. I hope we never give in to that temptation. I hope we a church determined always to pray for the world, opening ourselves to the Spirit which brings new life and new courage. I hope we are determined to be a community of disciples ready to promote social righteousness.

I hope that we are never so satisfied with the way things are that we aren't hungry and thirsty for the way they can be. These two most basic human needs, after all -- hunger and thirst -- connect us with the rest of the world. To be connected to people in this way is right.

For righteousness is the opposite of self-righteousness. We don't always have to be right to get it right.

Amen.