Hi
and Edwina, the dim-witted hero and heroine of the movie Raising Arizona,
can’t have kids, so they kidnap one of a set of quintuplets – because after all
they got four more – and Hi’s trying to explain to his boss how he and
the missus were able to adopt so fast, and he says “this whole thing is just
who knows who, and then over here you have favoritism” and his
even-more-dim-witted boss buys it because he knows that’s the way
the world works. That’s the way it works
today, and how it worked back when James wrote his letter. Money and power buy . . . more money and
power, and all that comes along with it, like accelerated adoption procedures,
the best criminal defense team in town, or political influence to steer
legislation in whatever direction benefits the most.
Problem
is, like Hi and Edwina in Raising Arizona, most folks in James’
congregation didn’t have more money or power. Maybe that’s why he’s so irritated when they
behave as if they do: “do you with your acts of favoritism really
believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?”
Are you really Christians acting this way? Fawning all over anybody with nice clothes or
a ring on their fingers, showing them to seats of honor . . . and when the poor show up, what do you
do? You make ‘em stand, or sit in the
aisles . . . if you do all these things,
have you not made distinctions among yourselves? Have you not become judges with evil
thoughts?
He
says: how can you dishonor the poor?
Isn’t it the rich who oppress you? Aren’t they the ones who drag you into
court for sleeping on the streets, or begging without a license, or being a
little late with the car payment? And you
act like them? If you do, James
says, if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as
transgressors . . . and it’s not the civil law he’s talking about, or even the
Torah . . . it’s the royal law of Jesus Christ: “You shall love your neighbor
as yourself.” Without thought to
income-level, without thought to race or creed or color or sex. You show no partiality because showing
partiality violates the code: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
And
as always in Scripture, this love is defined as – or at least identified by – what
you do, not some hormone-induced fog of feeling, but how you behave, how
you treat your neighbor, and now we’re getting to the crux of James’
argument . . . and in a sense, the bit about partiality to the rich is just a
sermon illustration – what James is really writing about here is faith
and good works, and he states it like this: “What good is it, my brothers and
sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works?” If you don’t follow the royal command, the
command to love one another, what good is your faith, even if you can have
faith without works in the first place?
That’s
the theme of this passage, and that’s what’s made it a thorn in Protestant
sides for five hundred years. Martin Luther
hated this passage so much that he called the book of James an epistle of
straw, and he wanted it thrown out of the bible. That, of course, didn’t happen, but it’s not
that it couldn’t have . . . after all, that same Martin Luther was a father of
the Reformation, in which it was decided that a large chunk of the Bible should
be jettisoned, so that now we Protestants don’t have the same Scripture as the majority
of Christians in the world, who are, of course, Roman Catholic . . . but
anyway, Luther wanted to eject James from the Bible because the way he
read it, it contradicts the Apostle Paul who wrote over in Galatians “ . . . we
know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith
in Jesus Christ.” And Luther wrestled
day after day with his human nature, angst-ridden about how God could forgive a
sinner such as him, so he made it a centerpiece of his theology, and it’s a
mainstay for Protestants to this day: in Latin it’s Sola Fide – Faith
alone.
So
now you can see the problem: James says “You see that a person is justified by
works and not by faith alone.” And he
uses the word “justified,” Paul’s technical term for the saving act of God, and
so what is this – Works righteousness?
Does it mean salvation isn’t a free gift after all? Do we have to work for it, like Holy
Boy Scouts, and do a good deed a day so we can get to heaven? Is there a big tote-board in the sky, an
abacus where God pushes beads from minus to plus every time we do good things
on earth? And what about this Paul
versus James stuff? Do we have to choose
one or the other, if we believe Paul do we have to throw James out, at least
metaphorically, never reading it or preaching it? I know many of my colleagues do just that,
they don’t preach from James hardly at all, because dealing with the theological
headache is a pain, and their congregations don’t want to hear they have
to actually do something . . . and
deep down inside, neither do they.
And
there’s another problem . . . look at
what James tells us these works are to be, look at what he tells us to
do. It isn’t “be moral,” as in don’t
sleep around, or “be good people,” as in pay your taxes on time and don’t sass
your parents – although I’m sure he wasn’t opposed
to these things . . . Likewise, he doesn’t say “go out and make disciples,
baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost” either, although
I’m sure that was a priority. No, he
defines good works as having to do with the poor . . . “If a brother or sister
is naked and lacks daily food,” he says “and one of you says to them, ‘Go in
peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily
needs, what is the good of that?” Pious
platitudes ain’t gonna cut it, y’all, and that makes us – and I include myself
here – really nervous. Because we
Christians are really good at pious
platitudes, we’ve cornered the market on ‘em.
And it’s one thing to hold
church on Sunday mornings and go to choir practice and serve on session, it’s
one thing to tell ‘em they gotta be saved, but it’s something else entirely
to clothe ‘em and feed ‘em. That takes
money, and that’s what a lot of us – and again, I’m not excusing myself –
that’s what a lot of us have a hard time giving up.
But
it takes something besides money . .
. it takes a willingness to mix it up, to be with folks who need our
help, and with whom we might be down-right uncomfortable . . . when I helped
out for awhile at an Atlanta shelter, it was easy to serve the homeless their
grits and pour ‘em their coffee, but like pulling teeth – for me, anyway – to sit down and relate to
them, one on one. It just made me nervous,
uneasy, and it was that way for almost all the middle-class volunteers. And this goes back to James’ tirade against
favoritism . . . our churches long-ago segregated themselves out by
socio-economic class, so we don’t see the poor alongside the rich very often,
but God help the welfare mom who accidentally stumbles into a Presbyterian
church. She usually discovers real quick
that it’s not where she belongs . . . and how many times have we seen or heard
about a church held hostage to one, well-heeled member, just because he gives a
lot of money? A friend of mine in the
Mississippi Delta almost lost his job, the session almost voted to fire
him, because his daughter brought a black man to church, and the guy
who’d been keeping the church afloat for years didn’t like it. But they hung in there, the big giver left –
taking his organist-wife with him – but it was a severe blow to God’s mission
in their town. And this was in the
mid-‘90s, not 1954.
James
says we’re not allowed to do that kind of thing . . . you’re not allowed
to cater to the wealthy among you, to the folks that give the most money . . .
James even questions our faith if we do . . . he says “do you really
believe in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?
How can you kow-tow to the wealthy, how can you bow down
to the God of money? That’s how the world
behaves, not the church . . .” And of course, that’s the point. If the church doesn’t behave as if it’s different
from the world, it might as well not have faith . . . how can we expect the
world want what we have if we don’t act
different when we have it? And for
James, that “acting different” is on behalf of the poor. If somebody is naked and we clothe them in
platitudes, how is that different from the world? If somebody needs food and we feed them with
empty blessings, what good is that?
But
what about eternal life? If faith
without works is dead, how can it alone bring about eternal
salvation? How can it bring about a
restoration of our right relationship with God?
Well – and again this is still a matter of debate – James probably would
say . . . it can’t. Look at the examples
he uses . . . Abraham was justified, was made right with God, by his action,
his good work in obeying God by offering his son Isaac on the altar in the land of Moriah.
Even though he’s acknowledged the one God – even though like the demons
he believed that God is one – his faith was brought to completion by the works.
Likewise, the prostitute Rahab was justified by her hospitality, her
welcoming act, even though she too acknowledged the one God of Israel.
Paul
uses the same technical Greek term, which we translate as justification – “considered righteous” in the NIV – but he
uses it in a different sense. For him,
it’s a one-time act, the first moment of conversion when God makes you right
with him. For James, it’s a process that
plays out over time, it’s the product of both belief and good works . .
. it’s the whole ball of wax. We are
justified, made right with God, by both belief and action, not one or the
other.
It’s
important to notice that this isn’t the only place in the New Testament where
belief alone is not enough . . . over in Matthew, Jesus himself says much the
same thing. Remember? He says that those who are righteous will
have eternal life, but those who are not will go away into eternal punishment.
And how does he define those who are righteous?
Those who are righteous feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, and
clothe the naked. Those who don’t do
those things, aren’t righteous.
For
James, you can’t separate faith from action in the world, they’re like two
sides of a coin, and I’ll bet you won’t find a congregation in this country who
would disagree with him . . . the question is how many of them translate that
theoretical agreement into action, and if they do, what kind of
activities are a priority. Biblical
scholar Luke Johnson says: “one way to test this is to ask whether the content
of the sermons, the subject matter of meetings, or the line items of budgets”
reflect this conviction, “that the ‘faith of Jesus Christ’ is not a matter of
doctrine or ritual, but a matter of sustained moral presence in the world.”1
And
for James – and apparently Jesus as well – the touchstone, the yardstick, the measure
of this moral presence is how we as a church treat the least of these among
us. If you go to the Old Testament books
of Micah or Amos or Isaiah and read the words of those prophets, you’ll see that
God demands not just excellent worship, not just hymn-singing or good, solid
preaching, but that we execute his justice on earth. Further, God’s justice is defined not
by fairness, as we often believe, but by everyone having enough to eat, clothes
covering their backs, a warm place to live . . . in other words, that they be
free from physical and economic oppression.
And now, lo and behold, some nine-hundred years after the prophet, James
wrote essentially the same thing. All
the empty belief, all the spouting of dogma, all the singing of “Great is Thy
Faithfulness” is dead if not accompanied by action in the world. Sounds like a broken record, doesn’t it?
But
brothers and sisters, that is the Good News of Jesus Christ . . .
really! We got it straight from the
horse’s mouth when Jesus gave us his mission statement in Luke. He said God had anointed him to bring good
news to the poor, release to the captives, to give sight to the blind, and let
the oppressed go free. The good news is
that there’s another way than the way of the world, a way, a vision, a new kingdom
on earth, where the lion shall lie down with the lamb and we shall practice war
no more. A kingdom where all have enough
to eat, clothes to wear, and oppression of the poor by the rich, of the weak by
the strong, is no more. A kingdom where
the only law is the Royal Law, love your neighbor as you love yourself,
the law that Jesus instructed us to follow.
And if we can’t follow it, we who have the power of the Holy
Spirit, who walk daily in the presence of the risen Christ, who are surrounded
by the love of a gracious God, if we can’t do it, who can? Amen.
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