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September 5, 2021
by Sara Baron

“Interconnected” based on James 1:17-27

Welcome to the book of James. It is one of my favorites, despite the fact that it takes away one of my best preaching tools. That is, I usually spend a lot of time explaining context and making sense of a scripture in the time and place it was written. But James is almost a form of wisdom literature. It is universal. So, we’re able to spend our time on the ideas in the book directly.

James is written to the followers of Jesus in the diaspora – that is, those who lived outside of the Holy Land. The ones who had been DISPERSED from the land of their ancestors in faith. This feels relevant right now too. I don’t know any church members at FUMC Schenectady who would claim modern Palestine or Israel as their native land, but I think that all of us are displaced from the “land” we once knew, and have not yet settled into the “land” we’ll live in eventually. The Pandemic has displaced us all (although not all the same amount.)

In this opening chapter of the book of James, we are urged to LIVE our faith. James wants faith in ACTION. He urges people not to just listen to preachers 😉 but to LIVE their faith, and he gets rather specific about it. James believes that people who are followers of Jesus should be acting out different values than the world’s.

The crux of the advice from today’s passage is “let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness.” For James, this is integral in what it means to be “religious” – right up there with caring about God’s beloveds who the world doesn’t value (“widows and orphans.”)

As far as I can figure it out, the work of Christians is to build the kindom of God. The kindom, sometimes called the beloved community, is God’s vision for the world. We will know it is here when the power of love overcomes the love of power; when the abundant resources of the world are used for the good of all people; when kin-ship connections cross all boundaries; when the poorest and most vulnerable people have enough to survive and thrive; when no one has to teach anyone about God because God is known by all. The kindom is God’s long term plan for us, and our work to get there happens in two broad ways: first, by creating Christian communities where we practice kin-dom values and treat each other like we’re already there and second by working with God to share love, to seek mercy, and advocate for justice so that the world is healed.

One of the parts of kindom building that can be hard sometimes is that it requires seeing clearly what the world is like now. We have to do this so we can hold it in tension with how God would have the world be in the kindom, but often the aching pain of the world as it is can be hard to let ourselves see clearly. For instance, we can’t work towards a world without rape and violence unless we admit that we live in a world with rape and violence, and that there are barriers to changing it. So, we seek to see clearly. We seek to see how things are AND how God wants them to be.

Now, I don’t want to shock you or anything, but the United States is a highly individualistic society. (The kindom is not.) We in the US have proven to the world how terribly individualism works – time and time again. Including in our responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic.

You might think that if you were looking at this pandemic with clear eyes that you would see that none of us can be well unless all of us are well- that we are collectively only as healthy as the least healthy among us – that every act of protection and prevention has enormous ripple effects. However, if we had learned this lesson, we’d be spending as much as possible to make it feasible to vaccinate every willing person in the world as soon as possible. We’d even do this before triple vaccinating our own population, because slowing down the spread of the virus is the most important way to keep everyone safe, healthy, and alive. The well being of all and the well being of the USA actually align! Yet, we miss the mark.

The book of James has an interesting perspective on the relationship that Christians have to the world. In the face of the injustices of the Roman Empire, the wealth inequality, the slavery, the power imbalances, the death rates of the poor, James urges the faithful … not to get angry.

I find that my first instinct is to argue with this a little bit. “Are you sure?” “What about when…?” Yet, even as I argue, I am convicted by this passage.

Society is rife with anger. Anger is pulling us apart at the seams. Some of the anger, I’d argue, is “righteous.” It is a response to injustice that needs to be seen, acknowledged, named, and addressed. We’ll talk about that in a moment.

Most of the anger is misplaced. The anger is being used to create groups of “us” that stand against “them,” and those distinctions dismiss that everyone in both groups are beloveds of God. The anger is being used to provoke fear, sell products, pass unjust laws, and elect politicians. The anger is being USED.

And James points out directly that the people who want others to get angry are selling them on the idea that if they get angry enough, they will provoke God to action. James says it won’t work though. God will act when God will act, and furthermore, prayer is a better way to go about it. Anger serves the people promoting it, not God.

But what about righteous anger? As I’ve been saying recently, anger is a “secondary” emotion. That is, it exists like a red flag to mark a place where something that is held precious is being violated. It lets us know when our values are attacked, and underneath that is another emotion. Most often anger is there to act as the bodyguard to sadness or the diversion to fear.

Sadness and fear are sufficient. They can guide us to good action, they can show us the ways of compassion, they can help us grow together. They are wise enough, that once we find them, we can let go of the anger that guided us to them.

Which means that the way to be “slow to anger” is often to identify anger, and then sit with it and find out what is underneath it. It means that we sometimes need to listen – to ourselves and our tender emotions. God is there, with us when we listen, with us when we feel, with us when we discover what is under our anger. This is, even, a form of God’s healing, God’s salve in our lives.

Of course, “be slow to anger” is the third piece of advice we’re given in today’s passage. The first two are to be quick to listen and slow to speak. It seems clear that James’ advice is aimed at faith COMMUNITIES, because his advice is aimed at deepening and maintaining good relationships among the followers of Jesus.

For the past several years, I have participated in “listening circles.” These intentional spaces have careful guidelines that are aimed at making sure there is holy and sacred space for listening – and speaking. At times there have been 20 or 30 people in these circles, and you might think that there would be a lot more speaking than listening. But, there isn’t. Often there are prolonged silences between speakers, and they feel like time to absorb the wisdom one beloved of God has offered. When the obligation to have a response is taken away, along with the tendency toward chit-chat, there is spaciousness for silence and listening.

When I hear James say, “be quick to listen, slow to speak” I think of how healing those circles have been in my life. I love being freed from having to have a response to something someone says, and instead just listen to them and receive their wisdom. And, when I do speak into such a space, I am astounded at the power that comes with being heard with love.

As much as I have loved these experiences though, it isn’t clear to me how to live “be quick to listen, slow to speak” ALL the time. Really listening to another of God’s beloveds takes energy and attention, and … let’s be honest dear ones, those are finite resources!!! We will drain ourselves if we try to listen WELL all the time. (I’ve tried.)

That said, there is a being who is capable of listening with complete attention, and full energy, with love and compassion, with care and support – all day, every day, to all of us. God, the creator, sustainer, redeemer has gifted us with life, and God is with us breathing new life into us day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, and even second by second. When we seek God in prayer and meditation, we find that God is close at hand, ready and able to offer us healing. When all we have to offer are sighs too deep for words, God knows what we mean. When we are full of words, God listens until we have exhausted them. When we are able to be with the Divine in holy silence, God meets us there. And, of course, when what we offer God is our listening, …

well, that’s when things really start to happen 😉

James encourages us to an active faith – not just to worship God once a week, but to live out faith in every day. He reminds us that the very people the world dismisses (the “widows and orphans”) are the ones that followers of Christ take care of. James doesn’t hate the world – though he isn’t impressed with it either – but he doesn’t think being angry with it is going to change it. James encourages the people of faith to act differently. Take care of the struggling and vulnerable, listen deeply, speak with intention, slow down anger and learn its lessons instead of acting it out. Don’t replicate the brokenness of the world – change it.

So, dear ones of God, I invite you to God’s restoration, God’s healing of the world, God’s work of the Kindom: be quick to listen; be slow to speak; be slow to anger. With such “simple” acts as these, we can heal the world. May God help us. Amen

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

September 5, 2021

Sermons

“Partiality” based on Psalm 125 and James 2:1-17

September 10, 2018February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

The Psalm sounds … nice. It sounds… basic. Yes, yes, trusting God is good, it makes you stronger. Yes, sure, God is with us. Bleh, bleh, bleh. God is for good people and God should protect good people from bad people.

It doesn’t seem particularly unique. That is, until one reads it in context. Psalm 125 is believed to be written AFTER the destruction of Jerusalem, which involved the utter destruction of the Temple, and the forced march of the Jewish leaders to slavery in Babylon. That fact alone makes it SUPER interesting, and eliminates the seeming niceness.

Verse 1 says, “Those who trust in the LORD are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever.” As one scholar, Patricia D. Ahearne-Kroll of Ohio Wesleyan, puts it:

“The notion of ‘Zion’ in ancient Israelite literature signifies more than a particular location (i.e. Jerusalem). It always relates to the temple in Jerusalem, which was built at the highest point in the city and was sometimes referred to as the ‘mountain’ or ‘mount’ of YHWH. In the ancient world, temples were not utilized like places of worship today; temples primarily housed the presence of particular deities. Rituals were preformed in temple complexes, but they usually did not incorporate a congregation. Priests would administer these rituals to maintain the sacredness of the space so that the presence of the Divine would remain and the advantages associated with that Deity would be sustained. One of these advantages was the perceived protection of the region by the god or goddess who was worshipped.”¹

The people understood Zion to be the temple complex, and the understood it to be unbreakable. Zion was protected by God. Zion’s power and God’s power were, essentially, the same. As Dr. Ahearne-Kroll puts it, “The concept of Zion, therefore, conveys the inviolability of Jerusalem; because God’s presence resided in the temple, Jerusalem would never fail.”²Thus, it is a big deal to make such a statement about Zion AFTER Zion has fallen.

If your faith said that God would never let the Temple that held God’s presence falter; and then the Temple was destroyed; it would now mean very different things to speak of that Temple at Zion. And the Psalmist says that those who trust in God are like the impenetrable Mount Zion which abides forever, except that it mostly DIDN’T when the Psalmist wrote it.

Right before we formed the Upper New York Annual Conference, we had the final sessions of our former Annual Conferences. After the final blessing was given in Scranton, PA, a voice shouted out “The Wyoming Annual Conference is dead! Long live the Wyoming Annual Conference!” Those words have been playing in my ears in the years since. At first I thought it was silly, those words make sense when one king has died and another has been crowned, but the Wyoming Conference was gone for good. Yet, the hope and faith I learned in the Wyoming Conference still live on in me, and I believe in the world. In my years here, I have learned that the Troy Annual Conference also lives on in her people, and in their faith and hope.

It is weak, I admit that, but the feeling I had when my Annual Conference died (which, for me as a pastor, was my church), is the closest thing I can find for understanding what the Psalmist was saying about Mount Zion abiding forever. Even though what they had known was gone, even though the gone-ness of their Holy Space was a violation of how they knew God, they held firm to their faith in God. They even, intentionally, used the metaphor of the holy space that had been destroyed before their eyes as proof of God’s goodness and permanence!

The Psalmist is so bold as to say, “those who trust in God are like the unbreakable Mount Zion” because the promise and faith of Zion lived on, even when the Temple stood in ruins. Even though the physical could be destroyed, the faith it build and the faith that was practiced there could not. So, even in its own destruction, the Temple Mount served as a metaphor for the eternal. Maybe for those whose lives and livelihoods had been destroyed, only a symbol that had known destruction could be the right symbol of faith.

Nevertheless, I hold that it is radical and profound to stake the claim, “Those who trust in the LORD are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever. As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the LORD surrounds his people, from this time on and forevermore.” The rest of the Psalm is a bit more honest. That’s good too. The Psalmist wishes for God to act, to kick out the oppressing force and all those who collaborated with it. The Psalmist, it seems, wishes for God to act to reestablish the impenetrability of Zion. The Psalmist wants things to be as they should be, and not as they are, and asks God to make things right again.

That’s where our two scriptures collide. James ALSO wants things to be made right again, and not to be as they are, but he thinks it is the job of the followers of Christ to make it so. James sees a problem in the community of Christ-followers, that they treat people with different means with different levels of respect. There does seem to be a little bit more going on in his narrative than what we, as moderns, initially hear in it.

The one presented as a rich man is said to be wearing a gold ring and fine clothes. That likely indicates that he was either a noble or a senator in the Roman Empire, AND that he was running for office. Thus, as one scholar says, “it would be apparent to the readers that the rich man under discussion was a representative of the aristocracy and that his connection with the Christians was supposed to be beneficial to both groups.”³

Dr. Elza Tamez, professor of theology at Latin American Biblical University in Costa Rica, says that there are two words used for “the poor” in Biblical Greek, “The poor were the ptōchoi, a Greek term designating those who totally lacked the means of subsistence and lived from alms; they were the beggars.”⁴ The other word was for poor people who had no land but did have a job. The word used in James for the poor person who enters the worshiping assembly is ptōchoi.

Thus, James’s objection is stronger than it initially appears. It isn’t just, “don’t treat rich people nicer than poor ones” although it is that. It goes a step further, “Don’t treat important people who can help your community better than you treat those who can’t afford to eat today.”

This is not the easiest teaching in the Bible, although it is fairly core. The Hebrew Bible obsesses over the treatment of the poor, particularly the most vulnerable poor. Jesus continues that tradition by engaging with and empowering people living in poverty and hopelessness. James says that God has a preference for the poor, and wants the people who follow Jesus to have that same preference. Some scholars point out that James does not condemn the rich one, or at least he does not do so inherently. Rather he condemns preferential treatment for the wealthy and powerful. He doesn’t say that the wealthy man is unwelcome, simply that he shouldn’t be treated better because he is wealthy.

James says this violates both the values of Christ and practicalities. Wealthy people were regularly oppressing the impoverished people who were the majority in the early Christian communities. The values of God and of Christ are not at all reflective of the values of material possession. The world tends to give more power to those who already have power and wealth, but that’s not how God would have it be. God who loves all of the people wants to lift up the lowly so that all have what they need to survive and thrive! Christians who are trying to build the kindom need to let go of the materialistic values of society and see people with God’s love and values!

That being said, it is much easier to say than do. The assumption that the wealthy man was likely very powerful and a possible protector of vulnerable people fits well into the challenges of living as Jesus lived. It is difficult to forego protections, particularly when you need them. It is ill-advised to anger a powerful person when their power means they can do you harm. It is much easier to fold, to give deference, to offer your chair.

It is easy to forget that when we offer deference to one who has more power, money, or influence we are inherently devaluing the one who lacks power, money, or influence. In those early house churches there wasn’t all that much room – they were in houses after all! Making space for someone meant crowding everyone else. And, as James said, it meant saying to the one who was already most vulnerable, “you can sit on the floor at my feet.”

I can’t read this passage without feeling convicted for all of the ways I fail to follow in the way of Jesus. I truly believe that God calls us to love each other – ALL of each other – with the love God has for each person. Yet, I notice ways that my treatments of people are different. I am not yet able to ignore all the ways that culture trains me to see, hear, and respond to people. (Here is hoping John Wesley is right and I’m moving on to perfection.)

Yet, I think James may know that he is asking something of people that is good to yearn for and VERY difficult to live. I think that because he goes on to talk about mercy. He encourages people to show mercy, so that they might receive mercy; assuming that they need mercy in cases like inappropriately showing partiality. It is, in fact, all tied up together. As one scholar says, “Favoritism emulated, not the law, but the oppressive measures of the rich who do not show mercy. The polar opposite of favoritism is mercy.”⁵

Mercy is “compassion or forgiveness shown toward someone whom it is within one’s power to punish or harm.”⁶ It is power over another that is not used, and instead grace abounds. The opposite of favoritism is mercy. Failing to show mercy is oppression. Mercy is the opposite of partiality. Isn’t that an interesting thought? Mercy, compassion towards someone you have power over – like a poor person entering a space where you belong.

May we move onto perfection. May we find the ways to eliminate partiality from our words and actions. And, in the meantime, may we show mercy. It will help make things right, and we yearn for things to be right. Amen

1Patricia D. Ahearne-Kroll, “Exegetical Perspective on Psalm 125” inFeasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 4, ed. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Louisville, KT: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 33.

2Ahearne-Kroll, 35.

3Bo Reicke, The Epistles of James Peter and Jude in the Anchor Bible Series, ed. William Foxwell Abright and David Noel Freedman (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co., 1964), 27.

4Elza Tamez, The Scandalous Message of James: Faith Without Works is Dead, (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2002), 19.

5Aaron L. Uitti, “Exegetical Perspective on James 2:1-10 (11-13), 14-17” n Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 4, ed. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Louisville, KT: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 43.

6Apple Dictionary, “mercy” accessed 9/7/2018.

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