Prayer of the Day: Blessed Lord God, you have caused the holy scriptures to be written for the nourishment of your people. Grant that we may hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that, comforted by your promises, we may embrace and forever hold fast to the hope of eternal life, through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Gospel Acclamation: Alleluia. The Spirit of the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, and to proclaim release to the captives. Alleluia.
Additional Scriptures: Luke 3:1-6; Psalm 85: 11-13; Matthew 5:17; John 16:33; John 8:31-32; John 1:14, John 1:1-5; Jeremiah 31:33; Luke 10:18; Deuteronomy 6:4-6
True Justice in a Post-Truth World
Where is truth? How do I discern truth? How do I act upon truth to do justice? What is true justice? What is true eco-justice?
On January 26, 2025, many preachers throughout America and the whole earth, in churches who follow the Revised Common Lectionary, will be preaching on Luke 4. In the preceding week, January 20, is the date the 47th President of the United States of America, truly and duly elected according to law, is sworn into office. In light of the challenges facing the world today, many preachers, followers of the Way of the Christ, especially in the context of Eco-faith and Eco-justice, might find themselves struggling with the challenge of crafting a message consistent with the Prayer of the Day: leading our assemblies of worshipers to eat and digest and receive nourishment in the Living Word, allowing God’s promises to comfort us, that we may continue to embrace and hold fast to the hope of the coming of the Kyros Kingdom, even here and now, eternally here in this place, even as truth seems to have gone on holiday.
Many of us are dealing with our own bewilderment, angst, anger, grief, dismay, deep fears for the survival of the true work of the Church in the world, and in terms of eco-faith, for the survival of the world itself. What if anything can a preacher even say about the election, about the future of Eco-faith, even the future of survival of humans on this planet, the future of the United States government, the strongest government on earth, this 239 ½ year experiment in democracy called the United States of America? Even if you just ignore it, how will this context affect the unconscious process informing your preaching?
I emphatically am not talking about electoral politics, who anyone voted for, or if they even voted. I am talking about the impending potential impact of government upon our soul journeys individually, and together as Church, and about how our Gospel might suggest a response to this impact. One might easily believe, but yet be reluctant to proclaim in worship, that truth, emet, seems to at least be on holiday, if not have disappeared altogether, as perhaps we are beginning a Post-Truth Era, a Post-Truth World. We are not only challenged by Post-Truth; we are challenged by Post-Literacy, the ignorance inherent in truth-ignoring, bias confirming information bubbles; and we are also challenged by Post-Volition, the apparent inability of so many to take effective, truthful action as children of God in any sort of true direction.
While not talking about electoral politics, I most certainly am talking about how the true Christian Way relates to governmental and political powers that affect eco-justice and eco-politics, and how this affects God’s call to the Church as we understand it. I also harken back to pre-World War II Germany and the world of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and of Bertolt Brecht, in the fervent hope that we are not doomed to repeat the history we do not understand.
My own lens or prism is through a long search, before I ever even realized it, for “sedeq,” for God’s true justice. I have been a legal professional for over 50 years. I was a Minnesota state trial judge in a small town, Hibbing, Minnesota for over 36 years, and have since reflected on the experience for several more years. In the church, I have been a commissioned lay leader, certified spiritual director, and occasional preacher. I continue to discover over time how my own soul journey is informed so profoundly by framing in this manner this question, this quest: how do I (how does anyone) respect and follow law, and yet do true justice? Following law versus doing justice, not only as a judge but as a follower of the Christ. How can I allow the Spirit to work through me so that my mishpat will reveal and incarnate the emet of sedeq?
The effect of governmental power upon God’s will for the Church, the tension between them, is as old as the Gospel. America, our country, was founded on religious freedom, yet certainly not upon “Christian Nationalism,” which I submit is an oxymoron by definition. The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776, 239 ½ years ago:
“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all [humans] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
I grew up in the same town as Bob Dylan, although several years later, and I also stayed there a lot longer (unlike Jesus in Nazareth). Over 40 years ago Dylan wrote a song called “Jokerman”, full of prophetic images, some as follows:
… Freedom just around the corner for you
But with the truth so far off, what good will it do?
Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune
Bird fly high by the light of the moon
Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman
…False-hearted judges dying in the webs that they spin
Only a matter of time till night comes steppin’ in
…It’s a shadowy world, skies are slippery gray
A woman just gave birth to a prince today and dressed him in scarlet
He’ll put the priest in his pocket, put the blade to the heart
Take the motherless children off the street
And place them at the feet of a harlot
Oh, Jokerman, you know what he wants
Oh, Jokerman, you don’t show any response
Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune
Bird fly high by the light of the moon
Oh, oh, oh Jokerman
Who is this Jokerman? Could it be in a sense the personification of forces of evil unleashed in our post-truth world today, and perhaps for each of us, those same forces prowling around our individual inner soul journeys?
Lectionary Texts
Nehemiah 8
So notable is the great passion and mourning-into-joy bursting forth from the Israelite people as they listened to Ezra read the written word of Law, the Torah, bringing their hearts back home from exile as a spiritual community in the great Restoration. They embraced the Living Word, and unbeknownst to them, on behalf of us adopted children (Gentiles), in so doing they also embraced the Word Made Flesh, “Logos sarx egeneto,” John 1:14, present from the beginning of time, John 1:1-5.
So many “re” words come to mind, in addition to “Restoration.” Repent, return, remember, reconnect, reform, reorganize, respect, revere, rejoice, restore. It is frankly astonishing how this at times wayward nation, from way back to the Exodus when Moses first delivered the written word of Law to them, how they lovingly embraced this very foundation of Scripture, the Torah, still today our Torah in Christ, the basic foundational written Law of our Lord for humans. It is almost as if they come to see it for the very first time, as a “new thing,” Isaiah 43:19; as the New Covenant, Jeremiah 31:33, “…I will put my law within them And I will write it on their hearts….”
Perhaps in our Church of the Way, as the Body of Christ in our modern “post-truth” world, we one day soon will have similar occasion to return, repent and be restored (before it’s too late) to the true justice (sedeq), the eco-justice that our Lord wills for us and calls us to.
Psalm 19
Psalm 19 first proclaims the glory of the Natural Law inherent in the heavenly bodies our Lord has created as of Day One of Creation, Genesis 1:1, according to ancient Semitic cosmogony, showing how God brought an orderly universe out of primordial chaos. (New American Bible, Personal Study edition, p.1)
“The heavens declare the glory of God;
the firmament proclaims [Creator’s] handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no word or sound;
no voice is heard;
Yet their report goes forth through all the earth,
Their message, to the ends of the world.” Ps. 19:1-5
Creator’s work is proclaimed silently, voicelessly, powerfully, to the ends of the world. The creation proclaimed is emet, truth. The true justice of this creation derives from Natural Law, wordless law. When Jesus was in the wilderness, when John the Baptizer was in the wilderness, when David and other shepherds tended their sheep in the wilderness, when they looked to the heavens, they beheld, as we do today, the Creator’s awesome wondrous loving natural works.
St. Augustine, 1600 years ago as he beheld it all from his perch in North Africa, said:
“I asked the earth, the sea and the deeps, heaven, the sun, the moon and the stars…. My questioning of them was my contemplation, and their answer was their beauty…. They do not change their voice, that is their beauty, if one person is there to see and another to see and to question…. Beauty appears to all in the same way but is silent to one and speaks to the other…. They understand it who compare the voice received on the outside with the truth that lies within.” The Confessions of St. Augustine (adapted), pp. 234-35 (48)
Augustine speaks of beauty as being the voice of wordless creation and the truth that lies within. While he does use the word “understand,” caveat here, he also famously said, “Si comprehendis, non est Deus,” meaning “if you comprehend, it is not God.” (Sermon 67 on the New Testament.) So always there is mystery and wonder flowing from the heavens, as truth, emet, springs from the fertile soil of earth.
Psalm 19 then goes on to extol the written Word of law, the Torah, vs. 7 and following, written law as perfect, reviving the soul, rejoicing the heart, enlightening the eyes, more to be desired than gold. Especially note the second part of verse 9: “…the judgments (mishpat) of the Lord are true (emet), and righteous (sedeq) altogether.”
Verse 9 calls forth a basic premise: If God’s law brings forth judgments based on truth that are altogether true justice, then it follows that any human judgments not based on truth, or based on that which is untrue, most certainly cannot accord with law nor bring forth justice. Big lies, embraced by post-truth authoritarianism, will lead judgments to stray from Natural Law and from Torah, and cannot lead to true justice, cannot lead to the sedeq founded in emet. Truth matters, truth brings freedom, John 8:32.
Harkening back to the Declaration of Independence, apparently Thomas Jefferson was familiar with Psalm 19, (“… Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God…”) and perhaps it was Creator’s plan to allow him the discernment of the true justice inherent in God’s law that was crafted it into the bedrock foundation of our country.
This connection between emet and sedeq is beautifully written in Psalm 85:10-11:
Steadfast love (hesed) and truth (emet,) will meet;
Justice (sedeq) and peace (shalom) will kiss;
Truth (emet) will spring up from the earth,
And justice (sedeq) will look down from heaven.
As Creator’s children tend the sacred soil of our earth, we allow truth, emet, to spring up in the seeds we plant, physically and spiritually, as eco-faith followers of the word, thus calling forth the Creator’s compassionate, righteous justice, sedeq, so that, Ps.85-12-13:
The Lord will give what is good
And our land will yield its increase.
Sedeq, (justice) will go before him,
And will make a path for his steps.
Bertolt Brecht lived in the Nazi Germany of the 1930s and wrote a play, Life of Galileo in 1938, about the conflict between scientific truth found in Natural Law and the non- truth (big lie) being dictated by the authoritarian rulers of the day. Galileo was a scientist who in the 1600s dared to prove that Copernicus was correct, that the earth really did orbit the sun, contrary to established doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, which had great worldly governmental power at the time. The traditional church dogma or doctrine was based in large part on a literal reading of Psalm 19 (the sun runs its course with joy, rising and setting in the tent set for it by the Lord in the heavens), and was enforced by the Inquisition. Galileo was forced under threat of execution to recant his true scientific findings and live out his life under house arrest, yet he managed to smuggle out his work for the benefit of future generations. As playwright, Brecht’s message for his time, true in Galileo’s day as it is today, is that real truth matters, that God’s truth, emet, cannot be dispelled by edict of the ruling authoritarian powers, Hitler or anyone else, and it is God’s will that God’s followers find a way for this truth, emet, to spring forth from the earth.
A contemporary of Brecht in Nazi Germany was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a theologian and anti-Nazi dissident who challenged the ruling powers of the day and thereby met his demise. A new biopic movie, Bonhoeffer, was released in November of 2024. Whether the film authentically told the truth about his life has been disputed. Some have attempted to use it to justify “Christian Nationalism.” The reaction to such efforts from the creators and cast of the movie is a statement quoting from a Bonhoeffer favorite, the Beatitudes, Matthew 5:3-10, and to then say “…. To us, the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer tells a tale about: speaking up against totalitarian regimes; and acting against systems of lies, bigotry, Nationalism, racism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia. To defend our history and culture from appropriation, historical revisionism. His legacy teaches us to always look out for the marginalized in our society….” Beautifully said, and a perfect statement for our Luke 4 Gospel.
One natural law derived from the cosmic truth of heavenly bodies, quite meaningful in my own journey, is the law of gravity. Yes, gravity! I once saw a sign in a restaurant, a take-off on old promotions for a reduced highway speed limit (“55: Not Only is it a Good Idea, it’s the Law!”), reading: “Gravity: Not Only is it a Good Idea, it’s the Law!” I always get a kick out of that. I would often use this in my judicial day job with kids in juvenile court to emphasize the lesson that Natural Law applies to all of us:
Judge: (Holds up pen.) See this pen? What do you suppose would happen if I let go of it?
Juvenile: (a little annoyed and confused) It’s gonna drop?
Judge: Are you sure? Why don’t we try it just be sure. (Judge lets go of pen. Pen drops.) Hey, it dropped! Imagine that! Now why do you suppose that happened?
Juvenile: Gravity? (Often with slight eyeroll.)
Judge: Yes, the law of gravity! “Gravity: Not only is it a good idea, it’s the law!” and you know what? It applies to you too, same as this pen, same as all the rest of us. No matter how hard you try, how high you jump, boom, you come right back to earth. Out of this world you cannot fall. So maybe it might be a good idea to figure out how get along in the world as it is, a little better than you have been, ‘cause, just like gravity, the way the world works is probably not gonna change too much just for you.”
The idea in my gravity lesson is to serve true justice by giving a kid a chance to avoid lasting punitive consequences and learn to correct a mistake. Emet leading to sedeq with hesed; true justice, sedeq with compassion, based on the truth of the natural law of gravity.
1 Corinthians 12
The Corinthians passage about gifts of the Spirit serving the Body of Christ is an important precursor to the Gospel story where Jesus returns from his time of solitude in the wilderness to reenter the solidarity of his home community. As our Lord creates each of us to be unique and beautiful iterations of God’s eternal glory, we must return our unique gifts as we move from solitude to solidarity.
We need one another, we need each other ’s gifts, to be able to appreciate emet and sedeq, to see what truth and justice looks like, to discern what the Lord is telling us, and to act accordingly. I love the words of the 11th Step of the 12 Step Program: “… sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God …, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.” This mirrors the Lord’s Prayer: bring forth your Kingdom, may your will be done, as in heaven, so also on earth. A Kingdom of true justice, with each one of us living out who we truly are according to our gifts.
Luke 4
After his baptism Jesus went into the wilderness for 40 days, then came forth from this time of solitude to begin his ministry of solidarity in the community. This reading is calendar-wise on the Epiphany side of one bookend around the great Incarnation Christmas story, with the other bookend being the Advent story of John the Baptizer, when “the word of God came to [him] in the wilderness,” Luke 3:2; Second Sunday of Advent.
While we know nothing of what interaction the two men may have had from the time John leapt in Elizabeth’s womb until the time of Jesus’ baptism, the similarities of their wilderness time are striking. In the Advent story “the word of God came to John” in the wilderness. He then went back to the people and proclaimed the words of the prophet as it is written, Isaiah 40. Jesus, the living Word of God made flesh, went from the wilderness back to the people of Galilee, even to his hometown, and proclaimed the words of the prophet as it is written, Isaiah 61. Both men enter a movement from deep solitude to strongly Spirit-filled ministry in solidarity with their community. Brian McClaren, in Do I Stay Christian? A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed and the Disillusioned, 2022, speaks of this solidarity at p.135:
“Solidarity… going to the deepest and most genuine core of your
Christian tradition and there finding a love that connects you to everyone
and everything, everywhere.”
Both John and Jesus engage in movement from the solitude of the wilderness to the solidarity of bringing their missions forth.
In his return to community in Nazareth, his hometown, Jesus proclaims from Isaiah, a Messianic passage, and says this is fulfilled, in effect saying, here I am folks, the Messiah, the fulfillment of this prophecy. “I am the Messiah.” As the story continues in the next week’s Gospel, he was not exactly received with open arms. One can imagine what many were thinking, even as they were first amazed, then yet, wait a minute, “Is this not Joseph’s son?” He spoke plain and humble truth, and yet they were quickly stirred with rage. Notably, he did not assert that he had come to “Make Israel Great Again” or that he was somehow going to be a worldly powerful political messianic leader. He chose a prophetic passage that proclaims the “Anointed One” to be for the powerless anawim: the poor, the captives, the blind, the oppressed.
So what guidance do these ministries of John and Jesus, bookending the incarnation in our seasons of the Church year, stories that are 2,000 years old, what do they have to tell us today in a world increasingly ruled by the worldly power politics of scarcity as manipulated by post-truth political power, rather than by the Spirit-led “politics” of abundance being truly, justly proclaimed out the solidarity of mutual love in the Body of Christ? Where the world is increasingly burning and flooding and being bombed; where the anawim of today are starving and abused; where the world, when we truly look, appears to be reaching an “eco-boiling point?”
In this post-truth era, are we not being called forth, both as individuals from our solitude and as Body of Christ in our solidarity, with all of the gifts of the Spirit that we can muster, and in many various ways as the Lord allows, to proclaim: to allow the Spirit to speak truth to power, rather than to ignore and thereby allow power to speak its own quasi post-truth?
It is undeniable that God wills the church to support those who are powerless and in need, whether it leads to worldly prosperity or not. The compassion that comes from loving the Lord with all our hearts, souls, and strength, Deut.6, compels us to reflect the light of revelation illuminating true justice, emet-sedeq, as followers of the Nazarene who emerged from the wilderness. May we also always be attuned to using our collective gifts to courageously fight against post-truth, non-truth, “alternative facts,” misperception of disinformation. For example, how might the ELCA, “Evangelical Lutheran Church of America,” be called to proclaim the true meaning of the word “evangelical” as we understand it. Even the word “Christian” seems to be on holiday. What does true justice require of true followers of the Way? In eco-faith terms, does not the true justice of Christian solidarity compel the intentional fostering of societal lifestyles in harmony with God’s Nature?
Conclusion
From Psalm 19 I have referenced truth, emet, inherent in God’s law, both natural and written, and have used the law of gravity as a whimsical example. Yet, while the ancient law is our foundation, it is should not limit our eternal destination.
Jesus did say in truth, emet, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish but to fulfill.” Matthew 5:17. Yet perhaps the whole story of the Incarnation, the Gospel, suggests that fulfillment of the law means that Law is newly illuminated by the Pascal Mystery and thus reclaimed within the law of love as written in The Shema, Deuteronomy 6:4-6. So, concerning gravity, I hope no one is ever discouraged from exploring their full potential within the bounds of the law of love. I recently heard a young girl sing a rendition of the song “Defying Gravity” from the Broadway musical and new movie Wicked, and it really struck me.
“…. Something has changed within me
Something is not the same
I’m through with playing by
The rules of someone else’s game
Too late for second-guessing
Too late to go back to sleep
it’s time to trust my instincts
Close my eyes and leap
It’s time to try defying gravity
I think I’ll try defying gravity
And you can’t pull me down”
As our Lord wills it, may we each uniquely, and together as Church, by grace and love, learn to defy the law of gravity such that in the Pascal Mystery we miraculously allow our Lord to fulfill that law. Jesus did miracles and taught his followers to allow him to perform miracles through them. The Oxford Dictionary defines “miracle” as an “event not explicable by natural or scientific laws … the work of a divine agency.”
An example of our Lord upholding, rather than defying, the law of gravity, comes during Jesus’ time of wilderness solitude when the devil, Luke 4:9-12, quoted Scripture and challenged Jesus to throw himself down from the pinnacle of the temple, and Jesus declined, quoting Deut.6:16 (“You shall not put the Lord your God to the test, as you did at Massah.”). Yet when the Lord so willed, Jesus easily defied gravity, a good example being the miracle of walking on water. Leonard Cohen, Jewish songwriter (most renowned for the beautiful Halleluia), in Suzanne:
Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him
He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them
But he himself was broken, long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone
And you want to travel with him, and you want to travel blind
And then you think maybe you’ll trust him
For he’s touched your perfect body with his mind
We must conclude that our Lord is calling us to allow him to defy gravity through us, as when he sent disciples in pairs on a healing mission and then proclaimed that he “saw Satan fall like lightning from the sky,” Luke 10:18.
For the sake of eco-justice in the world, may we each in our unique solitude, and together in the solidarity of the true Body of Christ, address the Lord’s call that we be agents for true justice in this post-truth world; may we claim in the Spirit of Truth the great joy fostered by a hope that is audacious, defiant, and outrageously, unspeakably courageous, as we “take heart,” for Jesus has “overcome the world.” John 16:33.

David Ackerson
Certified Spiritual Director
Messiah Lutheran Church, Mountain Iron, Minnesota
David Ackerson is a member of Messiah Lutheran Church, Mountain Iron, Minnesota where Rev. Kristin Foster was his pastor for many years. He has been a commissioned lay leader, certified spiritual director, and occasional preacher. He is from Hibbing, heart of the Iron Range, and has lived in or near there most of his life. He is a former Minnesota Judge of District Court chambered in Hibbing for over 36 years.