Trinity 14

Sermon preached by the Revd Anna Matthews

In the late second century, a pagan philosopher wrote a polemic against Christianity. One of the things he denounced it for was that the church was made up of ‘only foolish and low individuals, and persons devoid of perception, and slaves, and women, and children, of whom the teachers of the divine word wish to make converts’ (Origen, Contra Celsum 49).

This would have pleased the author of the Letter of James. This was a society where there existed a gulf between rich and poor, where to be rich could be seen as a sign of God’s blessing and favour, and where social stratification was buttressed by a system of patronage, benefaction, and obligation. The rich were to be honoured, the poor despised.

And this attitude had crept into the churches. James criticises his readers for fawning over the rich person who arrives dripping with gold, while ignoring or dismissing the poor among them. ‘Do you with your acts of favouritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?’ he asks. Is this how your faith shows itself?

If you really believe in Jesus, says James, that should show itself in how you act. It’s not enough to say ‘Jesus is Lord’. Even the demons can do that. No, what’s needed is to live the sort of lives in which Jesus’ Lordship is made manifest. If Jesus is Lord, then Caesar isn’t, and nor is the rich patron or benefactor or visitor. To confess Jesus as Lord commits you to living in a way that the life of Jesus is visible in you and in the Christian community.

‘Blessed are you who are poor’, says Jesus, ‘for yours is the kingdom of heaven.’ ‘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?’ asks James. If God has chosen the poor to be heirs of the kingdom, then why are you ignoring them, mistreating them, and disdaining them?

You can’t meet together for worship and then mistreat your neighbour. The prophets rail against this in the Old Testament. Jesus criticises this very attitude in the Gospels. And here James makes it abundantly clear that you can’t separate love of God from love of neighbour. How you treat your neighbour is an expression of your love of God. So while you might start off treating your neighbour with justice because this is what the Law demands (and James was probably written for Jewish Christian readers), you come to understand that treating your neighbour with justice matters because God’s love is shown in justice. Worshipping God and acting justly not different activities, but different aspects of the same love.

In other words, people should be able to know something of what the God we worship is like by the way we act. Do our actions and attitudes show God to be a God who has favourites, or do they show something of his wild, unlimited grace for all his people? Do our church communities bring the sort of surprising people together that Jesus did, or are they made up of people just like us? Can we see something of the way the kingdom is by the diversity of people God calls into fellowship in his Son, or have we just managed to reproduce the social norms of this or a previous age?

As the writer Annie Lamott put it, ‘you can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.’

This has been a perennial problem for the church. To start with it concerned Gentiles. Were they included within the good news of Jesus, or not? That’s there in the background to today’s Gospel reading. The pushy Gentile woman who argues with Jesus brings this into focus. She’s not teaching Jesus something he doesn’t know – he’s already been across into Gentile territory, teaching and healing – but she does show us that in Jesus, boundaries are being redrawn. The Gospel that will go out to all nations, the good news of God’s love for all people, is foreshadowed in her as she pleads for her daughter. 

Then, in terms of how holiness was understood, we get the healing of the deaf man with a speech impediment. Illness or disability also put you on the outside as far as access to God in the temple was concerned, but Jesus reaches right across this purity boundary to touch the man.

At other times in the Gospels we see him put children at the centre of the disciples; make friends of the mentally ill; accept hospitality from the sort of people that set respectable tongues wagging; and draw into his company the ill, the desperate, the poor, the no hopers, and the dead.

 And James’s question is: does the church look like that? Is the love of God for all his people shown in the sort of community the church is? Who are the favourites? Who is still excluded? Who is tolerated more than welcomed? Because, hard though it is to go against all the social conventions about the order of things, that’s not enough. ‘If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and 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?’ There is no use in pious meditations on the beatitudes if the poor person in the pew next to you is faint with hunger. There’s no use posting a sign outside saying that ‘all are welcome’ if that comes with a list of unspoken conditions.

Our favouritism might show up in different ways than preferential treatment for the rich. Maybe what we value is time spent as a member of the congregation, or academic achievement, or perceived usefulness or position or status. Maybe it’s age or youth, maybe it’s class. And it might not show up in such obvious ways as reserving the best seats for those we regard more favourably. It might show up in who we talk to and who we don’t at coffee after church; whose voice gets most weight when decisions are being made; who we can imagine doing certain tasks or roles.

For James’s question is for us, too. Do we, by our acts of favouritism, really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? What will people learn about Jesus by the sort of community we are?

Inclusion matters, because it shows people more of what God’s love is like, and the priorities of his kingdom. And it starts when we remember that none of us is here by right; that while we were still far off, Christ died for us. We were all outsiders to the covenant and to grace until Christ hauled us in. And this means that this is not our community but his. And if, like the church of the second century, we could get to the point where people criticise us for including those others despise or look down on, what a witness that would be.