All Saints’, Dorval
September 5, 2021
“Homeless Jesus,” sculpture by Canadian artist Timothy Schmalz
The letter of James is a brief text – five chapters; only four pages in the Bible I have handy as I write – but it packs a big punch. James does not mince words.
Protestants have a complicated relationship to this letter; James heavily emphasizes the role of good works in the life of faith, and the Reformers, with their emphasis on salvation by grace and faith, objected to that position. Martin Luther called James “an epistle of straw.”
But James is a necessary corrective to the kind of belief that claims that as long as your heart is right with Jesus, it doesn’t matter what you do. Our faith matters, but it’s hard to see what the point of faith is unless it makes a difference to how you live.
James highlights two specific examples in today’s passage: that of welcoming people into the assembly, and that of caring for those in acute need. Many of the things scripture says need to be extensively contextualized in order to be understandable two thousand years later, but these are immediately recognizable. These are situations which we still encounter, daily. How do we respond to someone who looks prosperous, educated, and powerful coming into the church building, versus someone who might have ragged clothes, not have showered in a while, and perhaps be displaying some confusing behaviour? And, how do we meet the needs of those within or adjacent to our community, who lack the basic necessities of daily life?
I think we would probably all agree on the answers to those questions, in the abstract. It’s putting them into practice that can be a challenge. And I’ve noticed that sometimes, our liturgical texts don’t actually help much. Consider this passage from the Good Friday Solemn Collects:
Let us pray for all who suffer
and are afflicted in body or in mind:
for the hungry and homeless,
the destitute and the oppressed,
and all who suffer persecution or prejudice,
for the sick, the wounded, and the handicapped,
for those in loneliness, fear, and anguish,
for those who face temptation, doubt, and despair,
for the sorrowful and bereaved,
for prisoners and captives
and those in mortal danger,
that God in his mercy will comfort and relieve them,
and grant them the knowledge of his love,
and stir up in us the will and patience
to minister to their needs.
Do you notice anything about these words? The long list of people with various afflictions, for whom we are praying for comfort, relief, and a knowledge of God’s love; and then the petition that God will “stir up in us the will and patience to minister to their needs.”
The assumption buried in this prayer is that “the afflicted,” “those in need” are out there, and “we” who are in here are happy and comfortable, and all we need is to be inspired by our faith to go to the aid of the people out there. There is no acknowledgement that quite a few of the people in the pews might be “in loneliness, fear and anguish” or “sick, wounded and handicapped”, let alone “hungry, homeless, destitute and oppressed”.
And while I’m sure that was never their intention, the effect of words like these, if they’re allowed to percolate into our consciousness unquestioned, is to underscore the idea that only a certain kind of person belongs in our sanctuaries, and that someone who doesn’t look or act like that kind of person must not belong, and that it’s therefore OK to treat them differently.
This effect is known as “othering” and once you start looking, you see it everywhere. And “othering” is one of the things that Jesus is most consistently and emphatically opposes. In today’s Gospel, in fact, Jesus has a moment where he most uncharacteristically “others” the Syrophoenician woman who comes to him begging for healing for her daughter – but when she rebukes him (or argues with him out of desperation) he quickly reverses course.
My theological guru, Dorothy L. Sayers, makes extensive use of a concept (originating with Charles Williams) called the “Coinherence,” which essentially states that in God, all of us are connected in a real and meaningful way. We share suffering and hope, we share guilt and joy. What happens to you also happens, in some sense, to me. We remain unique individuals, each severally beloved by God; but our belovedness also binds us together. This concept is expressed by a phrase from the TEC marriage liturgy: “… the bonds of our common humanity, by which all your children are united one to another, and the living to the dead …” Another way of expressing it is, of course, the communion of saints.
James writes, “You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’” And it’s, if not easier, at least easier to conceptualize, loving your neighbour as yourself, if you genuinely understand your neighbour to be yourself, and vice versa, on some level. It’s the ultimate protection against othering.
We need to let go of any idea that we have that it is possible to distinguish between the haves and the have-nots, those who suffer and those who are supposed to alleviate the suffering. Not only is it always possible that someone healthy and secure today could meet with a terrible accident tomorrow; but, more fundamentally, in the Coinherence, any distinction is absurd. Our suffering is shared, but so is our help, our hope, and our joy.
This does not, of course, mean that it is every individual’s job to save the whole world by helping every other person they meet or hear about, of course; that is impossible. Some are called to do great deeds; others, as Mother Teresa is supposed to have said, to do small deeds with great love. Not all of us – especially in a pandemic – are in a position to personally feed, clothe and house others. Sometimes the idea of “just writing a cheque” to meet a need is brushed off as impersonal and inadequate, but especially for problems on the other side of the world, sharing our resources in the form of ready money is often in fact the best and highest expression of the Coinherence.
And some people have neither the ability to personally serve or the ability to write cheques; but everyone has the ability to pray. And while we rightly criticize those who offer “thoughts and prayers” when it is literally their job to provide practical help, prayer is likewise far from a cop-out. Your prayers might be the reason that a billionaire decided to make a transformational donation, or a politician changed their mind about residential schools, or a stranger stopped to buy a meal for a person on the street. Prayer is what binds the Coinherence together.
As we come back together for in-person church starting next week, it’s a good time to think about how we welcome people. Even in the face of numerical restrictions on how many people can assemble at one time, we can think about, and put into practice, ways to be as welcoming as possible to all. We’re already working on it – yesterday, at the gathering for George Herman, one person in attendance used a wheelchair and had a service dog, and it was just great to be able to point her to the accessible washroom, the cut-out pew, and to know that if there had been a reason for her to want to go downstairs, she could do so easily and quickly. We are already prepared to welcome nonbinary and transgender people in at least one important respect, also having to do with the upstairs washroom, which is non-gender-specific.
We have made a good start, but there is more we can do. All of us – inside and outside the church walls – are united in the Coinherence, in the communion of saints. Time and space are no hindrance, but we are particularly called to care for those whom God puts beside us in the same time and place, even if that is the only thing we have in common.
As James says, let us put mercy above judgement, and show what we believe by how we behave.
Amen.
Leave a Reply