International Justice Day

July 17th commemorates 11 years since the Rome Statute was adopted leading to the establishment of the International Criminal Court. The holiday may not have made it into Hallmark's calendar or have its own greeting card, but the significance of being able to address such global corruptions as genocide, slavery, and torture in an international court is worth mentioning. I would be far out of my league to discuss the details of this law, or its controversies, but I appreciate the intent as pursuing justice worldwide.

In much the same way Martin Luther King Jr. recognized the need for justice everywhere and not just in his own neighborhood. Responding to criticism that his actions were "untimely and unwise" he wrote a lengthy letter from a jail cell in Birmingham, reminiscent of those written by the Apostle Paul in similar settings. MLK was living in Atlanta but could not sit idly by while discrimination took place in Birmingham.

People often question why I feel lead to move so far away to address poverty and oppression in Bolivia. King answered more eloquently than I ever could in his letter from prison, "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere... Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

"But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here... just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town."

It reminds me of another passage, from which the idea of "spend yourself" came from,"Is this not the fast which I choose, to loosen the bonds of injustice, to undo the bands of the yoke, and to let the oppressed go free and break every yoke? Is it not to divide your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into the house; when you see the naked, to cover him; and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?" -Isaiah 58:6-7