To state the obvious, there’s been a lot to take in lately. I keep hearing from friends and co-collaborators, I don’t how we’re going to keep this up.
At the start of this year, I sat down to plan the next few newsletters. I thought about a reader who asked me last fall, with all the talk lately about what’s wrong with diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, what do we need to focus on that we know is still effective? And I thought about the title my editor and I just agreed on for my forthcoming book—Racial Justice for the Long Haul.
This justice thing is a long haul, folks. The good news is that there are proven, effective ways we can make it happen. We’re going to need perseverance, strategy, accomplices, humility, tears, and a lot of other things. That’s why I decided to call this series “What we still need.” Every post for the next few months will focus on one practical strategy to hold onto for the long haul.
And I’d like to begin with something that caught me by surprise this week.
We need weakness.
This dawned on me as I was sitting in church listening to somebody read, “He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem” (Isaiah 53:3).
For those of y’all who don’t read the Bible much, this is from a prophet named Isaiah writing about 700 years before Jesus, and this passage is typically interpreted as a description of Jesus. Christians believe the God who made the universe also exemplified all of this: Despised. Rejected. Suffering. Familiar with pain.
In other words, weak. And not just a sweet and gentle kind of weak. We’re talking ugly weak. Embarrassing, frustrating, bang-your-head-on-a-wall weak.
I got thinking, what does it look like to take weakness as a starting point for justice?
When I read the news, I often feel weak. In the face of evidence that things might get a lot worse, I have to face the fact that I cannot take this all on myself.
But this is the truth that comes of acknowledging our weakness: we were never meant to take this all on ourselves. Justice is, by definition, a social condition, not an individual condition. That means it comes about through social means. No individual can put justice in place alone. Justice is about making relationships right with people near and far. That requires knowing what you can do, and also what you can’t. It requires asking for help, finding your weakness.
The anthropologist James Ferguson points out that the people who give the most to the poor are the poor themselves. Quite literally, people with less themselves are more likely to help out others with less. I’ve seen this in practice. A woman named Duduzile who I got to know in South Africa told me once, “If I have one hundred rand (the equivalent of about $10), and I only need fifty, that means the other fifty is for someone else.” She wasn’t speaking metaphorically. I watched this happen. People walked in her house, asked for help, and she helped. “My money is not mine, it’s God’s,” she said more than once.
Duduzile did not have a steady income. She knew what it felt like to go hungry. She gave because she could remember at any moment how it felt to be weak herself.
Here's what I’ve noticed:
If your motivation to give comes from having abundance, as soon as you feel that abundance threatened, you stop giving. But if your motivation to give comes from remembering your weakness, you never run out of reasons to give.
What does this look like to turn weakness into justice?
Try this. Remember a way in which you are, or have been, or will one day be weak. It could be material need, physical illness, loneliness, ormaking a fool out of yourself in public, or any ordinary way you finish the day disappointed.
Then remember how it feels to ask for help in those times—to rely on somebody else, to be a recipient. And remember how it feels to turn that into a mutual back and forth – relying on someone and having them rely on you back. That’s the beginning of justice. When we build that mutuality into society, we find justice.
Finally, two gifts for you.
I’d like to leave you with two ways to take a break from doom scrolling and make a positive next step from weakness to justice.
First, my friend Becca Feldhacker and I recently recorded a podcast conversation about the communal reality of poverty, which expands on the ideas in this newsletter. I hope you’ll enjoy this 15-minute listen.
Secondly, if you live anywhere near Madison, Wisconsin, I encourage you to sign up for the Kingdom Justice Summit, happening March 7-8. This is a highly practical annual gathering where Christians are invited to engage in community transformation, so all may flourish. I’m a planning team member and plenary speaker, and I can tell you it’s going to be a feast. Great practitioners, artists, musicians, and folks like yourself coming together for action. Early bird pricing ends Friday, so register soon.
Thanks for reading and passing this along. Stay well out there.