Faithful Responses

Sunday, September 30, 2012

Ordinary 26/Pentecost 18B

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

Text: James 5:13-20

¹³Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise. ¹⁴Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. ¹⁵The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. ¹⁶Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. ¹⁷Elijah was a human being like us, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. ¹⁸Then he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain and the earth yielded its harvest. ¹⁹My brothers and sisters, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and is brought back by another, ²⁰you should know that whoever brings back a sinner from wandering will save the sinner’s soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.

So this morning is our last foray into James’ letter to his congregation… or congregations… we’ve gotten a clear sense over the last few weeks (at least I HOPE we have) of how practical James is in approaching his folks with the ‘how’ of living the life of a follower of Christ.

This morning’s passage, for US anyway, may seem to hit a little off center on first read. There is just enough in it that goes against our western, science-based worldview that it seems a little too … ‘out there’ … too … faith-healy and supernatural for us to feel completely comfortable with it.

I would invite us to set aside the specifics and look at what James is encouraging his folks to do in the broader sense of the word.

Going verse by verse: he goes through a series of situations and answers them with the appropriate responses.

Are you suffering? Pray. Are you happy? Sing! Are you sick? Ask for the elders – in our context, these would be our deacons – and have them come and pray and anoint you with oil.  He then goes into a commentary on that specific topic. But there is an interesting twist to it: after his initial comment, he goes on to say “and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven.” He is categorizing illness and sin together, it would seem.

It gives us insight into our current view of various sins as forms of addictive illnesses. If we were to approach our sins in that fashion – not ONLY as allowing our wills to cave in to the temptations we might be faced with at any given moment, but as symptoms of an illness … it fills out another aspect of what it means to be slaves to sin, doesn’t it?

He follows with a word of encouragement: the prayers of the righteous are powerful and effective (availeth much, is what we might be replaying in our minds from the King James), and BECAUSE they are powerful and effective, all the more reason to follow Elijah’s example and pray for a miracle. The encouragement is in the fact that by this time, Elijah the prophet has reached mythic proportions in the pantheon of Hebrew prophets, an almost-unattainable level of faithfulness and obedience to God. But James, in just a few words, brings him down to the same level as the folks that he’s writing to: ‘Elijah was a human being like us,’ and then he goes on to present exactly how ‘powerful and effective’ Elijah’s prayers WERE.

His final entreaty in the passage speaks clearly to what I think has been his intent all along:

¹⁹My brothers and sisters, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and is brought back by another, ²⁰you should know that whoever brings back a sinner from wandering will save the sinner’s soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.

What is the image we get here? It is of brothers and sisters caring enough about each other to reach out to each other and reconnect – to remain in relationship – to maybe instruct, persuade, or point out – however you want to phrase it – when someone you love and care about is … misdirected? Straying? Lost? Confused? James’ wording here is comfortable for us if we’ve grown up speaking Christianese, but probably not so much if we’ve not – or if we are trying to communicate this idea to someone who was not raised speaking the same language of this subculture we live in.

To put it in terms that (hopefully) don’t immediately set off judgment alarms in the ears of those with whom we are trying to communicate simply due to the word choice:

‘Brothers and sisters, if someone you love and care about is doing things that are ultimately self-destructive and unhealthy and chaotic for their spirit and their life, and through your persuasion or presence in their lives they begin to get their life back on track, back in the direction of wholeness and integration, back towards acknowledging that God is God and they are not, and that Christ is Lord and that he is MORE than just savior, you will have saved them from a death that they would have experienced long before their heart stopped beating, and you will have put them on track to correct wrongs that were going far beyond simply themselves.

That last, I think, is the greater task – the much greater task. To be able to relate not simply to each other – that is hopefully understood to be a baseline for us – but to also be able to relate to those who are either on the periphery of our community or who are part of the greater community that surrounds us – we have that designation on our prayer list, if you’ve noticed – people who are not necessarily directly connected to us but of whom we are still aware and for whom we still care and most importantly, whom we still love.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

This is where our faithful responses come into play. Whatever situation we find ourselves in – whether we are suffering, or cheerful, sick, troubled, angry, whatever it is – because we have this family that we are a part of, this community of faith, this band of pilgrims with whom we’ve chosen to travel this voyage alongside, all of these experiences are experiences that we do not face alone, that we do not bear in solitude, that we are actually CALLED to share in the life of the community.

Insofar as we allow the walls that society tells us to build between us to stand, it is to that degree that we are diminishing the Kingdom’s ability to shine through in the way we live together. So James’ admonition is, just like Christ’s, to make this way of living so compellingly brilliant (in the ‘shiny’ sense of the word) that it would draw people in to that central light of Christ just as it has drawn us in.

Let’s pray.

From The Same Mouth

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Ordinary 24/Pentecost 16B

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton) Warsaw VA

James 3:1-12

Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. ²For all of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check with a bridle. ³If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies. ⁴Or look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. ⁵So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! ⁶And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. ⁷For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, ⁸but no one can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison. ⁹With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. ¹⁰From the same mouth comes blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so. ¹¹Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and brackish water? ¹²Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, yield olives, or a grapevine figs? No more can salt water yield fresh.

James is continuing the conversation – the instruction, as it were, on what constitutes true religion – pure and undefiled. Here he is tackling an issue that is still as relevant today as it was two thousand years ago – bridling the tongue.

In many ways, the observations he makes about what the tongue is capable of – and just to be clear, when we read ‘the tongue’, what we are talking about is the words that come out of our mouths – echoes passages we are familiar with from Paul – when he speaks in his letter to the Romans, in chapter 7 about doing things he doesn’t want to do, and yet does them anyway, and DOESN’T do what he WANTS to do… at least I HOPE it echoes some of the same thoughts …

The issue with our words is that, we only have one mouth. It would’ve been helpful if God had given us two mouths – one out of which to speak kindness and grace, and the other for judgment and hatred, for unkind words and spirit-tearing barbs. But we are what we are. We were only given one mouth. We were not consulted in our design.

I’m being facetious – I’m teasing, of course. The point that James is making is that we tend to be duplicitous beings – two-sided. The same mouth that speaks or sings praises to God for his goodness to us, thanks him for his blessings, and CAN speak grace and kindness into a given situation can, quicker than the blink of an eye, turn and speak words that totally contradict all we DO hold dear in our heart of hearts – or that can uncover true feelings regarding a situation or a person, to their destruction, and ours as well.

How often have words come out of our mouths that we have regretted, that we wish we had held back, that we wish had never been uttered?

James took Jesus’ five words that summarized the Hebrew Law: You Shall Love Your Neighbor As Yourself – and expounded on them in this letter.

How do you love your neighbor? Here are some ways:

He’s has tackled hypocrisy, in dealing with the wealthy in his congregation, as well as the treatment of the poor and the needy – specifically, the widows and the orphans – folks who in first century Palestine had no standing in society – none – zero, nada, zilch, goose egg. And now he is taking on how words are used.

One of the things discovered in the field of psychology is how words influence how thoughts and attitudes are formed. This is not about how words affect the ones who hear them, but the ones who speak them. I only took one psychology course in college, and the single phrase that stands out in my mind from that class is this: Fallible Human Being. The professor made that distinction on the first or second day of class. He abbreviated it FHB. He asked us to replace what we might usually call someone with whom we had an issue with those letters, and it really did make a difference.

If, instead of referring to someone as an ignorant fool, or a stupid idiot, we referred to them as that – a fallible human being – we would be reminded of the fact that we are all more alike than different, when it comes to stuff like this. That simple change of word choice – from one that sets us above the person with whom we have a disagreement to one that sets us alongside them – gives us a perspective that allows us to relate to them in a completely different way – as equals – as equally susceptible to making mistakes and coming to wrong conclusions as they are.

What it boils down to is this: we are capable.

We are capable of extreme cruelty.

We are capable of extreme generosity.

We are capable of extreme indifference.

We are capable of unbelievable grace.

And overwhelming kindness.

We can, each of us, make an incredible impact on how the world is perceived by another person. Whether through our actions or our words, we have the ability to transform perceptions.

The question for us, as it was for the congregation that James was writing to, is, how will we choose to affect those perceptions? More to the point, will we submit our speech to the Lordship of Jesus Christ?

Will we choose to further the notion that everyone is out for themselves? That looking out for number one is the order of the day? Or will we be standard bearers for the proposition that we are called to live in community, and that living in community involves caring for each other, tending TO each other, working together to overcome differences with love, and to allow grace to dictate our words and our actions rather than pure self-interest or greed?

Included in that ‘caring for each other and tending to each other’ part is speaking of each other with caring words, words intended to uplift and encourage each other, not words that tear at a person’s reputation or relationships, that are designed to put someone down in the eyes of others, but which, in love, place the speaker next to the one being spoken of – acknowledging that we are all capable (again) of making poor choices as well as good, Godly ones, that we are each capable of doing that which pleases God rather than the opposite, that we can be instruments of light as readily as we can be part of the darkness that infects the world.

For us here at Jerusalem Baptist Church in Emmerton, this means we are called to a diligent submission – to each other, to the Holy Spirit and to Jesus Christ. It means that we are to be living examples of circumspect humility, that when we speak, our words not be intemperate – immoderate, extreme, or hotheaded – but that they be thoughtful, caring, measured words – words that have been thought through, that reflect the father’s love for his children, that bring healing, that communicate love. That transfer Grace.

Let’s pray.

So Speak And So Act

Sunday, September 9, 2012

Ordinary 23/Pentecost 15B

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

James 2:1-17

My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? ²For 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, ³and 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,” ⁴have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts? ⁵Listen, 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? ⁶But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? ⁷Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you?

⁸You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” ⁹But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. ¹⁰For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. ¹¹For 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. ¹²So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty. ¹³For judgment will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment.

¹⁴What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? ¹⁵If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, ¹⁶and 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? ¹⁷So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

One day in the spring of 1989, we had a guest lecturer in E. Frank Tupper’s Theology class in seminary. His name was Will D. Campbell. I had heard of him, and knew he’d done some writing, but I did not really know that much about him. One of the drawbacks to not growing up here. Few cultural references. I should have been clued in when I got to class and there were people standing around the edges of the lecture hall – people were sitting on the floor. Every seat was taken. Other professors – WITH THEIR CLASSES – were there.

So I went reading, and this is what I found out about him:

Born in 1924 in Amite County, Mississippi, he was the epitome of what one would call a Son of the South. He was 17 when his home church – a little Baptist church made up mostly of family and extended family – ordained him to the Gospel Ministry. He began his college career at Louisiana College, but withdrew and enlisted when WWII began. After the war, he returned and continued his studies – first at Tulane, then on to Wake Forest and finally Yale Divinity School.

He served for a couple of years as a Pastor in Louisiana, but moved from there to work as the Director of Religious Life at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss). He began that work in 1954. Somewhere along the way early in his life he understood the intrinsic value of human life – regardless of the color of your skin. Early in his academic career he realized that this was going to have real consequences for him if he was going to keep living in the south.

As he began to speak out more for desegregation, he became something of a lightning rod – a target. He finally had to resign his position at Ole Miss in part because of all the death threats he was getting in response to his stand on the equality of all human beings.

From Ole Miss, he took a position with the National Council of Churches, as a field officer. During that time, he worked with most of the leaders of the civil rights movement in the south – in fact, he was one of four people who escorted black students when they integrated the public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. And he was the only white person who was present at the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  Despite that track record, he doesn’t consider himself to have been an activist. He was simply doing what seemed to be what was naturally in line with what his beliefs were.

 As he matured, Campbell had the uneasy feeling that he hated those redneck bigots who hated. He discovered how easy it was to play favorites and to oppress the oppressors. Strange, he thought, how he enjoyed thinking that God hated all the same people that he hated. He realized that he had created God in his own image, and after his own personal and political likeness. Through a series of encounters with unlikely "teachers," Campbell came to admit that after twenty years in ministry he had become little more than a "doctrinaire social activist," which was different than being a follower of Jesus.

The key? "I came to understand the nature of tragedy. And one who understands the nature of tragedy can never take sides." Campbell saw how he had played favorites and taken sides; he had subverted the indiscriminate love of God for all people without conditions, limits, or exceptions into a ministry of "liberal sophistication."

           

Acting upon these convictions, he started sipping whiskey with the Ku Klux Klan. He did their funerals and weddings, and even befriended the Grand Dragon of North Carolina, J.R. "Bob" Jones. When they were sick he emptied their bedpans. And then the hate mail came from the liberal left. In a 1976 interview for an oral history that he gave to the University of Southern Mississippi, he joked, "It's been a long time since I got a hate letter from the right. Now they come from the left."

Since God doesn't play favorites, Campbell concluded, neither should he.

His uncompromising theology has led him to keep his distance from political movements. He has insisted that "anyone who is not as concerned with the immortal soul of the dispossessor as he is with the suffering of the dispossessed is being something less than Christian" and that "Mr. Jesus died for the bigots as well"

We are not without our prophetic voices – even today.

The necessary connection between claiming to love God and proving that we love our fellow human beings became so embedded in the early Christian traditions that this teaching is repeated almost verbatim by Paul (in his letter to the Romans (13:8–9), and to the Galatians (5:14)), here in what we’ve just read, and again, what we heard from John last week and the week before: "If anyone says, 'I love God,' yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother" (1 John 4:20–21).

As I’ve shared with you before, I am a fan of Facebook. I love the way I’ve been able to reconnect with childhood friends who are now spread all over the world, and to keep up with extended family and friends, whether they are across the ocean or at the other end of the county. Anything from the mundane to the sublime can be found on any given day.

One of the things that has been trying, though, has been how to handle – how to respond to – political postings, as well as postings where people whom I love are making extreme statements on one side or another of an issue. In some cases I find myself reacting in agreement, in others, in disagreement; and my friends and family members span the entire spectrum of both politics and social issues, and I DO mean the ENTIRE spectrum.

Especially these last few months, as the campaigns for the upcoming elections have been ramping up, I have had to detach myself from posting or sharing things that I may agree with, but which when left in their original form – whether it was a sarcastic meme or an acerbic quote, cause pain to people who might hold the view in question. A dear friend pointed out to me that there were times when she came very close to unfriending me because of some of the things that I had repeated – or reposted. And I began to take more critical note of what is being said – and repeated – about any given candidate and realized there is an awful lot of untruth being shared and retold and spread in the name of one or the other political party – and worse – under the banner of Christ.

There is an understanding in James that Will Campbell got after nearly twenty years in ministry – that if we follow the one who died for all of us – every single last one of us – and treat one person differently from another based on their social standing, or on what they can or cannot do for us, or on whether they share our political stances or social and moral conventions, we are missing the point of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.    

It is that simple. We betray the spirit of the Gospel if we select whom we apply it to.

¹⁵If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, ¹⁶and 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?

Let’s pray.