Justice is what love looks like in public, and love begins with a cry for help.
Five years ago, my husband Caleb and I waited impatiently for a Cambodian taxi to whisk us to the airport, onward to our next leg of adventure in Vietnam. The world’s smallest girl, in a discarded Michael Jordan T-shirt, sidled up to me and tugged at my elbow. She feverishly pointed with her other hand at my plastic bag, which contained a baguette. She was hungry. I easily surrendered the bread; my gesture of charity, of sympathy, of pity. In a flash at least ten other children scurried over to tear at the bread, and just like that it was gone.
I cried throughout the flight to Saigon. So many questions haunted me: Does she have parents? How many hours a day did she beg? Was she going to eat dinner? While this wasn’t the first time I had been confronted by the face of extreme poverty, there was something about her. In that moment, I was confronted with a choice to care, to say “Yes! I see you. Yes! You have been fearfully and wonderfully made.”
After college, I taught public school for three years in the “murder capital” of the south Bronx but it hardly prepared me for the moment of encounter I experienced in Cambodia. It brought into stark relief my desire to find a vocation that insisted on the work of justice, mercy, and transformational love while not objectifying and reducing the poor to statistics — to an it. To borrow from Martin Buber, I sought real relation to a you, and subsequently to a divine You, in my encounter. Her real face and real story allowed me to enter into the real stories of millions of street children who are most vulnerable to the abhorrent injustice of sexual slavery. My current work as U.S. Advocacy Director at Love146, a leading modern anti-slavery organization, has challenged me to examine my framework of faith and demanded that I strive towards a practical, practicing theology of humility, compassion, and power.
The parallels between the neighborhoods of Southern Boulevard in the South Bronx, Svay Pak in Phnom Penh, and The Hill in New Haven, do indeed “flatten” my worldview and reinforce my conviction that it is only through redemptive communities of faith and action that we can hope to see the justice and righteousness of God’s Kingdom break in to our globally networked culture. This conviction undergirded my sense of calling to core leadership in the Elm City Vineyard Church in New Haven. Our community strives to seek the shalom of the city through incarnational ministry and lives empowered by the Holy Spirit.
The truth is messy, but the truth will set you free.
Here’s an example from Cambodia, a rough-edged story of slow hope on the issue of human trafficking. My friend Pastor Yeng trains community leaders how to prevent human trafficking. He trains them to think not only about the act of human trafficking but also about the “push factors” that increase the vulnerability of a child to being trafficked. Societies that ignore systemic vulnerabilities, that turn a blind eye to risk factors, are quixotic in their hope to fight injustice. During one of Yeng’s seminars, a local pastor fell to his knees in grief as he realized that he had been tricked into selling several of his own children to traffickers. He simply had not understood what was happening. In another church community, Yeng provoked frank discussion of the correlation between sexual abuse, sexual addiction, domestic violence and the trafficking of children for sex. The veil of shame and social taboo was lifted, truth and light came in, and hope began to dawn. After another training, one villager identified a trafficker within her community and literally ran him out of the village.
Jesus’ parables speak of the reality of the Kingdom of God in the messy, ambiguous present.
It has been incredibly encouraging for me to see how folks within Vineyard USA are also making the connection between our call to radical acts of justice with radical repentance and vulnerability. The “Love Justice” Taskforce at the Boise Vineyard, in their work to fight human trafficking, bravely ventured to address why there is a demand for children and women to be trafficked into the sex trade in the first place: men’s desire and demand for commoditized sex. The film highlighted the intersection between the use of pornography and prostitution and how it cultivated the perfect environment for the trafficking of children and women to create more pornography and to feed the demand for their bodies. The group organized a screening of a documentary on demand in conjunction with the church’s “Celebrate Recovery” ministry. Following the film, individuals from the ministry shared about their addictions to pornography and their journey with making the connections between a seemingly victimless act and modern-day slavery. I applaud the work of the “Love Justice” Taskforce and the Boise Vineyard for helping to lead the way in the spiritual transformation that leads to the long-term renewal of a community, and, I pray, a nation.
Justice smells fragrant and sweet.
Justice IS the Kingdom of God and Vineyard is a Kingdom movement.
This invisible fresh air strengthens us to visibly proclaim and execute Biblical justice: we are not activists who just want to “do something.” To paraphrase Ron Sider, we are not social activists, we are followers of Jesus. We respond to Jesus’s invitation to be filled up by the grace and power of the Holy Spirit to live justly in the world–an invitation to enlarge our imaginations and actions to go beyond the Facebook Cause of the Day or our spasms of compassion.
Slowly, sometimes steadily, more often haphazardly, we walk the narrow path that enables us to seek God’s kingdom on earth, as it is in heaven–a kingdom where we find our shalom by seeking the shalom of our community. It is incredibly exciting to be a part of the Vineyard movement as we lay hold of the invitation to participate in the kingdom of God through the work of justice and reconciliation. For me, and I know for so many of you, it is the aroma of justice that beckons us close to Jesus, that compels us to say, “Holy Spirit, come!”
My prayer is that the Vineyard movement will pursue a vision of being world-changers through the lens of justice, mercy and the power of the Holy Spirit. People who do not yet know the Lord will be attracted to this “aroma of Justice” and will find themselves embracing the Father of Love, Mercy, and Justice.
Kathy Maskell is the Pastor of Discipleship at the Blue Route Vineyard in Media, PA, and leader of Vineyard Justice Network.
