Social Justice
With what shall I come before the Lord
and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
He has told you, O mortal, what is good,
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice and to love kindness
and to walk humbly with your God?
Micha 6:6-8
STORY
The war in Europe ended with Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 7, 1945. Tony Bennett, after fighting in the Battle of the Bulge in January of that year, remained with the occupying American army and was transferred to Special Services, where he entertained the troops with his remarkable singing voice. Bennett toured the country, performing in concerts and shows wherever soldiers were stationed.
On Thanksgiving Day, Bennett was in Mannheim when he bumped into his old friend Frank Smith. They had been in a quartet together at the School of Industrial Art in Manhattan in 1942 and were excited to see each other again. Bennet recalled, “I was thrilled to see a familiar face from back home after being surrounded by strangers for so many months. He took me with him to a holiday service at a Baptist church he’d found. We wanted to spend the whole day together – just felt so good to be with a friend.”
Bennett invited Smith to join him for Thanksgiving dinner with turkey and all the fixings for American servicemen. The pair got as far as the lobby of the building the Army was using as a mess hall when they were berated by an irate officer. In the segregated military of the day, the two men were not allowed to be seen with each other at a military function, and definitely not share a meal together.
Regarding that encounter, Bennett wrote in his 1998 autobiography The Good Life, “This officer took out a razor blade and cut my corporal stripes off my uniform right then and there. He spit on them and threw them on the floor, and said, ‘Get your ass out of here!’ I couldn’t get over the fact that they condemned us for just being friends, and especially while we served our country in wartime. There we were, just two kids happy to see each other, trying to forget for the moment the horror of the war, but for the brass it just boiled down to the color of our skin.”
Bennett was reassigned from Special Services to Graves Registration, where he dug up the bodies of American soldiers killed in combat for reburial in military cemeteries. The experience “was just as bad as it sounds,” he recalled.
Fortunately, a friendly Army officer discovered what had happened and pulled strings to get Bennett back to singing in Europe. Soon, he was performing on the radio for American Forces Network with the Glenn Miller Army Air Force Band.
Bennett never forgot what he witnessed in World War II. The memories led him to become a civil rights activist. In 1965, his friend and singer Harry Belafonte asked him to walk in a civil rights march planned by Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma. Bennett accepted without hesitation, confessing “I kept flashing back to a time twenty years ago when my buddies and I fought our way into Germany. It felt the same way down in Selma: the white state troopers were really hostile, and they were not shy about showing it.”
Bennett went on to become one of the best performers of jazz and American standards, earning the Grammy Award for album of the year in 1995. For his support of civil rights, he also received the Citizen of the World Award and Humanitarian Award from the United Nations in 2007.
Still, those horrifying and harried moments of war and civil strife were never far from his mind, as he recounted “My life experiences, ranging from the Battle of the Bulge to marching with Martin Luther King, made me a life-long humanist and pacifist, and reinforced my belief that violence begets violence and that war is the lowest form of human behavior.”
DEVOTION
The prophet Micha, whose name means “Who is like Yahweh,” preached his sermon to the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem. Micah’s begins his indictment against the establish order of as he outlines their injustice toward the lowly, unfair business dealings, mistreatment of women and children, and a government that lived in luxury off the hard work of its nation’s people. After condemning these actions, he speaks how there can be restoration. Reconciling their relationship with God and reestablish a just and righteous community will require a renewed obedience to the Law of Moses, which will be reflected in authentic and sincere worship.
One manifestation of this, as dictated in our reading for this morning, is making atoning sacrifices. Micha affirms the traditional must continue, though these sacrifices are subordinate to the supreme sacrifice of civil behavior, as the prophet declares: He has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?
Our twenty-first century sacrifices do not involve burnt offerings, though they must be performed with the same dedication and seriousness. Perhaps foremost, one would place tithing. Yet, equal to this is attending Sabbath worship and being present in the sanctuary for the most holy days in the liturgical calendar. We must always consider our homes as a sanctuary to the Lord, so a sacrificial act would be family prayer before each evening dinner. More subtle, yet equally important, is private home meditation.
Though we know, especially as Micha instructs, the greatest sacrifice that we can make is to approach others with a humble and compassionate disposition. It is to see friend and foe, acquaintance and stranger, young and old, rich and poor, Black and white as equals to be addressed with respect. It is, to the best of our abilities, eliminate injustice and promote equity.
We are to walk “humbly with our God,” which means we are to live obedient to the righteous disposition of God.
Courtney Vance is an actor who studied at the Yale School of Drama. He has appeared in a number of movies, but is probably best known for his role, as defense attorney Johnny Cochran in the FX movie The People v. O. J. Simpson that was televised in 2016.
In his immediate family, his father and his 23-year-godson, both committed suicide. He recounted the difficulty of dealing with the grief of these two untimely deaths in his book titled The Invisible Ache: Black Men Identifying Their Pain and Reclaiming Their Power. Learning of the death of his father, from a phone call that he received between stage performances of the play Six Degrees of Separation, Vance recalled his feeling, “There’s no map for where your thoughts go in a moment like that, when you learn someone you can’t imagine life without is now gone, not because he was snatched away by sickness or old age, but because he’d chosen to leave us by his own hand.”
Vance dealt with his devastation by balancing time for biking, reading, attending church, and spending quantity and quality time with his wife, actress Angela Bassett, and their twins. He also got mental health counselling.
From these two tragedies he secured for himself a personal mantra: “How can I help?” He understands that you can never know how an individual is emotionally and spiritually suffering, so even a kind word from a stranger can offer hope. He shared this new insight saying, “Sometimes you change people’s lives just by saying good morning. I always say to myself, ‘I’ll never see this person again on the elevator, on the stairwell, in the grocery store. This is the only chance, the two of us.’”
Trying to live by his mantra, each night he reflects, “Be kind, and help somebody if you can. If you’ve done that in your day, you’ve accomplished something great.”
In the wisdom of the prophet Micha, let us, at the end of each day, affirm that we have followed the teaching: O mortal, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?