It's Hip To Be Square

“It’s Hip to be Square”

James 2:1-18

In his first year in seminary, Jim Wallis and his friends did a thorough study to find every verse in the Bible that deals with the poor and social injustice.

They came up with thousands.

For example, in three of the Gospels one out of every ten verses deals with these issues.

And in Luke it’s one out of every 7.

And yet they couldn’t remember a single sermon on the poor in their home churches.

One of them found an old Bible and started to cut out every single biblical text about the poor.

Many of the Psalms and Prophets disappeared.

That old Bible would hardly hold together.

They had created a Bible full of holes.

But the real Bible, is not full of holes about loving our neighbor, caring for the poor, the widows, the orphans, the outcastes, the hungry, the homeless.

There are over 2,500 verses in the Bible that deal with these issues.

And it has been suggested that this is God’s plan A for Christians—that we are to address the issues of fairness, the issues of helping the poor, the sick, the hungry…

…and that we are to allow God to work through us to accomplish God’s good plans for this world and for how we are to live our lives.

And that there is no plan B.

Just a plan A.

Even the most faithful Christians have always found it tempting to gut our Bibles in ways similar to this, by naturally overlooking God’s stated concern for the poor, and cutting out the Bible’s calls to care for people who are needy.

A few years ago, I was having a conversation with a Christian woman who was preparing to retire from a career which paid her millions—yes, millions of dollars a year.

She said to me, “I’m trying to figure out what to do in retirement.”

I asked her, “Would you be interested in helping the poor?”

And without skipping a beat, she said, “No.”

While God has a special concern for people who are poor, James suggests that the Christians he is writing to have the opposite preference.

After all, it seems that one day when their worship service was just getting started, two people walked in.

One of them clearly had a lot of money that he spent on a gold ring, and the hippest of clothes.

He may have even smelled a bit like money.

The other person was obviously poor.

We are told he had “filthy old clothes” and probably smelled more like moldy cheese than money.

Everyone watched as the head usher practically tripped over himself to make the rich guy feel welcome.

He gave him a bulletin and perhaps even elbowed a few people out of the way to find the him the best seat in the house.

But the same usher seemed a bit annoyed that the poor man had even decided to darken the door of the church that day.

He might have told him there weren’t any bulletins left and he told him that all the seats were taken so he would have to sit on the floor if he wanted to stay.

Based on appearances, on those tell-tale signs of wealth and poverty, the church James is writing to has “received these two people—who are both equally created in the image of God—very differently.

“Have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts,” James asks them.

In writing this, James makes it clear that it is evil to judge people based on—well based on anything, but certainly included in that is money, class, race, sex, sexual orientation—think of the Ethiopian Eunuch in Acts Chapter 8.

The church has been guilty of such discrimination for centuries now.

And we have always found a way to justify it: “Those people are lazy, or smelly, or dishonest, or genetically inferior, or mentally ill, or twisted up in their thinking.”

There’s always a good reason to treat people differently based on the cover of the book.

But James will have none of it.

Christians are to treat others as we have been treated by God—with non-judgmental, unconditional love and grace.

And that love and grace is the focus of Jame’s next major point.

He refers to the “royal law found in Scripture, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’” and in doing this James is distinguishing between God’s law and the law of the Empire.

The law of the land may allow discrimination, whether its based on race or gender or sexual orientation.

Then the law of the land is changed by Congress or the Supreme Court, and suddenly certain kinds of discrimination are no longer legal—although they still exist.

But Christians are under a higher law, the law of the Kingdom of God.