Interconnectivity: How Worship Leads Us to Do Justice, Part 2
VJN has invited Elizabeth Lawton, a member of the Society of Vineyard Scholars, to enrich our conversation by offering her insights on the relationship between leisure, worship, and pursuing God’s justice. Elizabeth is a graduate student in moral theology and Christian Ethics at the University of Notre Dame. She also holds a bachelor’s degree in international politics from Georgetown University. This is the second half of her piece. You can read Part 1 here.
We are who we are because of who we love. As bearers of the image of the triune God, we are indelibly shaped by our relationships with others. As Christians, we recognize our neighbors are God’s children and allow God to teach us how to love them well. As I discussed in a previous post, worship rightly pursued can become a lesson in loving well. When we submit ourselves in leisure to formation in the biblical narrative, we learn experientially about what faithfulness truly means—an unyielding dedication to seeking the good of the beloved, and a joyful desire to make sacrifices toward that end. In my time at the University of Notre Dame, I have learned about an insight from Catholic theology that I believe can enrich the way we in the Vineyard Justice Network think about living out the Gospel and loving our neighbors: the preferential option for the poor.
Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez, a Peruvian priest and now a professor at Notre Dame, has written extensively about the church’s call to the margins, and the option for the poor in particular. He emphasizes that the option for the poor starts and ends with a desire to follow the God of Jesus, and that it is rooted in a dedication to the authority of scripture. In the introduction to A Theology of Liberation, he outlines how God’s character, and love for all of us, is revealed throughout the Old and New Testaments in the special way God is present to those who suffer. He writes: “The entire Bible, beginning with the story of Cain and Abel, mirrors God’s predilection for the weak and abused of human history. This preference brings out the gratuitous or unmerited character of God’s love. The same revelation is given in the evangelical Beatitudes, for they tell us with the utmost simplicity that God’s predilection for the poor, the hungry, and the suffering is based on God’s unmerited goodness to us.” Opting for the poor means recognizing the biblical theme of God’s attention to those who are devalued, forgotten, and abused, and following that lead into friendship with those who suffer.
It means recognizing, as Fr. Gustavo outlines in his elegant book, On Job, that to speak about love in the face of intense suffering can be a morally precarious thing to do, and that true hope endures the pain of the world. In this way the option for the poor is deeply incarnational. It helps us make sense of how the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth ennobles us, taking the difficulties of this broken world very seriously, while still leaning into the age to come. Opting for the poor also means acknowledging that every one of us is utterly dependent on God, and we are bound up together in the history of this one world we all share.
Fr. Gustavo, in A Theology of Liberation, suggests that opting for the poor is an act of worship and obedience, which requires humility. He writes, “The option for the poor is an option for the God of the kingdom whom Jesus proclaims to us.… It is a theocentric, prophetic option that has its roots in the unmerited love of God and is demanded by this love.” Appeals to the unmerited goodness of God recall Pieper’s focus on leisure. Only a person with a leisurely spirit, who is willing to embrace her neediness, can accept God’s unmerited grace. But like Pieper’s description of leisure as acceptance of God’s gifts, Fr. Gustavo defines Christian praxis as active reception of God’s holiness: “Christian life is commitment in the form of an acceptance of the gift of the reign of God.” We must choose to accept our responsibility to one another and to grow in Christlike faithfulness.
As the people who worship the God of Jesus, we must be defined in large part by our ability to well love the materially, relationally, and spiritually poor. In fact it is problematic even to speak about the church making a choice to love the poor. Part of our ongoing conversion to fuller life in the Spirit, and deeper fellowship with the Church catholic, will include a growing conviction that if God is among the poor, then that is where the church is, too. Making a preferential option for the poor is part of what it means to make our lives “living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God,” and what it means to be the people of God.