Believing in Jesus = Honoring the Poor
or
Subtle, Sinister, Systemic Privilege
Text: James 2: 1-17
My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? 2For 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, 3and 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,” 4have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts? 5Listen, 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? 6But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? 7Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you? 8You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 9But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. 10For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. 11For the one who said, “You shall not commit adultery,” also said, “You shall not murder.” Now if you do not commit adultery but if you murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. 12So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty. 13For judgment will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment. 14What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? 15If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, 16and 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? 17So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.
The writer of the Epistle of James charged the early churches with privileging the rich. A similar charge could be leveled at today’s churches, perhaps even our own. If you think Open Table is exempt from this flaw, consider these two hypothetical scenarios:
Scenario 1: Our worship service has begun, a meditative mood has been set, and footsteps are heard down the aisle. You turn to see a disheveled woman in tattered clothes who appears to have slept outdoors for some time.
Scenario 2: Our worship service has begun, a meditative mood has been set, and footsteps are heard down the aisle. You turn to see a woman in an elegant suit, the picture of a successful professional.
For some congregations the salient question might be this: Would the poor person have been greeted as warmly as the rich one? But I’ve seen you extend an equally warm welcome to rich and poor alike. Yet despite our congregation’s commitments to radical hospital and inclusion, subtle prejudices remain in us all. I’m going to ask you to imagine what would be not only your actions but also your hidden thoughts and feelings. Though your actions would be welcoming, might you see a poor man or woman and think thoughts like these, however fleetingly?
Bless her heart. I wonder if she is just looking for a handout.
She could be the type who would drain our resources of time and money.
I don’t want her to think we’re prejudiced, so I’ll be quick to greet her after the service.
Now imagine the rich woman entering. Might she prompt these thoughts, though fleetingly?
Wow, what an impressive person. Is that her Lexus in the church parking lot?
She seems the type who could contribute in a significant way.
I hope we get her contact information. She looks well-educated; I think she’ll fit right in.
Here’s my point: A hidden camera probably would not be able to record any discernible difference in the way we at Open Table would behave toward these two women. Unless that camera were trained on our hearts and minds. I’m taking James’ point a step further because Jesus said that what a person thinks in her or his heart matters, too. And those biased thoughts could cause us eventually to treat these two people differently after the initial friendly greetings are over. Coming to an awareness of those subtler biases can be difficult. As novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote:
Every man [or woman] has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone but only his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.
If you are genuinely curious about prejudices of which you may be unaware, a test for implicit attitudes has been developed at Harvard and is available online. When I used to prepare my college students for service-learning experiences with diverse members of our community, I invited them to take the Implicit Association Test online at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit. Versions of this test can gauge gender bias, racial bias, age bias, political bias. There is not yet a test for a bias against the poor. Maybe that’s because we would all admit to that bias, even the poor who sometimes in our country vote against their self-interests. But the point here is that it’s easy to fool ourselves into thinking we don’t have biases. Culture conditions us all to have some automatic associations in our minds. However, even if our automatic responses are biased, we can still overcome those reactions and choose to act in ways that resist prejudices, like biases against the poor.
So my first point this evening is that favoritism can be more subtle than we think.
My second point is that favoritism can be more sinister than we think. Disregarding the plight of the poor is not a matter of simple thoughtlessness or cultural bias. According to James, favoring the rich calls into question our very belief in Jesus. You heard that right. Read James 2:1 again. The word “belief” (pistis—in the Greek)—is used here and elsewhere in the New Testament to mean something other than intellectual assent to a truth claim. Believing in Jesus, as Marcus Borg and others have been telling us, did not originally mean “accepting certain statements to be true.” Believing in Jesus, in fact, has nothing to do with whether or not we think Jesus did, does, or will do certain things. Believing in Jesus is about what we do. Believing means “orienting one’s life toward.” Think about how we use the word believe when we talk about believing in someone who is a leader. If I say I believe in a particular presidential candidate, I don’t mean I believe he or she exists, which is how people speak of believing in God; I mean I trust in/believe in a particular candidate’s ability to lead us. That’s closer to what the New Testament means about believing in Jesus.
Even in these paradigm-shifting times for Christianity, many Christians rarely consider orienting our lives in the ways of Jesus as the real test of Christian orthodoxy. But we talk about it a lot at Open Table because this fairly recent recovery of the original meaning of belief or faith is such a game changer for Christian theology. In the larger Christian culture, folks question another’s Christian credentials based on whether they honor certain doctrines. James says we may not be Christian unless we honor the POOR. We may not be Christian if we do not HONOR the poor. We do not have faith in Jesus if we do not HONOR the poor. We are not believers in Christ IF WE DO NOT HONOR THE POOR. Condemnation is not for those who question or deny particular theological statements but for those who dishonor the poor. Such an emphasis on loving neighbor is absolutely consistent with the Gospels portraits of Jesus, who never asked us to worship him but instead to follow him by caring for the least.
Kind of puts a new twist on the tiresome political rhetoric about whether or not we’re a Christian nation, doesn’t it? The Right and the Left trot out the First Amendment, Supreme Court decisions, and quotations from the Founding Fathers. But Jesus and James might say the real test is whether or not we are honoring the poor. Does America’s treatment of the poor make her a Christian nation?
Bono, lead vocalist of U2, put it this way at the National Prayer Breakfast in 2006: “Look, whatever thoughts you have about God, who He is or if He exists, most will agree that if there is a God, He has a special place for the poor. In fact, the poor are where God lives. . . I mean, God may well be with us in our mansions on the hill… I hope so. He may well be with us as in all manner of controversial stuff… maybe, maybe not… But the one thing we can all agree, all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and poor. God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house… God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.”
Privileging the rich is both subtle and sinister. My last point is that it’s also systemic. While I appreciate the point that solutions to societal problems start within the heart of individuals, I also believe that transformed individuals can do only so much by themselves—and usually their efforts are interventions after an injustice or Bandaid solutions rather than preventions or deep solutions to extinguish the problems. A case in point is what I believe to be an unjust tax code in the state of Alabama that includes taxes on groceries. This tax unfairly burdens our poorest citizens because they pay a higher portion of their income for basic necessities. Taxation of groceries disproportionately affects lower income families by almost four to five times the amount that high income families are affected. The fact that only two states “continue to apply their sales tax fully to food purchased for home consumption” tells you something. The fact that the two states taxing groceries are—you guessed it—Alabama and Mississippi and you, too, may be convinced this form of taxation dishonors the poor. (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, www.cbpp.org).
If I want to help hungry families in my state, I could offset an unjust law by donating some of my income to charities that serve the poor or donating canned goods to my local food pantry or donating my time to serve lunch at 15 Place or dinner to Family Promise guests or inviting a neighbor on a fixed income to my house once a week for a good meal. But I will not be addressing root injustice in the system which will continue to disadvantage the poor. That inequality cannot be overcome by my individual acts of charity. But if the tax system changes, not just one family but thousands will benefit—and this benefit continues. Of course, it takes concerted effort to intervene systemically because those who created the system continue to have great control over it.
It’s important for us to admit that good-hearted people can reach different solutions for society's problems. Certainly Jesus told us to meet needs of individuals—by visiting those in prison and healing the sick and feeding the poor. But Jesus and the Hebrew prophets before him did not have the option to vote or write their legislators or run for public office. Jesus did engage in political protest when he rode a donkey into his capital city—and days later was arrested and executed for that unsuccessful attempt to make systemic changes in a nation under foreign occupation and oppressed by ruthless taxation. We, thank God, have ways to engage political and social systems. We can disagree about what’s the best strategy for alleviating suffering and for honoring the poor. But as Christians, as believers in Jesus, we have to DO something about poverty itself. And you, friends, have the savvy to lead toward systemic changes.
William Sloane Coffin said, “Public good doesn’t automatically follow from private virtue. A person’s moral character, sterling though it may be, is insufficient to serve the cause of justice, which is to challenge the status quo, to try to make what’s legal more moral, to speak truth to power, and to take personal or concerted action against evil, whether in personal or systemic form” (Credo, p. 49).
The writer of James asked Christians then and asks us now, “My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?”
PRAYER: God of the poor, come to those who are impoverished through unawareness. The systems of this world are so invisible and entrenched. Help us see ways to work for peaceful, creative changes that honor the poor—that we may honor Jesus. Amen
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