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What 'chew talkin' 'bout James?

When I was a teenager, my parents owned a house at the Jersey Shore.  I was fortunate to spend most of the  summer there every year.  Life in a vacation town is different.  I had friends that I would only see in the summer. Sometimes a new family would rent a house in town and another family would not return.  Each year new friends were added to the mix and each year some were subtracted from the mix.

Kathy was girl that used to hang out in our group when we were in eighth grade.  She would sit on the beach with us, play volleyball and hang out with us on the boardwalk at night.  We would often tease and bust on one another.  All in good fun or so I thought.  And then the next summer, she was gone.  Her family stopped coming to the shore and she spent her summers working a summer job back in the Midwest.

 Flash ahead to the summer after senior year in high school.  I’m with my friends on the boardwalk, some of the old gang some new, and who shows up, but Kathy.  We didn’t recognize her at first, it had been four years.  Girls change a lot in four years.  So we all hung out that night, went out to our favorite pizza place, and caught up on one another’s lives.  However, over the course of the night, I had an uneasy feeling.

Now teenage guys are not the most perceptive people in the world.  Eventually, I figured it out.  Kathy never spoke directly to me the whole night.  She never even acknowledged when I spoke.  At one point everyone got up from the table and just Kathy and I were sitting alone.  So I struck up some idle conversation and was surprised when she responded, “I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Excuse me?” I thought.  What in the world could she possibly be mad at me for?  We used to be best friends.  I hadn’t even seen her in four years.  What could I have possibly done in the past hour to upset her?  I asked her what was wrong and she replied, “How can you not know?  You think I forgot what you said to me the last night I was here?”

She then recounted how, four years earlier, I made what I thought was a joke and she took as an insult.  “Well what do you have to say for yourself?” Kathy asked.

Like a typical fumbling seventeen year old guy I said, “Oh – um – I’m sorry – I guess.”  I’ve learned over the years that when it comes to women you really want to be more definitive in your apologies than that.

Whether we are children, teenagers or adults, we are so unaware of the potential harm our words can cause to someone.   Here were my friend Kathy and I, who I hardly had thought of in the intervening four years, sitting in an Italian restaurant in 1980 and for her it was still 1976.  It was as if my words to her were just spoken and hour ago.  The sad thing is that now, thirty years later I can’t remember what I said to her that hurt her so deeply, but I bet you she does.

Our tongues can devastate people.  In his letter, James says our tongues are like poison, like a fire that can burn down a whole forest.

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It's Always A Bad Time

It’s hard to follow Jesus.  If you’re like me, you probably imagine that it was much easier to be a Christian back in the first century.  You might picture the early church as a time of saints skipping through fields of flowers wearing sandals and everybody just lovin’ one another. In reality it was a time of conflicts, screaming matches and severed friendships.  One of the people who was a part of that chaos was James.    James was the brother of Jesus.  He knew him.  He knew Peter.  And he argued furiously with Paul.

 Despite all the turmoil of the time, the letter of James begins with the encouraging command, “My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy.”  We don’t know to what specific trials James referred.  He seems to suggest that his listeners are poor.  In the rest of the letter he gives hope to his readers who are being dragged into court by the rich and defaming the name of Jesus.  The implication is that his readers are not wealthy people, and that they’re going through tough times.

When a group is facing pressure from the outside, often its members often direct their defenses not against those who are attacking them, but against one another.  The bulk of James’ letter instructs its hearers on how to behave toward one another.  So it just may be that this group of early Jewish-Christians, stressed from the attack from the surrounding culture, had begun to turn on one another.

Today, one has to look no further than our urban areas to see examples of this.  Most of the crime in impoverished neighborhoods is committed against others who also poor.  How many of us know married couples who, having experienced a trial in their life, financial difficulties, serious illness in the family or the death of a child, grow, not closer together but farther apart?  Perhaps even getting divorced.

When we face the struggles and difficulties of life, we have a tendency to attack, not the source of our trials, but those closest to us.  James tells his audience, when you face those trials, don’t attack the people you love.  Don’t even attack your persecutors.  Instead consider it nothing but a joy.

Is he serious?  Is he a glutton for punishment?  

James was not advocating some self-punishing guilt-ridden religion.  He didn’t mean for us to consider our troubles as punishments from God out which we are to derive some perverse pleasure.  James says, when you and I face a trial, that doesn’t mean it’s time to beat ourselves down, it’s time to let God lift us up.

Bob Scott is one of the founding members of this church and the director of Trinity Institute at Trinity Wall Street in Manhattan. A few years back, Pam and I had the privilege of attending a Conference to which Bob invited us.  One of the speakers was Sister Helen Prejean.  Most of you know her as the person Susan Sarandon portrayed in the movie “Dead Man Walking.”  In her presentation, she recounted her journey into working with death row inmates.  It was not a calling she sought.  It was outside her comfort zone and extremely scary for her.  But every challenging step along the way, from walking in to visit with a guilty murderer to meeting with his victims’ families she described how God gave her what she needed to meet the challenge.  She said it was like “grace bubbling up from underneath.”

How many of us yearn for that feeling? That feeling of God’s grace bubbling up beneath us, supporting, sustaining us, and carrying us through the tidal waves of existence.

Go Ahead, Make My Day

One of the great things about having a few hundred cable channels is that you can always theoretically find something to watch. I enjoy watching biographies, so whether its PBS, the History Channel or the Biography Channel, there is usually one on at any given time.  What I have come to notice, is that  biographical documentaries all tend to follow the same structure.  They open with a montage of historians saying intriguing soundbites about a famous historical person whom you thought you knew well. 

 “He changed the world forever.”

Or, “He overcame obstacles that would have crushed others.”

Or, “He often dressed in women’s clothes on weekends.”

Sure enough, you’re intrigued and have to watch. That is usually followed by some nice looking graphic title sequence and then the person’s story.  Their story is always told in order, from their birth, through their formative years, through the events that made them famous, and ending with their death. 

At the end of the program, there’s another montage of historians making inspirational remarks about the person’s legacy.  Great world leaders have a legacy.  The causes of people like Gandhi, Lincoln or King live on.  Some even live on in memorials built in their honor and often the final shot of the program is of that memorial.  Great artists, writers or musicians live on in the genius of their work.  Their creations may be the last image or sound in their biographic special.  Maybe some slow motion shots of them smiling in a newsreel are included.   But pretty much, their death marks the end of their story. 

  We’ve all seen these kinds of shows, dozens of times.  We know what to expect.  Other than a brief epilogue about their legacy or influence, one’s death is always the end of their story.

I’ve never seen a biography that ends, “He died in 2005 and was buried in London” followed with the words, “and next week you can meet him for breakfast in Chicago.”  That would be just plain nonsensical. 

Yet that is the story of Easter.  Although the Gospels are not quite biographies in the modern journalistic sense,  they do tell us the story of Jesus’ life.  Like any good biography, they also tell the story of his death, but they also tell us something unique. The Gospels end, not by stating where Jesus is buried or where a memorial was built in his memory, or how his ideas or cause lived on.  Instead they end with his friends discovering that his tomb is empty.  If that’s not strange enough, a mysterious figure tells them that Jesus has gone ahead of them, back to their hometown where eventually they would go and have breakfast by the lake with him.  That’s just plain weird.

Searching For the True Cross

Early Christians held beliefs and practices that to us may seem strange and even a little exotic to us.  In the first few centuries of Christian tradition, there was a legend that was passed down about the Search for the True Cross.  It was the story of how Helena, the mother of Constantine, went to Jerusalem to find the remnants of the actual cross on which Jesus was executed.  In the ruins of Temple to Venus, she found three crosses and decided to test each of them to determine which one was the true cross.

In the city, lived a prominent woman who was very sick.  The legend says Helena brought a piece of the first cross to her bedside and it had no effect.  She brought a piece of the second cross and again, no effect.  Finally when a piece of the third cross was brought in the presence of the sick woman, her eyes opened, she stood up and began to thank God for her healing.

You and I approach Good Friday, searching for the true cross.  Like the people in that legend, we explore and test, seeking to find it.  We approach this cross with ambivalence, simultaneously attracted and repelled by its story and imagery.  It’s the same ambiguity that enables us to call Christianity’s darkest day “good.”  

We come carrying all the baggage of the false crosses that we have been presented with in the past.  We put those false crosses aside.  We leave behind the cross that was embossed on the shields and banners of the Crusades.  We leave behind the cross that adorned the palaces of the rich while the poor starved outside their gates. We leave behind the cross on the bumper sticker that says “God Loves You” while parked at a church that does not welcome everyone.  We leave behind the false crosses that has been used as weapons, as an instruments of arrogance or intolerance.

All of those false crosses leave us in our sickness.  They have no power to heal or restore life. Instead we seek the true cross of Jesus Christ.  The true cross that exposes the darkness in our world and in ourselves for what it is.  The cross that looks unflinchingly at the blood, the screams and torture of this world and doesn’t deny it.  The cross from which all those who suffer cry out, “Why have you forgotten about me God?”  The true cross that is never easy, quick or cheap.

The true cross in both the 1st century and the 21st century is an instrument of transformation and restoration.  It the place where we take a good hard look at the stark reality of the universe.  The true cross calls us to look beyond simple-minded feel-good religion and face that reality.

But where others only see failure, despair, hate and hopelessness, we see the presence of God.  We see a God who doesn’t cause the suffering in the world but one who participates in it.  On the true cross we see the true man and the true God who says to us, “Forgive them.  They know not what they do.”

On this cross God is reconciling you and I, in fact all of Creation, back to God’s self.  It is the mystery of the true cross.  There is no resurrection without crucifixion.