Built on Injustice

Discussion Questions 

1. Read Habakkuk 2. Then read the devotional below, “Built on Injustice.” 

2. The Common English Bible offers an alternative translation of Habakkuk 2:12: “Pity the one building a city with bloodshed and founding a village with injustice.” What roots of injustice exist in the place where you live? 

3. How do you experience bias in yourself? From others? 

4. What do you need to bring to God in your prayers today? 

Devotional 

[Shall not everyone say about them,] “Alas for you who build a town by bloodshed and found a city on iniquity!” – Habakkuk 2:12 (NRSV) 

Every year, my smallish town in Pennsylvania holds the earliest Halloween parade in the area. On the second Tuesday in October, participants including Scout troops, Little League teams, dance studios, and various bands line up near two downtown schools and follow the route, handing or throwing candy to people lined up along the curbs, many holding buckets out to collect whatever is being distributed. 

This year, one parent arrived home and looked at their child’s collection of goodies only to find a card advertising Women of the Ku Klux Klan, including their claim to be an “invisible empire.” 

Local news reported responses from the neighborhood around the parade route that I found heartening, celebrating the diversity of residents. Yet we live in an area where the Klan thrived in the past, and if this town wasn’t a “sundown town,” we live right next to one. 

I’m struck by the prophet’s warning in Habakkuk. As I watch division in the United States deepen, I also note that groups and individuals motivated by prejudice feel ever more emboldened to speak publicly. They know—and perhaps revel in the knowledge—that the collective “we” built this town, this nation, on the injustice of colonization and human trafficking.  

It’s too easy to ignore what’s going on elsewhere on a beautiful autumn day. A map of ICE activity across the country shows central Pennsylvania as a blank space. Only one local news outlet covered the Halloween parade story. Yet our history is our history, and is our present, and will be our future unless we change it.  

Prayer
Holy One, give us the courage to face our history, to acknowledge collective wrongdoing, and to become new people in you. Amen.