What Is Given--January 26, 2022

What Is Given--January 26, 2022

"Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him?  But you have dishonored the poor.  Is it not the rich who oppress you?  Is it not they who drag you into court?  Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you?" [James 2:5-7]

Somewhere in the recesses of my memory I come back to recollections of ninth grade geometry class, and how our teacher instructed us in the art of the geometric proof.  You could deduce the value of an angle or determine whether two lines were parallel, or demonstrate a whole host of other mathematical conclusions, all with a set of learned theorems, rules, and principles.  And at the bottom of it all were these statements we learned,  called "axioms," which were taken as bedrock assumptions.  

I loved that idea--that there were some things you didn't have to prove, but just seemed so self-evident that you could start with them as a "given," and then build on them to reach a variety of other conclusions.  Back in geometry class, the list of "axioms" is pretty short, but powerful.  Old Euclid, the ancient Greek mathematician, only had seven, and they are pretty fundamental.  His axioms were things like, "Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other," and "If equals are added to equals, the whole are equal, too."  Basic stuff, but, also, things that you need to be able to take as a given if you want to get anywhere else more interesting in geometry.

But Euclid got me thinking.  What we take as a "given" is pretty important.  What we consider so fundamental that we don't even feel the need to argue it is still worth spending time looking at, just to remember what everything else is built on.  Checking in with our "axioms" helps us to avoid mistakenly reaching nonsense conclusions that violate those fundamental principles and postulates or accidentally thinking we've proven that 1 + 1 equals 3. And it's actually this talk about axioms that makes me pay attention to what James here takes as a "given."

Notice the way he asks his question at the start of today's passage.  "Hasn't Got chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom?"  It's a rhetorical question whose answer James assumes is a given.  He takes it as an axiom that, yes, God is always picking the ones regarded as "nobodies" and lifting them up into positions of honor and restoration.  God is always looking out for the poor, the broken-hearted, the empty-handed, the overlooked, and those who have been denied justice, in order to renew, rebuild, and revive them.  This is just at the core of who God is, because for James, we can't get away from the particular story of the God we know in the story of Israel, who has a thing for picking "losers"--at least in the world's eyes--and blessing them.

It's old man Abraham, childless wanderer (with frequently wobbly faith), who becomes the covenant partner.  It's a nation of enslaved and oppressed people living under the lash of Pharaoh whom God liberates and leads into a new home.  It's overlooked Hannah who is blessed with a child and a hope.  It's runt of the family David who is chosen to be king. It's the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner who are repeatedly given special protections in the Torah's social safety net.  And by contrast, it's always the arrogant bullies, the hoarders of wealth, and the heads of empires whom God takes down, from Pharaoh to Nebuchadnezzar to even Israel and Judah's own worst kings.  You can't talk about the God of the Bible without getting into the question of God's character, and that includes God's particular commitment to lifting up the lowly and caring for those most in need.  

James takes all of this as a given--it's an axiom that God will have a particular care for the vulnerable. Now, to be fair, not every notion of God (or "god" or "gods") can take that as a starting point.  The ancient Greeks basically pictured Zeus, Hades, Poseidon, and the lot as arrogant humans with superpowers--they were capricious, self-interested, and didn't particularly care about looking out for the nobodies.  The philosophers like Plato and Aristotle spoke sometimes of a god-like "unmoved mover," but they didn't dare imagine that this impersonal being had compassion or empathy for the marginalized.  Even the "God" we invoke on our money in this country is usually thought of as a generic cosmic clockmaker, like so many of the Founding Fathers imagined, who set the universe up and set it running, but didn't get much involved beyond that.  James has a rather different set of axioms about God: he takes it as a given that the God of the universe is the same One who freed enslaved Hebrews, made away for the immigrant Ruth, and gathered exiles home.  And with that as a starting point, yes, James takes it for granted that God will choose to make the last first and the first last.  That all fits exactly with the particular character of God we meet in the Scriptures.

So now James can come to us with the open question--what will we do, if we are daring to let our hearts be shaped by God's?  If the God of the Scriptures is committed to feeding the hungry (and, if Mary's song is correct, sending the rich away empty), then where will or priorities be?  On helping people hoard more for themselves, just because they can (or in the name of some abstract notion of "freedom"), or to help the folks who are just looking to feed their kids?  On giving preference to what will help the Dow Jones close at new record highs, or making it possible for all the kids in your community to have decent education?  On making our own piles of money for future luxuries, or helping our neighbors to have coats for winter weather?  James sees the answers all flowing out from the starting point of who God is, like a geometric proof flowing from a set of Euclid's axioms.  When you know who God is--and what matters to God--you'll use your energy, money, time, and love in the same direction.  And because God's way, over and over again in the Scriptures, is to raise up the "losers" and dethrone the "winners," we'll be called to cast our lots with the ones labeled "losers" by the world, too.

When we remember who God is, we remember who we are.  And since the Scriptures take it as a given that the living God puts the last first, our trajectory for the day is laid out for us already, too.

What will it look like today for you and me to set our course based on the table-turning ways of God of the Exodus and the exile, rather than the gods of excess and empire?

Lord God, let all of our lives flow out of what we take as a given in your heart for those who are most vulnerable in the world.