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Justice and joy


longing might be W


A forwhat UMNS photo: Mike DuBois by Rev. Erika Hewitt


ho wouldn’t want to bring God great happi- ness?


I remember


the fi rst time I heard – and sang – the line “God will delight when we are creators of justice ... and joy.” Its words woke me and shook me: it was a moment of recognition. Th is is the God I serve, I thought. Someone else knows that God, too! Th is is a God who embraces us as partners, as co-creators. I believe that the holy nurturer God, the midwife of the human family’s fumblings as well as our progress, is made glad when we take part in her ongoing creation. If I sound a bit dreamy, it’s


because it’s easy to forget that we bring God delight when we take up the work of justice. Like most pas- tors I know, a signifi cant part of my ministry is calling our people into lives of service, public witness, and transformative justice. And, like most pastors, I’ve learned that our people are rarely motivated to this


work through guilt, shame, or a sense of duty. (One of my seminary professors tried to warn us of this in a New Testament class. “You’ll have to fi nd ways,” she counseled us, “to remind your parishioners that we do this justice work not because it’s a necessary burden, but because we believe that God has empowered and called us to be God’s hands on Earth.” We stu- dents all cocked our heads at her, still years away from having to fi g- ure out how to heed her advice.)


What justice isn’t and is Justice isn’t a drudgery; it’s


not the wilted broccoli on the plate, begging to be forced down before we can move on to the tastier bits. Justice is the hunger itself – the longing for what might be: the broken world restored into wholeness, as God intended. While I was raised in Th e


___________________________________________________________________________________________________ 12


United Methodist Church, I’m now a Unitarian Universalist.


and all of them are holy. Just as God’s boundless and uncondi- tional love encompasses all, so too does our vision of a world made whole. I believe that we cannot pick and choose which forms of oppression are worthy of our ex- amination, and which ones can be overlooked. Greed and disconnec-


January-February 2018 • WorshipArts • www.UMFellowship.org


From the start, Universalists viewed social justice as a central focus of their faith. Th ey chal- lenged one another to move be- yond their places of comfort and privilege, and to embrace people who were marginalized by society and by circumstance. If God never gives up on anyone, they reasoned, then neither can we.


A vision of a world made whole Here, then, are the intersect-


ing truths that I’ve come to learn about equipping people of faith to respond to God’s call to be people of justice: Justice takes many forms,


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