James 1:1-17

Several years ago the Sacramento Bee told a story about Marvin, a homeless man who lived wherever he could along the Sacramento River. He was about 45 at the time, an alcoholic, dirty, destitute—not exactly, he would admit, a model citizen. One afternoon he was hanging around the edges of a street fair downtown when he noticed a young boy sitting alone on the grass. He was about four years old, and Marvin thought he looked a little overwhelmed. Marvin watched him for a long time, and gradually came to the realization that this boy didn’t seem to have any adult connected to him.

Marvin remembered once being lost as a child. He remembered how terrifying it was. He went over to the boy and asked him if he was lost, and the boy began to cry. “Now don’t you worry,” Marvin said, “I been lost before and I know what to do. We’ll find us a nice policeman. Look, there’s one over there. Let’s just walk over and talk to him.” The boy took Marvin’s hand and they headed toward the policeman.

They hadn’t gone far when a woman came running over, hitting Marvin and screaming at him to let her child go. A crowd quickly formed, and people began to threaten Marvin and yell at him. Luckily the policeman was stepped in and asked questions. The mother admitted that in fact, she had thought the child was with his aunt, and the aunt thought he was with his mother—in other words, the boy really had been unattended in this crowd. “I thought I was going to jail, but in the end the officer believed me,” Marvin said gratefully. “Me.”

“If you show partiality,” writes James, “you commit sin.”  And again, “Do you, with your acts of partiality, really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?” Partiality—the Greek word doesn’t appear in classical Greek, but is unique to the New Testament. That means it is an expression the early Christians coined in order to describe a certain kind of attitude that they condemned. The word literally means “showing the face” to someone; the implication is that by showing one person your face, you turn your back on someone else. The idea here is that it is a sin to show favoritism to one person over another.

But it’s not talking specifically about job discrimination, or affirmative action, or any of those political footballs. Rather it has to do with an attitude toward other people, and assumptions that we make about other people. The example James gives is quite graphic: two people visit a congregation, one obviously rich and the other shabbily dressed. Who gets the attention? In this case, James notes, the rich person gets treated with honor, the other is scarcely noticed.

But of course it works the other way, too. Would the mother of that lost child have responded in the way she did if the person she saw holding her child’s hand was a well-dressed and attractive young woman instead of Marvin? Probably not—and  who could blame her? I would have reacted the same way. We respond to people in all kinds of ways, based on how they look, their status in life, what we think we may have to fear or gain from them.

But James tell us that our prejudicial attitudes toward people, as natural as they may seem to us, are a sin. They cause us to violate the commandment of God, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” As much as we love and honor that commandment, we must admit that we have a little trouble with it in real life. We are like Charlie Brown in Peanuts: “I love mankind,” he says, “it’s people I can’t stand.” We’re all for loving our neighbor in the abstract, but when we come face to face with some neighbors, it is exceedingly difficult.

Yet real life is where this commandment gets played out. And while James’ example has to do with showing partiality to the rich as opposed to the poor, there are plenty of other ways we categorize people that are every bit as insidious. Perhaps we show favoritism to persons of one race or ethnicity; or we avoid persons who have certain lifestyles; or we find ourselves attracted to people who dress or talk as we do. Often we do this unconsciously; it is just how we have learned to behave. We need to be confronted, again and again, until we can see our attitudes and change them.

The reason the Bible gives for not showing partiality is very simple: It is that God shows no partiality. That particular phrase appears half a dozen times in the Bible. “God shows no partiality.” Of course Jesus embodied that truth in all that he did.  We catch a glimpse of it this morning, when he ministers both to a foreign woman, and also to a deaf man—both outcasts in proper society of his day. But his lack of partiality went far beyond that; he ate with tax collectors and sinners, prostitutes and adulterers. His love embraced everyone, and he treated every person with respect.

That’s also what he asks of us. I was struck by the phrase in James, “you have dishonored the poor.” That gives a very important sense of what this all about, this loving your neighbor as yourself. It doesn’t require that you be best friends with everyone in the world; but it asks that you honor every person, that you treat every person with respect and recognize in them a person for whom Christ died.

I have trouble with this. The other day I was in a store, and the salesperson was being, in my mind, less than helpful. I responded in a tone of voice that I’m sure expressed my irritation and my lack of respect for the person’s failure to serve me as I demanded. The words were not articulated in my mind, but they were there in my heart: “This is just a salesperson; he doesn’t matter.” But you see, he does matter. “You have dishonored the poor,” James says. I dishonored this salesperson, because I did not see there before me a person for whom Christ died.

When the late Mother Theresa won the Nobel Peace Prize, the head of the Nobel Committee described her this way: “The hallmark of her work has been respect for the individual’s worth and dignity. The loneliest and the most wretched, the dying destitute, the abandoned lepers have been received by her and her sisters with warm compassion devoid of condescension, based on this reverence for Christ in man.” Or, as a professor at Catholic University put it, “She didn’t look at masses of people.  She looked at the person in front of her. One face, one smile, one heart, one person at a time.”

One person at a time—that’s how Jesus did it, too.  You see, when you look at people one at a time, you cannot show partiality because there is no opportunity for comparing, for weighing one person against another.

It is tough, learning to regard people in that way. It requires constant attention. It requires above all a humble reliance on God’s grace to remind us and train us and forgive us when we fail. But it is something we need to do. James is uncompromising on this point. By treating people with partiality, he says, you really raise the question of whether in fact you believe in Jesus Christ. And so it doesn’t matter if the face before you is a poor person like Marvin, or a leper or a person with AIDS, or an irritating salesperson, or a whining student, or an unfair teacher; it doesn’t matter if she is person of color, or a person whose English is broken; it doesn’t matter if he is a sinner, a convict, an alcoholic, a bigot. What matters is that this is the face of a person whom Christ loves. What Christ asks of you and me is that we be the agent of his love, and treat each person with honor and respect.

Richard O. Johnson is the Pastor at Peace Lutheran Church in Grass Valley, California.