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.
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