Month: September 2021

This week we are finally back in the Gospel, and we will actually stay with the Gospel for four weeks, which is the time it will take for us to cover the whole of Mark’s chapter 10. As I have told you before, I have called this sermon series “Overcoming our hardness of heart”, but really what I thought to myself was that I could have called it “Sex, money and pride” because it really is what it’s about! It’s about all those things that get in the way between us and the loving relationship we could have with God and with one another.

Maybe you have had a chance to read the whole chapter for today, if you have done so you will probably have realized that there is a very clear structure to this chapter: Mark describes four encounters (or four conversations) between Jesus and different people, whether they are Pharisees, complete strangers or the disciples themselves. And what is common to all those encounters (conversations) is that everybody ask Jesus the wrong questions. And what happens is that as they do so, they reveal what’s in their hearts, their own preoccupations with sex, money and glory – and they just want to make sure that’s God on board with it.

Today the Pharisees want to know if it’s okay with God if they divorce their wives when they are bored with them.
Next Sunday, we’ll see how a young man wants to know if it’s okay with God to enjoy his wealth in the meantime he keeps looking for the kingdom.
Then James and John will ask Jesus if it’s okay with God that they will sit at Jesus’ right and left in his glory after Jesus has suffered what he had to suffer
Finally, at the end of our chapter, we will see how Jesus meets a beggar, a blind man who at last seems to understand what following Jesus is about.

So you see there is a unifying theme in this chapter. It’s about sex, money and pride all right, but the commonality is that people seem to be seeking limits. What they can get away with and what won’t be acceptable and could deprive them from eternal life. They are all bargaining with God! And those people are not bad people. They are all following Jesus (even if it’s to test him) and they all take Jesus seriously enough to hear what he has to say on these different matters. But of course we see the common pattern: they try to understand what’s in it for them (like John and James) or how much they can get away with without serious consequence (like the Pharisees and the young man). I think it’s important we notice that because I guess it’s also about each one of us. We all wonder at some point what we can obtain from God and what we can get away with.

What’s more important to notice though is that each time, Jesus will answer people’s questions, yet he does so not by giving them what they would call a satisfying answer, rather Jesus turns the question back at them so they would understand what their questions are really about and what they reveal about their own hearts, their own thoughts. Maybe you know this saying that we “question the Scriptures”, but eventually the Scriptures end up “questioning us”, by the stories they tell they question our lives, our choices our characters…and well, this is exactly what happens here. Jesus is wondering aloud: “Well, what does it tell me about yourself, about your heart, that you would ask me such a thing?”

If you remember from the letter of James (James as in Jesus’s brother, not the James Son of Zebedee we hear about in this chapter) – James asks us to pay attention to our prayer life and he says that we don’t receive from God because we ask for the wrong things. We can see that clearly in Mark 10: People asking for all the wrong things, people asking God to tolerate or even to help them indulge in their thirst for glory, money or sex – and each time Jesus has to bring them back to the fundamental law of love they seem unable to observe or even to understand, even as they all try to be good, religious people.

So this is for the pattern. But back to our text today. Well, this is a tricky one because this passage has been much used by the church to keep people – especially women – in bad marriages, claiming that Jesus has a zero tolerance to divorce, and that divorce is systematically associated with adultery. Well, first of all Jesus does not associate divorce with adultery, that would be re-marriage, and re-marriage only as understood by the Pharisees asking the question on that day: whether it was okay to divorce – literally to “send away” – your spouse in order to find a new one. The Pharisees are actually referring to the Mosaic law (law from Moses) that allowed men to divorce wives who did not “please them” (anymore), which kind of indicates something like acting on a whim, or maybe for no other purpose than because they were bored with their wives without fault of their own. At any rate, it is clear that in this passage the Pharisees does not ask if it’s okay divorce their wives because they were abusive, or even because they had “grown apart” emotionally! It’s really about finding a new wife, and a more pleasing one…

And this is to this that Jesus responds. Basically Jesus says that if they were to divorce in these conditions, yes, they would legally have the paper, the certificate of divorce, but in that regard, it does not make much difference to Jesus to be covered by the law. If you send somebody away with no fault of their own just in order to be with somebody else, it’s still adultery. Maybe you can get away with it in the eyes of society or even within your religious organization, but in the eyes of God it does not make much difference, it still is about your motives and your inability to love deeply. And so Jesus reminds the Pharisees of the fundamental law of love: Oneness – which is what God intended from the beginning of creation. Oneness not only within couples, but with one another. If you remember what we said about Jesus’ farewell discourse in John’s Gospel, the disciples also are invited to be united in spirit in the same way couples are united in the flesh. As a reminder, adultery in the Bible has a much wider meaning than being in bed with somebody you’re not married to. It’s about turning against God, or maybe more simply, it’s about our inability to commitment. In the same way that you can be attracted to beautiful people and want to run away with them, Israel was attracted by other gods, gods that weren’t too demanding, gods giving advantages without asking for transformation. Idolatry in the Bible is about those people who want a god that helps them manipulate reality, who gives them advantages, indulges with them without requiring changes of heart (what James calls wisdom, when he opposes true religion and shallow religion). I guess, that at some point or another, we can all recognize ourselves in this as well…

So where do we go from there? By pointing at the little children as the closest to the Kingdom of God, I don’t think Jesus is saying to people that themselves have lost for ever their purity and their innocence…Or maybe they have, but it does not matter in the end because Jesus is trying to re-direct them to what’s more essential. Not “getting by” with appearances or even religious law, not even having “all the right answers” or, for that matter, “having all the right questions”, what’s important in the end is to find a way back from our hardness of heart, to learn how to love again, as little children do. In this process, maybe actually what we really need is to “un-learn” old ways rather than to check another box on the list of the perfect disciple – but about that, we’ll talk next week…

Today is our last Sunday with James. One of the things we have learned reading this Epistle is that James puts a strong emphasis on the works of faith. And so, it could come as a surprise that this last paragraph is all about prayer – because of our own tendency to oppose contemplation and action. When we talk about the “works of faith”, we usually believe that it is all about practicing charity and helping people in their concrete circumstances. And there is certainly a lot of that in James! Yet if you remember, we have also noticed how much James insists on the value of our words:
In chapter 3, James has warned us against the dangers of the tongue, how we can hurt others and ourselves by what we say, when we slander or gossip. In Chapter 2, James has warned us against speaking empty words to people in need, or giving words of praise to people we value because of superficial judgment, because of their appearance, and then we ignore those who don’t look so good…But what happens in this last chapter is that we learn that if words can bring some hurt and negative effects, they can also bring some good and be redeeming, and especially in the acts of confession and prayer – which are of course two important practices of the church.

So the question for us today is: How are we to practice confession and prayer so they would bring those positive effects?

– First of all, James reminds us to pray “in all circumstances”, which is an idea that is not foreign to the New Testament. We have to pray whatever our emotional or physical state. James says we need to pray whether “suffering, or sick, or cheerful” – because prayer is never easy.

For example, we generally assume that it’s easier to pray when something is wrong (and we need help and guidance). Yet we know that we can also get stuck in those times of suffering, and despair about not being heard and not receiving God’s help. Sometimes when life throws too much at us, it can be difficult to have a sense of God’s goodness and we can be tempted to stop talking to God. But James tells us to pray anyway.
Then, we could also assume then that it would be easier to pray if everything is well is our life, yet we also know that it can be in those times when we forget about God because we don’t need anything. James asks us to pray, to thank God and to manifest our joy.
Finally, we could also assume that it would be easier to pray when we are sick, because we obviously have to ask God for healing – and sometimes we have no other recourse than to ask God. Yet it can also be difficult to pray in times of physical weakness. When our energy is diminished, we can be tempted to become passive. Again, James asks us to pray.

It’s not only that we need God at all times…I think it’s also because – and it’s a very important thing to notice – that for James, prayer is to be practiced in community. We lift each other up and help each other by praying together. The prayer of the cheerful comfort the afflicted, the prayer of the sick brings compassion to the hearts of those well satisfied with their lives…Contrarily to what we generally assume today, faith is not the possession of one individual, it is also the practice of our community. I am tempted to say that our prayer will be as strong (or as weak) as is the faith of our community. Certainly, you have in mind those passages where Jesus performs miracles because of the faith of friends or parents asking for a favor for their loved ones. We also know that at times Jesus encountered so much opposition that he couldn’t perform any miracle.

– This does not mean that the visible outcome of the prayer is an indicator of our faith (whether communal or personal). To James, prayer always brings positive outcome, but those outcomes are mainly spiritual. When James says that the Lord “will raise up the sick”, it can be a physical healing, but he also talks about the Resurrection of the dead of course. He could also talk about giving everyone the strength to carry on…The power of resurrection can take many forms in our lives. Today we call that “resilience”. And certainly supporting each other as a community help us to build that resilience.

– Yet if we go even deeper in our reading, we will realize that when James talks about healing, he talks about the healing brought by the confession of sins, and the confession of sins as a community. Sickness is not an indicator of personal moral failure, but we cannot ignore that people get sick in many different ways when they are morally hurt or rejected. The most important to James is that we first heal our community spiritually, heal of the hurt that we so often inflict on each other, whether on purpose or not. If you remember from last week, James asked us to pray with truthfulness, coming to God with pure intentions…Well, we have also to be truthful to each other when we pray together, and to acknowledge our wrongs, so we can be a healthy and faithful community. We talked about that last week as well. James says that we get caught in conflicts because we are too self centered. Only self awareness of our motives can heal us. We see today that this self awareness can be brought by our community, by gently correcting each other and working on our misunderstandings. This requires from all great humility and a deep desire to change.

– Yet, I think that overall, James’ main idea in this passage is that we need to enter prayer with hope end even optimism because prayer will certainly bring changes. Remember from Chapter 1 that “God is the giver of all good gifts”. When we pray we all expect good things to happen…yet generally what we expect are physical or material advantages. Without denying God’s providence in our daily lives, according to James the main good thing that prayer provides, if we pray in trust and truth, is that we will be saved from sin, whether it is the sin to wander away from God or the sin of the conflicts in the community. In this, we don’t have to worry whether prayer “works” or not, because prayer will always bring victory and peace. When James takes the example of Elijah who could withhold the rain for years or making it come down from heaven, it’s not because James suppose we can control the weather with our prayers (we wish!). It’s an image to tell us that a sincere prayer has the power to open heavens and pour down blessings, not only on us but also on the world: “[Elijah] prayed and the heaven gave rain and the earth yielded its harvest”. James is asking us to believe that it can be true for any of us because Elijah was a “human being like us” who only “prayed fervently”…and received the blessing.

– This is the conclusion of James’ Epistle…If you remember the main question throughout his letter is “How do we treat each other?” – to me, the answer James gives to that question is not only that we should treat each other with respect and fairness, but in whatever we do, whether caring for each other, supporting each other, or correcting each other, we have to be a blessing – we have to be a sign of God’s love for one another. The works of faith are to make God real to one another, to bring God’s presence to one another.

This is our second to last Sunday with James’ Epistle and we’re coming to the heart of his letter, the core of his message. We now know that James wants to make sure Christians see the difference between true and false religion, between what is deep and real piety and what is an imitation of faith – whether this imitation happens by intentional affectation or because we delude ourselves with shallow and empty feelings. To make the difference between what’s real or not, James says that the best thing to do is to look in the spiritual mirror, to look at the way we live, concretely and how we treat each other. This is what we do (or don’t do) that will testify about our faith. In our text today, James asks us to “(…) show by [our] good life that [our] works are done with gentleness born of wisdom” and the he goes on to describe what wisdom looks like – and this is on that that I would like to spend a little time with you today.

First of all, James notices that everybody is wise in their own eyes, which is probably a very accurate observation! Most of the time, caught in our own inner reasoning, or just because of our blind spots and prejudices, we assume that “this is the way it is” or “this is the way things work”. We don’t hear often people saying about themselves that they are silly or foolish – unless they have just realized they’ve made a big mistake! We naturally assume we are clever and that we know what’s best…And I don’t think James is criticizing that directly – after all, if we were always convinced that we are stupid and wrong it would be very hard to make any progress in life – but James tells us to be careful. Not just because maybe we are not that clever, but also because wisdom is not about being clever, or at least not in the sense we understand it most of the time.

So what’s the difference? Well, James tells us that being wise is not so much about being intellectually sharp or educated. Rather, according to James, wisdom is “(…) peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy” (remember how we talked about partiality before?). And so this is what wisdom is really about: it’s about being humble and gentle. You may remember that I told you at the beginning of this study that we could tell that James was indeed Jesus’s brother, because they have the same character! In Matthew Ch 11, Jesus says of himself that he is “gentle and lowly in heart” – and we see that is the personification of wisdom for James! That, and to resist abuse of power and hypocrisy too – which is what Jesus spent his life doing. Being gentle and lowly does not mean that you have no opinion or that you are a doormat. Often today when we say we seek peace or concord, we mean something like: “Let’s not talk about what could bring conflict”. Yet this is not the way James describes it, or the way Jesus lived his life. Seeking peace is not about avoiding conflicts at all cost, by not talking about what goes wrong, peace is about being able to move beyond conflicts by looking for what’s best for everybody, honoring everybody’s right to be a full person – and as we said last week – honoring in each other the likeness of God.

Now what is the problem with us, that so often we think we are wise when we actually lack true Christian wisdom? Well, for James, it’s actually quite simple. He says that what prevents us from being wise is that we are too self centered. And we can be too self centered in two different ways: Either we are focused on pleasing ourselves (we are too self indulgent, we want more than what we really need) or we are focused on our own ambition (we want to be right, to be admired, to have more power). In both cases, we’re seeking our own advantage instead of everybody’s advantage – and this is why we cannot move beyond conflicts. Again, the problem is not so much that there are conflicts, in the sense of difference of opinions, the problem is that James’ community is caught in never ending conflicts because everybody thinks about themselves first!

So how do we move beyond that? Well, once again, James invites us to self awareness. We first have to get rid of our illusion of wisdom, false wisdom, and accept that we often ask or act out of self interest. Aware of that, we already have gained in humility, which enables us to approach God and ask to be filled with true wisdom. In this, we see again how, even without quoting it, that James is close to the fundamental call of the Gospel, that is to repent and to ask God to change our hearts. There is in James a deep trust that God will answer those who come to God. He says: “Draw near to God and God will draw near to you”. Yet there is a condition: We need to come to God with pure intentions – with a “pure heart” in James’ own words. Approaching God with a pure heart does not mean we have to wait to be perfect or much better people to ask God for anything! It just means that we are to be aware of who we are and be willing to change.

And this is, once again, the difference between true and false religion. James asks: What are our intentions when we draw near to God? Is it to seek our own advantage, or is it out of a desire to change? James says that the problem is that, in prayer: “We ask wrongly, in order to spend what [we] get on pleasures”. So it means that we also have to examine our prayer life. Practicing true religion is not about praying a lot, or showing a lot of piety. It is about approaching God with selfless intentions. It does not mean that we shouldn’t pray for ourselves! We can and should certainly pray for protection and guidance and even help in our daily needs, because that’s what Jesus taught us to do in the Lord’s Prayer! But we should not expect God to serve our selfish interests, especially if they conflict with the needs of others. We need to approach prayer with the desire to serve God rather than thinking that God will serve us – this would be worse than false religion, it would be the perversion of religion. We need to ask God to do God’s will, because that’s what Jesus taught us to do as well (in the Lord’s Prayer too!).

To conclude, I think it is important to notice that for James, wisdom is not a private, intellectual thing, rather, it is a matter of practice and wisdom is to be practiced in community, by seeking to move beyond conflicts towards what’s the best interest of all and beyond that, what is God’s will. Wisdom is built in our relationships with others and as we seek a deeper relationship with God. We grow, little by little with one another in our daily circumstances and by being open to God. This is, at least, to James, what a true Christian community should look like.

We’re continuing this week to read from James’ letter. We now know that James is writing his letter to help Christians understand what true religion is about. James opposes true religion to a “shallow” or “empty” religion. We have seen that to James, true religion is not just a matter of beliefs, or rites, but true faith is the practice of our belief. Faith is revealed in what we do, in the way we behave – and mostly in the way we treat each other in our daily lives. This is what James calls the “mirror”, the “spiritual mirror”: if we look in the spiritual mirror, that is the concrete ways we act towards each other, then we will know what our faith is really about.

In this sense, we talked last week extensively about how James is warning Christians about not showing favoritism. Quite the opposite, James encourages us to treat rich and poor alike, because all men and women are equal in the eyes of God. And so not only Christians aren’t to show partiality but if they ever are to take sides, they should actually be on the side of the poor, as God is, as a way to re-balance power that is always in the hands of the most wealthy in human societies.

It is interesting at this point to notice that, although James’ tone could be described as “moralistic” (We have seen that James is not interested in in-depth theology or details about worship) James is not a moralist either – at least not in the classical sense of the term. James’ letter is not a treatise on virtue, James is not interested in making Christians “good people”, in the sense of “reasonable” or even “virtuous” people. James is not interested in building personal respectability, if you will, rather he is interested in the dynamics or our interactions. What James wants for Christians is that they may be able to act towards each other with respect and fairness.

What is worth paying attention to though, is that in James’ thinking, “the way we act” is not limited to our tangible actions – this week, as we move in the third Chapter of the letter, James asks us to pay attention first to the way we speak. And again, it’s not about us showing ourselves educated or even polite as we speak, but it’s about the way we treat each others when we use words. James is not so much interested in our choice of words, rather what he wants us to be aware of is what our words accomplish. Again, we are drawn from the surface to a much deeper understanding of what true Christianity is truly about: lifting up each other and all people and beholding in them the likeness of God.

At this point I realize I could write pages on gossip (or speak for hours about it) – but I don’t think you would want that or that it’s even necessary. I guess that we have all gossiped and we have all been on the other end of gossip. And we know what gossip does to us – James compares it to a “fire”. It’s impossible to control, it burns, and it destroys relationships. When we gossip, we don’t even know what we are saying! If you have ever been overheard by somebody you were gossiping about, you may know what I am saying: It feels terrible and the first thing you want to tell them is that you didn’t mean it, because indeed you were just rambling, and not thinking! If you have ever heard people talking being your back, you also know the kind of special pain it is. Rejection and judgment can bring deep feelings of shame, self loathing and despair. Not only does it destroys relationships, sometimes it even destroys people themselves. And of course, it’s not only about gossip – I guess we also all carry in our hearts harsh words that have been spoken to us, maybe by a tough teacher or by the bully at school, or even words from a sibling or a friend, and it does not matter if it was 40 or 50 years ago – it still hurts. Or maybe we still regret having said something terrible to somebody! Deep down, we know that words aren’t just words, they are are actions too, would it be only because they can hurt as much as a slap in the face.

There is a very strange passage in the book “The human search of meaning” by Viktor Frankl. As you may know, Frankl spent several years in concentration camps. But he says at some point that what was the worst to him wasn’t the hunger, the nakedness, the freezing, the harsh work and the constant fear of death, he says that the worst thing was the way the nazis talked to them, like they weren’t human beings, like they didn’t really exist.

Words have power and I think what James is asking us to realize is how we often underestimate this power. We think that words don’t matter – when they really do. We can use our words to promote the likeness of God in people, we can also use them to deny their humanity. Blasphemy isn’t about saying a profanity when you drop something on the floor! (and we are so obsessed with “language”, aren’t we?) but if we open the Scriptures, we may understand that blasphemy is really about denying the likeness of God in our neighbors.

I told you several time that James was a very practical and down to earth person. And I think we really can see that in this passage. The spiritual mirror is very close to us. James is not asking us to become very respectable or virtuous people and James is not asking us either to take heroic actions for our faith or to make a big fuss about the charity we practice. At least for today, James is asking us to be mindful of the words we utter every day, in our daily circumstances and how we treat each other as we speak – whether we speak to someone or whether we speak about someone. Not only because it will end up impacting them, but it will also impact ourselves. If we use poisonous words, they will end up poisoning our own hearts.

So what are we to do?

Well, what is surprising is that James concludes that it is almost impossible to do, it’s impossible to “tame the tongue”! James seems to think that there is no remedy! So maybe it’s a call to silence. Which is not always that bad. We saw that in the first chapter, James asks that “everybody should be slow to speak and quick to listen”. Being able to keep silence and to listen is certainly the beginning of wisdom. Yet, and maybe more specifically in our passage, it’s also about awareness: Awareness of the impact of our words. And it can be spoken words but also written words. Maybe we can ask ourselves from time to time: Will I be happy to have written this email or this comment on Facebook in three weeks or three days or even three hours? What good are my words supposed to accomplish in that very situation?

Yet above all of that, what I also hear in James’ letter is that if our words are powerful. In what seems a very practical matter, we have a glimpse of a profound theology: Throughout the Bible, we see that the word of God has the power to create, to bless and to curse – God’s word is action, God’s word moves the world and in Jesus, God’s word came into the world. Our words are powerful too. If words are divine they can create, build up or tear down. James call us to use our words rightly. It does not have a lot to do with niceties – you know like paying everybody a little compliment when you arrive at work. If we were to do that, or to do that only, it would still be taking the surface – being merely polite – for the depths – honoring each other. Rather, it’s a call to be respectful, to encourage, to comfort and it’s also a call to say the truth – not using our words to deceive, manipulate others or just to bring them to like us. This passage is really about power, as power was the center of our previous passage when James asks Christians not to show partiality to the wealthy. In the same way here, James asks teachers to be very careful about their own authority. It’s not only about people whose job is to teach or preach, but for all when we are given authority when we speak. What do we do when we speak? Do we try to assert our own power, or do we try to share the power, do we try to promote our own agenda or do we offer tools to try to seek God’s will together?

If we really believe in the word made flesh, our words should be in the likeness of the God revealed in Jesus Christ: words meant to create, to redeem at our own level. Our words should be life giving. And so maybe to know better how to use our words, we can look at the way James speaks to his people: We do not have to do brilliant philosophy or theology – and it’s quite clear that James does not spend a lot of time philosophizing! It’s about showing love and affirming each other as we speak. It’s not about “walking on egg shells” – most of the time, when we “walk on egg shells” we do that to preserve ourselves, not those we talk to. Loving words often requires simplicity and brevity and directness. Sometimes it’s about having the courage to start a much needed conversation, instead of rambling. And maybe then we can see the changes starting to happen for the best. Remember, for James, true religion is also all about change – changing our hearts and the world around us. Certainly our words can do a lot when we mean what we say.

We’re back in the letter of James that we started reading last week. If you remember from last Sunday, we discovered in Chapter 1 James’ intentions in writing this letter to his congregation. One of the things we saw is that James is not preoccupied in doing in-depths theology, neither he is preoccupied with regulating the life of the church, whether in its administration or in its liturgy. What James claims to be concerned about is that the followers of Christ would practice true religion – that he opposes to a shallow religion. And to James, practicing the true religion is not necessarily about having all the correct beliefs or doing worship in a way or another. According to James “true religion”, the religion that really connects us to the heart of the faith of Christ, is about obeying the law of love, it’s about loving each other. This love, though, isn’t about tender emotions… James isn’t a dreamer or even a romantic, James is a very practical, down to earth person and he asks the followers of Christ to love each other and every person in the concrete circumstances of everyday life. To James, love is not so much about the feelings we have, rather it is about the way we treat each other.

So how are we to treat each other? Well, James being this very practical, down to earth person, gives us in our reading this week a vivid example of a “real life situation” (actually a lot of commentators have found this example so vivid and true to life that they notice it can make it difficult to hear). James takes the example of the congregation gathered in the synagogue – which would be the place where first Christians came to worship but also to deal with some legal issues (and it is not clear from James’ example if we are in the context of worship or litigation). Yet the context does not matter because it’s really about the way believers behave and interact with one another. And so this is what James says: Two persons show up in the assembly, and because one looks wealthy and nice (“wearing gold rings and fine clothes”), they are well received and given the seat of honor, and because one looks poor and dirty, they are left standing or made sit on the ground. I think we would all agree that this is unfortunate and that this kind of behavior should not happen among Christians…Yet to James, this is much more than an unfortunate situation, rather this should be a serious concern for all of us. James says that in doing so, when believers show partiality or favoritism, they dishonor the poor and they transgress God’s law. James goes even as far as saying that, when we show partiality, we transgress God’s law in the same way that if we’d commit murder or adultery.

That’s of course difficult to hear! And we may feel a bit sorry for these believers James is talking about! Maybe because we can easily identify with them…Who among us never judge people based on their appearances, even unconsciously? And so we think maybe those believers giving the best seat just wanted to be polite or helpful to the beautiful people, and on the other way around, maybe those believers asking the poor to stand were just distracted, or maybe they were a bit scared of them! It may feel a bit unfair to us that they end up being accused by James of a deadly sin…But to really understand James’ intentions with this example, maybe we should resist the temptation to be defensive and ask ourselves: What is at stake in here exactly?

Well, the thing we need to notice is that, in James’ example, the poor and the rich show up in the assembly at the same time. And to me, what James criticizes it’s not so much that we give a good seat to the wealthy and good looking person. He is not asking us to ignore them instead, or to not be too welcoming. And I don’t think James is overly concerned with the fact that some people need to stand in the congregation or sit on the floor when there is no room left. What James is concerned about is favoritism and the injustices they create. It’s because the believers have given the seat of honor to the wealthy that the poor has to remain standing or to sit on the floor. Because they have honored the powerful, the powerless is humiliated. The dignity they have given to one has been taken away from another, and that is what’s wrong with this behavior. So James isn’t asking believers to be unpleasant with people who look good or with people who have money, but he is asking believers to be as pleasant and accommodating with the poor and powerless as they are with people more fortunate, and not make a difference between them, because God does not make differences between people – and when God does make a difference, God would choose the little one over the great (as, for example, God chose Joseph or David against their elderly brothers). This is indeed God’s justice: God empowers the powerless and strip of their power the powerful, and this what the law of Moses and the Gospel of Christ is all about…

And so, in this chapter and beyond this specific example, James asks us to conform the way we behave to the beliefs we profess. True faith is not about having a correct set of beliefs. True faith is about practicing what we say we believe in. James is not teaching his congregation to be mean to rich people, he is teaching them to be fair to everyone and to pay a special attention to those to whom they normally wouldn’t pay attention to. As Christians, we shouldn’t behave according to our “natural tendencies”- according to James, acting like that is the way of the world that is always fascinated by the bright and shiny. Because we admire them or because we fear them or because we expect to receive something from them, we have a tendency to treat better the powerful and the beautiful. Because we are not attracted to them or because they have no power over us or maybe because we just don’t see them, we neglect the poor – but if we truly believe that we are all children of God, then we shouldn’t treat people based on how they make us feel or based on what we expect they would do for us. Moreover, each time we confirm the riches’ privilege we perpetuate the cycle of oppression human societies live by, when our Christian responsibility would be to break the cycle (James asks: “Isn’t it the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court?). This goes beyond what happens in our own faith congregations…in reality, it asks us: what kind of society is it that we do want to live in?

So no, it’s not easy to treat all people as equal and we have to work on ourselves to get there, yet this is what true religion requires of us: It requires that we won’t stay on the surface with what we profess. It is to believe with all our being. James wants to show us that it does not matter if we agree with Christian beliefs just because it’s a beautiful thing to believe in – what we have to do is to practice this belief. We can all agree that it is a beautiful thing to believe in justice and equality for all but if we’d truly believe in the beauty of justice then we have to practice it. What would you think of someone who would tell you that ecology is important to them, but then you see that they don’t even bother to recycle their trash? Well, you would probably think, and rightly so, that it’s probably because ecology isn’t that important to them! They don’t really believe in it! James says, well, it’s like when we say to a person who is naked and hungry to stay warm and have a good meal and then do nothing about it. If we really wanted them to stay warm and have a good meal, then we should give them clothes and something to eat, if it’s in the range of our actual possibilities!

James is not criticizing people for saying nice words, or wanting to be polite or comforting, James is warning us, he tells us to beware not to stay on the surface of things. Christianity is not wishful thinking, it is love in action or as the proverb goes, it’s about putting our money where our mouth is! Our faith should change us and change the way we live, change the world starting with the little world we all have around us.

I love it that James asks us if that kind of “faith” (to profess but then not doing anything) can save us. Because we always talk about “the faith that saves” right? Yet when we do that, we always refer to the faith that saves us, personally. But James isn’t asking us if our faith is saving us personally, I think James is asking us if our faith is saving others! And when James is asking us if our faith is saving others, he does not mean if our faith provides a good example to others…James is asking us if our faith is of any good to those around us, and especially to those in need!

Is our faith saving anyone? Is our faith of any good to those around us or in the midst of us? Is our faith accomplishing anything? “Faith, by itself, if it has no works, is dead”. Indeed.

Yes, those words are hard words to hear – But as we mentioned last week, James is asking us to have a look in the spiritual mirror, this mirror being our everyday life, James is asking us to become more self aware and consider our unexamined prejudices, our unexamined behavior and all the things we say are important but we just don’t do. And it’s difficult. Yet we need to remember that James is not trying to put his people down when he calls them out on their behavior. James is trying to lift them up and to make them whole. So they can really be one with themselves, so they can be, so they can incarnate, what they believe in with all their beings.

If we believe in the beauty of the message of Christ, then why wouldn’t we try harder to be living witnesses of it?