Love Mercy, Do Justice, Walk Humbly with Your God

(Note: Video (left) updated Monday (a.m.), July 28, 2008.)

The great banners running vertically down the façade of Lambeth Palace read: “Love Mercy, Do Justice.” The third piece of the touchstone verse from Micah, walk humbly with your God, provided the third part of Archbishop Rowan Williams’ meditation on why we bishops and spouses were marching in support of the Millennium Development Goals, MDGs,  on London Day, last Thursday.

It was the day we were given tea by the Queen at Buckingham Palace, a day filled with beauty and hospitality. This march in support of the fulfillment of the Millennium Development Goal promise: the halving of extreme poverty around the globe by the year 2015, however, was what gave the day meaning.

Since the General Convention of The Episcopal Church in 2003, support for the MDGs has been growing within the church. The Episcopal Church as a whole has embraced the 0.7% giving to Millennium Goals, as have over 80 dioceses. Giving at the 0.7% level for the relief of global suffering, to meet the core needs of the poorest of the earth has become a spiritual discipline for our church, for the majority of our dioceses, for parishes, evidenced in Lenten programs, Christian formation programs for children and adults, and for thousands of individual Episcopalians.

The major horizon that has not been reached, the one without which we will most certainly not meet these goals by 2015, is advocacy directed at our government. The United States does not give to the United Nations MDG program at the 0.7% level. Most Americans, generous and good-hearted as I find us to be, believe that we give for the relief of global suffering at much higher rates than we in fact do – most think we give somewhere around 20% to these causes. In reality, even giving at the 0.7% level has not been endorsed by the government.

The need is for people of faith to use their influence to call our government to do justice and love mercy. Given our separation of church and state, the government can leave the walking humbly with God up to the church, a joyful yoke for us.

In 2005, “MDG+5” as we called it, I was part of an interfaith vigil on Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza outside the offices of the United Nations in New York. We were there while the United Nations were meeting to continue to call attention to the Goals. The goals are interrelated, and staged for achievement year-by-year leading up to their fulfillment in 2015. One of the goals, maternal health, had been targeted for achievement by 2005. We knew then that the goal had not been met. This is because very few of the member nations had given at the 0.7% level that makes the total goal achievement possible.

In September of this year, when the UN meets again, only seven years from the target date of 2015, there will be many of your bishops making the journey to New York to make public witness of our support for the Goals. We will be inviting clergy and laity from all our dioceses to come and support the effort, to make a big presence at the Plaza.

You will be joined around the world by Anglican bishops (see video below) and the people of God whom they serve, each keeping vigil and making public witness in their own countries. I am part of a group here at the Lambeth Conference working to coordinate this effort.

The MDG March in London on July 24 was a sign of hope at the Lambeth Conference. We will tend the flames of this hope so that it catches fire everywhere, as Jesus hoped, (“I have come to bring fire to the earth and how I wish it were blazing already”) and we help our Brother Jesus “make poverty history.”