This week exploded with the demotion of Toronto Police Superintendent Stacy Clark to the rank of Inspector because she had confessed to being the mastermind of a cheating scheme by giving confidential information to junior police officers before promotion interviews. At the heart of her actions is the social divide of race. She is the first black female to attain to her rank in the Toronto Police Services, and the ones she helped to cheat were all junior black police officers. The tensions between the issues of the immorality of cheating and the immorality of racial prejudice were felt throughout the process of adjudication; crowds gathered in the courtroom in support of Clark; anti-racism rhetoric was spoken to the media at every turn. In the end, the disciplinary hearing decided to penalize the officer on the basis of cheating alone, igniting a sigh of disappointment from the crowd gathered. What caught my attention was the comment of the chief adjudicator in her case who stated in her judgment, “There is no room in policing for noble cause corruption.” That is an interesting reference for what was occurring here. Anti-racism is a noble cause; cheating, especially by those who police others against cheating, is a corruption.
I thought about the role of the believer in a world filled with the corruption called sin. While we’re not called to police the world, we are called to live differently from it. Racism is a corruption of the true humanity that God created in every person; cheating is a corruption of the way of truth that God calls each person to walk. If we argued that one corruption justifies another, we have drowned ourselves in the whirlpool of moral compromise that leads to even more corruption. And all corruption has its consequences. The officers who were aided in their cheating have all been disciplined and have waylaid their careers. The promotion process by which police officers are given a higher rank has been, in the words of the tribunal, “perverted in its integrity.” When faced with the confluence of the world’s corruption, what is the believer in Christ to do? I draw the lesson from our Lord Jesus when He was confronted with the corruption of funding Rome’s war machinery versus the corruption of lying and scheming to escape the paying of Roman taxes. Should we pay Rome taxes which they use to oppress others? Read Mark 12:13-17. The same account is given in Matthew and Luke, all of which detail how Jesus arrived at the answer. He said, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” The word “render” is “to give back to”. What’s our response to the choosing of immoralities? The answer: Return to God – all your heart, all your mind, all your strength, all your soul. Do that which God calls you as salt and light in a corrupted, darkened world. Don’t march by the same drumbeat. Love the truth. Love righteousness. Know His Word. Walk in it. And stay away from corruption.
Just Church
In the midst of a corrupted world, we need to be His church. “The vision of Just Church is to establish a church in just the way Christ called the church to be – true to His Word, loving Him, loving one another, and loving the lost.”
