SING OF JUSTICE

A Sermon by Bill McDonald from Psalm 82

July 15, 2007

Psalm 82

¹ God has taken his place in the divine council;

in the midst of the gods he holds judgment:

² “How long will you judge unjustly

and show partiality to the wicked?

Selah

³ Give justice to the weak and the orphan;

maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute.

⁴ Rescue the weak and the needy;

deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”

⁵ They have neither knowledge nor understanding,

they walk around in darkness;

all the foundations of the earth are shaken.

⁶ I say, “You are gods,

children of the Most High, all of you;

⁷ nevertheless, you shall die like mortals,

and fall like any prince.”

⁸ Rise up, O God, judge the earth;

for all the nations belong to you!

Somebody ought to do something. As a minister, you hear a lot of tales of woe, some serious, some not. One lady phoned me and said that her family had absolutely nothing in the house to eat and could our church buy them some groceries. Before I could answer she cried, “Oh, hang on a minute, the bacon’s burning!” Another woman called my church asking for help with the rent. When I asked if she and her husband had jobs, she said that they did but that it took all their money to make the monthly payment on their new stereo system. What’s wrong with these people?? They need to learn to budget and prioritize; they need to learn proper nutrition and home maintenance; they need job skill training and more education. Somebody ought to do something!

When I first read this psalm, I was fascinated by the idea that the Lord God convenes a divine council and “in the midst of the gods he holds judgment.” Immediately I wanted to know which gods. Was Thor there with his mighty hammer? How about Zeus? Perhaps some seats on the council belonged to Krishna or Baal or Aphrodite or Isis. Remember the Mos Eisley bar scene from the movie Star Wars with all its strange alien characters? I began to imagine a similar council of gods with Viking-clad, one-eyed Odin, multi-armed Hindu goddess Durga, and Medusa with snakes for hair. But when I researched this passage, I found something more shocking than any of those images. Guess who the gods are?

In Old Testament thought these gods were not equals with the one Almighty God, but were angelic messengers and servants whose duty was to maintain the Lord’s justice in the world. Ancient Israelites reading this song text came to identify themselves with these servants, the chosen people, selected by God to make sure that the world operated as God intended. Christian theology sees us as the descendants of the nation of Israel, as God’s children, God’s called servants, the caretakers of God’s world. In other words, the gods mentioned here--are us. If you have always wanted to be a god, guess what? You made it! And as such, we are the ones who are supposed to do something.

We are children of the Most High God, chosen, privileged, but this psalm warns us that our place in God’s sight stands or falls not on our title but on our treatment of the weak among us. In this song God criticizes the gods, us, because we haven’t been doing our jobs. We have failed to be God’s agents and instead have relied on our own understanding of how the world is supposed to work. We “walk around in darkness” as if we are not aware of how God wants us to treat people and “all the foundations of the earth are shaken.” A world that is supposed to be equitable, compassionate and inclusive instead is broken into refugee camps, ghettos, tenant shacks, reservations, barrios, and slums. We gods aren’t doing our jobs.

I saw a cartoon in the New Yorker magazine in which a beggar sits on the sidewalk with a sign, “Please help.” Driving by in a limo, a wealthy woman dripping jewels tells her tuxedo-ed husband, “Frederick, roll down your window and tell that man to pull himself together!” Admit it, isn’t that often how we feel? As one of our popular radio hosts would say, the poor deserve the conditions in which they live. They don’t want to live a normal life, we complain. But the Almighty God, Creator of heaven and earth, says, “Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy.” Even if it means rescuing them from themselves, I think. Not just to help the wrongly beset, not just to give a lift to the working poor, but to also rescue those without any goals in their lives, the ignorant, the uneducated, those who teeter on the edge of being uncivilized. We are to maintain their rights, to give them justice, to rescue them--all God’s children.

But the phrase that really hits us gods in this psalm is the end of verse four: “Rescue the weak and needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.” Keep the wicked from preying on and profiting from the weak, the orphan, the destitute and the lowly. Yet the economies of many nations are built on just such exploitation. Child labor, sweat shops, underpaid laborers, migrant workers, sex slaves, child soldiers, child camel jockeys, blood diamond miners, the selling of children, health care systems based on pure profit, indentured servanthood, plantations—we may want to think that these are historical social ills that have been cured, but it simply not true. Include on that list war profiteers—those who make their millions and billions off the blood of innocents and the destruction of lives. They may be able to hide the truth from their own citizens but God knows--and will judge them for every blood-soaked penny earned. These exploitative industries still exist for profit right in front of us and right under the eyes of the highest Judge, the one who has commissioned us to maintain justice in the world. It doesn’t matter if we are not the ones running those industries or piling up the ill-gotten wealth. If we are not taking up for the weak and the needy, then our sin is just as great as the profiteers. God calls on us, counts on us, to stand up, to speak up, to take the side of the weak.

The psalmist claims that God is going to strip the lesser gods, the servants of their privilege, of their position, and that they will die like mere mortals and fall just the same as those who govern wickedly. I’m not sure what that means for us, but I think we want to be on God’s side and to be seen as good servants of the Most High. After all, we reaffirm our duty to maintain God’s justice every Sunday when we say, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

This psalm was written 2,600 years ago, but more like it are still being written today because we still have the same problem. Woody Guthrie wrote, Plane Wreck of Los Gatos:

The crops are all in and the peaches are rotting
The oranges are filed in their creosote dumps
They're flying 'em back to the Mexico border
To take all their money to wade back again

Goodbye to my Juan, farewell Roselita
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria
You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane
All they will call you will be deportees

My father's own father, he waded that river
They took all the money he made in his life
It's six hundred miles to the Mexico border
And they chased them like rustlers, like outlaws, like thieves

The airplane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon
A great ball of fire it shook all the hills
Who are these friends who are falling like dry leaves?
The radio said, "They are just deportees"

Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can raise our good crops?
To fall like dry leaves and rot on our topsoil
And be known by no name except "deportees"

We may not want to hear all this. We may want to dismiss it as liberalism or welfarism or idealism, but it is of interest to God. For God has a passion for the poor and the downtrodden. And God’s counting on us to do something.