There’s a lot that needs to change outside us, but outer change requires inner and personal change otherwise it perpetuates the cycle of abusive power by those who are unconscious of what drives them. Revolutionary justice isn’t necessarily transformational justice. Without inner transformation, the oppressed can too easily become the oppressors and the cycle continues. To foster a transformational justice, we must face the internal biases, prejudices, assumptions, habits, and behaviors that arise from those unconscious biases. To grow the justice we need, we must grow ourselves.

The third and final in the three week series: “What Matters Now.” The sermon is meditates on several texts including Ezekiel 47.1-12, Luke 6.39-42. Find the audio sermon here.

1. River

“There is a river that flows

from beneath the temple.

Wherever it runs free,

healing follows in its path,

and everything around it flourishes.”

The prophet Ezekiel saw a river of life.

“You are God’s temple.”

Saint Paul says this river flows through us.

“There is a river

that flows from your hearts

into the heart of the world;

it is living water;

a healing stream.”

Jesus says it’s a river that heals the world. And Amos says it rights what’s wrong:

“Let justice roll down like waters,

and righteousness

like an ever-flowing stream.”

2. Flow

In each and every one of us, without exception, there is a living stream, the life of the Divine, the fountain of our flourishing. Infinite. Immortal. Priceless.

Risk everything to find it; give everything to free the river of your soul from every log-jam and hindrance so that it flows free and full within you. Cherish and protect it in others and in all that dwells in and on this precious planet—for everything that exists shimmers and glimmers and dances with the light of God’s soul, your soul, my soul, the soul of the cosmos.

If we are to find and free the river of our souls, we need religion, good religion—not the degradations and distortions that often pass for religion. Without good religion, re-ligare, that which reconnects us with what matters most within and around us, we and the world are left without the help we need for the finding and freeing and flowing of our souls and the soul of the world.

Religion, if it’s good, can help the river flow.

Many have tried to save civilization from the bad effects of religion—the flotsam and jetsam that fill the river. I explored all this last week. Nietzsche, for example, who’s often considered the great champion of atheism, and whose phrase “God is dead” gets bandied about carelessly, called for the “euthanasia of Christianity” not because he hated religion, but because he hated what religion had become. He argued that religion had failed its calling. It traded mystery and myth for the soul-choking debris of materialism and moralism. While good religion helps the river flow, bad religion obstructs the river of our souls, the flow of the sacred in the world.

Late in his life, psychiatrist, Carl Jung reflected back upon the tumult of first half of the twentieth century. “Our times,” he wrote, "have demonstrated what it means when the gates of the psychic underworld are thrown open [and there is no religion worthy enough to metabolize it]. Things whose enormity nobody [at the dawn of the century] could have imagined [, …] have turned the world upside down. Ever since, the world has remained in state of schizophrenia.”

Our madness seems only to have deepened and intensified. The social and political dysfunctions, the threats to our liberties and to the Earth, our common home, and the injustices that plague us are epidemic; they harm us; they could destroy us.

For us and for the future, soul matters now; religion matters now; justice matters now.

It matters that we work together to create a benevolent, generous, and sustainable human presence on this planet, participating cooperatively not only with other human beings, but with all of Nature so that we heal our damaged Earth and tend it in such a way that every blessed thing can flourish.

3. Logjam

There’s a parable, a wisdom saying, in which Jesus says: “Can a blind person guide a blind person? Will not both fall into a pit?” The answer to Jesus’ first question is, of course, is “no”—it’s tough for the blind to lead the blind. The answer to Jesus’ second question, is “yes,” they are both likely to fall into a pit.

Jesus’ wisdom continues: “Why, then, do you insist on seeing only the speck of dust in your neighbor’s eye, but don’t notice the big log in your own? How can you say to the person in front of you, ‘Hey, let me take the dust out of your eye,’ when there’s a tree in your own? You’re a hypocrite! First take the tree from your own eye, then you will see clear enough to take the dust out of someone else’s.”

I’ll bet it’s easier for you to see what’s wrong with me than for you to see what’s wrong with yourself. I know this because it’s easier for me to see what’s wrong with you than for me to see what’s wrong with myself. Or rather, it’s more convenient. It’s more convenient to focus on what needs to change in someone else because it lets us off the hook.

This is called “projection.” It’s a strategy of self-protection. Rather than acknowledge stuff about ourselves that needs work, we go to work on someone else. Rather than face what we don’t like about ourselves, we push our dislike onto someone else.

If we’re not aware, if we don’t do our inner work, we can work to right the wrongs of the world, but do wrong to the world in the process.

Leadership Journal once ran an article about well-meaning leaders, volunteers, and activists who leave strained relationships, anxiety, and hurt feelings in their wake. They don't intend to be hostile; they don't consciously breed discontent or intend to be judgmental. But the unconscious stuff that drives them hurts us—regardless of the good they’re trying to do, the wrongs they’re trying to right. We could call them “well-intentioned dragons.”

There’s a lot that needs to change outside us, but outer change requires inner and personal change otherwise it can perpetuate the cycle of abusive power. To grow the kind of justice we need, we need to grow ourselves—we need to face our internal biases and prejudices, we need to face the assumptions and habits and behaviors that drive us.

4. Blind

Rick Stevenson was the best dressed man I’d ever met. He sat across from me in our theology class in seminary, thirty years ago. Hand painted ties. Double-breasted suits. Hair cut perfectly, nothing out of place. His black shoes so well-shined that I could see my face in the leather. And when he walked, his shoes clicked. He had small steel plates on the heels and toes of those shoes for effect—so you’d know with your eyes closed that it was Rick Stevenson who was walking past you.

I showed up for class in jeans and a T-shirt. “This was graduate school, for crying out loud,” I whispered inside my head, “in southern California, of all places—not a job interview.”

Rick annoyed me. He was good looking, intelligent, articulate. He seemed more like a model or executive than a student. And then he challenged a comment I made in class; took the opposite position and argued it brilliantly. “Arrogant,” I muttered under my breath.

I was sure he didn’t like me. I told myself he carried a big old, brick-sized chip on his shoulder.

I later learned he thought I had one on mine. He could sense I didn’t like him.

Between us stood a wall of projection and prejudice. We were unconscious of the logjam of our histories and our assumptions, the stories we kept in our heads—things we’d yet to examine, interrogate, and emancipate, things that kept the river of our souls from the freedom they need to flow.

I don’t have time to tell you how Rick and I broke down that wall. I only have time to tell you what I learned that helped me begin to remove the logjam from my own eye.

Rick was a pastor in south central Los Angeles. A tough place. A way of life far removed from my own. “Let me ask you something, Chris,” Rick said to me one day after we’d been forced to work together on a project. He knew his appearance was part of the wall. “When the best dressed men in the ‘hood are pimps and pushers, who does a young black man have to look up to? What choice do you think he’s gonna make? I want to show the kids where I’m from that you can get an education, you can say ‘no’ to gangbangers, and that the gospel is a better path. That’s why I click when I walk. I want them to know I’m comin’.”

I had judged, prematurely, someone who I couldn’t understand. I had no idea what it was like to walk in a man’s shoes whose life had a very different history and context. This isn’t so hard to understand.

Harder to understand, but even more important, is this truth—for if we can get inside this truth, and work with it, we can find our way into the healing we so desperately need in order to foster the justice we cannot live without.

I had projected a boat-load of stuff onto him that wasn’t his to carry. It was mine. I grew up believing a story about myself that was I was never good enough, never right enough. It influenced the way I encountered this well-dressed, well-put together man who seemed not only good, but brilliant.

What I have to say might not make complete sense to you, but it’s a psychological reality; it’s the way our damaged psyches often work. Because I had been told repeatedly that I was not good enough, I learned to put down that part of me that occasionally rose up and thought I was not only good enough, but maybe even brilliant. That part of me that was strong, confident, intelligent, and articulate was not allowed to come out into public. I allowed myself to be mediocre, but never really good. Because if I was good, I would stand out and if I stood out I would be ridiculed, criticized, or embarrassed. That was my history, the story that played in my head.

And so, when I met Rick Stevenson, who symbolized everything the story inside my head was protecting me from, I had to dislike him, criticize him, and minimize him. In the strange logic of my wounded soul, I had to project onto him the discomfort I felt about my genuine, God-given goodness. In order to stay safe, being really good was never possible. Are you following me now? And that meant I couldn’t let anyone else be really good either.

I hope you’re with me because the biases and prejudices, the assumptions and habits and behaviors that drive injustice are rooted here, in the stories we tell ourselves, the biases passed on to us, the prejudices we’ve never examined.

And if we’re going to grow justice in the world, we’ve got to grow ourselves. And to grow ourselves we’ve got to face the injustices that are kept alive by the stories we repeat inside. They blind us to the log in our own eye, even while we try to remove the speck of dust in someone else’s.

5. Healing

On September 7, Juan Carlos Ruiz will host another round of guided conversations we call our Racial Healing Circles. There’s a second circle in October and another in November. And Alf Brandt and Peggy Froelich will hold some talk circles around the marvelous book, Waking Up White, and Finding Myself in the Story of Race by Molly Irving. The purpose of these circles is to help us work at justice from the inside out, to grow justice by growing ourselves, to help us remove the logjam from our souls so the river of God’s compassion, peace, and justice can flow.

I couldn’t be more grateful for this important work taking place among us. We need justice now. But we need justice that has soul, justice that is spiritually and psychologically intelligent that aims at healing not just revolution. Otherwise, as I’ve said, we will work as “well intentioned dragons” rather than the well-informed healers we need.

In healing circles, we enter into genuine conversation. We lift up what unites us rather than what divides us. We discover, respect and honor the unique experiences of each person in the circle. We engage in dialog through a series of open questions. The circles are confidential, safe spaces for all participants to have truthful conversations with one another. The experience relies on intentional listening and often leads to emotional and even transformational journeys for all of the partners in the work. Together, we unearth painful truths, the unprocessed stories that shape us, and the unconscious biases that drive us.

This is the kind of interpersonal work we need, especially at such a fractious and treacherous time. This kind of work can take place formally in circles like these here at Davis Community Church, or informally through conscious encounters with friends, coworkers, neighbors, and family members.

The point is: to grow the justice we need, we need to grow ourselves. And to grow ourselves we need each other. And with each other we will discover what we need to flow with the river of compassion, peace, and justice that runs through our souls into the soul of God.

6. Flow