A mess of pottage
Adjacent to the U.S. Supreme Court building and directly behind the Senate office buildings is the Methodist Building that houses a number of faith-based advocacy groups. On the grounds of the building there’s a little sign facing both of those government buildings that reads: “Do justice. Love Mercy. Walk Humbly.”
These words of God through the prophet Micah are imperatives — meaning they are not optional in a life lived before God. Justice is the foundation of God’s rule (Psalm 89.14).
What does it mean to “do justice”? This year is the 25th anniversary of the International Justice Mission, a Christian organization dedicated to the work of justice around the world by combatting trafficking, slavery and violence against women and children. In a recent interview founder and president Gary Haugen spoke about justice. A functioning justice system, he reminds us, is about far more than having a set of laws on the books. Laws are meaningless without the underpinning structure of policing, prosecutorial services and courts that insure that the laws are applied equally to the powerful as well as the powerless.
When the laws are arbitrarily enforced and applied only to those who can’t, through money or influence, buy their way out, there is no justice for anyone. Our founding fathers understood that through deep personal experience. In response to the imposition of the Stamp Act in August of 1765, John Adams wrote a series of articles that were published in the Boston Gazette. In those articles (collectively known as A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law) Adams reflected on the circumstances that led people to flee their homes for the uncertainty of life on the other side of a vast and dangerous ocean.
Adams noted that they were not enemies to monarchy and they had a regard and honor for the clergy, but “they saw clearly, that popular powers must be placed as a guard, a control, a balance to the powers of the monarch and priest, in every government, or else it would soon become the man of sin, the whore of Babylon, the mystery of iniquity, a great and detestable system of fraud, violence, and usurpation.” When church and state conspire together, Adams wrote, the tyranny is particularly fierce.
The founders “greatest concern seems to have been to establish a government of the church more consistent with the Scriptures, and a government of the state more agreeable to the dignity of human nature, than any they had seen in Europe, and to transmit such a government down to their posterity, with the means of securing and preserving it forever.”
I take no joy at the news of the search warrant served on the former president, but if justice is to be done, if we are to aid in preserving the government we inherited, we must insure that even former presidents are subject to our system of governance, Republican and Democrat alike.
In the heat of a moment, in service to partisan politics, it is terribly tempting to be like Esau, eager to give away our inheritance for a mess of pottage.