Friends,
For the past few weeks, we’ve been hearing from the Epistle of James, which I have to say is one of my favorite parts of the New Testament. There are several “Jameses” in the Bible, but this particular James is the one known as “James-the-brother-of-the-Lord.” There are different theological perspectives on what exactly it means to be Jesus’ “brother,” but all those perspectives point to this being a person who was exceedingly close to Jesus. I love the fact that we get to hear from this man who knew Jesus so intimately and well.
I really appreciate just how practical this epistle is. I can sometimes get overly “heady” and theologically “wonky” (which you’ll learn soon enough!), and the Epistle of James reminds me to duck my head down beneath the clouds every once in a while, and come back to earth.
It is also very clear that the church to which James wrote was dealing with some serious interpersonal conflicts. This is not the idealized vision of the church that I was taught in Sunday School. Rather, it’s a church that had issues, problems, and where people struggled to talk to one another with grace and love. It’s a helpful reminder that the church today isn’t all that different from the church of the apostles. James does not let us off the hook here, however. His epistle is a forceful admonition for the church to do better and be better—because how we treat one another is an integral part of our faith.
So, James tells the ancient church (and the church today) to “be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger” (James 1:19), to “bridle their tongues” (1:26), and to “show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom” (3:13).
Our vestry recently had a retreat, where the question that kept coming up was, “What does it mean to be a spiritual leader?” As a vestry we’ve been reading Ruth Haley Barton’s wonderful book, “Pursuing God’s Will Together: A Discernment Practice for Leadership Groups”. In it, she writes:
“Spiritual transformation takes place primarily in those places where we are not like Christ. In community, others become agents of God’s troubling grace, giving us many opportunities to see ourselves more clearly, to repent and to confess our sins one to another in order to receive grace and healing.” (Page 100)
Every group of human beings that gathers together regularly and honestly will have disagreements. Every church where people take their faith seriously will have people who disagree on what “taking their faith seriously” means. Every church where people care about the direction of the church will have people who disagree on exactly what that direction is supposed to be.
Those aren’t just lamentable realities—it’s what we actually want! We don’t want a church where everyone just smiles and nods politely at each other, but where we take our relationship with Jesus and our relationships with each other seriously enough to speak up, engage, and listen.
Of course, that takes a willingness to actually engage and listen when what we’re hearing isn’t something that we agree with. One of the things that percolated up through the vestry retreat was that we need a willingness to “extend grace whenever possible.” That is, we start with the assumption that this person that we are disagreeing with has good intentions, wants what is best, and is God’s child.
Then, when we speak up, we speak with grace. With gentleness. With, what Jesus might call, “love for our neighbor.”
By the end of the retreat our vestry landed on this being part of what it means to be a “spiritual leader”. James-the-brother-of-the-Lord might ask us to go one step further and say that these practices aren’t just for the leaders, but for the whole Christian community.
James has been exhorting us to this kind of faith and life and being together since the mid-first century. We should guess by now that this is one of those things that will always be before us to work on, to grow on, and to be a part of our ever-present spiritual transformation.
Extending grace whenever possible,
Rick
The Rev. Rick Morley
Rector
Published on September 26, 2024
Art: “The Parable of the Mote and the Beam” Domenico Fetti Italian, Gallery 620. Public domain image.