| A good name is to be chosen rather
than great riches, |
| and favor is better than
silver or gold. |
| The rich and the poor have this
in common: |
| the LORD is the maker of
them all. |
| Whoever sows injustice will reap
calamity, |
| and the rod of anger will
fail. |
| Those who are generous are blessed, |
| for they share their bread
with the poor. |
| Do not rob the poor because they
are poor, |
| or crush the afflicted at
the gate; |
| for the LORD pleads their cause |
| and despoils of life those
who despoil them. |
|
| Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23 |
| 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.' |
| 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. |
|
| James 2:1-8, 17 |
| In seminary I was exposed for the first time to an education
with a “precept” system. This meant that we spent
the third hour of every lecture broken into small groups to
delve deeper into the readings and lectures for the week. Sometimes
our precepts were led by the professor, sometimes by Ph.D.
students who were assistants for the classes. Generally, your
preceptor was also your grader. In intensive summer language,
you were just out of luck if your preceptor couldn’t
teach worth a lick. One of the best small group leaders was
a man named Ratiffe. He was a fine teacher and he gave some
of the most substantial comments on my papers during my Princeton
experience in that Missiology class. |
| Ratiffe grew up in South Africa. He started our first precept
by sharing his faith story and what had led him to Princeton
for his Ph.D. Usually our preceptors just got down to business
and did little sharing. Ratiffe is a white South African, now
in his upper thirties. He grew up in the midst of apartheid
and was taught by his church that the privilege of whites and
the system of injustice towards coloreds and blacks was ok,
it was God ordained. Sure there was the occasional admonition
for restraint and civility but in general—this was God’s
way. Ratiffe was a teen when he went off to a church conference
or camp and he listened to a guest speaker with a different
theology from his home church. This man spoke of God’s
command to love neighbor in a radical way. He claimed that
God was on the side of the poor and oppressed. He gave ample
biblical examples! Ratiffe realized that for the first time
he was hearing the good news! He felt liberated from the sick
feeling he would get when he saw whites claim privilege and
misuse people of color, when he thought about the laws of his
government—all of which had been sanctioned by his church.
It dawned on him that he had been hoodwinked all those years—buying
into a message that wasn’t good, for anyone. He had been
captive to ideology all that time although his church told
him he was blessed and free. |
| Ratiffe sat before us, because God had placed on his heart
the desire to help Christianity claim and repent for our mistakes.
He believed the worldwide Christian church must work in a new
way, and work ecumenically, so rich and poor, black and white,
male and female, easterner and westerner could be set free
from that which binds us. We did talk about the reading that
day—something about the beginning of the first truly
ecumenical conference that took place since early Christianity
in the late 1800s. My mind and heart were stuck on Ratiffe’s
witness. I was remembering some of the Christian teachings
I’d heard that were destructive and wondering if I could
ever have the courage to stand up to them with love, with love
for all people, as Ratiffe had since he claimed his liberation
by the good news he heard while away at camp. |
| Frances Taylor Gench concisely names that which was on my
heart. “How is it that the prejudices of the world rather
than the preferences of God come to be manifested in the community
of God’s people? (1) |
| A title of a song on the Prairie Home Companion sums up a
theme every one of the lectionary texts claims, “You
don’t love God, if you don’t love your neighbor!” In
our passages, our neighbors spoken of are the poor, the one
who is different, or the afflicted. Yet all of us need the
liberating words of our texts this week. It does no good to
show favor to the rich and seat them in special places as James
notes—it’s an oppression of the privileged which
does horrible things to their souls, especially if they forget
they are interconnected to others by God. |
| The rich and the poor have this in common: the Lord is the
maker of them all. It always seems to me that the neighbor
easiest for us to overlook is the one in extreme need, in poverty,
blighted we might even say. For what can we do to address a
situation so prevalent in the world and so far from a sustainable
outcome of transformation? |
| Here is what it boils down to if we believe that God is creator
and claim the revelation of God in Jesus Christ (including
his teachings), and the Spirit’s empowerment. There is
no justifiable way to ignore the plight of the poor or the
oppressed. “Do not rob the poor because they are poor,
or crush the afflicted at the gate; for the Lord pleads their
cause...” God is public defender of the cause of the
afflicted and poor in the world. We are given the honor of
joining with God and claiming our interconnectedness. The rich
and the poor have this in common: the Lord is the maker of
them all. |
| So, the Christian must lift up the poor. Possibly though,
and even more important to our health and wholeness, we must
also be willing to be lifted up by them. After learning from
those so totally opposite of us on an economic level, or from
those who have been oppressed, we might be able to claim the
contagious joy of those who have utterly relied on God to survive
and tell of God’s love and mercy. |
| Maybe it’s the tenacity of the poor or of those on
the fringes of society that is the scariest thing to overcome
in forming relationships with them. We don’t have the
boldness they do. Remember Mark’s story of the woman
who sought out Jesus to heal her daughter (Mark 7:24-37). After
hearing her plea for her daughter’s health he said, “Let
the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s
food and throw it to the dogs.” To break it down, that
meant, go away Greek woman, I am here to teach, preach and
heal Jews, not you—or your sick daughter! He denied her
request, but she didn’t leave. We might say, well ok
I’ll figure it out on my own then, and walk away in self
sufficiency. She refused to get up and go away. She thought
for a minute, and said, “Even the dogs under the table
eat the children’s crumbs.” Ah! She is right. Some
of the crumbs slip through the cracks, providing food for the
persistent. The crumbs fall, Jesus, even to me. |
| Is it possible her retort that considered and then shamed
Jesus’ food allocation argument struck home, most closely,
in Jesus’ stomach? As a drifter who relied on hospitality
Jesus was used to eating crumbs! Maybe this outsider, this
woman whom a good Jew of the day would look down upon, sparked
some righteous indignation in Jesus that made him question
why some are given God’s sustenance, while others are
left to suffer. “For saying that, you may go—the
demon has left your daughter.” We all need sustenance,
we all need God! In Jesus God pleads the cause of the poor
and oppressed, mentioned in Proverbs, through firsthand knowledge.
God was and is and chose to be one of the poor. Jesus mission
was shaped by them and became unabashedly for them. |
| Like all people of faith before us, God calls to us to open
our hearts to those who are strangers, widows, orphans, hungry,
sick or poor. One weekly online commentator, Dan Clendenin
writes, “James made the community’s response to
the poor a touchstone for testing the authenticity of its faith.
Christians should favor the poor not because of any political
[or theological] agenda of the right or left, but because we're
called to imitate the character of God.” (2) The
writer of the Epistle of James “reminds us all that we
are accountable to God for our words and deeds. … We
have already been saved by the grace of God through faith in
Jesus Christ. What is to be revealed is whether or not we have
misused the grace that is ours—whether or not we have
embodied in our lives the possibilities the gospel offers.” (3) |
| The rich and the poor have this in common: the Lord is the
maker of them all. |
| Amen |
| Beth E. Godfrey - September 10, 2006 |
| Central Presbyterian Church, Geneseo, New
York |
| (1) France Taylor Gench, Hebrews and James, Westminster
Bible Companion (WJKP: Louisville, KY, 1996 )101-2 |
| (2) Dan Clendenin, http://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20060904JJ.shtml |
| (3) Gench, 103. |
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