James 1:1-17

Channel-surfing a few days ago, I came upon one of those so-called “infomercials.” This one had nothing to do with diets, psychics, or get-rich-quick schemes. No, it was none other than Charlton Heston, peddling membership in the National Rifle Association, of which he is the current president. His pitch was interspersed with pictures of NRA rallies showing happy gun owners carrying picket signs with messages like: “More Guns—Less Crime” and “An Armed America Is a Safe America.” As a special introductory offer, new members would receive (honestly, I’m not making this up) a silver bullet, engraved with Mr. Heston’s personal autograph!

In a land that pledges allegiance to “one nation, under God”; in a land whose currency boldly proclaims, “In God We Trust”; in a land where church attendance is higher than any other in western civilization, the words of the prophet Isaiah, quoted in today’s gospel by Jesus of Nazareth, seem to ring true: “This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”

In Canada, we’re not much different. We, too, honour God in our national anthem; our provincial legislature begins each day with the Lord’s Prayer; and in the Canadian Alliance Party’s recent leadership campaign, we heard a lot about the religious values of Preston Manning and Stockwell Day. But no matter how much lip service we may pay to God, the priorities of our elected leaders seem to reflect what they call “the will of the people” more than the will of God. Whatever their political stripe, their top priority is most often expressed in terms of “increasing wealth and prosperity.” And in spite of the fact that Jesus, in his sermon on the Mount, teaches that it is impossible to serve wealth and remain faithful to God, we go vainly on our way. Even though the sin Jesus mentions most often is the sin of excess wealth, our public discussion of religious values is limited to sins Jesus never mentions at all: abortion and homosexuality. And all public talk about our shared religious values, while child poverty and homelessness continue to increase in our society, seems nothing short of hypocrisy.

Indeed, religious values are the very subject of today’s reading from the letter of James. As it was for the ancient Christian congregations James addressed, the growing gap between the rich and the poor remains the true measure of our commitment to religious values today. St. James provides a simple standard of measurement: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”

In the patriarchal society of James and Jesus, in which there was no social safety net—no welfare, no pension plans, no life insurance—husbandless women and fatherless children had little legal protection and few human rights apart from their status as a particular man’s property. Their distress was often reflected in poverty and homelessness, which often made them beggars for charity, just as with many of the poor and homeless in our day. Their distress was the result of social structures—that is, their distress was created by the laws, customs, and institutions that organized community life. The worldly stain of which James warns us is the idolatry of claiming to be religious while dismissing the distress of social outcasts either as God’s will or their own fault because of laziness or stupidity, and therefore not our shared responsibility.

The letter of James begs to differ. Following the example of our Lord Jesus, James calls for a restructuring of our social relationships. Both Jesus and James understood that sin and evil are most powerful in their social structures. Charity actually helps social injustice survive. That’s why food banks, which were originally intended to provide temporary, emergency relief, now outnumber McDonald’s restaurants in Canada. But real justice, what the prophets call the righteousness expected by God, demands more than charity. Justice means daily commitment to reflect the love of God in our social structures: in our government, laws, courts, and schools as well as in our personal relationships. The theological word for it is “incarnation.”

God’s love became flesh in the gracious act of God’s entry into the world in the divine humanity of Jesus Christ. In the same way, the church is called to bring God’s love into our community life. And if we are to be “doers of the word” and not “merely hearers” of God’s word, our calling extends beyond this hour of public worship into daily public service. Without that, James insists, our religion has no value! We may not literally have widows and orphans in distress among us today, thanks in large part to the changes that have been made in our social structures. But we still have victims of injustice in our midst. Your calling, and mine, is to stand with them, and stand up for them, so that the world may know what true religious values are.

Peter Lisinski is the Pastor at Meadowvale Lutheran Church in Missisauga, Ontario.