The Trouble We Need--September 9, 2024

The Trouble We Need--September 9, 2024

"My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, 'Have a seat here, please,' while to the one who is poor you say, 'Stand there,' or 'Sit at my feet,' have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?" [James 2:1-4]

My former preaching professor back in seminary used to say that a good sermon has to trouble you enough to make you squirm, as well as speak grace strong enough to make you weep. Everybody likes the second half of that. Rarely do we recognize how much we need the first. James is here to trouble us, but in a good way.  And that's because the way of Jesus calls us to be troubled when our head-knowledge about God doesn't line up with our actions in God's name.

James is an honest fella, and he knows how to trouble us enough to make us squirm... and then some. Just listen to his pull-no-punches approach in this passage, which many of us heard read in worship this past Sunday, and you know it. He tells the truths we would rather ignore, and he does it out of a deep place of love for the folks who are getting stepped on by that very same willful ignorance of ours. Like the prophets of ancient Israel, who were willing to call out the wealthy and the powerful for their mistreatment of those most in need, James cares about the actual lives of those who are being pushed aside in the community of Jesus. And he won't stand for it. 

For James, this isn't about some abstract principle of "fairness" or whether the Christians in his community have the "right" to treat others however they want in the name of "freedom." For James this is about the very real, very particular lives of neighbors, who are being made second-class within the church itself, and James sees that such discrimination runs counter to the heart of Jesus. This is about embodying love and embodying the way of Jesus.  And the way of Jesus is about more than the facts about God we believe with our minds or recite from a creed.  The way of Jesus is about how we live out our whole lives as whole people.

The way James phrases his question here gets me every time. He just comes out swinging and says, "Do you really even believe in Jesus if you are discriminating against people because they are poorer than you?" I think for a long time, that question made me bristle, because I didn't like the idea of somebody (never mind it was somebody speaking with the weight of the Bible's own authority!) questioning the sincerity of my faith because of some issue I saw as "secondary."

And that's just it: I think for a lot of us (certainly in my own experience) we learned Christianity as a set of correct facts about God to be believed, memorized, repeated, and organized into a system. We called this "theology," and were told that questions about how we treat other people were called "ethics," and that these were really secondary, or bonus, matters compared with "what the Gospel is REALLY about." After all, growing up in a tradition that emphasized that we are "justified by grace through faith apart from works," it only seemed logical that we should spend all our time making sure fellow Christians believed the correct facts about God in order to be saved (which, it turns out, is not really what "justified by grace through faith" means anyhow). Discussion about how we treat other people seemed like we were saying that doing good deeds could save you, and we were CERTAINLY not going to say that! And after all, if we started meddling in talk about how we treat other people, that could very quickly become political (gasp!) or affect the way we actually lived our lives, gave our time, and spent our money (double gasp!). It was so much easier to treat Christianity as a set of religious facts and dogmas one had to believe correctly in order to be "justified by faith" rather than say that following Jesus demanded a certain way of treating other people.

The trouble is (and already I find myself squirming again), James reminds us that we don't get to separate how we act from how we think and believe. Saying "I'm saved by good theology so we never have to talk about ethics" is nonsense two times over--for one, because it assumes we are saved by our good theology in the first place, and secondly because it assumes you can split what we believe about Jesus from how we live our lives as his disciples. And we can't--they are two sides of the same coin.  They are both part of the same reality--the same way of life, which is Jesus' way.

James questions how we can believe in Jesus if we are disregarding the poor among us because Jesus is so clear in his concern and love for those same faces. Saying that being a follower of Jesus is compatible with looking down on the poor is like saying you support shooting sprees in Jesus' name or nuclear war for the sake of the gospel, or that your devotion to Christ is the source for your racial bigotry. You simply cannot.   This is not a matter up for debate to James, but has to do with the very heart of the Jesus we say we believe in. Jesus, after all, has a particular set of commitments and a particular character--he chooses love over hatred, healing over hurting, self-giving over domination, liberation over oppression, and sharing abundance with the poor rather than hoarding wealth for oneself. Over against all the voices of celebrity preachers of the "prosperity gospel" Jesus clearly takes sides with the have-nots of the world, announcing "Blessed are you who are poor," and "Woe to you who are rich" in Luke's gospel, and lifting up the ones regarded as nobodies by the well-heeled and wealthy. For James, this is such an obvious and essential piece of who Jesus is that to miss this is to misunderstand what Jesus is all about.

Like the theologian and biblical scholar N. T. Wright puts it, “Justice is what love looks like when it’s facing the problems that its neighbor is dealing with. And, if we can’t translate our love into justice then I think Jesus himself would say ‘Have you actually understood what the word love means in the first place?’”  James is simply make the same point: the way of Jesus is not merely a matter of things we believe about God, but about a certain perspective on the world that leads us to care about the most vulnerable--because Jesus cares about them. Showing favoritism for the well-heeled in the name of Jesus is like having a Pig Roast for Vegetarians or a Fight Club for Pacifists--it runs completely counter to Jesus' agenda and entire way of life.

To say we believe in Jesus--especially to give him our allegiance as "Lord"--means we seek more and more fully to align our hearts with his, and to let our lives embody his character. And because Jesus' heart is oriented toward honoring the poor and lifting up those the world treats as disposable, we are called to do the same. That's a part of who Jesus is... and therefore who we are, as people who confess Jesus as Lord.

And so, if we are going to be people whose lives embody the way of Jesus, then our actions and attitudes need to reflect Jesus' priorities, too. So James doesn't let us get away with just having the intellectual belief that "God cares for the poor," but insists that our actions embody that care, too. We don't get the right to look down on people who are on public assistance or rely on school lunch programs to feed their kids, or to dismiss people struggling to make ends meet as "lazy" or "unintelligent." We don't get to assume that people who live in low-income housing are going to use any money they have for drugs or alcohol or some other vice--not even when it is politically fashionable to do so. And James calls us out on giving positions of privilege and honor to the people from wealthier backgrounds, too--he insists we show respect and love to the ones most in need.

That means getting to know one another, too--rather than just treating anybody as part of some faceless collective we dismiss as "the poor," we are called to get to know each other's stories, to honor people with the gift of our time, to show respect to the folks who can't do anything for us in return, and if anything, to give preference and advantage to those who have less than you or I do. As Gustavo Gutierrez put the challenge to us, "So you say you love the poor? Name them." It's easy to remember the names of those who can do you a favor or are well-connected. But love calls us to get to know the stories of the people right down the street, the folks across town, the people who walk past our church buildings but wonder if they will find a welcome if they walk through the door because they have nothing to put in the offering. James won't let us off the hook for making those things a priority, because he knows they are a priority for Jesus.

Today, then, let's do the hard work James calls us to do. Let's have an honest look at ourselves, even if it makes us squirm, to spot the places we are still harboring prejudices and assumptions about people. Let's be done with belittling anybody's job or treating it as "unskilled"--let's be done with cracking jokes about "flipping burgers" or "entry-level" work. Before writing someone off as lazy or lacking motivation, let's commit to getting to know someone's story, and seeing their faces. Rather than using "blessed" as a code-word for "rich," maybe it's time to dismantle once and for all the anti-Jesus notion that having more money is a sign of God's favor. And then finally, for today, James challenges us to use what we do have--our own wealth, our influence (yes, including our votes), our time, our energy, and our love--to seek the benefit of the ones the rest of the world treats as disposable, regardless of where they are from, what they look like, how they dress, or what they do. For James, those are all signs that we really believe in Jesus, because those are all things that reflect the heart of the Jesus we say we confess as Lord.

And if all of that makes us uncomfortable, fine--it's ok if we are troubled. Maybe it's the sort of trouble we need. Because along with that trouble comes this grace enough to make us weep: ours is a Lord who is always looking out for the welfare of those the world treats as nobodies, because ours is the Lord who sees everyone as somebody. Following that Lord just means we'll take it seriously enough to live it out in our own choices as well.

Lord Jesus, align our priorities with yours. Let us love our neighbors around us with your kind of priority for those treated as nobodies by the world.