In the summer of 2014, I found myself in an internship at a small church in Johannesburg, South Africa. It was winter there, and the nights would get brutally cold. Each Wednesday night, I worked with a group of volunteers to hand out blankets, soup, and sandwiches to homeless people in the city. 

One Thursday, I woke up to a text from a friend: The police dumped water on the homeless while they were sleeping, and they took the blankets we gave them.

I felt a range of emotions, anger and frustration being at the forefront. I shared the story with anyone who would listen, complaining about the officers’ cruelty. To me, it was an obvious act of injustice. Anyone would be able to see and name that. 

I was surprised, then, when a parishioner in my Bible study, a retired police officer, disagreed. “It is illegal to sleep in those parks. I used to walk with my daughter through those parks. Now, refugees have flooded the city. Crime is up. Isn’t it an injustice that my daughter and her children can’t go walk in those parks without being afraid?” He wasn’t angry. He was using solid statistics about the increase in crime and the relative dangers of the area.  

Our debate, really, was over the definition of justice itself. I rejected his vision of justice in this issue – it was and is reprehensible that police officers would act so atrociously to the homeless, and that the laws the homeless were violating were unjust. I believed that there were better and more humane ways to make the community safer. He likewise rejected my argument – that the rules of the city were inherently unjust.

In the days since the election, I’ve thought a lot about that conversation. I’ve read letters from bishops and pastors, heard sermons, and seen the plethora of posts on Facebook. A common theme is the need for justice. Bishops and pastors alike affirm our “commitment to justice.” Another is the need for some form of unity to emerge, to make space for reconciliation. Both are well-intentioned; both are misguided. 

I’m sure that they are intending to ease the tensions running throughout our church. Calling for justice may seem like a bold statement, but it is effective only insofar as the people hearing the message share the same definition of justice. Every cop in Johannesburg believed, on some level, that they were acting for a more just society. 

The work of justice is work that orders society towards the common good. That is the work of our church members in their everyday lives. I suspect that many of them believe that they are taking up that work by doing what they feel is right and good. I don’t believe I am equivocating when I say that voters are often willing to set aside comments and policies with which they disagree – no matter how vile – if it means their version of justice will come to fruition.  

None of them, I don’t expect, would reject a blanket call for justice. It is a statement that each person can interpret on their own and feel safe to either endorse or to roll their eyes at. Like the call for reconciliation, the call for justice effectively becomes a call to return to the kindness of our Sunday afternoon potlucks. 

Instead of issuing such calls, I think the church should take a posture of repentance, for at least two reasons. First, we have failed to give people tools to discern the common good together. The common good is not something we create. It is a truth that exists that we must learn to recognize. Instead of offering a way to discern it, the church grants permission for people to indulge the worst of our individualist behaviors – the notion that we get to decide what is true, what is just, and what is good. 

Our culture frequently tells us that what is good is a private matter. But the church calls us to a common table, where we expect that the Holy Spirit will “make us one with Christ, one with each other, and one in ministry to all the world.” The work of the church, in this time, is to give people the ability to discern the common good, and to remind them that they cannot find that on their own. 

Second, the church should repent for our desire to eagerly move past tension. Tension is uncomfortable, but it is necessary. We like the absence of tension because it deludes us into thinking that we are on the path towards common good. We also enjoy the excess of tension – conflict – because it, too, deludes us into thinking we are on a path towards the common good, if only we can defeat this group opposing us. 

But tension—particularly those tensions that make us see the gap between how the world is and how the world should be—is a necessary part of forming people to do the work of justice. There should be tension between differing ideas of the common good, because we must be able to articulate that which is part of the common good and that which is not. While we must be careful to not jump to outright conflict, the church should be a place that amplifies tension so that we reclaim our ability to discern what is true and good. 

To be clear, I am not suggesting some sort of lukewarm “all sides have a truth to share” moderation. What I am suggesting is that our responses to the election have demonstrated the failures of the church before the election. We are failing to form people who can discern the common good together. We are failing to give people a language by which they can speak about issues like justice and virtue. We are failing to hold ourselves accountable to the shared work of sitting at a common table in tension as we try to recognize truth around us. 

I ended my conversation with that retired cop. I provoked an argument, and he disengaged. I wish, though, that I had paused for a moment and invited him to read scripture with me. I wish I had committed to reading scripture with him. I wish that we had committed to walking the streets together in prayer. I wish I had kept the discussion in tension rather than the easy move towards conflict. Perhaps then we might have at least started towards understanding justice. At the very least, I would have been more fit to call myself his pastor.