Will We Let Justice Flow?

Being Black in America has never been an easy proposition. While the Black experience in this nation has known moments of profound hope—emancipation proclaimed, rights codified, barriers broken—we must not deceive ourselves into believing that the original sin embedded in the American enterprise has failed to leave an indelible mark on the nation’s soul. That sin has shaped not only institutions and laws, but the collective psyche of every generation and every person whose feet have touched this soil.

For those who fail to meet the Euro-normative aesthetic expectations of a nation that proclaims equality while denying the full humanity of many, oppression is not a distant memory preserved in textbooks or confined to foreign lands. Oppression is an unwelcome yet familiar companion, walking alongside the ever-elusive promise of hope. For those who experience it firsthand, oppression is lived, embodied, and transmitted—felt in neighborhoods, classrooms, courtrooms, grocery stores, and even sanctuaries.

The challenge before us is not merely recognizing that racism has been woven into our collective history. The deeper challenge is acknowledging that we have all been shaped by a habitual refusal to reckon with the parts of our story that unsettle us—parts that, if faced honestly, would illuminate the inequities still embedded in our present. This selective amnesia fosters the dangerous illusion that suffering for many was rare, incidental, exaggerated, or long resolved—that entire classes of people somehow escaped the violence of systems deliberately designed to benefit the few while dividing the many. When memory is curated for comfort rather than truth, injustice quietly reproduces itself.

And injustice does not reproduce itself in abstraction. It takes form in policies, in priorities, and in public spending. What we refuse to remember shapes what we are willing to fund. What we deny in history reappears in budgets.

The discomfort of this conversation does not absolve us from confronting the reality before us. Regardless of political persuasion, we live in a nation that spends far more on incarceration than on nurturing the minds and futures of its children. We allocate enormous resources to punishment while rationing healthcare, underfunding education, and constraining pathways to human dignity and communal flourishing. Such patterns demand moral examination. Budgets are moral documents; they disclose our collective theology—what we fear, what we trust, and whom we deem worthy of investment. These disparities are not accidental; they are the fruit of deliberate choices. And choices reveal our deepest priorities.

As social safety nets are weakened and programs designed to support human flourishing are dismantled, the promise of God-given and inalienable rights—life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—becomes increasingly fragile, particularly for those already pushed to the margins. Scripture insists that human dignity is not conferred by the state but rooted in the imago Dei (Genesis 1:27). If every person bears the image of God, then any system that erodes that dignity stands under divine scrutiny.

So we are left to ask, with both urgency and lament: Where, then, is justice? And for whom is liberty truly secured? When the prophet Amos cried, “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24, CEB), he was not offering poetic sentiment but issuing a divine indictment. What would it mean for justice to roll—not selectively, not episodically—but continuously? Who would be lifted? Who would be unsettled?

It is tempting, in moments of visible crisis, to compare the deployment of federal force in American streets to authoritarian regimes abroad. But for communities that have long lived under surveillance, suspicion, and disproportionate punishment, such images are neither novel nor shocking. For those who know the underside of the justice system, what we witness today is not an aberration but a continuation—patterns and practices that have existed, adapted, and endured throughout this ongoing experiment we call the United States of America. The chorus of the oppressed has long joined the psalmist in asking, “How long will you forget me, Lord? Forever?” (Psalm 13:1). The question echoes still—not because God is absent, but because injustice remains stubbornly present.

Our Native and Indigenous siblings do not need to look overseas to understand the trauma of removal, land theft, and cultural erasure. Japanese American families who were incarcerated during World War II know the cost of fear baptized as patriotism. Black communities targeted, monitored, and disrupted in the name of “security” know what it means to be presumed dangerous by default. Appalachian miners, exploited and discarded when profit margins demanded it, know how power protects itself. And the names—Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tamir Rice, Emmett Till, Medgar Evers—alongside countless others known only to grieving families and faithful ancestors—testify that this story is neither ancient nor resolved.

We, then, live in a moment that is neither new nor unprecedented. Racism is not a glitch in the system, nor merely an unfortunate social habit. It is not simply ignorance, nor only individual animus. Racism is sin. It is willful participation in a lie about who belongs, who bears worth, and whose lives are expendable. And the answer to sin is not denial or defensiveness; not silence, symbolic gestures, public relations statements, or partisan arguments. The answer to sin is repentance—repentance that is personal, communal, and systemic. For sin is never merely private; it distorts relationships, institutions, and imaginations alike. None of us stands outside its reach.

Because racism is sin, it is not merely a sociological problem to be studied, nor a political inconvenience to be managed. It is a moral crisis that demands spiritual clarity. The sages and prophets of old never wasted time debating whether injustice existed; that has always been self-evident. The deeper question has always been this: Will we see? Will we remember? Will we act?

The prophet Micah does not leave us guessing about what is required: “to do justice, embrace faithful love, and walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8, CEB). Justice is not abstract. Faithful love is not sentimental. Humility is not passive. If justice is more than rhetoric, it must take shape in laws, budgets, and institutions. If faithful love is more than charity, it must shape how economic systems treat the vulnerable. If humility is genuine, it must restrain those who hold power and compel them toward accountability.

And this is not foreign to our civic tradition. At its best, American democracy has acknowledged that self-governance requires moral and intellectual formation. In a 1924 address, President Calvin Coolidge observed that “the institutions of our country rest upon faith in the people” and that citizenship requires not only action, but intelligent action—formed by education, reflection, and lifelong learning. He described the meeting house and the schoolhouse as twin foundations of democracy.

If that vision carries any weight, then faith communities and educational institutions cannot retreat into silence. The meeting house must still shape consciences. The schoolhouse must still cultivate discernment. And citizens must refuse the comfort of ignorance.

It should go without saying that racist behaviors, dehumanizing language, and corrosive tropes have no place in a nation that pledges “liberty and justice for all” and claims to live under God. Yet history reminds us that whenever power seeks to preserve itself, fear becomes a convenient instrument and exclusion a persuasive strategy. The apostle Paul reminds us that “we aren’t fighting against human enemies” (Ephesians 6:12, CEB), but against powers and principalities—systems and structures that distort human relationships and obscure the image of God in one another. These destructive narratives persist not because they are true, but because they protect interests.

If lies are sustained by distortion, they are undone by truth. If injustice is perpetuated through forgetting, it is resisted through remembering.

To remember is not to dwell in despair. It is to resist erasure. It is to tell the truth about what has been so that it does not continue unchecked. When Israel remembered Egypt, they were refusing Pharaoh’s logic. When the church remembers the cross, we proclaim that violence does not have the final word. Sacred memory makes truth present again. It calls us back to who we are and whose we are.

Hope divorced from truth is sentimentality. Hope grounded in truth becomes courage.

Resurrection does not deny crucifixion; it passes through it. It names the wound before proclaiming new life. If the wounds of this nation are real, healing cannot come through denial. It must come through repentance, repair, and renewal.

But repentance is not the same as guilt.

Guilt turns inward. It paralyzes. It deflects. It centers the self. And guilt has no grand use in the life of faith. Conviction, however, tells the truth without collapsing into shame. Conviction opens the door to transformation. Conviction asks not, “How do I protect myself?” but “How do I participate in repair?”

If racism is sin, justice is not optional. If every person bears the image of God, dignity is not negotiable. If we have inherited a story marked by distortion, we are called to reshape it. Silence is not neutrality—it is participation.

Sin does not have the final word. Grace does. Yet grace is not passive. It calls. It convicts. It compels.

The question, then, is not whether God desires justice. Scripture has answered that already. The question is whether we will become the kind of people who desire it enough to pursue it—personally, communally, systemically. Whether we will remember truthfully. Repent honestly. Act courageously.

Justice will not roll down on its own.

Will we let it flow through us?