The Sermon No One Wants to Preach

Sermon

No one reads sermon titles anymore; nevertheless, I still give my sermons a title. On the off chance that you read this title, I want to be clear, it’s not just me who doesn’t want to preach this sermon. No one wants to preach this sermon. If you were considering awarding preaching medals to the Westminster pastors, James as a preaching text is sufficient justification. It’s a hard book—hard to read and hard to preach.

If this sounds a tiny bit whiny, it’s all about my overactive sense of personal integrity. It’s a fact that I am the kind of preacher who needs to hear her own sermons. This happens to be one I not only don’t want to preach, it’s one I don’t want to hear. Anti-racism discussions, in a time of quarantine affording us plenty of time to reflect on those conversations, have helped me realize how very far short I fall of the standards set by scripture. Racism, classism, jingoism—they’re all in me, and it would be self-serving to preach as if I didn’t know this about myself. To preach this text with integrity would be both prophetic and an indictment. But I don’t have that much integrity. I could pretend I didn’t notice how much I do not measure up to “the royal law according to scripture.” To pretend that I do, or that it doesn’t matter that I don’t—that’s likely to make me look good at the expense of inflicting yet more pain on others. Scripture’s standards are unattainable, so we’re all in trouble. I get this. I was bemoaning my preaching dilemma to one of my colleagues last week, and he offered me this word of grace: “There’s more good than evil in the world (but not by much).” That’s attributed to either Abraham Heschel or Rabbi Zalman or the Buddha or MLK. Or all of them.

James’s premise is that how we behave (our deeds) is a logical outcome of faith. The kind of holiness James advocates isn’t about ritual; it’s concrete, way-you-live-everyday holiness. We participate in the holiness of God, he says, when we care for the poor. Those whom James labels the poof are people we associate today with people of color, those who are chronically unemployed, differently abled, homeless. Wealthy people don’t fare well in James’s letter, in stark contrast to the poor who are the elect of God, God’s favorites. Peace activist Philip Berrigan says God has a special role for the poor. “The poor,” he says, “tell us who we are. The prophets tell us who we can be. So we hide the poor and kill the prophets.” One seminary class had its doubts about this “preferential option for the poor” in scripture, so they did an analysis of New Testament verses dealing with the poor and justice. In the first three gospels alone, one verse in ten is about the poor and justice. In the gospel of Luke it’s one out of seven. How we treat the poor, James says, shows exactly what sort of interpretive lens we use to read scripture.

I get that we can only see from our own point of view, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t adjust that point of view. My past year with eye troubles has helped me learn this in a very literal way. One eye has a blind spot, for which my other (cataract) eye compensates, so if I let those two eyes work together, I have full vision. When I think one eye can do everything on its own, I either don’t see the middle of what I’m looking at, or I lose brightness of color and depth perception. As individuals, we are prone to blind spots and shallow vision. But when we cooperate and communicate with each other, with unfamiliar viewpoints or those with whom we do not agree, we get a deeper, clearer perception of the world.

For years, I resisted going to Al-Anon because I didn’t think I was “that sort of person”! The lens I had of myself was of a “nice, middle-class girl” and we didn’t have “drinking” problems, nor did the people around us. By facing my own faulty perception, my distorted take on class, I learned the best spiritual practices. That was my conversion, giving up being good. In the 12th century, St Francis recognized our “being good” lens. “We must bear patiently not being good,” he said, “ . . . and not being thought good.” For Francis and for James, clinging so tightly to our own good is hypocrisy. When our ego needs to have others believe we are good, it’s a quick and slippery slope to focusing on that and forgetting about objective, common good.

The reason I don’t want to preach this text is because to preach with any integrity, I’d have to change my life. I like being comfortable. I like living in a safe neighborhood. I like not worrying about food security. I like beautiful things and being clean and having my opinion count. But if I really paid attention to this text—if I paid attention to what I’m preaching—I might have to change. Prophets tell us who we can be. Who we are is children of God, and that is our motivation and our impetus. As a child of God I can stop doing for the poor and start doing with them—the poor who also happen to be children of God. Prophets urge us to recognize our solidarity with the poor, who lead us to our conversion by showing us who we are.

My favorite conversion story is that of St Francis of Assisi. Francis grew up in 12th century Italy, the only son of a rich cloth merchant. He was a party boy, the coolest of the cool kids, always ready with a song or a joke. His serious side was expressed in his longing to show valor as a knight. His father encouraged this, partly because this was the route toward nobility for the upwardly mobile merchant class. When Assisi went to war with neighboring Perugia, Francis went off to fight. As luck would have it, he was immediately captured and thrown into a dungeon, where he languished and sickened for over a year until his father paid for his release. Were times that tough that it took a year to raise the ransom? Was dad teaching him a lesson: get serious, settle down in the family business, marry money, make babies? The record is not clear.

What we do know is that when Francis returned, his health was precarious and he’d become pensive, more apt to wander off into the surrounding countryside to think and—what?—pray? meditate? It was risky going out alone into the countryside because of the danger of robbers or, worse, lepers. There were plenty of lepers. Whether these were literally folks with Hansen’s disease or just down-on-their-luck folks whose horrible living conditions destroyed their health, we don’t know. They were malodorous; whether from rotting flesh and putrefaction or lack of sanitation, their disease literally ate them. Their appearance made them universally despised, not to mention feared, given the likelihood of disease transmission. The law required that they ring a bell to warn the rest of the populace that one of THEM was around the corner.

So it was that one day Francis was out on his horse—the 12th century equivalent of “out in his Beemer convertible”—when he heard a bell. The leper was begging, the only vocation open to him. As the despicable wretch held out his hand for the rich kid to drop in a coin, Francis saw the man. For the first time—saw the man. Francis could have rolled up the window and not met the guy’s eye as he rolled past. Everyone did that, no harm no foul. A kindly man might roll down the window and poke out a ticket to Sisters of the Road Cafe. Francis got down off his horse. Some of the stories say Francis kissed the leper, others say he embraced him. No matter. For Francis, the leper went from being an object to being a subject. It was his moment of conversion—when he saw the leper as a child of God, and he (himself) no better than the leper. He gave the leper his down jacket, his Nikes, his Smart Wool sweater and socks. Francis finally saw that what was eating him wasn’t leprosy, it was ambition, consumerism, desire for prestige. His life lacked gospel integrity. And it was never the same again for Francis of Assisi.

So you can see why I don’t want to preach this text from James, which criticizes us for treating the rich as people-like-us and poor people as—well, as poor people. If I’m going to have to get out of my sweet little Honda Fit (not just roll down the window) and recognize that I’m no better than anyone else—!

This is what I know. God wants to convert us. We pray, “Thy kingdom come,” and that means we’re asking God to work now to eliminate the barriers to love and justice. To help us be honest and loving with ourselves about our need to change. I speak, not just individually, but in the corporate and collective sense. God wants to convert our institutions to be just and loving. God wants to cover us with grace. You know grace. Grace exposes us and heals the ways we resist goodness. Grace challenges the ways we are closed to compassion, the injustices we take for granted. It’s that prophet thing—what we can be is revealed. What makes this grace even bearable is remembering that “There is more good than evil in the world.” Even if “not by much,” at least it’s there. And as children of God, we are given that grace for free.