The
Book of James in our Bible is one of those books that when you thumb through
the Holy Scriptures trying to find it, you often fail because it is so brief. Just a few pages long, it finds its niche
right after Hebrews and just before the First Letter from Peter. It is often passed over, and so James is not
a book many Christians read all that often – though perhaps we should.
Martin
Luther called it an “epistle of straw,” meaning that it had no relevance to the
Christian faith, and therefore he did not like it very much. However, most Lutherans today think that
probably what he meant was that the Book of James is not at all Christological. That is, there is nary a mention of Jesus
Christ in its few pages. In addition, it
certainly is not at all like many of the other letters included in our Bible, a
number of which were penned by the Apostle Paul.
This
Book or Letter of James is not nearly as theologically deep as, say, the
letters to the Romans or the Galatians.
The author wrote it to a first century Christian community that was
experiencing a good bit of internal rancor and conflict – not unusual for those
early faith families. The letter is very practical in nature,
probably because it was addressing some very specific issues in that fledgling
church, issues dealing with the very nature of ministry itself.
And
because this letter of James is so short, you can be darn sure that the author
does not mince words. He says what he
means and means what he says. In the
portion of the letter that we just read, he makes two points that leap out at
me.
The first point is the
remark about listening, not in the sense of just hearing but rather in really
trying to understand what another person is saying. It is like the
story that has been told of Franklin Roosevelt, who often endured long
receiving lines at the White House. He complained that no one really paid any
attention to what was said.
One day, during a reception, he decided to try an
experiment. To each person who passed down the line and shook his hand, he
murmured, "I murdered my grandmother this morning." The guests
responded with phrases like, "Marvelous! Keep up the good work. We are
proud of you. God bless you, sir."
It was not until the end of the line, while greeting the
ambassador from Bolivia, that Roosevelt’s words were actually heard. Somewhat
confused, the ambassador leaned over and whispered, "I’m sure she had it
coming."
Are you listening? How good a listener are you? That is one
of the questions that the author of the Book of James raises. In quoting the letter, Episcopal priest Rick Morley
puts it this way: “’Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger.’
Wow. Really, James could have stopped his epistle right there, and he would
have said 99% of what the Church has needed to hear for 99% of its existence.
(The author) tells everyone to “cool
it,” “slow down,” and stop being reactionary—whether you’re right or not. ‘For
your anger does not produce God’s righteousness’…James is saying that you
could, in effect, believe all the right things, say all the right things, and
“think you are religious,” but you won’t find righteousness with God with
snapping, reactionary anger.”
Perhaps those are words that we here in our
church should remember as we begin to grapple with the question of growth and
what growth might look like for us. Surely
we will be coming at the question of who we are now and where we want to be in
the future and what all that will mean when it comes to the way we do worship, the
manner in which we make music, and even how we educate ourselves and our
children in the Christian faith. Trust
me – we will not all have the same perspective. Not all of us will agree. And so it will be crucial for us to remember
the admonition of the author of James: “Let
everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger.”
The author of the letter goes on to
tell us that we cannot achieve God’s high and lofty purpose for us, we who are sons
and daughters of the Holy One, if we fail to become better listeners. That being said, however, and this is the
other point that struck me in the passage, it is not all about listening. It is not all about the ears. That is only where it begins.
"Do not
merely listen to the word, (as we read in the letter)...Do what it says (Let
me repeat that – do what it says). Those who listen to the word but do not do
what it says are like people who look at their faces in a mirror and,
after looking at themselves, go away and immediately forget what they look
like.”
In other words, it is not enough for we
who say that we are Christians to simply listen to preachers like me talk about
the Christian faith. Hearing alone is insufficient. There is more. We must “do.”
You see, there is an essential link between hearing about the faith and
living it, “doing” it in an every day sort of way.
And what type of action, what kind of
“doing” defines our faith and describes a true Christian? The author of the letter of James has an answer
to that, and his definition is extraordinarily simple: "Religion that God
accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in
their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world."
Fancy that! The author of this letter mentions
nothing about going to church on Sunday or reading the bible and praying daily,
though he does talk about those things in other places (so do not get the wrong
idea).
But here he cuts to the chase on what this
“doing,” this acting upon one’s faith, ought to be: First, look after widows and orphans. Using modern
language we would say: look after the
marginalized and the poor, look after those homeless men who stand on the
street corners of Portland with their handwritten cardboard signs, look after
the ones in Raymond whose heat is sucked out through the drafty places even as
the winter air is sucked in, look after all those singles, couples, and
families who could go under if we were not looking out for them.
And second, keep from being polluted by
the world. Keep from falling into the
pervasive cultural trap of disbelieving in the abundance of the resources God
has given to this world and instead hoarding what you have because you are so
fearful that there is not enough to go around.
Or simply figuring it is not your problem to solve because somehow the
affluence of the 1% will really trickle down to the very least of these. In other words, as a Christian, you need to
be taking action. You need to be shaping
your life around mission and outreach, around aiding the modern-day orphans and
widows.
In the end, it is like this: The only
way you can see your faith or communicate it to another person is by what you
do. As Robert L Kinast comments: Faith and works "are not two separate or
competing realities. They are two phases of a process as necessary and natural
as breathing in (the word) and breathing out (the service). The one leads
to the other…We only perfect our faith” by practicing it.
First Congregational Church in
Montclair, New Jersey is the church I grew up in, and it has a tradition now that
four times a year, in each of the months with a fifth Sunday, the church family
gathers for a brief worship service, and then the whole congregation goes out
into the community. Some go to the food
pantry, others to the soup kitchen, and still others to nursing homes. They hang a large banner on the doors of the
church that reads: “Jesus has left the
building, and we followed.” Now - that
is a powerful sermon! Something we might
do here as part of a growth strategy?
Jesus left the building, and we
followed: That simple slogan lies at the core of this little, oft forgotten
letter of James. You can
come into this sanctuary on Sunday mornings and hear me prattle on about our
faith. You may even listen ever so
intently. You may be able to rattle off
Bible verses from memory. I may be able
to spout theology. But those
intellectual gymnastics alone does not make us Christians. In order to be God’s sons and daughters in
the very best and truest sense of the word, the world needs to experience who
we are.
The world will see our faith because of
our actions, or the world will see our lack of faith for the same reason…When
we ignore the need around us – local, national, and global - when we let
children go without food or anyone go without healthcare, if we do that even as
we say that we are Christians, we are telling the world a lie about Jesus…But
when we live the truth, when we “do” the faith, oh, what a story about
Christianity we have to show and tell.
See how they love one another. See how
different they are. See how their values are far better than even the best the
world has to offer. If we want to show people who we are as a church family and
what our faith is really all about, we do not need to learn high blown words to
tell them. However,
we do need to get out of this sanctuary and do what Jesus calls us to do and
what the author of this letter reminds us - live the faith…Be a constant doer
of the word. In that way, we will be
truly blessed – just as the world around us will be blessed too.
by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond VIllage Community Church, Raymond, Maine
www.rvccme.org
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