One Person to Another--January 3, 2022

One Person To Another--January 3, 2022

"James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes in the Dispersion: Greetings." [James 1:1]

It begins with one person, reaching out to other ordinary people, all trying to serve God, and all of them convinced that following the way of Jesus can make that happen.

Let's just start there.  This--this new series in our devotions together, as well as this book of the New Testament--is about people daring to live out the good news they have found in Jesus.  It is about people seeking to embody the Gospel.  And therefore we are always going to have to come back to the question, in some form or another, "How do we live this out?"  The first organized communities of Jesus' disciples called themselves, "followers of the Way" (see the book of Acts on that), which suggests at the very least that they saw their faith as something concrete, practical, lived, and without a doubt, embodied.  And so here, even in the very first words of the book, we start with one embodied disciple, whom we know as "James," reconnecting with other disciples, who are all seeking to serve God together.

Beyond that, let's agree to leave other preconceptions and baggage aside for the moment, especially about this book in particular.  Some folks get antsy about even touching the book of James. They might remember that another disciple and older brother in the faith, Martin Luther, just couldn't help but hear some passages of this book as an attack on Paul's theology of being justified by grace through faith. Luther himself called this book "an epistle of straw" and came very close to proposing that the church cut it out of the Bible (he didn't, which suggests to me that ultimately Luther was willing to be humble and open-minded enough to consider that he didn't have all the answers and that there could be worth in things he could not see the value of).  Other folks get hung up on whether this "James" whose name is attached to the book is the same "James" named elsewhere as "the brother of the Lord," or one of the twelve apostles named "James" (there were two in that group), or whether he was just an ordinary member of an early Christian community who also shared the name.  (Fun fact: although our English translations refer to this person and book as "James," the actual name in Greek is "Iakobos," which is more literally akin to our name "Jacob," and which would already have been a popular Jewish name because of the patriarch Jacob, later named Israel.  For our purposes, we'll just call him "James," but you can think of him as a "Jake" if you like, too.) James, for his part, doesn't say anything more about himself than merely that he is a servant of God and of Jesus, so maybe that's all we need to worry about.

It is so very easy for us church folk to overcomplicate the Gospel or turn it into something abstract and intellectual--just head knowledge, or mere feelings and "spiritual" emotions.  James and his book here are going to help us resist that temptation. He meets us as an ordinary person, with calloused hands from labor, tired feet from walking, and wrinkle lines worn into his face from years of living.  And he finds us much the same--equipped with these bodies, these hands, these feet, and these lives of ours, in which the Good News takes shape.

If you have found yourself, now or ever, let down by talk from Respectable Religious people whose words didn't match their actions, or whose love didn't look much like Jesus (and let's be honest, we've all been there), then come along on this journey together, with our older brother James keeping us honest and training us more authentically to embody the Good News that has already been given to us.  Come, one person, just as you are, reaching out to other ordinary people who are daring to live the Good News of Jesus.

O God of all, we deeply want to serve you, and we are convinced that Jesus makes that possible for us.  So help us, with the help of older guides along the way, to embody the love of Jesus, and to serve you as his disciples.