Listening to Brother James: The Way of Humility

Humility is not an easy thing. The story is told of a bishop, a priest, and a peasant who go into a great cathedral. The bishop went up to the altar rail, beat on his chest and declared, "I am nothing! I am nothing!"

Then the priest went up to the altar rail, beat on his chest and declared, "I am nothing! I am nothing!"The peasant who saw all this was very impressed. So in all humility, he went to the altar rail, beat on his chest and declared, "I am nothing! I am nothing!"The bishop turned and hissed into the priest's ear, "Who does he think he is?"[i]

Humility is not an easy thing, but that’s exactly where Brother James takes us in the reading for today. We’ve been reading through the book of James over the last few weeks and we’ve been hearing some consistent themes. This is a book that is very concerned with the status that some members of the community are giving to the rich. They give them special treatment, special seats in worship. But James reminds them that God has a different order. In fact, in God’s order, it is the poor who have been chosen to be rich in faith. The community of Jesus is an upside-down community, not like the world.

“Keep yourself unstained by the world.” This is another of the messages that James has for the community he is writing to. The world has a corrupting influence on Christians because the world lies to us about who we are. Therefore, we need to be able to speak truth to one another…to recognize the danger that lies in the tongue and to use it only to build one another up.

The conflicts within the Christian community are also something that concern Brother James. He advises the people to be “quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to anger” [1:19] and he warns about speaking ill of one another. What we do and how we relate to one another needs to line up with what we say we believe.

So we get to chapter 4 and we’re back to the question of disagreements between Christians and the focus is about to go inward – right to the heart. “Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you?” James has already warned us about being double-minded…about not giving ourselves fully to being God’s people instead of the world’s people. So now he sees that the conflicts we have with other people are really just outward signs of something deeper going on within us. We are at war with each other because we are really at war with ourselves.

“You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts.” Now I doubt that there was an epidemic of murder within the community, but James is saying that there might as well be. He’s already talked about murder when he talked about showing partiality to the rich. He’s trying to get to get our attention. We may not be killing people for things we want but don’t have, but we are doing devastating things because of our envy.

How many of us are living beyond our means, racking up the credit card debt, because we feel like we are depriving ourselves or depriving our families if we don’t. The word ‘Christmas’ is starting to pop up in conversations now as September draws to a close. It’s a scary word – partly because we know what the busy-ness will mean and partly because we know ourselves and know what we do to ourselves and to our budgets every year when Christmas comes. We can dress it up in other clothes, but it’s envy and it causes problems.

How many of us have let our possessions take on demonic meaning for us? We assume that they give us a certain amount of status and we think if we get more of a certain kind of stuff it will give us a more privileged status in the community. Dr. Seuss knew all about this. Do you remember the story of the star-bellied sneetches? In his book The Sneetches and Other Stories he tells about a group of sneetches who lived on the beach (conveniently since it rhymes with sneetch). Some of the sneetches have green stars on their bellies and others have no stars upon “thars.” This is a problem because to be a star-bellied sneetch was to have an elevated status and this led the plain-bellied sneetches to envy the star bellies.

Enter a marketer! Sylvester McMonkey McBean shows up and he has a wonderful machine (conveniently since it rhymes with McBean). This machine can put stars on the plain belly sneetches. So, of course, they eat this up. All the plain belly sneetches go through the machine and get green stars.

This totally upsets the prevailing order. The original star-bellies can’t distinguish themselves from the plain-bellies anymore and they lose their status. But McBean has another machine that will remove stars and thus give them a plain-belly. With the stars gone they can now be distinctive again and look down their noses at the new star-bellies.

Chaos ensues. Stars go and come. The Sneetches wear themselves out trying to achieve some higher status and the only one who makes any money is…you guessed it…Sylvester McMonkey McBean. But something wonderful happens as he leaves town.

[McBean] laughed as he drove in his car up the beach, “They never will learn. No. You can’t Teach a Sneetch!”But McBean was quite wrong. I’m quite happy to say.That the Sneetches got really quite smart on that day.The day they decided that Sneetches are Sneetches.And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches.That day, all the Sneetches forgot about stars and whetherThey had one, or not, upon thars.[ii]

If the Sneetches can learn, why can’t we? Why do we believe that some new thing is going to give us what we want? Why do we believe that someone else has something better and if only we had it, we’d be better off? Why do we insist on looking at other people’s bellies when the real problem is in our heart?

How do we address this problem? James tells us to pray. James talks a lot about prayer. “You do not have, because you do not ask,” he says. “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.” Prayer can change things – most importantly, it can change us.

One time there was a church down the street from a notorious pool hall. Everybody in the neighborhood knew that the pool hall was a place where bad stuff was going on. Youth were being led astray. Drug dealers were hanging out there. So the church started to pray that God would burn the pool hall down. And one night it did. Lightning struck that building and it burnt all the way to the ground.

The neighborhood was happy. The church was pleased. Then the man who owned the pool hall sued the church. The case went to the court and the man said, “They prayed that my pool hall would burn down and it did.”

The church members said, “We can’t be held liable for this, your honor. He can’t sue us because of a lightning strike.”

The judge said, “Maybe not. But I think it’s really interesting that the owner of this pool hall believes in the power of prayer more than a church does.”

Prayer changes things and the most important thing it can change is the human heart. Because this is where James takes us. He doesn’t point us toward prayer so that we can get the status that we think we deserve or the things that we think we need. Prayer doesn’t help us get what we couldn’t get by other means. Prayer moves us toward humility, toward integrity, toward single-mindedness.

"’God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.’ Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Lament and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy into dejection. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.”

The gospel passage for today gives us some great examples of humility. First, in James and John who lack humility and who try to get a favored seat by Jesus’ side in the kingdom. Then, in the children, that Jesus welcomes to his side. Who does this upside-down kingdom belong to? Not to those who seek it for personal advantage, but to those whom no one else would suspect because they are so far from what the world considers cool or powerful or influential. The kingdom belongs to children.

This week Matthew Bailey got me thinking about humility. In a blogpost he talked about the difference between two people who were inducted into the basketball Hall of Fame last week. One of them, Michael Jordan, was flashy and photogenic and the best basketball player of his generation and he knew it. The other was David Robinson, a much quieter, less flashy guy who helped his team, the San Antonio Spurs, become a real team.

When Michael Jordan got up to give his acceptance speech he showed that he is still as competitive and driven as always, but he did that by calling out people who he felt had snubbed him or underestimated him through the years. He flew one of his old high-school friends to the awards ceremony, someone who had been kept on the high-school varsity team instead of Jordan. Jordan pointed out that he was not as great a player as he was and told his old high-school coach, “I wanted to make sure you understood: You made a mistake, dude.” It was funny, but in an uncomfortable way.

Robinson, on the other hand, was gracious. He acknowledged his teammates, his sons, his wife, his pastor! He talked about how his faith had helped him. He quoted the gospel story of the ten lepers who were healed by Jesus and only one returned to give thanks and he said he wanted to be that one who gave thanks for what God had given him. David Robinson had every reason to think of himself as the biggest man in the room that night, and not just because he’s seven feet tall. But David Robinson humbled himself.

Who are we in the end except people who have no room for boasting except in the life and death of Jesus? Who are we except vulnerable human beings who leave footprints in the sand that will eventually wash away? If there is anything enduring about life, it is because of the life we live as people of faith. We put all our trust in a God who can take the most unusual raw material and make it into something amazing. The way of humility is the way into the heart of God. And the way to get there is through prayer. Thanks be to God.


James 4:1-17 [NRSV]
Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.

Adulterers! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you suppose that it is for nothing that the scripture says, "God yearns jealously for the spirit that he has made to dwell in us"? But he gives all the more grace; therefore it says, "God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble."

Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Lament and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy into dejection. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.

Do not speak evil against one another, brothers and sisters. Whoever speaks evil against another or judges another, speaks evil against the law and judges the law; but if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. There is one lawgiver and judge who is able to save and to destroy. So who, then, are you to judge your neighbor?

Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money." Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that." As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil.

Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin.

[i] Adapted from the blog “Pratie Place,” http://pratie.blogspot.com/2005/11/humility.html.
[ii] Dr. Seuss, The Sneetches and Other Stories, Random House, 1961.

Listening to Brother James: The Sanctified Life

We have been having a great time of revival here at Franktown these last two nights. We have heard Jon Cash bring a challenging message and we have seen people respond. We have had great music. Great fellowship. Great ice cream.

Jon’s message over the last two nights has been about getting out of our comfort zone and stepping out in faith, not fear, to be followers of Jesus. He has warned us about being counterfeit Christians who have the form but not the substance of faith. He has invited us into a new relationship with Christ. He has talked about heaven and warned us of hell.

Revival is a time when we go back to what got us here in the first place. Maybe it was your parents who got you here in the first place, but hopefully, at some point, it was a powerful experience of God. And the preaching is designed to pull us back to that first love. So we preachers try to get up for occasions like this.

Now I’ll try not to be like a preacher who was asked to speak before the District Conference one time. The District Superintendent asked this man to speak and she told him, “O.K., you are on the program for twenty minutes.” The other preachers from the district were sitting behind him in the choir section, giving him moral support and throwing in an occasional "Amen" to help the preacher along. The preacher preached his twenty minutes and kept going. He preached for 30 minutes, then forty minutes and then for an hour. He was up to an hour and ten minutes when finally, a man sitting on the front row took a hymnal and threw it at the preacher who was still going strong. The preacher saw the hymnal as it was hurled his way and he ducked. Well, the hymnal kept going and hit one of the preachers sitting in the choir section. As the man in the choir section was going down, you could hear him say, "Hit me again, I can still hear him preaching!"[i]

I’ll try not to be like that this morning. That’s kind of like the story of the boy who was coming out of church one Sunday by himself. Somebody saw him coming out and knew that the service wasn’t over so they asked him, “Is the preacher finished?” And the boy said, “Oh, yes, he’s finished; he just hasn’t stopped talking yet.”[ii] I’ll try not to be like that either today.

What I want to talk about is how this message of having faith intersects with what James talks about which is doing faith. And in particular today I want to talk about how telling the truth is so important to being a person of faith.

So let’s start under the tree. Amazing things happen when you’re sitting under a tree. The legend says that Isaac Newton was sitting beneath a tree watching an apple fall when he discovered the law of gravity. St. Augustine was sitting in a garden, presumably beneath the trees, when he heard a child’s voice telling him to “Take up and read” the Bible he held. When he did he found salvation and never looked back. Amazing things happen when you sit beneath the trees. I know, because I had one of those experiences.

It wasn’t that long ago. Just about a year and a half ago I was at the Festival for Faith and Writing at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. After one of the sessions I was sitting beneath a tree writing in my journal, one of my practices for listening for God. And just as clearly as Augustine heard that voice in his garden, I heard God…it must have been God…saying three things: Be free. Tell the truth. Don’t do it alone. It was transformative. I heard it as three things I had to do in order to be the person God called me to be.

It’s not always been as clear as it was on that day, but I have been trying to live out those things for twenty years now as a pastor in the United Methodist Church. But I have to say that I often wonder how well I am living up that calling. Those things sound easy. Be free. Tell the truth. Don’t do it alone. But they are a challenge.

And being a pastor? Brother James is pretty discouraging on this point: “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For all of us make many mistakes.” Sometimes I ask myself, in the face of James’ message, “What were you thinking, Alex?”

I remember when I was a teenager I got up in front of my church during a revival and said, “I think God is calling me to be a missionary.” There was the sound of a thud in the back of the sanctuary and I think that was my mother hitting the floor. “I think God is calling me to be a missionary and I’m ready to go.” By all rights the whole room ought to have erupted in laughter at that point. If people had not been sitting there in their Sunday best trying to look proper and be on their best behavior they might have.

Because they knew me. They knew who I was. They had watched me grow up. I went through a painfully awkward stage there that lasted…oh, twelve years. They saw me when I decided to play catch for the church softball team and warmed up right in front of Mr. Moubray’s new car. I missed a catch and he had to get a new windshield. They knew that about me.

They saw me when I tried singing in the children’s choir before I knew how to sing. They saw me when my friend Philip Jaderborg and I used to run through the streets of the small town where I grew up shaking all the vending machines to see if they would give us free stuff. You see, they knew who I was and still they did not laugh. I think they knew. They knew that if God wanted to call me into some kind of missionary work that would be just the sort of thing that God would do. You know what they say. If God could get Balaam’s ass to talk…well, maybe there was hope for me.

But it’s one thing to be foolish…it’s another thing to recognize how dangerous it is to follow God’s call into ministry. Do you remember when Joshua was talking to the people of Israel after they conquered the Promised Land? They had come through the wilderness. Forty years they had been wandering in the wilderness. Forty years of manna. Forty years of grumbling. Forty years of ‘Are we there yet?’ And they finally come into the land and they’re gathered together at the high, holy place at Shechem.

Joshua comes before them and he recites their history going back to Abraham. He reminds them that God had given a promise to Isaac and the promise had continued through Jacob and Esau and into Egypt and out of Egypt and through the Red Sea and into the land of the Amorites, whom they conquered, and into the land of the Moabites with Balaam and his ass who blessed them instead of cursing them. Then God brought them across the Jordan River and into the land. God knocked down the walls of Jericho. God gave them victory over the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, the Jebusites, the socialites, the crystal lights, gingivitis and the heartbreak of psoriasis. Everything and every one that could oppose them, God delivered over into their hands. God gave them land that had not labored on, towns they had not built, vineyards and oliveyards that they had not planted.

But…the people had something they had to do. “It wasn’t your bow that won the victory,” God said. It wasn’t your sword. It wasn’t your doing that you are where you are, but there is something that they had to do. They had to choose. They had to choose whom it was that they were going to serve. They could choose to serve the god of the Amorites and the Canaanites. Or they could choose to serve the God that had brought them up from Egypt. But now it was ‘fish or cut bait’ time. They had to choose.

You remember that song by Bob Dylan. “You’re gonna have to serve somebody. It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.” That’s what Joshua was saying to the people. Then he tells them, “You gotta choose, but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”

The people say, “The Lord did all of this for us. The Lord brought us to this place. Who else would we serve? We will serve the Lord, too.”

Then listen to what Joshua says to the people, “You can’t serve the Lord! You can’t do it, because you know what’s going to happen? You will forget God. You will serve other gods. And God is a jealous God who won’t tolerate that and then where will you be?”

But these people are a stubborn people and they say, “No, we will serve the Lord!”

Joshua says, “O.K., you are witnesses against yourself.”

But the people say all the more loudly, “The Lord our God we will serve. That is the god we will obey.” And they make a covenant on the spot.

That’s what it’s like to follow God into ministry. You stand up and say, “I will serve the Lord as a pastor,” and there ought to be somebody around to say, “You can’t do it.” So then you say, “No, I will serve the Lord!” And then somebody should say, “Alright, but you are a witness against yourself, because you are going to mess up.” Then you say, “No, I will serve the Lord!” If I were going to redesign the ordination process, I think I would include something like this.

James says that it is dangerous to follow God as a teacher of the Word and this is why: You have to tell the truth. You think that’s natural. You think that’s easy. But do you realize how hard it is to tell the truth in this society we live in? The world has an interest in telling us lies about how the world works and about who we are.

The world will tell you lies like: you’ve got to look a certain way, you’ve to have this much money, or you have to have this kind of job. And let me tell you, none of those is true. You are not what you look like. For some of us that’s a mighty good thing. But you get seduced by the commercials, don’t you? Have you seen that Nutrisystem commercial? “After I lost 40 pounds, my husband jokes that he finally has a trophy wife.” Wow. How many times have you heard commercials say, in so many words, “If you just had whiter teeth… if you just didn’t have bad breath…if you just didn’t wear such out-of-style clothes…if you just got a tummy tuck or a nose job, you would be somebody”? But that’s a lie. And Christians have to say that one another. When your wife comes down the stairs and says to you, ‘Does this make me look fat?’ you might have to embellish the truth. But when your Christian friend sees that you have been seduced by the lie that you are what you look like, your Christian friend needs to tell the truth.

You are also not what you own. No i-Pod is going to give you eternal life. No 28-foot boat is going to make you a man or a woman. No cell phone is going to bring you salvation. Those are all lies and somebody has got to tell you the truth.

And you are not what you do. You are more than the job that makes you money, the role you play in the family, the position you hold in the community. Somebody has to tell you the truth.

There are other lies out there, too. Lies that tell you that it doesn’t matter what you do with your body because it is your body. So if you have sex without thinking about the consequences and outside of a marriage relationship, whose business is that but yours? If you put drugs into it, whose business is it? If you drink till you’re falling down drunk, whose business is it? When somebody calls us on it we might even tell them to get out of our business. But somebody knows that it is God’s business and somebody’s got to tell you the truth. Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit and we honor God or dishonor God by what we do with these bodies we have been given.

Oh, there are lies out there. There are low-down, dirty lies. There are lies that tell us that it’s a sign of weakness to believe in God. You are a wimp if you’re a Christian. If you believe in Jesus Christ, some people think, it’s just a crutch and man, do you people waste a lot of time in church on Sundays.

But somebody’s got to tell the truth. You know the truth. You know that God’s power is shown in weakness. You know that we are strong when we are standing on the rock that is the Lord. You know that we are strong when we are standing on the cornerstone that the world rejected. You know that he’s got the whole world in his hands when those hands are stretched out on a cross. You know that we are uplifted when we see that the Son of God has been cut down. You know that we are full when we see that the tomb is empty. You know that ‘on Christ the solid rock I stand because all other ground is sinking sand.’ That’s the truth that somebody’s got to tell.


Maybe we’re not up to truth telling, though. Maybe Jack Nicholson was right in the movie A Few Good Men when he said, “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth.” But what does the scripture say? “You will know the truth and the truth will make you…free” [John 8:32]. The truth will make you free.

So Brother James tells us that the sanctified life is about telling the truth but he also gives us this warning. He warns teachers of the word that they will be judged with special harshness – so be careful in your speech. And he warns the whole community to be wary with how they speak. “The tongue is a fire,” he says. It causes division and hurt and pain when we use it to speak words that do not build up the body of Christ. When we speak ill of our neighbors. When we start defining them through the sins that they struggle with rather than looking at them the way that God does – as people struggling with sin but still worthy of all of God’s love and all of God’s grace.

When we use the same mouth to bless the Lord and to curse our brother or sister, we are hypocrites. Now how many times this week have you used that mouth of yours to offer a blessing to someone? And how many times have you used it say something bad about someone else? Does your Mama know how you used that mouth?

It’s not easy telling the truth. I remember the first month I was a pastor. I was serving a church in Dallas, Texas…an associate pastor in a bilingual church and I was barely lingual, much less bilingual. Three weeks in my senior pastor said, “I’m going to Austin for a few days. You’re in charge.”

So thirty minutes into the first day after he left, I was sitting in the church office and I got a phone call. A young man with a severe drug problem who was in the church had committed suicide by hanging himself in a hotel room on his fifth wedding anniversary. I called my senior pastor and he said something to the effect of, “Didn’t you hear me? You’re in charge.”

So I went to the home of the family of the young man’s wife. And I walked in with my Bible and the ten or fifteen Spanish words that I knew. They treated me like the pastor. I’m remembering that verse right about now…not many of you should be teachers…what in God’s name was Alex Joyner doing as a pastor? They gathered everybody up together in a room. There’s the grieving widow. There are the relatives with hollow eyes, red from crying. There must have been some people breathing in the room, but when I remember this scene all I remember is dead silence. They were waiting on me.

They were waiting on me! I could just hear the challenge: Now what are you going to say to us, preacher? How do you say that all things work for good when something like this happens? How do you say that there is good news? How do you stand up in the face of darkness and evil? How do you explain what this young man did? How do you talk about life? How do you talk about hope? How do you talk about redemption and salvation when something like this happens? Because it sure looks to us like death wins. It sure looks to us like what the world says is right, “Life’s a bear, then you die.” They didn’t say this out loud, but I’m hearing it in my head.

They were waiting on me. And you know what I had to do? I had to tell the truth. I had to tell the truth. And the truth was not that this young man’s death was the last word to be spoken over his life. Another young man’s death on a cross in Calvary two thousand years before was the last word. The truth was not that their lives were meaningless because that young man’s death was senseless. The truth was that God was in Jesus Christ reconciling the world to God’s own self. The truth was not that death wins. The truth was that “I have overcome death, and behold I am alive for evermore.” The truth was not that evil and the grave triumph. The truth was that the stone was rolled away. The stone was rolled away and Jesus walked out of that tomb and Jesus busted down the doors of his disciples and spoke peace and sent them forth and ascended into heaven and established his church and lives and reigns forever. And he wants every person to be part of that kingdom. And if that sounds too fantastical to be true, well, you just go try to find a story the world tells that you can stake your life on.

You think the truth is that you’re a user or a loser? You think the truth is that you’re a failure? You think the truth is that you’re a consumer or a victim or a self-made man or an abused woman? You think the truth is that there is no purpose to this crazy universe and we’re just a collection of atoms in a random array? You think your greatest sin defines who you are? You think your success defines who you are? You think any of these definitions is in any way satisfactory to in any way let you know the truth of who you are? Or do you need somebody to tell you the truth about who you are?

The truth is that we should be wary of speaking in God’s name, but we should dare to do it. The world needs some people who will look at its brokenness and failure and see that God has not abandoned it to its sin. You need somebody who will let you know that your hope is found in a savior who died on a cross on Calvary and who rose again to draw all people unto himself. You need somebody who will let you know that you are no longer a child of wrath, but a child of God. You need somebody who will stand by you in the storms and who will not look away when you are in pain and grief. You need somebody who will sit in a room when it is at its darkest and talk about the light. You need somebody who will look squarely into the face of the evil and know that it does not represent the world as God designed it to be and it does not represent the world as it will be when God redeems it. You need somebody who is full of God’s spirit and full of God’s grace. You need somebody who will tell you the truth for God’s sake.

So who’s going to do this with me? Who’s going to get out of their comfort zone and do something stubborn and foolish for God? God needs men and women, boys and girls, who will stand up to tell the truth about this world. And the truth is this: Christ Jesus…is alive. Christ Jesus…is alive. Christ Jesus…is alive. And the world is not ever going to be the same. Thanks be to God.

James 3:1-18 (NRSV)
Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For all of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check with a bridle. If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies. Or look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire!

And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no one can tame the tongue-- a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God.

From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so. Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and brackish water? Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, yield olives, or a grapevine figs? No more can salt water yield fresh.

Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth. Such wisdom does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.

[i] Adapted from a story on http://javacasa.com/humor/sermon.htm.
[ii] Ibid.

Listening to Brother James: When Faith is Dead

Sometimes biblical passages require a lot of head-scratching to figure out what they might mean and how they might be relevant to today’s world. Sometimes it is important for us to dig into the historical context that produced the passage to try to determine what was going on back then and to shed light on obscure practices or people who are long gone. We pull out maps so that we can see who the Babylonians were and where it was they took the exiles from the nation of Judah. Preachers love passages like that because it allows us to pull out all of the tools that we used in seminary and to toss around phrases like, “Well, my exegesis of this passage led me to a significant hermeneutical insight.” Which is just a fancy way of saying, “You know what I found out in studying this passage?”

Sometimes, though, there is no head-scratching required. The passage is so clear and direct that it’s hard not to see what it’s all about and hard to avoid the impact it’s going to make. Even when you’d like to get around what it’s trying to say by pulling out the seminary toolbox, there is no avoiding it.

Well, today we’ve got one of those passages. Brother James doesn’t leave us anywhere to go. He may have been talking to a first-century congregation struggling with its status within the larger community, but what he has to say is so central to who Christians say that they are that we are on the hook, too.

“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 on the floor,’ have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?” Not much to update there. James could have been walking into Franktown Church circa 2009 there.

“If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; stay warm and get enough to eat,’ and yet you don’t supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” What more can we add to that? I could give you a profile of poverty and charity in the late Roman Mediterranean context but what we really need to hear is what’s happening in the Eastern Shore context of today.

“Wasn’t Rahab the prostitute justified by works when she welcomed the messengers and sent them out by another road? For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead.” Now we should probably remind ourselves that Rahab was the one who welcomed and protected the Israelite spies when they were scouting out Jericho on their way into the Promised Land after wandering through the wilderness for 40 years. Even though she was a prostitute and of a different race and probably on the outs in her own community, she was the one who offered God’s people hospitality and found herself among God’s favored people.

That’s important to remember. But do we really need another sermon on the difference between faith and works and Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation in order to understand that the point of this passage is not to get the theology in our heads right? When Brother James writes it is the theology we live with our hands that needs some work! The relationship between faith and works in salvation is interesting and in its own way important, but the way that we live out that salvation in the world is life and death, because faith without works, as Brother James reminds us over and over, is dead.

So I hear James talk about the sin of favoritism and I know that we’re guilty of it every day. It happens in obvious ways like when we send off the vibe through body language or unintended glances that you have to look a certain way or dress a certain way in order to be accepted in worship. Dressing modestly, yes. Doing what we can to be presentable before the Lord and other people, yes. But to mandate a tie or a certain quality of dress or suit in order to fit in? When I hear people say to me, “I would go to church but I don’t have the clothes for Franktown,” I wonder: what sort of message are we sending or what sort of message are they assuming we are sending?

That’s only on the surface, though. There is a deeper issue that James is getting at. He tells us about the dangers of giving preference to people with gold rings and fine clothes. He warns about reserving space and influence for the rich over the poor. He goes on to impress upon the congregation that favoritism is not just bad public relations (PR) but a sin. And like all sins from adultery and murder on down it has eternal consequences. The commandment we are charged with, James reminds us, is to love our neighbors as ourselves and if we are not doing that in our relationship with the poor then we have sinned as surely as if we have done something criminal.

“God has chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that God has promised to those who love God. But you have dishonored the poor.” Dishonored the poor!

Sometime over the last 30 years we stopped talking about poverty in our country and then we stopped talking about in our churches. We had a war on poverty. Do you remember that? Back in the 60s. We lost that war. We made some improvements. We made some mistakes. We relied too much on government programs and not enough on dealing with human nature. But a majority of us believed that poverty was crippling our country and limiting the horizons of too many people, especially our children, and we felt it was something worth fighting.

We believed it because we used to be a very egalitarian people. It’s right there in our founding documents. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created…equal.” And so even when we lived through a Great Depression and many, many people fell into poverty we recognized the plight and the nobility of the poor in our popular culture. Ever heard Woody Guthrie sing “Pastures of Plenty” or “This Land is Your Land” or read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath? There was an ethic of moving families out of poverty as something that was in the interest of a whole people. When prosperity returned to the country following World War II, even as those who were able were improving their condition, the country still discussed the problem of continuing poverty in a land of plenty.

Now we don’t talk about poverty much in our public discourse, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not still here. In one of the most recent issues of The Shoreline, Roberta Kellam pulled together a very helpful article on the face of poverty here on the Eastern Shore. What she found may not be all that surprising, but it was the first time I had seen anyone pull together the relevant facts and figures.

Among the findings here are that Northampton County is one of only two “persistent poverty” counties in Virginia according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Our poverty rate is over 20% and despite the fact that those rates declined in the 90s, in this decade the number and percentage of poor residents has increased. The rate is particularly high for children and for households where there is only one parent. About 1 out of every 2 households headed by an unmarried woman is dealing with poverty. Half of all those households.[i]

The article notes that rural counties like Accomack and Northampton have an opportunity to address these issues if they utilize certain resources. Roberta quotes two researchers who say that “social capital is clearly important in lowering poverty in rural communities. Communities that have solid participation in associations and networks do better.” What does that mean? The health of our groups can improve the health of our community and what’s one of the most important groups in a community? Churches.[ii]


But here is where we need to come back to Brother James, because we shouldn’t hear these statistics and hear the analysis of researchers and say that the church, like the Ruritans and the Rotary and schools, should be out there addressing poverty. We should be addressing poverty, but not because we’re a social service organization. We should be addressing poverty because Jesus addresses poverty…because Brother James addresses poverty.

This is where the failure of the church in recent years has become clear. If we were depending on national ideals or our government to address poverty we failed when they failed. If we were thinking we didn’t have to worry about the conditions faced by the poor because somebody else was working on it, we failed. When we started to think of poverty only as a spiritual discipline rather than a social reality, we failed.

What makes this failure sad is that it takes a lot of work to read the Bible and not see God’s concern for the poor. In the Exodus story, God comes to free the Israelites from slavery in Egypt because “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt, I have heard their cry…I know their suffering” [Exodus 3:7]. That word ‘know’ is not some intellectual knowing, either. The Hebrew word carries with it the knowledge born of experiencing that suffering with the people.

The book of Leviticus tells us of the provisions made for the widow and the orphan and the sojourner in the midst of God’s people – those who were the most at risk and usually the poor. Proverbs 21:13 says that “if you close your ears to the cry of the poor, you will cry out and not be heard.” The prophets, like Amos, rail against Israel when the people offer elaborate worship but fail to ensure justice for the poor.

Jesus comes among the people as a poor man and he spends his time with poor people. He called to the rich to join him and grieved when they were so enslaved to their possessions that they could not leave them behind to give themselves to God’s new way. In his parables Jesus talked about a poor man named Lazarus who was favored by God in the resurrection. He talked about how we would see him present with us in the face of those who needed food and shelter and comfort. God cares about poor people and the poverty God cares about is real, material poverty and not just spiritual poverty.

John and Charles Wesley believed that. Those early Methodists were continually concerned about those who were beaten down by the economy of their day. John Wesley felt that “the reason the prosperous have so little sympathy with the poor is that they had so little direct intimate acquaintance with them. Therefore, he urged the discipline and practice of visiting them, and he considered visitation of the poor as indispensable to Christian discipleship as acts of piety and worship.” That was the conclusion of our United Methodist bishops when they did a study of children and poverty in 1996. In a letter to the church they asked, “Could it be that what some have seen as malaise or crisis in congregations is related to our forgetfulness of the poor and the resulting separation from the God who has chosen ‘the least of these’ as special means of grace?”[iii]

So what do we do with Brother James who comes to our service this morning like a wild-eyed prophet that no one knows quite how to handle? How will we respond? I can make a really pretty sermon about this. We can pretend that he was just talking to those folks back then and that what he has to say doesn’t apply to us anymore. We can blame all sorts of societal woes and individual sins and political ideologies for the persistence of poverty and its absence from our public conversation. But down the street people will still have no indoor plumbing. Children will not get adequate nutrition and may even go hungry. Economic opportunities will still be limited. And we will still think of the poor as ‘the poor’ rather than beginning the kinds of relationships that allow us to give names to the people whom God has continued to love.

Unless we spend time in the “classroom of the poor,” as the El Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero called it, we will not be able to build the connections that allow us to be the church God calls us to be. We will not be a church that truly has open doors to all people. We will not have a ministry that is really all about the world out there instead of the space in here. And this faith that we think of as so vibrant and vital will be a dead thing. Brother James knew a thing or two about life and death. And what he wanted for his people, for God’s people, for all people…was life. Thanks be to God.


James 2:1-26 (NRSV)

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?

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?

You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors.

For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. For the one who said, "You shall not commit adultery," also said, "You shall not murder." Now if you do not commit adultery but if you murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty. For judgment will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment.

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, 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? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

But someone will say, "You have faith and I have works." Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith.

You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe-- and shudder. Do you want to be shown, you senseless person, that faith apart from works is barren? Was not our ancestor Abraham justified by works when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was brought to completion by the works. Thus the scripture was fulfilled that says, "Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness," and he was called the friend of God. You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.

Likewise, was not Rahab the prostitute also justified by works when she welcomed the messengers and sent them out by another road? For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead.


[i] Robert Kellam, “Persistent Rural Poverty on the Eastern Shore of Virginia,” The Shoreline, Citizens for a Better Eastern Shore, August 2009, Shore Facts, pp. 1-4, http://www.cbes.org/shoreline/2009/SL0809.pdf.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] The Council of Bishops, the United Methodist Church, “Community with Children and the Poor: Renewing the Episcopal Initiative,” Eastertide 2001, http://archives.umc.org/initiative/statement.html.