Sermon at Transfiguration
Church, Mesa
Year B, Proper 17
Have you ever spent
time looking at pictures of yourself from 2 years ago? 5 years ago? 10 years ago? Longer? What comes to mind for you as you look at
those pictures? Is there some surprise
about yourself? Perhaps you can remember
the dreams you had for yourself or those close to you when the picture was
taken. Perhaps you remember the hopes
that turned out to be dashed. The hopes that should never have been hopes in
the first place. The forgotten dreams that brings regret once remembered. The
fulfilled dreams that brought great joy.
Perhaps you’ve even
looked back at old journals? Or old
lists of goals stuffed in a book somewhere that you come across when it’s time
to do a deep cleaning. I wonder what
folks think about when they read those lists.
I wonder if we remember something about a better part of ourselves that
we may have forgotten.
Let’s come back
to that later, but I’m curious,
What are your
favorite books of the Bible?
Part of the genius
in the use of the lectionary—the three-year cycle of readings that are
appointed for use in worship—is that it gives us a systematic breadth of
biblical material over those three years.
One advantage is that we are not simply subjected to the whims of
preachers who may want to simply stay in their own comfort zone or only preach
their favorite passages. But sometimes,
if the preacher is patient, their favorite passages come around.
So I am excited
to be here with you this morning! Not
only because I have always felt so welcomed in this community, but because I
get to talk about the letter of James— my favorite!—one of the most radical and
one of the most slandered books in the Bible!
Elsa Tamez, a
Latin-American feminist theologian, once noted that:
If the letter of James were sent to Christian communities in certain
countries that suffer from violence and exploitation, it would very possibly be
intercepted by government security agencies.
The document would be branded a subversive because of the paragraphs
that denounce the exploitation by landowners (5:1-6) and the carefree life of
merchants (4:13-17). The passage that
affirms that “pure, unspoilt religion, in the eyes of God our Father is this:
coming to the help of orphans and widows when they need it, and keeping oneself
uncontaminated by the world” (1:27) would be criticized as a reduction of the
gospel or as Marxist-Leninist infiltration in the churches. The community that was to receive this letter
would become very suspicious to the authorities.[1]
Tamez was
speaking in the context of civil unrest and revolution, and oppression in many
Latin American countries. The
disappearances. The torture chambers. The assassinations. Her point remains.
The letter of
James has had to deal with similar interceptions over its history. This letter has made church authorities
suspicious since the beginning, and perhaps the only reason it made it into the
canon of scripture was the hard-fought consensus that it may have been written
by James, the brother of Jesus. And at
that point it’s included because, hey, its Jesus’s brother. Even then, its position as scripture was not
solidified until the 400s.
Further, In the
Reformation, the letter suffered more malignment. Reformers like Luther downplayed James’s
letter for two reasons.
1)
Western
Christianity has in general been more interested in figuring out the
philosophical underpinnings of the faith than the implications of that
work. The controversies in Western theology have been more
invested in who Jesus is and the fully human and fully divine nature of
Christ. Important work, to be sure; but
in the meantime, a letter about the implications of living a holy life loses
its luster or importance in the mainstream theological debates of the day.
2)
The
reformers were concerned with how salvation works. Is it by faith or works? James was seen as too focused on works as
opposed to Luther’s faith by justification alone. There is a definite preference for Paul among
the reformers.
a.
And
actually, Luther said “St. John’s Gospel and his first epistle, St. Paul’s
epistles, especially Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians and St. Peter’s first
epistle are the books that show you Christ and teach you all that is necessary
and salvatory for you to know, even if you were never to see any other book or
doctrine. Therefore St. James’s epistle
is really an epistle of straw, compared to these others, for it has nothing of
the nature of the Gospel about it.”[2]
Harsh!
The malignment
did not end at the Reformation. With the
ascendance of historical-critical biblical criticism in the 1800s-1940s, many
commentators simply thought that the letter of James was “too Jewish.” The anti-Semitism exhibited in the
scholarship showed up as some argued that the letter is actually a Jewish
letter with references to Jesus added in later.
So it seemed to many to be an un-Christian letter in the New
Testament. Remember this is the anti-Semitism
that set the stage for the holocaust, so naming something as “Jewish” was a way
to dismiss it. Never mind that even
though James does not talk about who Jesus is,
it is chock full of what Jesus said.
But it’s not just
in theology that James is not talked about.
The letter is frequently and historically cherry-picked in worship. We
only hear it once for a few weeks every three years. Rarely is it preached
upon. In fact, missing from our
lectionary are the first six verses of the fifth chapter of James, which read:
Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are
coming to you. Your riches have
rotted, and your clothes are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and
their rust will be evidence against you, and it will eat your flesh like fire.
You have laid up treasure for the
last days. Listen! The wages of
the labourers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and
the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury
and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts on a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the
righteous one, who does not resist you.
Throughout
history, in churches where royalty, feudal lords, landowners, slave owners, corporate
executives, and the richest donors to the church may be sitting in the front
pew, few pastors have wanted to spend long commenting on that passage. But it is a prophetic piece. And by
prophetic, we do not mean just telling the future, but naming what is wrong in
the community and larger society. In
essence, prophets are those who bring social critique, and in the Biblical
sense; always point out when the poor are not being taken care of, which
signals to the prophet that justice is not being served. Because of this, James’ letter is in line
with the prophets of the Old Testament (and Jesus!).
There are three
angles through which to view the letter, and I commend these angles to you as
you hear the passages from James as they are read over the next few weeks. These angles are helpful in that they help
illuminate in our own context the ways this letter still has much to say.
The Angle of Oppression and Suffering: There is a community of believers that
suffers. There is a group of rich people
who oppress them and drag them before tribunals. There are peasants who are exploited,
Christians and non-Christians, by rich farmers who accumulate wealth at the
expense of the workers’ salaries.[3] There is a class of merchants who lead a
carefree life with no concern for the poor.[4]
The Angle of Hope: The community of believers needs a word of
hope, of encouragement, of reassurance concerning the end of the
injustice. James gives it to them from the
very beginning of his letter. We see
hope in James’s greeting, his insistence on exhorting the community to faithful
expectation and happiness in the face of unrelenting BS, in his words about
God’s preference for the poor, God’s judgment against the oppressors, the
anticipated end of that oppression, and the coming of the Lord.
The Angle of Praxis (practice): The
content of the letter is concentrated in this angle. For James the denunciation of the present
situation and the announcement of hope are not in themselves sufficient. Something
more is needed: praxis [action, a practice].
He asks of these Christians a praxis in which they show a resolute
patience; a consistency between words, belief, and deeds; a power with prayer;
an effective wisdom; and an unconditional, sincere love among the members of
the community that does not make distinction between members based on wealth
[—or rather, to elevate the poor since the status of the rich so often
guarantees that they will get respect.[5]][6]
This emphasis on
the practice of faith is where James will concentrate for the rest of Chapters
1 and 2 in his letter, beginning with his admonition to “be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive
themselves.”
This brings me back to the questions I started with. Time has a way of dissolving one’s attention,
intention, and resolve. As James says,
“if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at
themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away,
immediately forget what they were like.” There are times in our faith that are like us coming to our senses, like looking up and breathing deeply of fresher
air than the drudgery of life might normally allow, gaining a perspective so
much greater than our own, only to then find our lives return to tunnel vision in
the act of existing. But it’s amazing
how soon the memory of our intentions can come back to us when we are
confronted with it face-to-face. That
project you always wanted to do. The
commitment to spend more time with your loved ones. Exercising the gift you offer to the world’s
great need. The persistent sin that remains unaddressed. How many times have you committed to
something only to later discover much later that it had become forgotten? How often have those commitments represented
the better of your intentions and an impulse given to you by God through the
Spirit?
James’s letter will cover a lot of ground in the next few
weeks. They are words well worth
marking. And it’s worth seeing that it
is a letter that speaks to hope, oppression and suffering, and the shape of the
holy life in ways immediately relevant to our own lives.
I suggest that questions that confront us today are
these: Is there a greater purpose of
your life that has been forgotten that needs to be recovered? What is the thing God wants you to hold onto
as your own precious work for the Kingdom we proclaim in word and deed? How will you own this truth, and hold it as
the gift it is in the days, weeks, and years to come?
May God bless us in both our hearing and doing, as we
proclaim and build for the Good of the Kingdom.
[1] Tamez,
Elsa. The Scandalous Message of
James: Faith without Works Is Dead. Rev. ed. (New York: Crossroad, 2002) 1.
[2]
Wittenburg, 1522.
[3]
Jas. 5.
[4]
Jas. 4.
[5]
Jas 2:1-6.
[6]
This list of interpretive angles is found in Elsa Tamez, The scandalous
message of James: faith without works is dead, Rev. ed. (New York:
Crossroad, 2002), 11.
