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?

When I was in my early twenties I discovered the works of Mary Renault. Through her writing – especially The Last of the Wine (1956) and The Charioteer (1953) – I came to read the books of Plato. I most enjoyed Phædrus and the Symposium because both of these speak of love, specifically love between men. The Socratic Dialogues still sit on the shelf of my “personal scriptures”, books that changed my life. But I never took a class in Plato: they were reading “for fun” of the sort in which one has the luxury to indulge when commuting to or from work via mass transit: having 30-45 mins every morning and evening to read… sheer joy! Anyway, I met a platonic scholar one afternoon at the bookstore where I worked. I was reading Phædrus and he asked me how it was I came to be reading that. And I shared my story about Renault and gay love and he blushed and said that was not at all what the dialogue was about. Rather it was using such love to expose a rhetorical fallacy. If you look at the wiki article, you’ll not see any of that listed among the themes of madness and divine inspiration, or rhetoric, philosophy, and art. I thought certainly the scholar was just dodging the clear and specific meaning of the text – perhaps he was gay, himself, and closeted. Such topics must have embarrassed him, I thought. Except, like I’ve since found out, scholarship agrees with the guy I met in the store: the content is different from the form, the story is different from the meaning…

On my blog recently, too, theres been a bit of a blow up about a post I made about a group of folks called “The Outlaw Preachers”. To frame the discussion I noted the way the Outlaws welcome LGTBq folks. This, naturally, resulted in a pro-gay/anti-gay discussion that had nothing to do with my original post.

It would be real easy to turn this into a sermon on Social Justice and, even, perhaps socialism. But that is not, I think, where James is going – even though it it a valid conclusion to draw from these texts.

James is making an example of the issue of poverty.

But he is not talking about poverty.

So I want to play with the story a bit – and lets see if we can hear in the story what James is talking about.

First, the most obvious:

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 who is poor and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one wearing the fine clothes you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?

If a person of your own race – whatever it is – comes into your assembly, and if a person of another race also comes in, and if you take notice of your people and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one who is different you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?

Politics?

If a person with a Obama buttons and a tie-dyed shirt comes into your assembly, and if a Birther in a button down shirt also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the tie-dye and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one who is a Birther you say, “Stand over there there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?

If, on Gay Pride Sunday, a person with many buttons and in a rainbow t-shirt comes into your assembly, and if a person in in a shirt and tie with a very large Bible also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the rainbow shirt and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one who looks really conservative you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?

Liturgy and community norms?

If a person with the 1928 prayerbook and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a woman in a clerical collar also comes in, and if you take notice of the one with the right BCP and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one who is in clericals you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?

If a person with a gold cross and in a black cassock comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in shorts and whose wife is not wearing a schmatta also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the cassock and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one who is in shorts you say, “Stand WAY back there,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?

Can we carry this further?

If a literal 6-day young earth creationist comes into your assembly, and if a well known and respected scientist also comes in, and if you take notice of the creationist and say, “Have a seat here, please – and would you mind sharing something during coffee hour?” while to the one who is a scientist you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?

Or maybe the reverse? Which is more likely in my social circles: the Scientist would get asked to speak and the mere presence of the Creationist would drive most people bonkers.

James is very focused here on poverty, on social justice issues within the community he is addressing. It is Saint Paul who pulls out all the stops: Neither Jew nor Greek, Neither Slave nor Free, Neither Male and Female. James says, “Neither poor nor rich” but both he and Paul are talking about the same things:

Making distinctions among yourselves, and becomeing judges with evil thoughts.

It’s the “Judges with Evil Thoughts” that is the problem, really, for both Paul and James.

I went to confession once with Fr Victor – Memory Eternal! – and I confessed to often making assumptions about people and then judging them on those assumptions! In other words I was making up reasons in my own mind to judge these persons long before they ever gave me a reason on their own! (This, too, would be another issue to confess.) I can – often – look at someone and assume their friendship or the reverse. I can be preparing for a fight long before they even get introduced to me…

I remember once being in an Episcopal Church and some visitors came. I heard that the visitors had come from a certain parish that had, once, been pastored by a man who had been involved in the theft of rather a lot of money (it’s a long story) but merely hearing of the parish caused a lot of anger – rightly or wrongly founded on that long-ago ex-pastor – to flair up and be directed at the guests. I never actually got to talk to them, mind you. It was their presence that did it. And… get this… it was the youth group of that parish that was visiting.

I have to confess things like that rather a lot.

Fr Victor said there was a word for it in the Russian Tradition – Evil Imaginations. I don’t have a slavonic Bible present but here’s the Greek, right here in James: διαλογισμων πονηρων – dialogismon poneron. Evil Thoughts. But that word, “thoughts” is important because it’s not just an “idea”, but rather a “dialogismon”. It’s a Dialogue! A whole series of ideas, a back-and-forth in your own head – it is “Imaginations”. “Poneron” implies that the dialogue is, in fact, with Satan. It’s a pulling down of the mind.

And of course you start to judge the person.

That’s what Satan wants: he is, after all, the Adversary. He wants to tear people down and if he can use my own mind (or yours) to do it, that’s more power for him.

In the Gospel today, Jesus breaks one of the Taboos of his people, associating with a Gentile. He does this rather a lot in the NT. First he tests her faith a little, but finding it strong – bold even – he does for her what he does for everyone and makes her whole. James, Jesus’ Brother, tells us not to make distinctions based on the things of this world, the things that we see. How hard must their parents have worked to instill such an idea in the midst of a world (and several cultures) beset with xenophoiba? How hard must we work to instill it within ourselves?

I work in an employment agency. In a worsening economy we are increasingly beset with people seeking work. My own job as gatekeeper at the front desk is to sort out people who are qualified from people who are not qualified: to divide the people who can make money for our company from the people who are, essentially, a waste of our time.

I wrestle with this all time, most recently coming to a decision that if I get all caught up in not-judging these people, I will fail to be of service to anyone we can actually help. I’m being a better steward of limited resources by judging than by not. But where does that leave my soul?

How do we avoid not only judging but also dropping people into boxes where we leave them to rot?

James draws the conversation from his specific example to a discussion of Faith and Works, keeping to his example. But we need to hold not just his example in place but all the implications as well: slave and free, insider and outsider, male and female, gay and straight, republican and democrat, Arab and Jew, Muslim and Christian, American and whoever out enemy is in this “war” we’re in now. Any freaking “Us and Them” you’ve got. James says it had better all be “us” when you come to the table of God.

Of course, he’s talking about this in the Church. But you can’t practice one thing at Church and another thing at work, can you?