Proper 18, Year B | James 2:1-17
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
September 8, 2024
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
Last week we began a five-week course of readings in the Book of James. James’ letter covers what can seem like a lot of different topics, but we can tie all those different ideas together under the concept of “family resemblance.” James suggests that we gaze into a mirror not simply to fix that stray hair or to make sure our clothes are clean and neat but to consider who exactly it is that we look like. What aspects of Jesus, our elder brother, can we find in our own appearance? What about our Father? Is there evidence of relationship in how we think or behave?
This week James dives straight into the uncomfortable topic of prejudice. God cares equally for everyone, offering rain and sunshine throughout the world, distributing different foods across different climates yet always providing something for animals and people to eat. When one region suffers drought, all within that area are affected by the same forms of lack. If, instead, a region is experiencing bounty from rain and good weather, that same bounty provides for all. It isn’t God who distributes unevenly—that’s us, choosing singly or as a society who should benefit from abundance and who should bear the greater brunt of our common challenges.
But before we get into all that, I feel like we need to go back to something we touched on briefly last week.
For at least the past five hundred years, the Western Church has embroiled itself in the controversy of “faith” versus “works,” with various groups championing one side over the other across the centuries. “Faith and works” tends to be the stereotypical divider between the Roman Catholic tradition and most other modern denominations—at least from the Protestant point of view. “Those people think they can get into heaven by performing certain actions, but we know that salvation is a gift from God by grace through faith.” We then attempt to position different Apostles against one another, generally setting up Paul’s writings in adverse relation to James’, pulling snippets of larger ideas to shore up whichever position we happen to prefer. At least, that’s my experience having grown up within the “faith alone” crowd. I’m not sure the “works alone” crowd particularly cares one way or another, if anyone supporting that position even exists. (I’ve never encountered it apart from academic theory.)
As I mentioned last week, however, that entire controversy becomes a moot point when we recover the meaning of the word we see translated as “faith.” Reclaiming the word behind “faith” as “faithfulness”—which is exactly what “faith” meant when the Bible was first translated into late Middle English six hundred and fifty years ago[1]—the illusion of “faith versus works” falls apart, which is exactly what James is arguing in the last few verses of today’s reading. “Can faith(fulness) save you? A so-called faithfulness devoid of corroborating behavior is fantasy.”
Taking it back to family resemblance, if you don’t look anything like the people you claim as family, if you don’t act like them or share any of their characteristics, why should anyone believe you? If God, as Love, is our collective Ancestor, the root of our existence and the one we truly hope to honor and emulate, there needs to be some reflection of who that God is in our lives. Equally, we cannot properly claim to follow Jesus if we consistently refuse to act in love toward the people around us.
That’s where James’ references to prejudice come into play. God doesn’t play favorites. Everyone in a given area gets the same sunshine, the same rain, the same heat, the same cold. God provides the same food and the same water, making it available for all to use. Humans are the ones that decide who should receive the benefits of the things that God provides and who should go without. As children of God, we should also strive to treat people equally, fighting against our inborn desire to curry favor with wealthy or powerful people while dismissing those living on the margins of society.
That, of course, is much easier said than done. From the time we first become aware of differences among people, society and personal experience train us who to treat with honor and who we can simply dismiss without consequence. And that’s why faithfulness is so important. Faithfulness isn’t about always doing the right thing, never making mistakes, or never giving in to our prejudices and temptations. It’s about repentance—about coming back to God’s path again and again and again. Faithfulness involves looking at where we are, recognizing the gap between how we treat people and how God treats people, and then working to remedy our shortcomings. It’s looking in James’ mirror, considering who we presently are versus who we claim to emulate, and then seeking to change, better honoring God’s Image in one another and better reflecting that same Image present in our own lives.