Jesus exhorted all of us to love God with ALL our heart, soul, mind and strength and our neighbor with ALL our beings as well. Or we are to love both God and neighbor with every fiber of our whole being.
Loving God and neighbor lavishly requires doing justice extravagantly. Only extravagant Jubilee justice releases the oppressed---ends systems of brutal oppression. The combination, and only this combination, is really good news to the battered poor of our world.
Amos 5:24: "I want justice---oceans of it."
Luke 4:18: "release the oppressed."
Romans 14:17: "The kingdom of God is justice, shalom and joy in the Holy Spirit."
From the pen of Ta-Nehisi Coates, "Letters to My Son," The Atlantic:
"But all our phrasing---race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy---serves to obscure that racism is a [lived] visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscles, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth." And Coates could have added "creates individual, family and community PTSD."
Biblically, according to Hebrew roots, oppression crushes, humiliates, animalizes, impoverishes, enslaves and kills persons/peoples created in the image of God.
A true story from the medical doctor of Haiti fame, Dr. Paul Farmer; Farmer describes giving a painful spinal tap to a Haitian girl with meningitis: "Wild cries erupt from the child. She's crying, 'It hurts, I'm hungry.' Can you believe it? Only in Haiti would a child cry out that's she hungry during a spinal tap."
In order to rebuild a poor community that has been oppressed for 500 years, a Christian ministry must stay in one location for a whole generation using the principles and methods of Christian Community Development. It will take love and justice to release the oppressed. Warm feelings of love, generous charity and isolated, well-meaning projects will not get the job done.
Haitian Jean Thomas has been doing CCD in rural, poverty-stricken Haiti, Fond-des-Blancs, for over 30 years. HCDF has accomplished a lot, but Fond-des-Blancs needs another 30 years to complete the process. Transforming a socioeconomic hell takes incredible commitment, biblical wisdom, and an extended time period.
Haitian Pierre Thomas, Jean's brother, who, of course, knew the language and culture, tried a different approach---starting a number of projects in different communities. Years later, what were the results; all the projects failed. Why? The isolated projects were not embedded within a comprehensive community development plan.
No comments:
Post a Comment