Rejoicing in Reversal--January 10, 2022

Rejoicing in Reversal--January 10, 2022

"Let the believer who is lowly boast in being raised up, and the rich in being brought low, because the rich will disappear like a flower in the field. For the sun rises with its scorching heat and withers the field; its flower falls, and its beauty perishes. It is the same way with the rich; in the midst of a busy life, they will wither away." [James 1:9-11]

This is one of those provocative Bible passages the Respectable Religious Crowd often pretends isn't there.  Especially in a culture like ours, whose conventional wisdom says that making a bigger pile of money is both a worthy life's goal and a sign of "good, decent Christian values," many Americans don't know what to do with an outright condemnation of wealth like this from the pages of Scripture.  And let's admit it: popular religion in our time and place tends to me more interested in what will make you a profit more than what makes you a prophet.  And yet... here is James, throwing down the gauntlet and poking at us with the promise of a great reversal of rich and poor. And he does so, not to alert the wealthy and well-heeled so that they can sequester their fortunes away and hide them in tax shelters or preserve their assets, but because he is convinced that God is behind this grand table-turning that lifts up the lowly.

So, we're left with the question: what are we going to do with James and his words here?  The temptation is to willfully ignore, soft-pedal, or blunt the razor-sharp message he brings here.  We can look for ways to tell ourselves that James doesn't mean what he sounds like he is saying.  We can decide, with folks like Luther, that this is just an "epistle of straw" and that we don't have to listen to it, in favor of other books which don't seem so critical of wealth and prosperity.  Or try and change the subject by criticizing James later on for sounding like he's saying you're saved by works rather than grace, so that we can avoid the way he is making us squirm here in these verses.  Really, any of those approaches are ways of avoiding what James wants us to hear:  in God's ordering of things, it's the ones regarded as nobodies who are to be lifted up, and those who have been hoarding more than they need will find their wealth evaporating like the morning fog.

Now I'm not terribly brave, but I do think we need to muster up the courage to hear James on his own terms, even if it means we are going to have to let go of much we've been told is Respectable Religion about money.  There are lots of voices out there who are sure that being a good Christian will make you richer, or that following Jesus is compatible with being a billionaire, or that the Gospel has nothing to critique about the decrees of "the market."  James, however, isn't one of them.  And he's convinced that all those other voices have confused the living God with a golden calf.  

James knows his Bible, after all, and he knows that over and over again, the God of Israel finds the nobodies and lifts them up, while taking the proud, puffed-up plutocrats down from their lofty perches.  It's the enslaved Israelites to whom God brings redemption, at the expense of Pharaoh's monopoly on wealth and power.  It's the scorned Hannah whom God grants a child to, leading her to sing a song about God lifting up the poor and needy.  It's the people without land, resources, or money that God made special provision for in the Torah--insisting that the rest of the nation provide for them from their own harvests and resources.  It's the folks who had lost their family inheritance that God promised to cancel debts for and to return their lands to.  It's the exiles God speaks tenderly to, while promising eventual calamity for the empires that carried them away from their homes.  

The thing we are going to have to wrap our heads around if we want to be in relationship with this God, the particular God whom we meet in the story of Israel and the face of Jesus, is that the living God takes sides--always for the sake of those who are left out, stepped on, and empty-handed.  And if we're sitting on a pile of more than we need, the way to align our hearts with God's is for us to share what we have, rather than pretending God is a lucky charm to help us cling to our investment portfolios.  If we hear these words of James and are a little squeamish about whether we'll be losing some of our money and status, then maybe we need to look at what we're doing with our resources.  James is convinced that God's grand reversal of the lowly and the lofty is Good News--if it doesn't hit our ears that way, we need to ask how our priorities and assumptions have gotten out of alignment with God's table-turning ways... and what we can do to get back in tune with God.

Today, the change James wants to make in us is that we would come to value people over profits.  It may take a long time for the grip of greed to be pried from our hearts (and our pocketbooks), but maybe it starts with re-examining what luxuries are in our lives that could be better spent helping someone else simply to live.  If I'm wallowing in a thousand different television channels to watch (while I also complain that I don't get the quality time with my family these days), maybe I need to take the money I'm spending on personal entertainment and use it to help a local non-profit help homeless families get permanent housing.  If I find I'm buying more and buying new, not simply to replace what's broken and unfixable, but for the sake of having the latest whatever-it-is, maybe I need to re-evaluate my choices and imagine what it would be like to be a refugee family from Afghanistan who has nothing but the clothes on my back to start a new life with my children.  If I'm giving my kids so much "stuff" that they are becoming spoiled and entitled, maybe I need to see that what I've been justifying as "showing love to my kids" is actually cruelly stunting the growth of their spirits. If I can only think of my work in terms of how much money it brings in rather than whether I'm doing good work that needs to be done, maybe I need to revisit what work is for.  All of those may be small choices, and small actions, but they begin to pull up the fingers of the clenched fist of avarice in our lives... so that we can learn again that the Gospel is good news for people with empty hands.

Lord God, where our hearts are out of line with your table-turning goodness for the lowly and the poor, shake us up and redirect us so that we will rejoice in your way of providing for the ones left out by the world.  Use us and the resources you have entrusted to us to make that happen.