This chapel marks the beginning of the Pilgrimage Toward Justice symposium. This symposium seeks to challenge you to form your own ideas about justice and how it pertains to your life.

Today we start off with some incredibly straightforward concepts. Isaiah, Micah and Matthew send a clear message: Help those in nee. But how does helping those in need pertain to your life? It pertains because you must make a decision. We live in a time when our consumer culture has obliterated all neutral ground. Silence in compliance. With every decision you make, you take a side.

To support the status quo, to stand idly by, to pretend as if there are not people making less than a dollar an hour, to eat while others go hungry, to not even consider how the masses are controlled by a minimum wage just below the poverty line, to think for one second that the civil rights movement accomplished all of its goals, to do any of these things is to kill.

Whereas before injustice was the goal of the system, now injustice is inherent in the system, a necessary by-product of our consumer demand.

We need the factory workers in Mexico to go hungry in order to save a few dollars on a t-shirt. We demand that the government exploit entire countries because "man, I can't remember the last time i saw gas prices this low!." Because of the way that we define success it is vital for someone else to suffer. in order that we may succeed. In order for someone else to gain, we must lose.

Who is that other person? Corporate executive or factory worker? Rich man or poor man? Isaiah, Micah and Matthew call us to alleviate the very suffering and injustice that we now cause. They call us to use our resources and our voices. We are not called to not do injustice. We are called to do justice.

Be proactive. Speak up and speak out. Empower the less fortunate and fight for the oppressed. We are called to act for justice.

So ask yourself this question: Today, what am I going to consume? Who am I going to kill?