I wasn’t necessarily the biggest fan of seminary. I’m grateful for the education I received at Fuller Theological Seminary, but I feel like I learned just as much actually doing ministry as I did sitting in a classroom. There were a few times, though, that my courses in seminary completely altered how I view God and the Bible. One of those transformative experiences took place in my Christian Ethics class.
I had grown up in the church, but I feel like my Christian Ethics class was the first place that I really learned about justice and injustice in the Bible. It wasn’t even on my radar that God cared about how we treat the least of these. I really didn’t understand how the treatment of the poor and oppressed, around the world and in our own country, mattered to God. Thankfully my eyes were opened in that class and I now know that God is a just God whose anger burns against injustice.
Injustice like what FIFA has allowed to occur in the country of Qatar.
On Tuesday night in Switzerland, Swiss law enforcement officials moved against many current and former members of FIFA’s executive council. Swiss officials worked in conjunction with the United States Department of Justice, which has indicted 14 officials on charges including racketeering, money laundering and conspiracy. Basically, FIFA is a corrupt organization and many of its officials have illegally lined their pockets by accepting bribes and handing out rewards.
Nowhere is this corruption more clear than in FIFA’s selection of Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup. The World Cup is the world’s largest sporting event for the world’s most popular sport. Qatar is a small Middle Eastern nation but, much like the Millennium Falcon, they’ve got it where it counts. Qatar doesn’t have the infrastructure necessary to host the World Cup nor do they have reasonable temperatures in which to play soccer, but they do have a lot of oil and a lot of money, something that made them very attractive to FIFA’s executive council. So instead of hosting the world’s premiere sporting event in a country with the necessary infrastructure and temperatures below 100 degrees, FIFA awarded the World Cup to Qatar.
And while that may be wrong, that only scratches the surface of the injustice taking place in Qatar.
Qatar didn’t have the infrastructure necessary to host the World Cup so it needed to create that infrastructure. That meant building soccer stadiums, hotels, roads and everything else necessary to host hundreds of thousands of visitors. Qatar had the money to pay for the work, but not the workers. So Qatar brought in foreign laborers to build their stadiums and hotels, mostly from Asian countries like Nepal and Sri Lanka.
Those workers are basically indentured slaves. They often have their passports taken away as soon as they enter the country. They are promised one job and one wage, and then given another when they arrive. They are forced to live in squalor, in shanty towns set up for migrant workers. A report from the International Trade Union Confederation estimates that 1,200 workers have died in Qatar since it was awarded the World Cup in 2010.
That sobering number becomes even more harrowing in this image from Deadspin.
FIFA officials haven’t only lined their pockets with millions of dollars, they’ve also dipped them in the spilled blood of the poor and oppressed.
Isaiah 59:1-8 says:
Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save,
nor his ear too dull to hear.
But your iniquities have separated
you from your God;
your sins have hidden his face from you,
so that he will not hear.
For your hands are stained with blood,
your fingers with guilt.
Your lips have spoken falsely,
and your tongue mutters wicked things.
No one calls for justice;
no one pleads a case with integrity.
They rely on empty arguments, they utter lies;
they conceive trouble and give birth to evil.
They hatch the eggs of vipers
and spin a spider’s web.
Whoever eats their eggs will die,
and when one is broken, an adder is hatched.
Their cobwebs are useless for clothing;
they cannot cover themselves with what they make.
Their deeds are evil deeds,
and acts of violence are in their hands.
Their feet rush into sin;
they are swift to shed innocent blood.
They pursue evil schemes;
acts of violence mark their ways.
The way of peace they do not know;
there is no justice in their paths.
They have turned them into crooked roads;
no one who walks along them will know peace.
There’s a lot of injustice in the world, so much that if we were try to acknowledge it all we would be paralyzed. And I don’t think that my little blog can do much against the injustice of a monolithic corporation like FIFA. But any amount of light keeps injustice from hiding in the dark, where it can continue to oppress and imprison. And we may not be able to reform FIFA from our keyboards, but from our knees we can pray for those still enslaved in Qatar and we can pray that God’s justice will roll like a river across our broken world.
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