James 2:1-17

Have your ever visited a foreign culture?  Have you ever had that experience of being the one that doesn’t know the language and customs of another people?  It can be quite uncomfortable.  You look for a friendly face.  You listen for one familiar voice.  You look for someone that can translate for you and make the strange intelligible.

I remember arriving on the train to the lovely village of Garmisch-Partenkichen in the Bavarian Alps.  I was 22 and traveling on a Eurail Pass with my backpack and bedroll.  When I stopped to change some dollars into Deutsch Marks, suddenly I heard an unmistakable Texas accent.  This well-dressed woman wearing a lot of jewelry was trying her hardest to be an Ugly American.  Because she was both demanding and unpleasant, no one was anxious to help her.  She turned to her husband to say: “Imagine that.  None of ‘em speaks American.”  The bank workers understood her and changed her money, but, because of her bad attitude, they refused to speak to her in English.  When it was my turn at the window, I asked them politely in German to change my money.  They smiled at me knowing that I, too, was American.

Perhaps you have never thought of it, but our congregation’s culture can be every bit as foreign as traveling to Europe, Latin America, Africa, or Asia.  You first-time visitors may well feel that you have just arrived in a foreign land with a strange language and unusual customs.  What do some of those words mean?  Why do they sing songs like that?  Why do those people stand up and sit down and even kneel so often?

Many of you have heard me say that I grew up around three different Christian cultures – my mother was Lutheran, my father Baptist, and my paternal grandmother Roman Catholic.  I also sometimes attended with my best friends their Church of Christ and Episcopal congregations.  Each church had a very different culture – not only the worship life but also the terminology and the activities.  Frequently I felt like an outsider, a foreigner, because I was a Lutheran Christian and many of the people did not know what a Lutheran was.  One time a Baptist lady that I knew well asked whether Lutherans believed in Jesus Christ.  Our Lutheran culture was foreign even to another Christian.

Our God is a welcoming God who wants the whole world to experience His love and mercy in Jesus Christ.  Throughout the Bible we are urged to welcome the stranger and to show hospitality.  We are commanded in both the Old and New Testaments to love our neighbors.  Jesus even tells us to love our enemies.

I remember the very first time our family visited St. James Lutheran Church, the rural congregation where I was eventually confirmed.  Mother and we four children arrived early and found a pew to sit in.  As the organist began to play the prelude, we looked at the board on the wall that displayed the numbers of the songs we would sing that day.  And we opened the familiar hymnal, the same songbook we had used in our old church, and found the first hymn.  About that time a family stopped alongside our pew and stared at us with something akin to hostility.  Then with a huff they sat down.  As soon as the service was over, the woman from that family came over to speak to us.  She said: “You sat in our pew.  If you’re going to come back, you have to sit in one of those pews over there.  No one has spoken for any of them yet.” 

Welcome to St. James.  If there had been another Lutheran church close by, I think our family would have gone there the next week.  But Mama was going to raise us Lutheran, and so we went back and eventually fought our way into that congregation.

Today the apostle James speaks to his Christian community in Jerusalem about hospitality to outsiders particularly to those that are poorer.  Our God is a God that shows no partiality to anyone, says James.  Our God doesn’t make a more gracious welcome to some just because they might be able to give a larger offering.  James says that if our God doesn’t make distinctions based upon class or wealth neither should we.

I can’t help but think of First Lutheran Church where I was baptized.  In those years not long after the end of World War II, many families didn’t own cars.  They rode buses for longer distances and walked for the shorter ones.  My father had two jobs and mother was not working outside our rent house.  With four small children at home, money was tight.  Oftentimes my father would hock his railroad watch until payday just so that there would be enough food to eat.  Of course, none of us kids knew about that. 

On Sundays our pastor’s wife, Mrs. Helberg, would drive to our house and give us a ride to church.  Mama was a Sunday school teacher, and they wanted to be sure that we had no problems getting there.  Often Mr. Hansen, the Sunday school superintendent, and his family would give us a ride home after church.  We kids knew we didn’t own a car or a television in those days, but we didn’t realize that we were part of what is today called the working poor.  Within a few years, Daddy got a promotion, and we moved.    

What a contrast between the welcomes that our family received at two different Lutheran churches.  At First Lutheran we were valued sisters and brothers, part of the family.  There was no need for us to spend a lot of time trying to get to church and back on the bus.  Rides were offered without any sense of a stigma attached to it.  On the other hand, after our move, St. James was an insular rural church where the outsider was viewed suspiciously.  Eventually we felt welcome there, but it didn’t happen overnight.

The apostle James is concerned about hospitality.  He wants our welcome to be both genuine and the same for everyone.  James wants us to be sure that anyone that comes to Christian worship is welcomed regardless of her or his income.

When my German grandmother came to America in 1900, she was an indentured servant.  A family of some means paid for the passage of this 16 year old girl, the oldest child of a farm family who dreamed of escaping to a better life.  Her life here was harder than the one she left behind.  If a Lutheran congregation had not offered worship in German, there would have been no place where my grandmother would have felt at home.  She taught herself to speak and read English and to write it phonetically.  After she married, my grandmother raised her five children in that church, Old Zion in downtown Philadelphia PA.  Years later, she became an icon there, serving 35 years as the President of the Frauen Verein, the women’s group. 

Today there are congregations, not many of them Lutheran, that are offering worship services in Spanish to those with green cards, to those that are legally in this country.  One large nondenominational church in Charlotte has a sign out in front declaring both worship in Spanish and the availability of English classes.  The stranger is being welcomed.  At the same time, that congregation is helping the stranger to become familiar with a foreign culture – to learn its language and its customs.  I would expect that such a church would help the stranger to prepare for American citizenship.

St. Matthew’s could become such a congregation.  We could become a place that offered a Spanish worship service, English classes for immigrants, and even coaching to prepare for American citizenship.  We could provide a gracious welcome in Jesus’ name.

James takes issue today with a congregation in which favoritism is being shown to those that can make an immediate positive impact on the community.  You can imagine the picture here of a congregation that gladly makes room for the well-dressed couple that pulls up in a high dollar car.  They get the warm welcome and several folks wanting to speak with them after worship.  But then the same congregation is very cautious about that poor couple that stayed overnight in the parking lot hoping to get breakfast and some help with gas money.  James challenges us: “And one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?”  God is not a respecter of persons.  James asks, “Are we?”

Faith is caught more than it is taught.  The single greatest influence on our faith life and how we live out our faith comes from our parents.  But our grandparents and even our fellow church members can have a profound effect on our catching the Christian faith.  Our God wants everyone to get welcomed, everyone to get baptized, everyone to be transformed by the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and everyone to learn to follow Jesus by giving away our lives in humble service to God and neighbor.

Josh McDowell and Dave Bellis have written a new book with the title “The Last Christian Generation.”  To emphasize the point about parental influence, they describe a mother’s impact on a little girl whose father is off fighting during World War II. 

They write: “Little Sarah didn’t remember her daddy, but her mother had been diligent about making his reality alive in her mind. She told her little girl how daddy still provided money for their house, clothes, and food. She read her his letters containing endearing expressions of love for his daughter. Those letters also asked Sarah to be brave while he was gone and to help mommy by hanging up her clothes and picking up her toys. He admonished her to be kind to the neighbor children when she played and to always say her prayers at night.”

“The mother spent time explaining to Sarah what her daddy was like – of his providing and protecting nature, his caring love, his honesty and integrity, his sense of honor and duty to family and country. She let her daughter know how deeply in love she was with Sarah’s father. Sarah’s mother guided her young daughter in knowing how to respond to such a loving father when he returned from the war.”

“Then one day, Sarah’s mother announced that her father was coming home. The little girl was overjoyed. She couldn’t wait to see in person the man she had only seen in pictures. And when she met him at the airport, she ran eagerly to his open arms. She responded with love to her father because she had been taught how to love him by someone who knew and love him herself” (69-70).

McDowell and Bellis say that’s exactly what churches and families are to do for our children.  And we should also do the same thing for newcomers.  We are to teach by example what it means to be disciples of the Lord Jesus, those that learn to love God with our whole lives.  If we want others to know God’s love, to experience God’s forgiveness in Jesus Christ, and to be transformed into followers of Jesus, then our welcome will be with more than words.  We will lead by example.

This past week we hosted four homeless families in the McSwain Center.  Many of you signed up to do one or more tasks to help welcome them.  Through this Wilmington Interfaith program, these families are getting an opportunity to get back on their feet, fully employed, and into their own apartments or homes.  Whenever you helped to provide for these families, you welcomed them in Jesus’ name.  You showed them God’s love with more than words.  In about three months, in mid December, you will get an opportunity to welcome some other homeless families in Jesus’ name.  Will you do your part?  That’s what James is asking of each of us today – to do our part.

Today there are many people that have grown up unchurched.  They may be rich in things and poor in the ways of God.  Their parents may have been nominal Christians as children or may even have been active once upon a time in a Christian church.  But they have chosen not to be practicing Christians, and their children have not had basic instruction in the Christian faith.  To their children any church is a foreign culture with strange language and strange customs.  Like visitors to a foreign land they need someone to welcome them and serve as an interpreter for them.

We need to be able to teach both children and adults that because of our estrangement from God, because of our disobedience, whether willing or unwilling, we are all sinners.  Yes, we can pretend that each of us in the driver’s seat, and that it’s up to everyone to decide what kind of life they want to live.  We can pretend that all truth is relative and that finally whatever works for each of us is all that matters.

But then someday we are going to die and on that day we will face the God who is the Maker and Owner of all things.  In Matthew 25, the Lord Jesus teaches there will be a judgment day.  We will have to answer for how we have lived our lives.       

Our Father in heaven is a welcoming God in Jesus Christ.  He receives sinners like you and me, because His Son has died for the sins of the whole world.  His Son has lived the perfect life we cannot live and has died the death we don’t want to die in order to show mercy on sinners like you and me.  God’s mercy in Jesus Christ triumphs over God’s judgment against our sin.  When we are baptized into Jesus’ death and resurrection, we are promised that Christ has died for our sins and has welcomed us as beloved daughters and sons of God.  Our God wants us to trust Him with our lives.

Today James says if God has shown mercy to us in Jesus Christ ought we not to show the same mercy to everyone regardless of where they come from and what they may have to give us?  We who are grateful for God’s love and forgiveness are called to offer a grateful welcome to sinners like us.  We are called to teach by example so that the young among us will know what it is to love God, to follow Jesus, and to be like Him.

Samuel D. Zumwalt is the Pastor at St. Matthew's Evangelical Lutheran Church in Wilmington, North Carolina