The kingdom of God is supposed
to be different than the world, worldly values and so forth. The Church and the
members of the church, the disciples of Jesus, are supposed to be so unlike the
world that we stand out. We are supposed to be different. In theory, we value
completely different things in this world; in theory we value different aspects
of people. The early church was so radically different that people threw them
to the lions; they were killed not sacrificing to the emperor, for carrying a
Bible, they were killed for their beliefs. These days, we seem to desire
nothing as much as to look like everyone else in society. We don’t want to
stick out; we want to blend in less someone mock our belief in God.
One of the ways we might see
this is in how we treat each other within the church. We are supposed to love
our fellow congregants, as much or more than we love our neighbors. And yet, we
seek to categorize each other, we seem to want to assume all sorts of things
about each other. We assume that wealthy people are bright and nice; we, the
church, suffer from ‘conventional wisdom’ that everyone gets what they deserve.
Well, that is clearly not true. As the church, we should know this.
Conventional wisdom doesn’t apply to us. Instead, God’s wisdom is what we live
to discover and live out. Unfortunately, I suspect we will always struggle
against what society ‘knows’ to be true. We will always struggle to act like
Christians when we want to act like everyone else; we will always struggle to forgive
those who sin against us. We will always struggle to spend money the way God
would have us spend it, rather than being a regular part of this culture of
consumerism. We will always struggle to identify ourselves more as Christians
than Americans. We will always struggle to not idolize people who have all the
stuff they could ever want, instead of people we should be idolizing who are
good parents, have a relationship with Jesus and live that out and so forth.
Today’s passage is about that
struggle, in a particular context. Our text today is James 2:1-12.
My brothers, as believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ, don’t show
favoritism. 2 Suppose a man
comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in
shabby clothes also comes in. 3 If
you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, “Here’s a
good seat for you,” but say to the poor man, “You stand there” or “Sit on the
floor by my feet,” 4 have
you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?
5 Listen,
my dear brothers: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the
world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love
him? 6 But you have insulted
the poor. Is it not the rich who are exploiting you? Are they not the ones who
are dragging you into court? 7 Are
they not the ones who are slandering the noble name of him to whom you belong?
8 If you
really keep the royal law found in Scripture, “Love your neighbor as yourself,”
you are doing right. 9 But
if you show favoritism, you sin and are convicted by the law as lawbreakers. 10 For whoever keeps the whole law and
yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. 11 For he who said, “Do not commit
adultery,” also said, “Do not murder.” If you do not commit adultery but do
commit murder, you have become a lawbreaker.
12 Speak and act as those who are going to be judged
by the law that gives freedom, 13 because
judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy
triumphs over judgment! [1]
Let’s pray.
As you may have noticed, we’re heading through the
letter of James to the early church for the next few months. James was the
half brother of Jesus, and he was one
of the important leaders of the early church in Jerusalem. It was James and
Peter who blessed Paul on his church planting journeys out into the Greek
world. James was not over and above all that was going on as Jesus left earth
and went to heaven, but James was in the midst of the creation of the Way, the
disciples of Jesus Christ. When he writes his letter, he writes as someone
facing the same persecutions as other new Christians, or possibly worse
persecution because he was in the church in Jerusalem, the headquarters of the
Jewish faith. It seems to me that because the headquarters was in Jerusalem the
persecution would have been worse than in the outlying areas. I’m open to being
corrected on that, and I’ve never seen any statistics on it, but it would make
sense that the Jewish persecution of the church would be fiercest in Jerusalem.
James writes a very practical letter to the early
churches that are spreading all over the known world. This letter would be
copied, by hand of course, and spread from city to city, from church to church. James writes about church life; the tough
parts of following Jesus, the persecutions, trials and temptations. He writes
about how to live with the truth of Christ deep in our hearts, so much so that
acting in a way contrary to Jesus teachings is like forgetting ourselves.
And then James starts to illustrate this new life, in a
particular circumstance that he likely has seen. He has seen the church start
to act like the world; treating people as though they were still a part of the
world; placing a value on people based on what they look like and what they
have, something the world still does and tempts the church with. Instead of
acting like the church, they have started acting like the world. They have
started prioritizing like the world, they have started discriminating like the
world.
My
brothers, as believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ, don’t show
favoritism. 2 Suppose a man
comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in
shabby clothes also comes in. 3 If
you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, “Here’s a
good seat for you,” but say to the poor man, “You stand there” or “Sit on the
floor by my feet,” 4 have
you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?
You can hopefully see this temptation: the church, which is made up mostly of outcasts and those who are not well off, and suddenly what happens…new people come in. Some wealthy, some not. The temptation is to make sure the wealthy people stay in the church; they can help the church our more than can someone who is not wealthy, at least that is the conventional wisdom. But conventional wisdom never applies to the church. God works things out when we can’t see it possibly happening, God makes the impossible possible, and He turns conventional wisdom on its head. All people are valuable in God’s sight; He made them in His own image. So who were they, so who are we to say some people are obviously more valuable than others, just by their bank account? It’s ridiculous that we should have this kind of thinking, but there it is. The church has always struggled; Christians have always struggled to raise their thinking to God’s level, to have God’s mind rather than the world’s. And that’s what James is requiring. The life of faith in Christ means a retooling of our thought lives, it requires rethinking everything that we do. We cannot live like non-Christians or pre-Christians, we have to commit our lives, and our thought lives, to Christ. And that’s an odd thing, I admit. So many times it is only in looking back on a situation that I think, boy, I should have handled that differently. I should have zigged when I zagged.
That’s what James is saying. You shouldn’t think and act like the world does; valuing a person’s money as though it were the entirety of themselves. Instead, we need to see people as Christ does; all valuable because they are loved by God, created in His image, and given all sorts of varying spiritual gifts in order to be used by God to His glory. How easy it is for us to condemn that fake way of classifying in others, and be blind to the ways we ourselves do the exact same thing. When we decide that some people are beneath us, or can’t possibly be right about something because you know how they are…When we decide someone is a certain way, we are sinning against God. That isn’t the way God would have us live together as the church. Be careful when you categorize people. It isn’t good, and it isn’t safe, for any of us.
The next section is really James illustrating this point for us.
Listen, my dear brothers: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the
eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised
those who love him? 6 But
you have insulted the poor. Is it not the rich who are exploiting you? Are they
not the ones who are dragging you into court? 7 Are they not the ones who are slandering the noble name of
him to whom you belong?
It was the rich, back then, who could afford justice. It was the rich who could afford to drag people into courts and get their way. Wealth has a tendency to oppress; not always, certainly, but it can make people think their rights are more important than other people'’. And lest you think that has disappeared, I was reading online that a person in Florida was nabbed for the same thing as Rush Limbaugh. Faking prescriptions and getting lots of pain pills. This man had been in a car wreck, had both legs amputated and still was in constant pain from his back. Rush’s defense was he was an addict, and got off with a dependency program. The other man was given 25 years. Don’t think humans have progressed all that much. We haven’t.
You see, that’s a great illustration of how the world thinks and works. The powerless get what they get, and the powerful get what they want. We Christians ought to be different. Jesus says a lot about taking care of the poor and the powerless, and we ignore it at our own peril. It was Jesus who told the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. It was Jesus who said in Luke 6, Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.” It is James who repeats these warnings to make sure the early church didn’t, and we don’t, perceive, act and think that money has anything to do with how good a person is. The early church, for the most part, was made up of the powerless, and to attract another powerless, poor person would have held less fascination than to attract someone with lots of money. Remember from last week, that James is very concerned with what we do as Christians; that everything might be about the building up of our faith in Christ, and not ourselves, not in worldly ways of building security. What we do shows what we believe. If we believe God loves all people, then we should treat them as such, and so should the early church. If we believe that Christ died on the cross so that people might be saved, we’ll share that with folks, and we’ll live in a different way, with different values than those around us who are not believers.
James goes on to illustrate this theme of perceiving God’s way, and doing something about it.
8 If you
really keep the royal law found in Scripture, “Love your neighbor as yourself,”
you are doing right. 9 But
if you show favoritism, you sin and are convicted by the law as lawbreakers. 10 For whoever keeps the whole law and
yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. 11 For he who said, “Do not commit
adultery,” also said, “Do not murder.” If you do not commit adultery but do
commit murder, you have become a lawbreaker.
There must have been some rumor that James heard, or something he saw that makes him beat on this point over and over. Of course, it doesn’t say as much in the Bible, but that’s the only thing I can think of that would get James so worked up over an issues like this. He must have first hand knowledge of an incident where a poor person was put down, and a wealthy person elevated, to the shame of the congregation, to the shame of the entire church. We aren’t the world, I hear James say. We’re different. Quit trying to bring worldly attitudes and practices into the church. So much so, that if you show favoritism, it is the same as being a murderer. I cannot think of a stronger statement to stop doing something. I would hope that would stop all of us.
Over and over James points to the revolutionary law of the New Testament that should make us completely different than the world. Love your neighbor. Not just like them, or put up with them, but love them. Love them so much, that they are on par with you. This was revolutionary and redefined the early church. It was this ultimatum that redefined Christians’ lives back then, and made them into different people, different than the societies they lived in. And it didn’t matter which society. Christianity rapidly spread because they were different-they served God through loving their neighbors. And I worry that we’ve lost that in our attempt to serve the more powerful in society. Certainly James was worried about this as well; that in acting exactly like the world act they were losing their distinctiveness, they were losing Christ’s influence, they were losing Christ’s message of love and hope. Why is James so hard on this issue? Because it cuts to the core of who Christians are. Are we like everyone else? If not, why in God’s name, are we acting like everyone else? There has to be something about us that is different, that the hope we have in Christ spills over into our lives and it is out of that hope and love we have found in Christ that we minister to those around us. It is out of Christ’s love and hope that we treat our neighbors differently, we treat the world differently.
James last point here makes all this abundantly clear.
12 Speak
and act as those who are going to be judged by the law that gives freedom, 13 because judgment without mercy will
be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment!
We are those people whose lives have been redeemed, brought back from the brink of destruction and given new life in Christ. And because we are going to be judged not on what we have done or not done, but on Christ’s actions, when we placed out lives in His hands it became His blood, His perfect life that matters and not our own. We have been shown the ultimate mercy, and it is our job to joyfully pass that on to others. God’s mercy triumphs over His judgement, and that is our proclamation. So we better be different. When everyone else is trying to lead moral lives, whatever that looks like for each of them, we’re different. We know that ‘leading a moral life’ doesn’t mean anything. What matters is Christ. It matters that we are in Christ, and that we minister from out of our relationship with Him. We deal with the world from out of our relationship with God, and we look completely different than how the world responds. We deal with our fellow Christians not as the world would have us deal with them, but out of our relationship with Christ.
This issue that James is dealing with, is at the same time, a very small issue, but it points out a fundamental truth that the early church is getting wrong, and one we still do. We think we are still a part of the world, and it is okay to act like it. It’s still okay to try and live life the way we think we should live it. It’s okay to use conventional wisdom; it’s okay to hurt people who have hurt us, it’s okay to harbor resentment, it’s okay to spend all our money on ourselves and our own comfort and entertainment. The truth is we are not a part of the world. Once we gave our lives to Christ, we began the slow and often painful task of turning over our thoughts, our actions, our entire lives over to Him. All that we thought was fine needs to be shaped by Christ. All our thoughts, all our actions have to have Christ at the center. We are all in the process of doing this. Slowly Christ is shaping us through the presence of the HS in our lives. Sometimes its slow, and sometimes we need a swift kick in the butt. That’s what James gave the early church here, and if you feel convicted, it’s been done to you as well. Don’t worry, we all need a swift kick on occasion. The damage isn’t permanent, and hopefully it will reshape you, and me. It did to the early church. Their love, their ministering out of Christ’s love and power changed the world, and it still does.
Let’s pray.