5/31/26 Sermon

We've been walking through the letter of James for a few weeks and then took a few week break. And if we can remember back to the first chapter of James, we probably started to notice that James has a habit. He won't let faith stay a private, indoor thing.

He opened by writing to scattered people — people who'd been blown out to the edges of their lives, whose first instinct when things got hard was to look for the exit. And his word to them was: don't bolt. Stay. Let endurance do its slow, quiet work in you. Then the last time we were in this letter together, he took that staying and made it active. He said faith isn't something you hear on a Sunday and nod along to and leave in the pew. "You must be doers of the word," he said, "and not only hearers who mislead themselves." Be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger. And real religion, the kind that's pure, looks like caring for the widow and the orphan — the people the world is busy forgetting.

So that's where we've been. And now, in chapter 2, James does something he hasn't quite done yet. He stops talking in general about "doing the word," and he walks us straight into a room and shows us a scene.

One thing worth knowing before we read it. When James says "meeting," the word underneath is actually synagogue — which tells you how early in Christianity this is, how Jewish this little community still is, and that it's the kind of gathering where rich and poor sat down in the same space. That's the setting. Two people come through the door — one dressed like money, one dressed like he slept in his clothes — and James watches to see who gets the good seat.

What he's about to do is connect three things we usually like to keep in separate drawers: how we sort people into who matters and who doesn't, the old command to love our neighbor as ourselves, and whether our faith actually does anything once it walks out these doors.

Listen for that as we read. James, chapter 2, verses 1 through 18.

My brothers and sisters, when you show favoritism you deny the faithfulness of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has been resurrected in glory. Imagine two people coming into your meeting. One has a gold ring and fine clothes, while the other is poor, dressed in filthy rags. Then suppose that you were to take special notice of the one wearing fine clothes, saying, “Here’s an excellent place. Sit here.” But to the poor person you say, “Stand over there”; or, “Here, sit at my feet.” Wouldn’t you have shown favoritism among yourselves and become evil-minded judges?

My dear brothers and sisters, listen! Hasn’t God chosen those who are poor by worldly standards to be rich in terms of faith? Hasn’t God chosen the poor as heirs of the kingdom he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor. Don’t the wealthy make life difficult for you? Aren’t they the ones who drag you into court? Aren’t they the ones who insult the good name spoken over you at your baptism?

You do well when you really fulfill the royal law found in scripture, Love your neighbor as yourself. But when you show favoritism, you are committing a sin, and by that same law you are exposed as a lawbreaker. Anyone who tries to keep all of the Law but fails at one point is guilty of failing to keep all of it. The one who said, Don’t commit adultery, also said, Don’t commit murder. So if you don’t commit adultery but do commit murder, you are a lawbreaker. In every way, then, speak and act as people who will be judged by the law of freedom. There will be no mercy in judgment for anyone who hasn’t shown mercy. Mercy overrules judgment.

My brothers and sisters, what good is it if people say they have faith but do nothing to show it? Claiming to have faith can’t save anyone, can it? Imagine a brother or sister who is naked and never has enough food to eat. What if one of you said, “Go in peace! Stay warm! Have a nice meal!”? What good is it if you don’t actually give them what their body needs? In the same way, faith is dead when it doesn’t result in faithful activity.

Someone might claim, “You have faith and I have action.” But how can I see your faith apart from your actions? Instead, I’ll show you my faith by putting it into practice in faithful action. It’s good that you believe that God is one. Ha! Even the demons believe this, and they tremble with fear. Are you so slow? Do you need to be shown that faith without actions has no value at all? What about Abraham, our father? Wasn’t he shown to be righteous through his actions when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? See, his faith was at work along with his actions. In fact, his faith was made complete by his faithful actions. So the scripture was fulfilled that says, Abraham believed God, and God regarded him as righteous. What is more, Abraham was called God’s friend. So you see that a person is shown to be righteous through faithful actions and not through faith alone. In the same way, wasn’t Rahab the prostitute shown to be righteous when she received the messengers as her guests and then sent them on by another road? As the lifeless body is dead, so faith without actions is dead.

WORD OF THE LORD

The first time I was suspended from school, it was my father's fault, and for two reasons.

The first reason was something he'd tell me on the first day of school every year. He'd say, "Find the kid nobody's hanging out with, and go be his friend." I passed that on to my own kids on their first days of school for years.

The second reason was a story he told me. When he was a boy, two kids sat behind him on the bus and started in on him and bullying him, and my Uncle Doug reached over the seat and beat them both up. So when I was in fifth grade, and my best friend was getting picked on by a kid in the seat in front of us, I figured if my uncle could handle two bullies, maybe I could handle one. I reached over the seat, spun the kid around, and hit him as hard as I could. I did not pass that one on to my kids.

The principal suspended me, and then he told me he'd have done the same thing — which was the worst possible thing he could've said to me, because after that I got suspended about once a year for fighting. I couldn't stand bullies. If I saw somebody picking on somebody weaker, I'd try to put a stop to it. I didn't always win. But I'd do it again. There's something about somebody being picked on that has driven me crazy my whole life.

Which is what makes the next part so hard to tell you.

There was a kid I grew up with. We'll call him George. George was scrawny and lanky. He wasn't funny, he wasn't smart, and if I'm being honest I couldn't find a single thing about him I liked — though I'm sure that if I'd ever bothered to know him, I'd have found something. George got picked on constantly, because he was weak. Not just physically. He was weak in just about every way. And he put up zero resistance. When he got shoved, he just took it. All the teasing, all of the bullying, all of the outcasting, he took all of it. He never once stood up for himself. And I despised him for it.

One day I was walking down the hall after lunch. George was down on one knee in the middle of the hallway, tying his shoe. And it seemed like every kid who passed shoved him over. Again and again. And George just took it. Got back up, knelt down, got knocked over again.

I don't know what came over me. But I felt pure rage. I stood there watching him get shoved down over and over, and my blood boiled — not at the kids doing the shoving. At him. At George. For sitting there and taking it. For not fighting back, not saying anything, not doing anything. For being so weak. I don't think I've ever hated anyone the way I hated him in that moment.

And I hated him so much that I walked up to him and kicked him in the ribs and screamed in his face.

A teacher had me by the collar before I knew what I'd done, and George and I ended up in the principal's office — the principal who by then was on a first-name basis with my father. He looked at me, and all he said was, "George?" He couldn't make it make sense. Neither could I. Then he turned and asked George what happened. And George sat there and said nothing. He wouldn't tell on me. So I told on myself.

When I look back over my life — all the trouble I got into, all the fights I started or tried to stop, and then who I've tried to become, what I say I believe now — I feel nothing but shame about George. The one time in my life somebody clearly, desperately needed a hand up off the ground and instead I kicked him in the ribs. If there's one person I'd want to find and apologize to, it's him. And I still don't fully understand why I did it.

But I think I'm starting to.

Because here's the thing I've had to sit with: I didn't kick George in spite of everything I believed about standing up for the weak. I kicked him because of something else I believed, something I'd swallowed so completely I didn't even know it was in me. I'd been taught — we're all taught — that the unforgivable sin is to lose. That the world sorts people into winners and losers, and that the losing is somehow their own fault, a kind of moral failure. George was losing. Visibly, constantly, without a fight. And some part of me had been trained to find that disgusting.

You want to see what I'm talking about, walk through a middle or high school cafeteria sometime. At my school you could practically chart it — the closer your table was to the back wall, the higher up the order you were. We even have a phrase for this type of thing. Survival of the fittest. We say it like it's a law of the universe. The strong rise, the weak fall, that's just nature, that's just how things are, and who are we to argue with nature. I had that phrase running under everything, and a boy named George paid for it with his ribs.

Here's what's strange, though. The man whose name we've stapled to that phrase didn't believe it. Not the way we mean it. If we actually read Darwin’s The Descent of Man, the book where he turns his attention to us — the phrase "survival of the fittest" shows up only twice. The word love shows up ninety-five times. And Darwin's conclusion about our species is almost the opposite of the bumper sticker. He thought the reason we're still here — the reason human beings made it — is that we’re the animals that take care of each other. The ones who feel for the weak. The ones who cooperate. He looked at all of nature and decided that for creatures like us, the supreme value isn't competition. It's actually care.

Science took a couple of centuries to catch up to what the church was supposed to have known all along.

Because seventeen hundred years before Darwin, a man named James sat down and wrote the same thing to a struggling little group of believers. He called it the royal law — "love your neighbor as yourself." And then he asked them a question that I think he's still asking us this morning.

What good is it, James says, if people say they have faith but do nothing to show it?

It's a brutal question, and it's aimed right at people like me. Because I'm very good at believing the right things. I can tell you all day that I love God, that I'd stand up for the weak, that Jesus died for the least of these. I can fill a sanctuary with the right words. And then I can walk down a hallway and kick a kid who's already down on the ground.

What James understood — what I'm only now understanding — is that you can’t separate the two. My faith isn't a private thing I hold between me and Jesus. My salvation isn't just mine. It's bound up in yours, and in George's, and in the people I'd rather not look at. How I treat the person in front of me is how I'm treating Christ. There's no other meter. The great preacher James Forbes once said nobody gets into heaven without a letter of reference from the poor. James, the brother of Jesus, would have nodded at that.

This is why I don't trust a faith — least of all my own — that stays warm and quiet and indoors. We can stand in here and feel all the right feelings, and James will tell us flatly that it doesn't count for anything if we go back out the doors and step over the people on the ground. Faith is dead when it doesn't result in faithful activity. That's the line. Dead. Not weak, not immature. Dead.

And the wild thing is, we already know how to do the other thing. We practice it in here every month. We come up to this table and we take a torn-off piece of bread and a swallow of juice and we have the nerve to call it a feast — and it is one, because nobody walks away hungry. We don't let a few of us gorge while the rest go without. The table doesn't have a back wall and a front. Everyone's invited, everyone eats, everyone leaves full. That's the whole point of it. We rehearse, right here, the world the way God actually built it — where the strong make room for the weak and nobody's worth is measured by whether they won.

But James won't let us stop at the table. He says the quality of your faith isn't proven by how beautifully you eat in here. It's proven by whether you carry these same values out that door — whether you'll feed the actual hungry, lift up the actual fallen, refuse to step over the actual George. Spiritual food's too important to deny anyone. So is the regular kind. So is dignity. So is a hand up off the ground.

I can't fix much in this world. I can't make people stop sorting each other into winners and losers. I can't even teach a whole congregation to love let alone an entire culture. I'm powerless over almost everything. But I'm not powerless over whether I'm the kind of man who kicks the Georges of this world when they're down — or the kind who kneels down next to them and helps them tie their shoe. That one's mine to choose. I have power in that decision. Today, and tomorrow, and the day after.

I think Jesus is standing in front of all of us this morning asking the same question he asked Peter on the beach. Do you love me? And I want to answer yes — with my head, with my heart, with the bottom of my soul, and with everything I actually do.

Because, as James says it:

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if people claim to have faith but do nothing to show it? Can this kind of faith save them? Imagine a brother or sister who is naked and never has enough food to eat. What if one of you said, "Go in peace! Stay warm! Have a nice meal!"? What good is it if you don't actually give them what their body needs? In the same way, faith is dead when it doesn't result in faithful activity.

So may you go from here with your heart opened — to God, and to your neighbor. May you preach your faith with your hands more than your mouth. And may you be the hand that helps someone off the ground this week.

Amen.