October 7 - Snippet from Sunday - Prejudice and the King

I have yet to meet a church whose members don’t quietly hold prejudice and division from one another in their hearts. Already as a small child, I knew there was division in the heart of the congregation I grew up in and loved. The meetinghouse was situated midway between two small towns. Church members came from both towns to worship together as one body. But whenever there was a congregational vote, the church was split along town lines--who lived where, who went to Bible study in one municipality or the other. This internal divided-ness spilled over to the conversations over coffee in the fellowship hall or the church foyer. Those three men were from Town A, that group of women was from Town B, and so forth.

This is not what Jesus wants for the community he calls his body. He prayed that we may be one just as he is one with God his Father, separate in person but united in spirit (Jn 17.21). But even before the New Testament was fully written, already churches were drawing lines and taking sides.

[. . .] According to James in 2.8, the standard we’re held to is unconditional love, love without discrimination, love without favoritism or prejudice. James calls this the “royal” law; we could also translate it “the King’s law.” If we were to read on to v 11, we’d find James focusing our attention more and more on the King, the one who spoke this law to us.

Whether we identify this King with God in the person of Jesus in Mk 12 or Yahweh God speaking to Moses in Lev 19, this law sums up how our King desires us to live with one another. When we nurse prejudice in our hearts or show favoritism, we walk away from what God wants. It doesn’t matter that prejudice is only a feeling or that favoritism is affects how we treat others only a little. Just as surely as if we committed adultery or murder, James says in v 12, we’re walking away from the path to the good, free, and just life God desires for us.

[. . .] My brothers and sisters, this should not be for us. Jesus’ cross has toppled every dividing wall. While age, money, gender, race, class, interests and hobbies are all still realities we live with, we don’t live by them. We don’t let them determine who we extend friendship to. Jesus has crossed the biggest barrier, that between a holy and faithful God and us faithless people, to make us God’s friends. Where that barrier has fallen, no other barrier should still stand.

(Check out the whole sermon after the jump. . .)

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I want to begin this sermon a bit differently than I have most sermons. I want to read out a handful of stories about Jesus before we turn our attention to Jas ch 2. The first two stories are from Luke’s Gospel-biography of Jesus. The last is from Matthew’s. So listen in.

Jesus went out and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi sitting at his tax booth. “Follow me,” Jesus said to him, and Levi got up, left everything and followed him.

Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” (Lk 5.27-30)

. . . 

When one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, he went to the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table. A woman in that town who lived a sinful life learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume. As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them, and poured perfume on them.

When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is--that she is a sinner.” (Lk 7.36-39)

. . . 

Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’”

The blind and the lame came to him at the temple, and he healed them. But when the chief priests and the teachers of the law saw the wonderful things he did and the children shouting in the temple courts, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” they were indignant. (Mt 21.12-15)

If we listen to just these stories, Jesus seems to lack good sense about the sort of people he associates with. He chose a tax collector for one of his close friends. Then he went to a house party with other mafia-type tax collectors and their “sinner” female escorts. In the next story, we hear that one of these escort-service women, a prostitute, interrupted a respectable dinner party to kiss Jesus’ feet and massage them with perfumed oil. No wonder the Pharisees questioned Jesus’ legitimacy! In the last story, Jesus interrupted the business people selling the goods for pilgrims’ festival sacrifice. He threw them out of the temple courts, and in their place he ushered in people who were disqualified from temple worship according to Old Testament law: blind and lame beggars. With a chorus of kids chanting praise for this undoubtedly entertaining disruption, it’s not hard to understand why the religious administrators were indignant.

By most accounts, Jesus lacked what we today might call good judgment about people. If we’re honest, most of us wouldn’t want to be friends with the people Jesus chose for friends. Many of them have bad reputations or bad hygiene. They were the sort of people that mothers and fathers would warn their children not to hang around with. They didn’t want their sons and daughters to pick up bad habits or catch something from those kind of people.

But we shouldn’t expect anything else from our Lord. The same Jesus who brings us the message of salvation summarizes his message in the Beatitudes. In Mt 5, he says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth” (5.3-5). In a world made new by the gospel, the poor, the sick, the down-trodden, and the outcast finally receive blessing. They’re finally given enough, healed, vindicated, and welcomed home.

The letter from James often echoes Jesus’ teaching. In ch 2, vv 1-13, James applies this bit of Jesus’ teaching about the right sort of people to respect and befriend. While James doesn’t quote Jesus directly, words and phrases from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and other teachings keep appearing in James’ letter. It’s almost as if James were writing a Bible study on Jesus’ teaching to help his readers apply it in their daily lives.

Last Sunday morning I insisted that hearing the gospel word of salvation should lead to living a life of obedient discipleship, that claiming Jesus as Savior should lead to obeying him as Lord. This, if you remember, is what it means for us to be, as James says in ch 1, v 19, “quick to listen, quick to obey.” Last Sunday we talked about the importance of discipleship generally; this Sunday we’ll talk about what discipleship means in one particular, concrete area of our lives: friendship.

However, before we talk about how we can follow Jesus in making and being friends, we need to examine what Jesus’ teaching meant for the original audience of James’ letter, the first Jewish Christians in home churches scattered throughout the Roman Empire. This original situation plays a very important role in helping us understand vv 1 through 7 of ch 2. Listen to how James begins this passage

My brothers and sisters, do not hold the faith of our glorious Lord Jesus Christ together with favoritism. For suppose a man wearing a gold ring and fine clothes comes into your meeting, and a poor person wearing filthy clothes also comes in. If you pay special attention to the one wearing fine clothes and tell him, “Sit here in this good seat,” while you also say to the poor person, “Stand over there” or “Sit down next to my footstool,”have you not discriminated among yourselves? Have you not become judges with evil motives? (vv 1-4)

For the home churches to whom James addressed his letter nearly two thousand years ago, Jesus’ teaching about how to regard and think about other people should have meant consistency in how they treated others, whether they were rich or poor. James tells them that our faith in Jesus--that God is making the world right through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection--doesn’t make sense if we’re still nursing prejudice and favoritism in their hearts. James tells his readers that they can’t fully “receive the word which can save them” if they continue to discriminate among their neighbors.

I have yet to meet a church whose members don’t quietly hold prejudice and division from one another in their hearts. Already as a small child, I knew there was division in the heart of the congregation I grew up in and loved. The meetinghouse was situated midway between two small towns. Church members came from both towns to worship together as one body. But whenever there was a congregational vote, the church was split along town lines--who lived where, who went to Bible study in one municipality or the other. This internal divided-ness spilled over to the conversations over coffee in the fellowship hall or the church foyer. Those three men were from Town A, that group of women was from Town B, and so forth.

This is not what Jesus wants for the community he calls his body. He prayed that we may be one just as he is one with God his Father, separate in person but united in spirit (Jn 17.21). But even before the New Testament was fully written, already churches were drawing lines and taking sides. We hear about this here in James’ letter, but the most infamous story of a prejudiced and internally-divided church come from Paul’s letter to the church at Corinth.

In his letter to the Christian communities in the city of Corinth, Paul’s very first command addresses the division that prejudice, favoritism, and pride had created in their gatherings. He tells them that he longs for them to quit their in-fighting, to put aside their quarrels.

Paul’s antidote to their prejudice and pride is the unexpected, upside-down logic of a Messiah who saves by his own death on a cross. Paul spends the next two chapters exulting over the sort of wisdom God shows by saving us through Jesus’ humiliating death. In v 18 of ch 1, he says, The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

Prejudice, favoritism, discrimination, division, and pride--all of these run against the grain of God’s choice to save us by a cross. The cross turns everything upside-down; it sets right what the world has set wrong. Like Jesus said, the poor are blessed, so are the hungry, the weeping, the oppressed (Lk 6.20-22). Division and discrimination try to grab hold of and take advantage of all those categories of the old, broken world. Prejudice and pride latch on to things like social class or race or age or popularity to help us get ahead and to keep everyone else down in their place. When people who claim to follow Jesus do this, they make a mockery of God’s choice to save us by the cross. Listen to how Paul sums up his position against favoritism in 1 Cor 3, vv 3 and 4:

You are still worldly. For since there is jealously and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere human beings? For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not mere human beings?

The Christian communities in Corinth pridefully divided themselves according to which Christian teachers they thought most prestigious; the division of the home churches James wrote to was rooted in money and power. In Jas ch 2, we read this example of a rich person who wears his wealth like an advertisement on his sleeve walking into a Christian gathering, perhaps like our worship service this morning. At the same time, a poor man in dirty, smelly clothes also walks through the doors. One scholar’s commentary said that the poor man’s “contemporary equivalent would be the street person whose lack of access to facilities leads to being clothed in filthy and stinking rags” (Johnson 222).

It’s not hard for us to imagine ourselves in the place of those church members. Our eyes would be immediately drawn to someone in a designer suit or dress, just as surely as we would give a wide berth to someone dressed in what we’d consider rags not fit even to donate to the thrift store. But knowing the context of those believers a bit better helps us understand even more the wickedness of the favoritism this hypothetical home church acts out.

See, back then most believers--almost all believers--were poor, desperately poor. They were the sharecroppers, the manual day laborers, the slaves. When their eyes saw the fine clothing and the shiny gold ring of a wealthy, upper class individual, they weren’t just hoping to strike up a friendship with a well-traveled person with good taste. No, they were hoping for a ticket out of poverty.

The picture James sets before us could almost be comical. It doesn’t take much imagination to see the believers jumping up when this wealthy person crosses the threshold, stumbling over one another to say, “Let me take your coat” or “Here, have my comfortable seat with a good view.” They would do anything to get in the good graces of this rich person.

It would be funny, if not for the poor person who walks in behind the rich person. Maybe the believers hear the door squeak, they look up, see that it’s just another poor person like themselves. Nothing to get excited about hear. No one gets up to offer the poor person a seat. Maybe someone at the back, offended by his smell, whispers to him, “Why don’t you go stand over on the other side of the room.”

James rebuke to this sort of behavior and to the heart attitudes that produced thunders from the page. Listen to vv 5 and 6:

Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters: Did not God choose the poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which he promised to those who love him. But you have dishonored the poor?

Jesus blessed the poor, not the rich. Jesus gave life and strength to the sick, not the healthy. Jesus chose sinners for his friends, not the righteous. Do we think that we can use the old divisions between wealth and poverty to get ahead? Do we think that the well-off deserve better treatment than the destitute? We’d better think again.

Maybe we used to think this way, but Jesus’ cross has changed everything. I can’t help but hear more of Paul’s words to the Corinthian Christians:

God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things--and the things that are not--to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. (1 Cor 1.27-29)

When God chose to save us and set everything right through Jesus’ cross, God showed us his pleasure in blessing and using the things we turn up our noses at to work redemption, the dream of equality and enough for everyone.

James goes on to name the rich as the very people oppressing the poor believers in the Jewish Christian home churches. Just as it is true in our day, those with money were the ones with the power to set up systems that benefited their pocketbooks while keeping the poor in their place. Maybe the believers showed them favoritism to get ahead, or maybe it was just to lessen the intensity of their oppression.

Either way, James goes on to say that any show of prejudice or favoritism violates the royal law of love. Listen to what he says in vv 8 through 10:

If you really keep the royal law, in accordance with what Scripture says, namely, “Love you neighbor as yourself,” you are doing well. But if you show favoritism, you sin and are convicted by the law as lawbreakers. For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at even one point is guilty of breaking the whole of it.

According to James, the standard we’re held to is unconditional love, love without discrimination, love without favoritism or prejudice. James calls this the “royal” law; we could also translate it “the King’s law.” If we were to read on to v 11, we’d find James focusing our attention more and more on the King, the one who spoke this law to us.

Whether we identify this King with God in the person of Jesus in Mk 12 or Yahweh God speaking to Moses in Lev 19, this law sums up how our King desires us to live with one another. When we nurse prejudice in our hearts or show favoritism, we walk away from what God wants. It doesn’t matter that prejudice is only a feeling or that favoritism is affects how we treat others only a little. Just as surely as if we committed adultery or murder, James says in v 12, we’re walking away from the path to the good, free, and just life God desires for us.

You’ve probably had this happen when you’ve been driving somewhere: You almost take the right road, you almost turned at the right place, but you didn’t. It doesn’t matter that it was just one turn too soon or just one mile too late. You don’t end up where you wanted to go. That’s the way it is with us and God. But thank God for the mercy he’s given us through Jesus!

So, how does this come home to where we live? We’re not poor like the Jewish Christians of two thousand years ago. If we have divisions in our fellowship, they probably aren’t along socioeconomic lines.

I think this passage, if we think it over for long enough, has a lot to say to more parts of our lives than we’d like to admit. But two seem to stand out to me this morning. The first has to do with how we understand our fellowship within a growing and changing city.

I’ve heard that Warman once had the reputation as a Mennonite town. If someone heard you were from Warman, they assumed you were Mennonite. But while some of the streets still have ethnically Mennonite names, Warman is no longer an ethnically Mennonite town.

As a church with a Mennonite heritage, this puts us in an interesting situation. As people in that tradition, we affirm in our confession that the whole reason Jesus started a church was to witness to and welcome more and more people into God’s kingdom. Maybe we once did that by having lots of babies and persuading our cousins to come to our church instead of the one down the road. But those strategies, if they ever worked, do not work any longer. No, we have to throw wide open the doors of this meetinghouse, both so we can welcome any and all into our fellowship and, even more, so we can go out and witness to God’s kingdom by serving our neighbors and our town.

A.H. shared a poem with me, about a young person visiting a church one Sunday morning. He didn’t grow up in the church, so he didn’t know what to wear. He looked awfully out of place. An usher looked at him and said, “Why don’t you sit in this folding chair in the back row.” As the young man sat there, no one greeted him. They all just filed by to fill their familiar places in the pews. He listened to the sermon; he even thought it was good. But after he stood to sing the sending hymn, he found his folding chair folded back up, the usher ready to show him the door. The message was obvious even if unspoken: you don’t fit here.

Friends, empty your hearts of prejudice. Remember that Jesus came to call the unlikely and the unlovely. He calls us to holiness, yes, but don’t allow yourselves to judge others because they are not as far along that road as you are. Holiness is best expressed in mercy. Rejoice when our meetinghouse fills with people who look like they’re not sure if they belong here. Do any of us truly belong? Belonging is a grace-gift from God; pass it along freely and joyfully.

The second area James’ instructions press on our lives is much more intimate: friendship. Friendship is one of the best things in life. A good group of friends will turn our private happiness into a party, and they give us strength and hope when we feel weakest and hopeless. Part of Jesus’ salvation word to us is that he calls us his friends and tells us to be friends to one another.

But our friendships, like our churches, often shape up according to prejudice. Young people befriend young people. White people befriend white people. Middle class people befriend middle class people, and working class people befriend working class people.

My brothers and sisters, this should not be for us. Jesus’ cross has toppled every dividing wall. While age, money, gender, race, class, interests and hobbies are all still realities we live with, we don’t live by them. We don’t let them determine who we extend friendship to. Jesus has crossed the biggest barrier, that between a holy and faithful God and us faithless people, to make us God’s friends. Where that barrier has fallen, no other barrier should still stand.

I want to end this morning by shaping this second application into a concrete challenge. All of us, if we are honest with ourselves, know that our friendships are too much shaped by our prejudices. This week, I challenge you to reach out in friendship to someone you have no reason to befriend. Maybe you’re older--befriend someone that is younger. Maybe you work on cars all day long--go have a cup of coffee with someone who is a teacher. Maybe you really don’t care for sports--find someone who will let you watch the Riders game with them this week.

According to James, our King has told us to love as he loves. God shows no favoritism. Jesus said that God blesses the just as well as the unjust with the sun and rain needed for their crops to grow (Mt 5.45). We should be just as unconditional, just as unprejudiced in showing our love.