Transcript
James Really Works: Make No Distinctions
First Baptist Richmond, September 8, 2024
The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
James 2:1-10
My brothers and sisters, do not claim the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ of glory while showing partiality.
I know that not all of you were here last Sunday. It was a holiday weekend, and some of you were trying to squeeze the last drops of enjoyment out of your summer. I can’t fault you for that, but I can tell you this:
You missed a great sermon!
I was introducing this five-part series from the Book of James by reminding you that James was the brother of Jesus. It’s true! But if you don’t believe me perhaps you will believe the Apostle Paul, who in the first chapter of Galatians mentions going up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas (that is, Peter). He says that he stayed with him for two weeks but during that time he didn’t see any of the other apostles except James, “the Lord’s brother” (Gal. 1:19). James was a leader of the church in Jerusalem, perhaps even the head of the church. In Acts 15, when they hold a big conference to decide whether Gentiles have to be circumcised before they can join the church, it’s James who has the final word. After summarizing his argument he says, “Therefore I have reached the decision that we should not trouble those Gentiles who are turning to God,” and all the Gentiles in the room breathed a huge sigh of relief.
But you may be wondering how it happened. How did James, the younger brother of Jesus, become the head of the church in Jerusalem? That’s a good question, but what I want to know is how James, the younger brother of Jesus,
came to refer to him as “our glorious Lord Jesus Christ” as he does at the beginning of today’s epistle reading? Because last week I talked about growing up in the same house as my older brother Ed, and even though he is still the best Christian I have ever known, there was never a point at which I would have referred to him as “My glorious Lord Eddie Somerville.” I knew him too well. I had seen him at some of his best moments, yes, but I had also seen him at some of his worst. If James’ experience was anything like mine how did he come to the place where he could refer to his older brother as “our glorious Lord Jesus Christ”?
I have a theory.
Again turning to the words of the Apostle Paul, but this time from 1 Corinthians 15, where he talks about handing on as of first importance the message that he had also received: “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James…” That’s where I want to stop, and that’s where I want you to imagine what it did to James to see his brother—the one who had been crucified, dead, and buried—now standing before him alive and well, perhaps even inviting him, as he had invited Thomas, to put his finger in the marks of the nails and his hand in his side. Don’t you think James might have said, as Thomas did, “My Lord and my God!”
I don’t know how it happened for you, but I hope there came a time when you stopped thinking of Jesus the way you did in childhood. I hope you came to that place where you had an experience of Jesus that moved you from knowing
things about him to actually knowing him—to seeing him for who he really is—so that you could stumble down a church aisle and say to the preacher with tears in your eyes, “I have decided to follow Jesus.” And I hope you followed that decision at some point by standing waist-deep in the waters of baptism and saying in a voice so loud and clear they could hear you in the balcony, “Jesus is Lord!”
I think that’s the moment James has in mind as he writes to the members of his church who have now been scattered by persecution, and who find themselves in cities and towns across the ancient world, planting churches and trying to keep the Jesus movement alive. But James has heard rumors about some of them: he has heard that they are making distinctions between the wealthy people who visit their churches and the poor people, and that doesn’t sit right with him. That doesn’t sound like the kind of thing his brother Jesus would support at all. So he says, “My brothers and sisters, do not claim the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ of glory while showing partiality.” In other words, “Don’t call yourselves Christians if you’re going to make distinctions between people!”
And yet we do it all the time.
I remember, shortly after moving to Washington, DC, sitting at one of those sidewalk cafés and watching people walk past. I had come from a small town in North Carolina where everybody looked pretty much the same, but in DC everybody looked different, and in that neighborhood in particular everybody looked really different. I remember trying to put each of them in the appropriate category: “There’s an African-American woman; there’s a white man with pink hair; there’s an Asian man with an iguana on his shoulder; there’s somebody who could be either a man or a woman.” Very quickly I had to give up that exercise. But then I had to think about why I was doing it at all. What perverse impulse was it in
me that needed to put people in their place? Why couldn’t I just say, “There’s a person; there’s a person; there’s a person”?
But the longer I was in DC the easier it was to do that. Because there was so much diversity everywhere. And what I came to realize is that diversity is beautiful! I could see it in my own church: there was Rahel Nabukodnezzar from Eritrea; Simon Wu from China; Miriam Rajkumar from Dubai; Paulo Ordoveza from the Philippines; Nikki Ogunnaike from Nigeria; Grey Rodriguez from Colombia; Mizuho Kida from Japan; Kasasira Mwine from Uganda; Veena Kapadia from India; and Rob Marus from…Missouri. Because it wasn’t just international diversity: there were people with different levels of income and education; people of different genders and identities; people with different degrees of ability and mobility (and maybe this would be a good time to recognize the members of our deaf congregation who have joined us this morning, and to appreciate what they add to our fellowship, and to apologize to their interpreter who just tried to finger spell all those international names).
I’m telling you, if you have ever marveled at the beauty of the diversity in God’s creation you will understand how I marveled at the beauty of diversity in that church. And maybe that’s why I pushed the deacons of this church to adopt a statement for our website that says: “We affirm the biblical truth that all people are created in God’s image, and therefore seek to welcome every person in the Spirit of Christ.” Which is exactly what James was pushing for. He said, “How can you claim the faith of our glorious Lord Jesus Christ if you show partiality? How can you call yourselves Christians if you make distinctions among yourselves?” And then he gave an example. He said, “Let’s say someone comes to your church dressed in fine clothes and fancy jewelry and you leap up out of the pew and say,
‘Oh, Please! Come sit with me!” But then someone else comes in wearing dirty clothes and smelling of the streets and you say, ‘Go sit over there somewhere.’ Have you not made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?”
Let me pause long enough to do some word study, because there are two problems here: the first is that we make distinctions. The Greek word is diakrinō. It means “to judge between.” We say, “This one’s rich and that one’s poor; this one’s white and that one’s black; this one’s straight and that one’s gay.” But the second problem is that we show partiality. The Greek word is prosōpolēmpsia; it means, literally, “to receive the face.” It comes from the practice of people kneeling before a king and waiting until he comes to one of them, leans down, and lifts his chin so that he can see his face. He shows partiality to that one, as we do when we give a rich person the best seat in the house. James wants us to know that both of these things—making distinctions and showing partiality—are opposed to the spirit of Christ, who really did seem to treat all people equally.
How did he do it? I don’t know. He was the Son of God. But I’ll tell you what I do: I try to look for the image of God in every person, believing that it’s in there. So I have to look, and sometimes I have to look hard. Where is it? What feature, what trait, what characteristic tips me off that this person is a child of God? In some people I’m still looking, but the looking itself is part of the answer, because if I believe that it’s really in there I will keep looking, and I will keep in mind that it’s probably not something on the outside. If God’s image were on the outside then all of us would look the same. But we don’t. Some of us look very different from each other. And so it must be something on the inside. We have to look where God looks: not on the outward appearance, but on the heart.
And how long does it take you to get to know someone’s heart? And how often, when you do, do you discover that they’re not so different from you? That’s how it always works, isn’t it? The head doesn’t persuade the heart; the heart persuades the head. Let’s say, just for example, that you don’t really care for Australians, that you confide to a friend, in secret, “You know, ever since I saw that movie Crocodile Dundee I’ve wanted to stay just as far away from them as possible.” But then your daughter falls in love with one of them, and before you know it he’s there, in your life. It turns out he’s a pretty good cook, and one night he makes dinner for you and you take that first bite and say, “Crikey!” because it’s the best thing you’ve ever put in your mouth.
A few years later the two of them decide to get married, and they ask you to do their wedding. You can’t say no to that. But then you find yourself standing in front of your beautiful daughter and this biological specimen she’s brought back from the land down under thinking, “It’s true: you can’t make a silk purse out of a dingo’s ear.” But then you ask him to kiss the bride (because it’s in the script) and when he does tears come to your eyes, not because you’re so angry but because it’s so tender.
And then, a few years later, he becomes the father of your grandchildren, and you look at those beautiful babies and realize that they’re half Australian, but instead of spending all your time trying to figure out which half you just spend all your time loving them and before you know it you love all things Aussie, even (or perhaps especially) that young man who is now your son-in-law.
I mention this on ONE Sunday because today, even more than most days, we have thrown open the doors of First Baptist Church and invited anyone who wants to join us to come on in. Which means we could end up with some
Australians in here, or some half-Australians, or any other kind of person you might meet in this world. And we might be tempted, as I was tempted while sitting at that sidewalk café in Washington, to put everyone in their place, to make distinctions, and perhaps even to show favoritism. But let me challenge you to do something else: Let me challenge you to look for the image of God in every one of them. And the best way to do that, I think, is by looking them in the eye, because the eye (as Jesus once said) is “the window of the soul,” and if you’re going to find the image of God anywhere you’re probably going to find it there.
It happened for me not long ago.
I came out of my study one Sunday morning on my way to early worship and found someone standing in the hallway, looking a little lost. “Hey!” I said. “Are you here for church?” “Yeah,” he said, “but I think I’m too early.” “Well, you’re too early for the 11:00 service,” I said, “but not for the 8:45. Why don’t you come with me?” And he said OK. As we walked down the hall I glanced over at him to see how he was doing, and to make sure that this was something he really wanted to do. He was wearing tennis shoes, and shorts, and a long-sleeved shirt with the tails hanging out, and a tie. It was the tie that got me. I realized that he had thought about his outfit for that morning, and thought about where he was going, and maybe he knew that a lot of people dress up for church on Sunday, and that some of them even put on ties. I got the feeling he had looked for a tie at some point, and found one (who knows where; maybe in our clothes closet), and then wrapped it around his neck and tied it with a clumsy knot so he would fit in with the rest of us. I said, “You really did want to come to church this morning, didn’t you?” And he said, “Yeah. I did.” And then he looked me in the eye, and I caught a glimpse of his soul, and it was as innocent as a newborn baby’s.
And that’s when I began to pray that when we got to the chapel no one would make distinctions, and no one would show partiality, that instead someone would welcome him as they might welcome Christ himself, that they would say, “Oh, please! Come sit with me!” Because, “I was a stranger,” Jesus said,
“And you welcomed me.”
—Jim Somerville © 2024
