Deuteronomy 05: Justice and Righteousness

Redemption Church KC Sermon Podcast

1. One of the slides in this week’s sermon read as follows: “Our economic system is designed so that corporations and billionaires can: avoid paying a living wage to their workers, turn your honest day’s work into cash, and keep most of it for themselves while avoiding paying taxes they expect you to pay, using their profits to buy political muscle, and to distract the working class with never-ending culture wars, knowing if they can keep us fighting each other over social issues, we’ll never come together to demand systemic change. That’s our system.” Of this, Tim said, “This is how a system with no access to wisdom organizes itself.” And (paraphrasing), “if the people of God organize themselves like the empires of the world, they cannot bear the image of God.” Discuss: How do you respond to the idea that our current world’s systems are the result of a lack of wisdom? What do you think of the idea that our empire-patterned systems are incongruent with our purpose to bear the image of God? What’s the impact of a Christianity that patterns itself after Empire-driven values and ideas?

2. A passage from Deuteronomy 16 read, in part, “…and for the people, they are to do justice (mishpat) with righteousness (tsedakah).” Tim expanded on the Hebrew concepts behind these two words. Re justice (mishpat), his summarizing slides read: “Systems that govern actions Maintain social relationships that are human, humane, and humanizing” and “What needs to be done in a situation: a set of actions that must be taken in order to restore God’s ideal” Re righteousness (tsedakah): “The standard by which other things of the type can be measured; how we know we’re doing right by somebody in a given context” And “The state of affairs that constitute that ideal; what you aim to achieve, only embodied in people & relationships.” What thoughts and feelings arise for you as you absorb these ideas and summaries? Do these definitions shift your own understanding of justice or righteousness in any way? If so, how? When you consider your own life, both in everyday matters and in larger extraordinary contexts, how conscious are you of trying to live in accordance with this wisdom? Where does that seem most natural? Where is it most difficult? Where/when do you think it matters the most?

3. Where do you find examples of people living out God’s instruction to “do justice (mishpat) with righteousness (tsedakah)?” Are they more plentiful in some contexts than in others? Share about some of the ways - big or small - that you see “justice with righteousness” alive in our world. Where does this type of systemic way of being begin? Where can you find its seeds in our communities and lives? How can you encourage its embodiment in yourself and in others?