Who's Your Favorite?

Who’s Your Favorite?

James 2:1-10

August 23, 2015 • Mount Pleasant UMC

Sermon Study Guide

We all have favorites. For instance, who is the best baseball team [shout it out]? How about the best football team? In 2007, when the Colts played the Bears in the Superbowl, we were serving in northwest Indiana, an area that strongly leans toward Chicago sports, though there were several Colts fans in the congregation as well. On that particular Sunday, I was afraid I would have to draw a line down the middle of the room—Colts fans on one side and Bears fans on the other! How about ice cream—what’s your favorite ice cream? And pie? There are a lot of different answers being given! It seems we can’t agree on what is the best in any particular area. We just have our favorites.

Rachel is enjoying being an only child; she says it’s her turn anyway because Christopher had a four-year head start on her. But I’ve always told her that she’s my favorite—daughter. And Christopher is my favorite son. She sometimes asks me what I would have said if we had two girls or two boys, and I tell her than the oldest would be my favorite firstborn, and the youngest would be my favorite second-born. That doesn’t mean they don’t still try to play the “favorite” card. Last week, we were at the Chevy dealership and there was a Corvette in the showroom. Rachel took a picture of herself in the car and sent it to her brother with the text, “This is what Dad is buying me for my car.” She was disappointed when Christopher didn’t respond!

Parents who play favorites among their children often find themselves in all sorts of trouble—even back in Biblical times. Maybe you remember the story of twin brothers Jacob and Esau. Esau was born first, by a few minutes, and he was his dad’s favorite, but Jacob was the favorite of their mother. And that caused all sorts of hurt and brokenness and pain as Jacob was always trying to become the favorite—or at least get all the inheritance. The story sort of repeated itself a generation later, when Jacob had twelve sons—but his favorite was Joseph. If you’ve read the story or seen the musical, you know that being the favorite got Joseph sold into slavery by his jealous older brothers (Genesis 27-37). Favoritism or partiality is “the most subtle of all sins” (Cedar, Communicator’s Commentary: James, 1, 2 Peter, Jude, pg. 53) because it easily sneaks up on us and plays on our sense of comfort, wanting to be with and around those things and people we like or who like us. But just because it makes us comfortable doesn’t mean it’s right or the way God wants us to live. As we’ll look at this morning, James reminds us that partiality is a sin and something God’s people ought to have nothing to do with.

We are continuing our journey through the book of James as we consider what “Practical Faith” looks like. Last week, you remember, we were in chapter one and talked about our call to practice true religion, which James says is caring for and reaching out to the most vulnerable in our culture (1:27). Out of that thinking, then, flows this next chapter, the first part of which is aimed directly at the church.

James begins this chapter quite directly: “My brothers and sisters, believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ must not show favoritism” (2:1). The word translated as “favoritism” literally means “to lift up someone’s face,” and originally, it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It simply meant “to accept people,” but then gradually and by James’ time, the word came to represent all the ways someone’s wealth, power or prestige caused someone else to give them preferential treatment (Barclay, The Letters of James and Peter, pgs. 62-63). James gives a vivid example of this, in verses 2-4, of two men who come to church. One man is wealthy and has fine clothes on along with a gold ring—probably more than one gold ring. The tradition of the time was for wealthy men to wear rings that covered most of their fingers—more than one ring per finger preferably. There was even a practice that you could rent a ring or two if you didn’t feel you had enough (Barclay 64). The rings were meant to proclaim to those who noticed, “I’m wealthy, I’m well off, and I deserve special treatment.” So a man like that comes into church and is ushered to a special seat. And then in comes a poor man, wearing filthy clothes and probably smelling from a lack of hygiene, and that man is told to sit on the floor or to stand over in the corner. The rich man is treated well; the poor man is treated as somewhat less than human. James says that is “evil” (2:4). Not just bad, or a poor choice. James uses that loaded word “evil.” (The word there can also mean “malevolent.” It’s bad stuff.)

Former Anglican Bishop Tom Wright tells of something like that happening to him at church—only he was the one who became the center of attention, by accident. Wright was headed to church on Easter Sunday and thought he had arrived early enough, only to find that the church was packed and there was a waiting line outside. It was Easter, after all! He took his place in line about the time a senior and distinguished person in the city recognized him and called him by name. Wright was surprised and delighted to be recognized, until his acquaintance whispered to him, “Come with me.” Together, they walked past the line and up to the ushers. “I am Lord Smith,” the man said. “I would be grateful if you could find my friend and I someplace to sit.” And suddenly, there was space in the church. The two men were given excellent seats in the front, but Wright says he couldn’t enjoy the service because he kept wondering if his friend or the ushers had read James 2 lately (The Early Christian Letters for Everyone, pgs. 13-14). I think he knew the answer, actually.

Favoritism, partiality—James says these things are evil. But, we might say, we’ve never done anything that blatant in our church—give thanks to God! And yet—are there other things we do that show favoritism in smaller, more subtle ways? Remember, partiality is a very subtle sin. Perhaps some of our struggle can be found in the way we interact with guests or first-time visitors here in the worship service. The temptation is to talk to and sit with our friends, people we know and people we like. But isn’t that just another form of favoritism? Even if we don’t blatantly treat folks who are new as “outsiders,” we can do it and not even be aware of it. Thom Rainer, one of the best church researchers working today, ran a poll late last year and discovered ten reasons why guests don’t return to church. Included in that list are things like this: “Unfriendly church members,” “no one who helped us get information,” and “people kept telling me I was in their seat or pew.” When I hear that last one, I always think of the pastor we had when we were in seminary. When he and his family arrived, newly appointed, at their church, Sherry, his wife, sat down in the sanctuary to prepare herself for worship. It wasn’t long before someone came up alongside her, smacked her on the shoulder with a purse, and said, “You’re in my seat.” Imagine that woman’s surprise when, just a bit later in the service, Sherry was introduced as the new pastor’s wife. You see, we can unintentionally keep people from the Gospel and from the church even through subtle forms of favoritism. That’s why James is so concerned about this matter.

Our focus on Sunday mornings ought to not be mainly on our friends or on those we know well. As a congregation, we need to be first and foremost focused on welcoming those we don’t yet know—welcoming them as Jesus would. We can connect with our friends at a whole lot of other times. Our call on Sunday mornings is what Bishop Robert Schnase called “radical hospitality.” Hospitality we understand; we set the best “table,” so to speak, and try to be as welcoming as we can be. But what makes hospitality radical? Schnase says it’s when we offer the “absolute utmost of ourselves…to offer the gracious invitation and reception of Christ to others” (Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations, pg. 21). It’s when we turn our attention away from ourselves and onto the needs of others, when we welcome each and every person who comes our way as if they are a child of God—because they are! Schnase says folks who are radically hospitable “exhibit a restlessness because they realize so many people do not have a relationship to a faith community” or to Jesus (21). Radical hospitality begins to overcome our natural inclination toward partiality. Are we restless? Do we realize how many people are without Jesus? Does that have an impact on our lives here and now?

And radical hospitality goes beyond our church building. When we’re in the home, or in the workplace, or at the coffee shop or at the grocery store, we’re called to constantly be aware of those around us who need the love of Jesus in their lives. Yes, this Christian life is more than just a few hours a week; it’s a 24/7 commitment because there are always more people who need to know the Savior. In what ways do we ignore others, or treat others as less than human? What about the guy on the corner who is always there asking for money? What is our attitude toward that person (whether we give him money or not)? I confess, that’s one I struggle with. Having been in a position where I’ve seen so much fraud and people taking advantage of the system, I’ve become rather cynical over the years about those who claim they are in need. When I’ve watched someone who has received assistance from the church get in their car, drive around the building and send another person in to ask, when I’ve had someone hide in the church until after everyone was gone and then steal the mission jar, when you’ve had people asking for help while they are checking their email on their smartphone—it’s easy to become hardened. Favoritism, for me, is easy. Difficult is doing what Paul tells us to do in Philippians: have the same attitude toward others that Jesus did (Philippians 2:5). I have to remember that Jesus talked as easily to a Pharisee or Sadducee (religious leaders) as he did to the tax collector (a terrible sinner in those days) or the man possessed by demons who had been living in the tombs and probably didn’t smell that good or the woman who had been through five husbands and was living with another man. When the disciples wanted to shoo the children away, Jesus welcomed them and took them onto his lap—and I’m willing to bet they weren’t just sitting there quietly! They were probably making noise and squirming and chattering. They may have even been making a mess and interrupting his teaching, yet Jesus welcomed them because he welcomes all. To have his attitude would mean my heart would extend radical hospitality toward each person. Or, as James puts it, “Believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ must not show favoritism” (2:1).

Now, we have to ask the question: why is this so important? Why does James settle on this topic for so long? He reminds us it’s a matter of understanding where we stand in relation to Jesus. For one thing, we have all broken God’s law. James says in verse 10, “Whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.” In James’ culture, debt was the biggest issue (glad we don’t have a debt problem in our world!). In fact, in the first century, a creditor—a rich man—could, if he met someone who owed him money out on the street, grab the man by the neck of his robe and drag him off to the courts (Barclay 67), choking him and demanding repayment. James says these same rich people you are so eager to treat as better than others when they come to worship are the same ones who threaten ordinary people’s lives (2:6). Can you imagine sitting down at church and seeing, across the aisle, that person who just a few days before had drug you into court, and then watching people fawn over that person? And yet, before we think of ourselves as better than them, James reminds us that everyone has broken God’s law in some way. We can’t keep every little piece of it, and if we’ve broken it in even the smallest way, we’re lawbreakers. We’re criminals. I have never murdered anyone, but I do tend to drive faster than the speed limit. In breaking even (what I consider to be) a small law, I am a lawbreaker. James says this: “No matter how good you may be in other directions, if you treat people with respect of persons, you have acted against the will of God and are a transgressor” (Barclay 69). We have all broken God’s law.

But, before we lose all hope, James also gives us good news. There is a way to fulfill the law—all of it. In last week’s reading, we were told by James we needed to spend time “looking intently” or gazing into the “perfect law” found in the Scripture (1:25). As we gaze into that law, as we let the Scriptures seep into every part of our being, we come to see that underlying everything else in the Bible is what James calls the “royal law,” royal because it comes from King Jesus. And that law is this: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (2:8). You remember, I hope, what we looked at just a couple of weeks ago, where Jesus was asked by a lawyer what the greatest commandment was. What was the most important law out of all the ones they had been given? And Jesus affirmed the lawyer when he chose two verses as the most important, two commands which are really two sides of the same coin. Do you remember what they were? “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself” (cf. Luke 10:27). Jesus affirms that you can’t really love God without loving your neighbor, and you can’t really love your neighbor if you don’t love God. Two sides of the same coin. Two movements of the same life. John puts it even more bluntly in one of his letters: “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen” (1 John 4:20). Okay, John, don’t hold back! Tell us what you really think!

This goes back, though, to the very creation of the world. God made earth, sea, sky, animals, sun and sand, and then he came to the crowning part of his creation. He made men and women, and that’s the only part of creation that is said to be made in God’s own image (cf. Genesis 1:17). My dog, Hershey, is very cute and a pretty good dog, but she’s not made in God’s image. Our anti-social guinea pig is a creation of God, but she’s not made in God’s image. Only human beings are made in God’s image, and that doesn’t mean we look like God, or that God is just a big human being. It means that there is something within us that has the capacity for wonder, for creativity, for moral choices, and for love. The work of salvation is primarily to restore the image of God within us. We are saved from sin so that we can become more like God—or, in other words, be made more like who we should have been from the start. And that’s why the fulfillment of the law, the primary thing we should be doing each and every day is loving others, loving our neighbors. Paul said it this way: “Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law” (Romans 13:10).

Okay, you might say, but, pastor, there are some folks who are just hard to love! You don’t know the people who live on my block, who go to my school, who live in my home! Oops, perhaps that’s meddling! Yes, there are people who are difficult to love. I can tell you that when Bishop White laid his hands on my to ordain me, I did not get miraculously get the ability to love everyone. There are people who annoy us, there are people who are unkind to us, and there are people who are just downright mean. You’re thinking of someone like that in your life right now, I would imagine. Maybe it’s not even someone you know, just someone you’ve come in contact with or someone you see regularly but haven’t really met. Christian musician Rich Mullins used to talk about the time Jesus called him to love someone he didn’t want to love. He was driving along somewhere and there was a man hitchhiking, so Rich pulled over to pick him up. He said when the man climbed into his truck there was an overpowering aroma that let him know the man hadn’t showered in more than a few days. As they drove along and talked, the man lit up a cigarette and said, “You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?” Rich said that the combined smells got to him and eventually, he told the man he was going a different direction and let him out of his truck. That man was hard to love, and Rich said he knew he failed to be who Jesus called him to be that day.

I can relate—not exactly in the same way, but a while back there was a man I was struggling to love. He had said some things that had, whether intentional on his part or not, caused some difficulty for me and my family, and I honestly would have just been as well off if I didn’t have to talk to him anymore. And then, one Sunday, as I’m trying to get things ready for worship, trying to get my head on straight for preaching, he walked into my office. “I want to pray for you,” he said, and though the prayer was awkward at best, I have to admit he was the better person that day. He was and is sometimes hard to love, but my calling is to love him anyway. And there are many other times I can think of when I was in similar situations. That’s why James says the final piece to all of this is the reality that only Jesus can supply the love we need to show toward others. In the latter part of this chapter, James point people back to “the law that gives freedom,” which is a reference to the law of love, the law Jesus laid down as the standard for our life. Only the law of love really gives us freedom to live—and it’s that law that is meant to change us from the inside out, making us who Jesus longs for us to be. James, in verse 19, reminds us that it’s not enough to just believe. The most recent survey from the Pew Forum indicates that a bit over 70% of Americans claim to believe in God—and, more than that, they claim to believe in Jesus. They will say they are part of the Christian faith. And while that number is down nearly 8 percent from seven years ago, it’s still a significant majority. Seven in ten American adults believe in God, and yet on any given Sunday morning, it’s not 70% of the population that is in worship somewhere. Another study indicates that 40% of believers will say they are in church every week, while actual numbers show that only 20% of us show up for worship. Now, granted, worship attendance is only one piece of the picture, but it still gives us a vivid image of the chasm between belief and actual practice. Belief is worth little if we don’t, in some way, put that belief into practice. James puts it in a stark statement: “Even the demons believe” (2:19).

It’s not enough to believe; we need to receive from Jesus that life-transforming love toward others than only he can give. We need to be transformed by the “law that gives freedom” (2:12). John, in one of his letters, put it this way: “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:7-8). The first thing we need to do is to pray for that other person, and pray that we might have the ability to love them, or to see them as Jesus sees them. For some, that might sound simplistic, like the typical “religious” answer, to “just” pray. But, folks, there is not a greater tool given to us than prayer. There is no other way for Christ to truly change us except by our opening our hearts and lives to him by prayer. So we pray something like this: “God, give me the ability to love this person even when I don’t want to, or when they make it difficult to love them.” We might even have to pray a quick prayer in the midst of one of those moments like that person showing up in your office: “Lord, just a bit of love right now. Help me love them. Help me see them as your child.” In my experience, at least, I don’t begin to “feel” love right away, but as time passes and as I continue to pray for that person, my heart toward them changes and my temptation toward partiality is lessened as God helps me see all people as his children, all as being worthy of his love. And if they are worthy of God’s love, then who am I to withhold my own love from them?

So pray for the ability to love that person, and then do loving acts toward them, even when you don’t feel like it. Offer the man who is poor the best seat in the house; that’s what James is advocating. It is said that, out of this passage, a powerful custom developed in the early church. When a regular member or attender came to worship, the usher would help them, direct them, look after them. But if a stranger came to worship, particularly a poor stranger, the bishop himself would get up from his chair and greet the person, helping them find their place (Wright 14). It’s a matter of acting the way we know we should. There’s a spiritual principle here, that feelings follow action, not the other way around. Feelings most often come second. There are days I don’t “feel” all that Christian, or all that lovable or loving, but my feelings don’t change the facts. John Wesley once asked a spiritual mentor what he should do when he didn’t feel like he had any faith. I always picture Wesley as this strong man of faith, boldly declaring the Gospel and winning thousands of people to Jesus Christ, but there were days when he simply didn’t feel like he was a Christian at all. His mentor told him on days like that to do this: “Preach faith until you have it, and then preach faith.” Act the way you want to be, and the feelings will follow. After the death of Mother Teresa, her private journals were uncovered and published, and many people were shocked that this woman who demonstrated the love of Jesus on the streets of Calcutta, who stood up to kings and presidents on the issue of abortion, who welcomed the least of these, the ones no one else cared for—she often had times of deep doubt and struggle with her faith. And yet she kept on living out love, refusing to show partiality or favoritism. She lived her faith until she had it, until the feelings came back again, then she lived faith even more. The spiritual principle is this: actions come first, then feelings. Don't wait for the feelings to come to be able to love that other person. Do loving actions first; live the way Jesus wants you to live and the feelings will follow.

This is one of the reasons I’ve titled this series “Practical Faith,” because you simply can’t get much more practical than the way our faith compels us to treat others. Pastor Rick preached a couple of weeks ago from 2 Corinthians 5 about the ministry of reconciliation, and there’s a verse in that passage that reminds us of why we choose to live this way: “For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all” (5:14). All. Everyone. Not just some or a few. All. I’ll readily admit that there are still people I’m working on loving (no one here, of course!). But I want to remember James’ direction: “Believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ must not show favoritism” (2:1). Instead, I want to hear the call to love in every way, every day, any way I can. Can you hear that call as well? Let’s pray.