“God is Just”
Leviticus 25:10
Hosea 5:10
Paraphrase of Matthew 21:12-13 by Meredith Miller
Preached Sunday, August 16, 2026
We are continuing with our sermon series, “God is…” that explores key attributes of God that children - and adults - need to come to learn and know about God so that we can trust God, so that we can have a lifelong and abundant relationship with God. So far we have explored that God is Good. And that God is Powerful. In each sermon I have asked if - or actually admitted as such - that we adults really struggle with knowing and trusting these things.
We struggle with knowing a God who is Good when we have an image of a human-like god Zeus - always walking on eggshells in case a bolt of lightning is coming our way. Versus a God who is Goodness and Love itself and extends that Goodness and Love to us with every breath.
We struggle with knowing a God who is Powerful in a world that primarily views power as a means of control of others. God’s power is not about control. God’s power means no force in this world or beyond is able to separate us from the love of God.
And so today I will say - we also tend to struggle with knowing that God is just. How could we not in a world with so much injustice? The disclaimer for today’s sermon is that, most likely, there will be parts of this sermon that make you uncomfortable. I invite you to sit with this discomfort. The Gospel should make us uncomfortable because Jesus did not come to protect that status quo. Sit with the discomfort and pray through it. Now, disclaimer aside -
I think a lot about wanting to protect the innocence of my children in this world. I want them to keep on believing as long as they can that the world is full of kindness and love and wonder. And the world IS full of kindness and love and wonder. It is also full of pain and injustice. And, as kids age, they do become aware of this. The kid who is mean on the playground, the man overheard on the news belittling people, personal and familial hardships and struggles, the first active shooter lock down drills in preschools and Kindergartens. Even as I think about my children and wanting to shelter them as much and as long as I can - I know that too is a form of privilege based on class and race. My friends who parent Black children are forced by society to talk to their children about injustice and prejudice at a much younger age. My one friend said her son was 3 years old the first time a racial slur was hurled at him like a weapon. And in the last couple of years, more than 6,300 children under the age of 18, some as young as 2 months old, have been detained by ICE in Detention Centers here in the United States. Nearly half of those children have been held at Dilley Detention Center and 97% of them have no criminal record. Children’s TV show creator and advocate, Ms. Rachel, has been interviewing the children in Dilley to bring attention to their plight of lights left on 24 hours a day, worms in food, unclean water, and rampant illness due to those conditions - not to mention the psychological effects, separation from other family members, and fear. My heart breaks and I weep as I read about children as young as 5 years old, including autistic, nonverbal, and ill children, living that nightmare. As I tuck my own 5 year old into bed at night, I pray for those children who are being treated as so much less than the children of God that they are. Who are being oppressed - whom injustice is committed against them.
I weep for these children. God weeps with them too.
As children have a burgeoning awareness of the wrongness of the world, we as adults know all too well how unfair, cruel, and unjust the world can be. We live in a sin-sick world where the imago dei, the image of God, is too often ignored in the lives of our neighbors, especially our most vulnerable neighbors, and injustice is done against them - and by them I mean the last, the lost, and the least. Those whose lives and existence are pushed to the margins. The poor, the outcast, the disabled, children, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities, or anyone deemed as “other.”
In this midst of all this - how can we believe in a God who is just?
I think we need to know God is just. That is the only way we can have hope. And the only way we could love God and have a relationship with God. In our unjust world, I do not want to worship a God who is not Just.
God is Just.
We must hold tight to that Just-ness and trust in that yes, God sees the pain and injustice in this world. That yes, God cares about the pain and injustice in this world. And yes, God is going to do something about it, too. We read in Scripture that God plans to remake the whole world to be the way it was always meant to be - good and just. Meredith Miller says she describes this New Creation to children as, “all the good and no bad, all the joy and no sad. It’s where everyone knows they are unconditionally loved, and they treat others well because they know they are too.” It is as Julian of Norwich describes it, “all shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
Scripture is also full of evidence of God’s Justice - we find that God is always concerned with the plight of the oppressed and works to make the world right again.
The first Scripture verse we heard today was from the book of Leviticus - and Leviticus is a hard book to work through in Scripture and there is a lot in there that’s good and a lot that needs to be put in its cultural context. But the basic gist of Leviticus was - after being freed from Egypt - how were the Hebrew people to live as a people set apart, God’s holy people.
And it is here that we get the radical - for then and now - commandment of Jubilee.
Every fiftieth year is to be the year of Jubilee - a “super Sabbath” with feasting and rest for people, animals, and land.
Land was also returned to original owners (such as those who may have had to sell them because they fell on hard times), and any enslaved people were also to be made free. This helps stop the cycle of permanent inequality. We know that wealth and poverty are affected through generations. Some people are simply born ahead in the social game than others due to the plight and injustices their ancestors faced. With Jubilee, God seeks to end the cycle of inequality and injustice.
Miller puts it like this: “It’s as simple as this: Our God is an Exodus God, so we will be Jubilee people. God goes first to rescue us; we respond by being restorers for one another.”
Basically, every 50 years, things were supposed to be made right. The playing field was leveled back out. Sadly, the commandment of Jubilee has been long left unpracticed in our world and would certainly not be a popular take with politicians, wealthy land owners, those who exploit the work of others, and all the economic systems of the world that put profit over people. But even though Jubilee is not in practice, our God is still a just Jubilee God - one who works to break cycles of injustice and inequality and make things right with the world.
When Jesus goes to the temple in Luke 4, he reads from the prophet Isaiah which echoes the commandment of Jubilee: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim that the captives will be released, that the blind will see, that the oppressed will be set free, and that the time of the Lord’s favor has come.” This year of the Lord’s favor is a reference to the year of Jubilee. Jesus is coming to continue the work of Jubilee and Justice in the world. He is telling the crowds listening to him that his work involves a radical re-working of the status quo on behalf of the oppressed. We may not realize it, but this is the same thing we pray for every week when we pray the Lord’s Prayer: “Your will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.” That is a radical and powerful prayer that prayers for the overturning of all of earth’s structures and systems of injustice, inequality, and oppression. It is praying for that day when all shall be made well and all are equal at the feet of Jesus.
The second Scripture our liturgist read today from Hosea is probably less known to us and sounded strange. Again, it’s only one verse so I’ll read it again here and then give the backstory: “Judah’s leaders are like those who move boundary stones. I will pour out my wrath on them like a flood of water.”
Normally I am not a fan of descriptions of God’s wrath due to the way that we confuse it with a punishing petty god like Zeus - as mentioned earlier - we struggle to believe God is really good. But also - what are boundary stones? What’s the context here?
Boundary stones are just what they sound like - they were physical stones that marked one family’s land from another’s. Moving a boundary stone would be, in essence, stealing another person’s land. So who was moving the boundary stones? It was not the poor or the powerless, it was the rich and the powerful who thought they could steal from their neighbors and get away with it. Those with more power and wealth, taking advantage of those without, in order to gain more power and wealth - widening the gap of inequality and justice. Sounds nothing like today’s world, right? God is not just angry because someone moved a rock - God is angry that injustice is being done - that the powerful are oppressing and harming their neighbors for their own material gain - and getting away with it.
I want a God who gets angry over that sort of thing. We should all get angry over that sort of thing.
This is the same God we see depicted in Jesus in the paraphrase I read today when Jesus got mad at the money changers in the temple who were taking advantage of the poor. Jesus didn’t overturn tables simply because things were being sold in the temple. He overturned tables because the poor were being taken advantage of by the very people who claimed to represent God.
God’s anger is not arbitrary - it’s connected to God’s Goodness - in that God gets angry when we treat each other in ways that deny the Goodness of God in the world and in each other. In ways that oppress the beloved children of God, especially the poor.
So yes. Our God is a just God who sees and cares about injustice in our world - and who has done, is doing, and will do work to right that injustice and make the world as it should be.
In the meantime, in our world filled with injustice, how do we lean into God’s Justness and learn to trust God and partner with God in justice work. What spiritual disciplines can we foster, what can we do, to practice Just-ness in this world?
First, is to stay the course. In his book, The Justice of Jesus, Joash Thomas says, “Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ While I believe this to be true because of God’s goodness, I also believe that for centuries now the arc of the Western church has bent in a different direction. If that sounds harsh, just ask our Black neighbors, many of whose ancestors endured slavery, lynchings, and Jim Crow segregation, all of which were widely embraced and given theological cover by Christians. Just ask our Indigenous neighbors, whose ancestors were victimized by genocide, erasure, and church-run residential schools. Or ask my ancestors, whose land, culture, and way of relating to God were for centuries usurped by colonial Western powers backed by the Catholic, Dutch Reformed, and Anglican churches. Because of my own privilege as a male, upper-middle-class immigrant from the Global South, it took me until 2020 to fully realize the Western church has a history of repeatedly failing our poor and oppressed neighbors.” Joash goes on to talk about the backlash pastors and churches who work for God’s Jubilee Justice for our neighbors face and how, so often, many have the privilege of dropping out of the long and arduous work of justice. Justice is not an easy road. It is one that bookmarks all of creation - from the Fall to the New Creation. We must stay the course, working with one another to continuously carry on for the sake of the oppressed.
Miller talks about how she is tempted to fade away from justice oriented activity with her family because of the slowness of the work. She says, “Perhaps we resist because we know too much about the slowness of justice, the resistance to justice, and the reaction against justice-seeking.” But even then we can cry out with the Psalmist who says, “How long, O Lord?”
The work of justice is always ongoing and it takes a lot to make things right again. By trusting in our God’s Justness, in the vision of God of Jubilee and the New Creation, we can continue coming back to the work of Justice, working towards that day when it is on Earth as it is in Heaven.
The long work of justice can look like many things: It can look like talking openly, with children, with each other, within congregations and communities, about injustice and justice in this world. We so often want to hide or protect children - and adults - and ourselves - from the injustice of the world. But if we don’t talk about it - then those who experience injustice can feel ignored and ostracized and even oppressed by those who claim a Just God but don’t acknowledge the injustice right in front of us. It can cause a false sense that God does not care for the plight of the oppressed. And for those kids who experience suffering - they will not come to know a God who cares and loves them intimately.
As we talk openly about injustice, we will often face pushback or criticism from those who perpetuate or benefit from injustice. Anytime we read history or hear a story, we can practice the spiritual discipline of Justice by asking, “Whose story is being told and whose is missing?” By asking this question, of history, and of one another, we can open ourselves up exploring the whole story of injustice together as neighbors, moving past political conversations and dividing lines to a place where all voices are heard and listened to, and lifted up to the God who is Just.
The last spiritual discipline of Justice that I want to lift up today is serving. Being the hands and feet of Christ. And serving without saviorism. That is, recognizing that we do not come to bring Jesus to those who are less fortunate than us - Jesus is already with them - as Jesus is with us. Instead we listen to the needs of those we serve without pre-conceived ideas of what is “right” for them, coming together as fellow beloved Children of God who have much to teach each other.
The work of Justice in an unjust world is hard. Trusting that our God is a Just God in a world of Injustice is hard. The journey of justice is a long and rocky one. We will not always get it right. In fact, we often won’t. And yet we can commit ourselves to truth-telling, to confession, to reparations and repairs - to coming together as the people of God to trust that our God is Just, and so, we are capable of doing the work of justice together with Christ and our fellow beloved children of God until that day when it is on earth as it is in heaven, “all the good and no bad, all the joy and no sad. It’s where everyone knows they are unconditionally loved, and they treat others well because they know they are too.”
May it be so. Amen.
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