A NOTE FOR MY COTTAGE FRIENDS -
Last week, I closed comments making them only accessible to paid subscribers. The policy is intended to protect our community during this contentious election season.
Guess what? I MISSED YOU! I love hearing from you and love reading your exchanges with each other. ❤️
So, I’m going to experiment a little with the comment policy and find something that works.
Sunday Musings will be open for comments for the entire community until the Wednesday following publication. After that, I’ll restrict commenting to only paid subscribers.
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For the foreseeable future, commenting will be available to free subscribers on a limited basis on Sunday Musings and occasional midweek posts. Commenting is always open to paid subscribers.
Today is the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost.
Lately, I’ve found that the New Testament epistle lectionary readings have spoken a word that I’ve needed to hear. For whatever reason, recent passages from Ephesians and James have seemed particularly relevant to the moment.
Today, I continue on with the Epistle of James, a letter with a controversial history and a prophetic message.
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James 2:1-10, 14-17
My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?
For 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, and 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,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?
Listen, 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? But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you?
You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it.
What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? 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?
So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.
Recently, I received a puzzling email. My correspondent asked me not to address anything implicitly or explicitly political at a future event. The note flummoxed me, and I realized that if I followed such a directive that I wouldn’t know what to say.
“Well,” I thought, “there goes the Bible.”
Like today’s passage from the Epistle of James.
This reading is political. There’s no getting around it. Social distinctions and favoritism based on wealth are sinful. God prefers the poor. The rich are the bad guys — and blasphemers to boot. If an assembly of Jesus’ followers privilege the wealthy, they’ve failed the command of neighborly love.
But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors.
You might talk a good game about loving your neighbor, but if you don’t do something to redress favoritism and social inequalities, your faith doesn’t mean much.
Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.
Later, in the same letter, James wrote, “Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you. Your riches have rotted…The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter.” (5:1-5)
James ends that section by saying that these wealthy oppressors have themselves “murdered” Jesus.
Do we seriously think for even a second that James would be silent about tax breaks for corporations or the wealthiest people in our society? Or, that he wouldn’t jump on X and attack Trump’s promise to reward his billionaire lackey Elon Musk with a cabinet position? James would have plenty to say about a dictator who fancies himself better than everyone else and bases policies on transactions and quid pro quo, a candidate full of “bitter envy and selfish ambition….”
James’ words don’t need much explanation. They are clear moral directives. And they sound as if they could be an editorial from today’s newspaper — or perhaps, a speech given at a convention of Socialists.
Is it not the rich who oppress you?
James’ letter has been, however, explained away by later Christians who found it to be inconvenient theologically, socially, or economically — like Martin Luther who famously called it an “epistle of straw.” It was easy not to listen to James and dismiss his prophetic insistence on “the rich being brought low.”
James is an interesting letter with a long history of controversial debate regarding its dates and origin. The traditional view is that it was written by James, the brother of Jesus, who is mentioned in the gospels and was executed in the early 60s. That would date it to the decade before his death and make it one of the earliest letters in the New Testament.
Textual and literary critics have pointed out, however, that James’ Greek was quite sophisticated, making it unlikely to have been written by the biblical character — and leaving its date wide open to interpretation. Most scholars gave it a later date.
In more recent years, however, even liberal biblical scholars have recognized that even if James wasn’t written by Jesus’ brother, it may well be an early text as its themes echo other primitive Christian teachings and the sayings of Jesus. The late Marcus Borg pointed out that James seems to know Mark’s gospel, but neither Matthew or Luke — perhaps dating it to the 70s.
That’s important because early Christian communities were notoriously political, and less willing to compromise with Rome than later ones. The first followers of Jesus got in trouble for refusing to recognize that Caesar was Lord, insisting instead that their Christ was Lord. To proclaim “Christ is Lord!” was an overt political slogan, the sort of yard sign that could get one tossed in some Roman prison. Not because the Romans didn’t like Christian theology or spirituality (the Romans didn’t care an iota about what Christians believed), but because they thought Christians were traitors to the imperial order — and because their movement presented a powerful, perhaps even revolutionary, alternative to the Empire.
The alternative was found in (what some scholars have suggested was) the first Christian baptismal creed: For you are all children of God in the Spirit. There is no Jew or Greek; there is no slave or free; there is no male and female. For you are all one in the Spirit.
Those words, quoted and slightly revised by Paul in his letter to the Galatians, were taken from an early Christian baptismal liturgy, and may have even been used in his own baptism. And they may well be the oldest words to survive from the ancient Christian movement. That means the very first Christian creed was not about the nature of God or the Trinity or the divinity of Jesus, but it was about us — a creed of human solidarity and the breaking down of ethnic, economic, and gender barriers to create a community where there is neither favoritism nor privilege to those who the empire deems important.
Not only have we largely ignored James, but we have little memory of the creed that might have shaped the very assembly to which he wrote.
As New Testament scholar Stephen Patterson says, “Whatever the future holds for our little world, with its big fish like Trump, it is time now than ever to tell the story of this forgotten first creed….”
History reminds us again and again that it has always been easier to believe in miracles, in virgin births and atoning death, in resurrected bodies and heavenly journeys home, than something so simple and basic as human solidarity. Here, then, is an episode of our history from a time long past, when foreigners were slaughtered, captives sold as slave, and women kept in their place, when a few imaginative, inspired people dared to declare solidarity between natives and foreigners, free born and slaves, mean and women, through a ceremony and a creed….that first, unbelievable creed. (from Patterson, The Forgotten Creed, p. 7)
Sounds like the Books of Acts to me, all those stories about sharing everything in common and having no distinctions based on nationality or wealth. And James echoes that in these ancient prophetic words, reminding Jesus’ first followers not to give in to the temptations of empire.
And it was political. Inescapably, completely political. Miraculous, too. Because if you think about it — what could be more miraculous than a community that doesn’t worship the rich, privilege the elite, and ignore the poor?
If you tell me that I can’t talk about politics, I’ve got nothing. Jesus’ best miracles were the political ones. Like inspiring a group of poor, marginal Jews and outcasts to resist Rome by challenging Caesar and the empire. Like the miracle of the first Christians in the story of Acts. Like the miracle recited in the baptismal creed by the earliest converts.
And it is the miracle that James said we accomplish with our works.
I wrote about Stephen Patterson and The Forgotten Creed in August 2020 in a post called, “The Importance of ‘And’: The Forgotten Political Message of Christianity.” Oddly enough, it was inspired by the selection of Kamala Harris to be Joe Biden’s VP choice! It is a good piece and worth revisiting.
INSPIRATION
I live a life of appetite and, yes, that's right,
I live a life of privilege in New York…
I have a rule —
I never give to beggars in the street who hold their hands out…
The poor are poorer than they ever were.
The rich are richer than the poor.
Is it true about the poor?
It's always possible to be amusing.
I saw a rat down in the subway.
So what if you saw a rat.
I admire the poor profusely.
I want their autograph.
They make me shy.
I keep my distance.
I'm getting to the bottom of the island.
Lower Broadway comes to a boil and City Hall is boiling.
I'm half asleep but I'm awake.
At the other end of me are my feet
In shoes of considerable sophistication
Walking down Broadway in the heat.
I'm half asleep in the heat.
I'm, so to speak, wearing a hat.
I'm no Saint Francis.
I'm in one of my trances.
When I look in a mirror,
There's an old man in a trance.
There's a Gobi Desert,
And that's poetry, or rather rhetoric.
You see what happens if you don't make sense?
It only makes sense to not.
You feel the flicker of a hummingbird
It takes a second to find.
You hear a whirr.
It's here. It's there. It hovers, begging, hand out.
— Frederick Seidel, “Widening Income Inequality”
It does not take an advanced degree in theology to tell that such behavior (favoritism) doesn’t go well with what James has put forward as God’s way.
In James 1:27, he has reminded readers that “religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is … to care for orphans and widows in their distress”; by the same token, he says, “God [has] chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom” (2:5).
Whatever we might say about cultivating benefactors whose (hypothetical) gifts might provide sustenance for ministries and programs, James recognizes the temptation to favor people like us, or whom we wish we were, over against people whose affliction reminds us of how contingent our good fortune may be. This is just the half-hearted discipleship that submits to desire: the desire to be comfortable, the desire to be upwardly mobile, the desire to experience only life’s ups, and to be insulated from life’s downs. Such desire fuels litigious efforts to secure our well-being at the expense of others, regardless of their own contingent circumstances.
By contrast, whole-hearted faithfulness to God will always require of us whole-hearted faithfulness to the least of Jesus’ brothers and sisters: to orphans and widows, to our naked, hungry neighbors, to wounded and broken left-behind bystanders.
— A.K.M. Adam, Oxford University
My “road sabbatical” has come to an end. Time to pack and lecture again! 🧳👩🏫
On Sunday September 15, I’ll be preaching and speaking at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Wilmington, Delaware. You are invited to come!
You can also find me at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary on September 23 and 24 for the Henderson Lectures. The Monday evening lecture is free and open to the public. Here’s the INFORMATION.
Indeed, Faith and Politics are bedfellows, at their core they both speak to truth and justice.
Rev. Curt
https://kerceykentproductions.com/the-gift-of-trump/
Thank you Diana. You got me thinking. Political, social, theological; one could argue that everything is related to all of these. The question is how. Our social context disregards religious and 'political' arguments when convenient (and perhaps vice versa). James' letter is, in my opinion, not a social treatise, but a (Jewish, if the writer is the brother) faith argument. Our society does not abide by that - it's pluralistic (which begs the question, can we all get along? How?). Naming the political enemy does nothing to advance a social/ist argument (we do not struggle against flesh and blood ...). If James is speaking with the faithful, it does nothing to advance a wider sociopolitical argument, because not everybody else has the same reference point (faith in what?). Not "Jew or Greek" was an internal argument tied to faith in Christ, which the wider society does not abide in. And it seems like Jesus acknowledged that we should pay taxes and give God our devotion. I do not think James' argument is against the rich (Abraham was), but about the witness (if you love each other they will know you follow Jesus). Is God partial to one human or another? In political rhetoric (not the argument for what is wholesome and promotes the well being of the polis, which I'm all for), all these ideas are conflated and manipulated. The church/religion has been marginalized in society and politics, until its principles are convenient. Who used to build schools, orphanages and hospitals and with whose funds? How can the faithful followers of Christ participate in society and politics without becoming the Amish or the Mormons? We are still trying to make sense of that dynamic in a post-everything context. The debate continues.