Inside This Guys Head

Just kidding. I will only write about 4-6 posts on this. Consider this an introduction we will revisit throughout the series.

The Poor/Needy, the Widow, the Foreigner, the Orphan/Fatherless in the Hebrew Tradition

Yahweh is very specific about the poor, the widow, the foreigner, and the orphan/fatherless. It isn’t because he values them more than others. It is because their state of being makes them the most vulnerable in their society. 

In ancient near eastern societies poverty happened for many reasons. One primary reason is that governing systems of a nation most often worked better for some groups of people than others. In many cases these systems could work against other people. This group of people were defined as those who were “made poor”.

Let’s talk about that language of “made poor” for a moment.

In the gospel accounts there are two greek words for the English word poor. There are the penés, understood as the person who serves their own needs with their own hands. It describes the working person, the peasants who have nothing to brag about as they are neither rich or landowners, but they are not destitute or excluded from the social order. Though they lived on the edge of existence and their status lowly, they still had status. But it is important to not that this isn’t the word Jesus chooses in His sermon in Luke 4:18-19. It is the ptóchos, which describes absolute and abject poverty. In Jesus’ world (the Mediterranean region) one’s status in society was not located solely in economic realities, but was dependent upon a number of conditions, including gender, education, family heritage, vocation, religious standing, economics and so on. This was a word reserved for those of nominal status and spoke to those excluded based upon the social categories of status and honor bound up in any number of conditions mentioned above, also known as structural and systemic realities.

Back to the prophets. Those “made poor” are vulnerable to the wealthy people of privilege and power. In Israel the powerful and privileged often exploited the poor. But they didn’t stop there.

Widows, orphans and foreigners were also vulnerable. The widow and orphan had no one to protect them, especially if they were female. The same is true of the foreigner who would be at a natural disadvantage due to ethnicity and pagan religious commitments.

Justice & Righteousness

In Hebrew Scripture the two words for justice and righteousness are often connected to these four specific groupings of people.

Mishpat is understood as justice in legal and governmental spheres of civic life, and is often translated “justice,” depending on the context of the Scripture. It is used in its various Hebrew forms more than 200 times in the Hebrew Scriptures. You can call this legal justice.

The other word is Tsedeqa, understood as justice in social and human-to-human spheres of civic life on social levels, dealing with how one treat his/her neighbor and fellow human. It is sometimes translated “justice,” but most often translated “righteousness,” which could literally be called social right-ness (justice), or doing right (justly) by your neighbor. It is used in its various forms over 399 times in the Hebrew Scriptures. However, it is overwhelmingly concentrated in the Torah in directing God’s people to do right by their fellow human (Genesis, 16 times; Deuteronomy, 18 times; Exodus 4 times; Leviticus 5 times). You can call this social justice (if you want people to throw stuff at you).

Mishpat and tsedeqa are paired together over 50 times, mostly in the ministry of the Hebrew prophets. God sent these prophets to be truth-tellers that would remind his people of what it means to faithfully love God and do right by one another, especially the vulnerable. 

The heart of God has not changed. We see it in the ministry of Jesus. We see it in the life and teachings of the apostles. We see it as a part of God’s summons for His Church, if we are to faithfully to participate in his redemptive work in the world by the Spirit.

So, the concept of social justice is as biblical as tsedeqa and mishpat. It is biblical because Jesus, when he is deemed King and Lord, has something to say about how his people live and interpret life in society as a colony of heaven in the midst of the nations. Or in Peter’s words, a “royal priesthood” and “holy nation” in Babylon.

Conclusion

When the Church fails to teach justice in accordance with the biblical tradition and settles for reacting/responding to party-political notions of justice, or when the Church declares a gospel that fails to speak to justice, let’s not be surprised when Christians fall for other definitions, understandings or theories of justice. Maybe this is why I am consistently hearing christians, pastors, and theologians going off on what they call ‘social justice,’ but doing so generally without dealing with the whole of the biblical tradition first. Instead, social justice becomes defined by or compared to ideological terms like Critical Race Theory or Marxism, or discussed primarily in terms of what has become party-political issues. Consequently, the biblical tradition becomes (unknowingly) a secondary source (I will attempt to speak to this in other posts).

In the meantime, if someone speaks out against social justice and fails to deal with justice in the Hebrew tradition or the Hebrew language house, please be discerning. Quoting the Christian Scriptures here and there, or even the Hebrew Scriptures here and there, isn’t sufficient. The entire biblical discourse needs to be considered. The Christian tradition holds that the Lord gave us one collection of books as a Sacred text. Let’s spend our lives well learning it and do our best to resist cherry-picking or proof-texting.

In the next post I will address the critiques of ‘social justice’ and touch on Critical Race Theory and Marxism, only because they use these theories as a basis for critique. But before I post it I need to move to an undisclosed location. 😉

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Some resources that inform this post:

^{Social Critique by Israel’s Eighth-Century Prophets: Justice and Righteousness in Context by Hemchand Gossai}

^{Wrestling with God and the World: The Struggle for Justice in the Biblical Tradition by Robert L. Foster}

^{The Liberating Path of the Hebrew Prophets Then and Now by Nahum Ward-Lev}

^{In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible by Michael Walzer}

^{Justice: Rights and Wrongs by Nicholas Wolterstorff}

^{Informing the Future: Social Justice in the New Testament by Joseph Grassi}

Remember the moments when King Jesus uses strong words? They could be interpreted as lacking compassion, un-Christ-like (oddly), and perhaps even dehumanizing.

Jesus uses rhetoric like ‘white washed walls’ and ‘hypocrisy’ (Matt. 23:27-28), ‘children of snakes’ (Matt. 12:34; 23:33), and ‘you are of your father the devil’ (Jn. 8:44-47). He calls false prophets and false teachers ‘ravaging wolves’ in ‘sheep’s clothing’ (Matt. 7:15, 10:16). He warns that everyday worshippers that refuse to offer concrete expressions of care for the poor, imprisoned, stranger, and sick will be a community of ‘goats.’ And of course there’s everyone’s fav when he turns over the Temple tables of greed and power (Jn. 2:13-16). As far as I can tell Jesus speaks these words to either religious leaders, everyday worshippers or both.

Jesus eventually offers an invitation to repentance and forgiveness to those on the receiving end of these words. I am especially glad because I have been (and will be) on the receiving end! The hard truth is that the threads of faith sewn together with the reign of sin and death must be pulled. Words can do that. They disrupt and disorient, sometimes in candor, sometimes in hyperbole and satire (read some of Jesus’ words closely in addition to the Hebrew prophets). Words can also heal, but only after we are awakened to what is making us sick.

What I see in King Jesus is that love is not sentimentality. Love does what is right, not what is easy. It is a relational expression of truth, compassion, and justice modeled after the holy heart of the God who knows us best and loves us most. Love has to look and sound like something more than sentimentality, especially when it speaks to those standing in the majority or in the social center of influence and power. And not everyone will like it (Matt. 10:34-39, Jn. 6:60-64).

When we call for ‘compassion’ and ‘Christ-likeness,’ let’s remember the whole narrative of Scripture and deal honestly with the prophetic moments of Jesus’ priestly and kingly ministry. He can teach us how to hold the tension of the priestly and prophetic in place. I, like many of you, am still learning how. It’s the most compassionate, Christ-like, and truly human thing we can do.

“Therefore, everyone who will acknowledge me before others, I will also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven. ³³ But whoever denies me before others, I will also deny him before my Father in heaven. ³⁴ Don’t assume that I came to bring peace on the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.³⁵ For I came to turn

a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
³⁶ and a man’s enemies will be
the members of his household.^[k]

³⁷ The one who loves a father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; the one who loves a son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. ³⁸ And whoever doesn’t take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. ³⁹ Anyone who finds his life will lose it, and anyone who loses his life because of me will find it.

Matthew 10:32-39

These are Jesus’ words as he prepares his disciples for heartache.

Any of us can baptize our beliefs in Christianity but it doesn’t make our beliefs “christian.” Eventually the life and teaching of Jesus will confront our beliefs. What is true and faithful will be separated from what is not.

Followers will begin separating from fans. Sheep will begin separating from goats.

Love for the vulnerable, powerless, weak, and marginalized will reveal what is true and become the basis of separation and division.

This is where prophetic speech comes in to boldly and disruptively invite us to awareness and repentance, where love must move from sentimentality and belief to truth-telling and action. This is how love becomes a form of power that can drive out fear. This is how we are liberated from the bonds of death and all our violent death-dealing ways. But division will come, and so will heartache.

(See Matthew 25:31-46, 1 John 4:7-21, Hebrews 2:14-15)

Isaac is a beautiful soul. He is a faithful member of the WCC family and senior at the College of William & Mary. He is also one of mine and Alison’s adopted students—a part of our family. I hope you will hear his heart. If you’re a member of the WCC family, I especially hope you will hear that causal and loose rhetoric like ‘chinavirus’ and ‘kung flu’ is anything but harmless. I’ll let Isaac explain why. Please, hear your brother in Christ. ~ Fred

To My Closest Friends at WCC,

It is a wonderful feeling to write to you and share some thoughts with you in a turbulent time. I know that this season has been incredibly difficult for many of you and know that my family and I are praying for God to do his miraculous work each day for His children that he so loves. It has been a five year gift full of surprises, joyous parties, and many warm hugs and I could not be more grateful that you have adopted me as your child.

To Fred, Allison, and Ian, Thank you beyond words for adopting a skinny, crippled, nerdy Korean adolescent into your family and nurturing him to befriend the unfamiliar faces, the cobblestone walkways, and the copious amounts of soda that you have at your disposal in this town of Williamsburg. You are my family and Ian, I owe you a game of Madden when I visit.

And to you church, thank you. Thank you for caring the burden of Christ’s love and spreading it throughout the community. You’ve done it remarkably for me and it should not stop. Your willingness to fight poverty, racial injustice, and historic levels of ignorance during the Covid-19 crisis is a right and worthy effort. Keep asking God for an open mind, then listen to the students, fellow brothers and sisters, elders, and children around you and see what you can do.

So many weeks ago, Fred asked me how the coronavirus adversely affects Asian American students at William and Mary. And seeing that I am one of many, let me share some thoughts on how a virus can affect Chinese and Korean students in particular.

First and foremost, I know I will always be seen as the foreigner in a largely white America. Yes, a smart foreigner who has his allegiance to this country questioned on a yearly basis and one who does not have the ideals of Western nonhierarchical Christianity running through his veins. I am always asked which Korea I am from as if that is some way to protect the safety of Americans distancing themselves from communism. And most frustratingly, I know coronavirus will make my ethnic roots weaker and force Korean Americans to be seen as lesser citizens in the places we are the minority. I imagine the same for my Chinese brothers and sisters. When the President of the Free World calls you a “foreigner” worthy of extradition to a country you left in your infancy, you realize that there is no home for you in this world. A house maybe, but no home.

Yet, Asian American racism is not a broad form of physical violence and verbal trash talk. It is highly dependent upon where you live and who you interact with and it becomes weaker the more north you go in the States. Most Asian Americans live in ethnically singular areas and create their own little sanctuary towns filled with Asian marts, schools, banks, and baptist churches. Yes, the Billy Graham speak is still palpable to us. We try to be a model minority because we know that is how we bring honor to our families.

In other words, there is little effort to seek equity and more effort to create a copy of our own heritage here in the States. Yet, this is also the biggest problem. When I entered Williamsburg, I knew my mental perspectives had to change.

No it really isn’t about physical features like small eyes or yellow skin, but it is more the fact that the story of Americanness has been shaped by its economic and political might. I as a Korean American have always felt dumber than, poorer than, more legalist than the enlightened Anglo American Jonathan Edwards stereotype, and thus have always tried to prove that I am worthy of my place in society. Yes, the precise feeling is that I do not have a home. And maybe this is why Heaven is more comfortable as an idea to me.

So it is the inability for a town like Williamsburg to see how different Asian Americans are that is its greatest weakness. I am not talking about political diversity, I am talking about value and moral diversity. Asian Americans struggle with the idea of personal freedoms, individualistic rights, and a professional world valued in dollars. We prefer family, respecting our elders, and sharing the wealth that is ours. It is not about performance metrics as much as it is about honor and shame. And the most shameful act is to speak another’s story as if you empathetically know something. In Asia, that is not advocacy, that is just an uninformed prideful fool who does not know his place.

And our parents do not make it any better. Trust me, our parents think straight-As in high school is average and getting into an Ivy League school is the standard expectation. Failure is the worst title you can bestow because you have now become a laughing stock amongst your peers.

And that is why we feel shame when the coronavirus is called the “Chinavirus”. Shame that we are responsible (and trust me we will be the scapegoat before we know it), less than, stupider, and less worthy of equal treatment because we do not measure up to the brilliance of the Western world. Having a 3.6 GPA at William and Mary was bad enough. Now it is our fault for infecting the world. I am not a mosquito or a beast, and surely no sleazy sex addict, but I’ve been emasculated into one.

In 1854, Horace Greeley, editor of the New-York Tribune newspaper, wrote a xenophobic and racist editorial opinion supporting the popularly demanded exclusion:

The Chinese are uncivilized, unclean, and filthy beyond all conception, without any of the higher domestic or social relations; lustful and sensual in their dispositions; every female is a prostitute of the basest order.[2]

So WCC, when I am asked how WCC can help the outsider and in particular Asian Americans, I reply, “Tell us we are worthy of our heritage”. Tell us that we are good enough and that we aren’t crippled as Jesus did to the Samaritan women. And stand up for us when we are dining with you in Merchant Square’s restaurants and someone says “Who is that?” Put your arm around our shoulders like a mamma cub protects her children. And treat us with love like we matter as much as your own children would. And it is in this that people like me will gain the courage to fight the sin in this world. I am not asking for you to speak up on our behalf because you are not Asian, but I am asking for this church in all your courage and or obedience to Christ to give us a shot to be at being loved just as you are in Christ. And this happens when you invite us into the most sacred and guarded places of American society: Your homes, your picnics, your fishing trips and most of all your conversations. Acknowledge that we are different and embrace that. Jesus came for the Jews and the Greeks. He did not say that we had to surrender our ethnicity as Christians. I am a Christian just as you are. Born of different skin, palate, and language, but I consider it an honor to call you my brothers and sisters in Christ. It is really just that simple. Yet, when I walk around in everyday America I wonder how each person sees me. And for as much you all have loved me with unbelievable grace and love, my childhood insecurity keeps me wandering and pondering hoping to find some resemblance of a permanent home. Yet, I know I am a nomad and I guess some of you know that feeling all too well particularly in these times.

What I know is true is that our God doesn’t employ accountants, legal scholars, or judges to gauge our earthly accomplishments and allegiances. You and I won’t show honors that are pinned to our lapels and our beloved banknotes masked in trusts will never hide or replace our sins; rather, you and I will be judged by what we did with a man named Jesus Christ and how we either took him seriously or we did not. Nothing more and nothing less. The Book of Life is calling your name.

Look to the Cross.

~ Isaac K. Ahn

*Alison is a strong and courageous follower of Jesus. Her depth and thoughtfulness about our faith is reflected in this post. I hope you will receive it as I have. P. S. I’m thankful for the non-anxious presence of WCC these days who, like us, are learning that the common life and common good in Christ are the point of our gatherings. I look forward to regathering but I’m grateful we aren’t collectively anxious about it. ~ Fred

A few days ago I spent the afternoon on a beach reflecting with dear friends about our differing views of God. From childhood to adulthood, each of us had specific reasons for our feelings and opinions yet, by way of Scripture, had come full circle to see God through a more accurate lens. In essence, while our children wrestled in the water, we had “church.” We had “church” in its fullest sense: a community of believers gathered to share in life together. 

That afternoon on the beach garnered deeper reflection as I contemplated the Christian communities’ obsession with returning to a corporate gathering, or in some cases during this pandemic, not refraining from the gathering at all. Has Sunday morning become so embedded as the crux of our faith that we can’t possibly see an evening spent on a dock discussing ways to minister to others as being “the church?” Has Sunday morning become so embedded as the crux of our faith that we can’t possibly see an evening around a socially-distanced campfire with dear friends from our church family as being “the church?” Has Sunday morning become so embedded as the crux of our faith that we can’t possibly see birthday parades for friends’ children from our church family as being “the church?” Has Sunday morning become so embedded as the crux of our faith that we can’t possibly see an afternoon of slip-n-slides and water balloons with children from our church family as being “the church?” Has Sunday morning become so embedded as the crux of our faith that we can’t possibly see how to be the church Monday-Saturday? 

Yes, the corporate gathering is necessary. It was created to edify (enlighten and inform) and to share in the common good. However, if you use only the corporate gathering to “feed your soul,” then you have whole-heartedly missed the beauty of the corporate gathering. Sharing in the common good was the primary source of love and sacrifice in the days following Jesus’ ascension. And today, sharing in the common good provides meals for those who are sick, provides child care for a weary single mom, offers financial help to those in need, transports patients to chemo treatments, and sits with friends in the hospital. Sharing in the common good moves one another out of and into new homes, paints their kitchen cabinets, fixes their cars and toilets, accommodates food allergies, and answers midnight phone calls. Sharing in the common good prays for difficulties with misguided children, offers patience with one another’s quirks, and challenges one another to think deeper and be more culturally aware. Creating a life that shares in the common good is the point of our ecclesiastical commitments. By sharing in the common good, you are demonstrating Christ’s love to His creation. It’s the sharing in the common good that makes Sunday morning worth attending. 

For those who are beating down their church building doors and providing their own misinformed reasons for why their local church continues to meet online, what keeps you from “having church” on a beach or sitting on a friend’s back porch? Why does the local church have to reopen its doors against the advice of the W.H.O. for you to feel ministered to? What have you done to prevent being able to share in the common good with other members of your church family? At some point, each member of a local congregation has to take responsibility for its own lack…lack of connection, lack of community, lack of faith, lack of understanding. I have witnessed people leave their local church in search of a “better” Sunday gathering. And as expected, when life caved in, they were confronted with the notion that neither their hipster worship music nor their stance on women’s roles brought them dinner. Every example listed in this writing, I have either offered or received. It wasn’t the Sunday gathering that walked me through my mother’s death nor did it share in the pain of infertility and failed adoptions. The Sunday gathering didn’t care for my child while I had minor surgery nor did it sit with my husband during a hospital stay while I was out of town. The Sunday gathering didn’t offer support when I went back to work full-time, and it certainly didn’t say, “We stand with you” when our family took a stance against racial inequity and police brutality. It was the relationships that were cultivated outside of the Sunday gathering that supported us in that way, and those relationships, not the Sunday gathering, will continue to do so. 

Give your local church the benefit of the doubt. Is it possible that there’s a team of people offering instruction and consultation with the lead pastor? Is it possible that a survey was sent to every member of your local church, and now the staff is considering the needs of the majority rather than your opinion? Ask yourself why the Sunday gathering has become so important to your spiritual health that you can’t possibly function without it for a few more months. Reach out to others. Make a play date. Start a book club or a Marco Polo group. Ask a friend to pray for you or your family while being honest about what those prayers might be. Sit at the river with a friend. Walk a trail. Or host happy hour on your back porch. But for the love, do not lay your lack of “church” or community at the feet of the Sunday gathering. She was never designed to complete your life. Only to enhance it.