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.