Last week I introduced a new series to you, so that last week and in the next four weeks of my preaching here we will walk through The Letter of James, portions of which have been set as the lectionary reading. We skip the Sundays when I’m in Pomonal, and if you missed last week you missed the beginning. If you want to catch up have a look at the Sermons tab on the church’s website; and if you want to read ahead, well bad luck because I don’t post until after I have preached.

Today we begin at James 2:1, so if you weren’t here last week, or you forgot to listen let me briefly highlight the first chapter. The oldest of Jesus’s younger siblings, his brother Jacob, wrote later in his life about God’s understanding that humans are basically good creatures who do dumb things, and that God alone has the capacity to rescue us.  Jacob pointed specifically to humankind’s need for wisdom, perseverance (which last week I called “guts”), and a love which does not get angry other than at injustice in the world. All of this is active in Jacob’s way of thinking, it must be done rather than just thought about. I wrapped up last week saying that women and men who carry out God’s instructions will be blessed as they get about it in the doing.

Today we pick up reading where Jacob writes in James 2:1-9 about justice in interpersonal relationships, suggesting that God does not favour anyone according to human standards of wealth or health. In other words, our local congregation as a partner in The Church should never use the human metric of whom has the heaviest wallet to weigh the merits of any prospective disciple: we should never exclude anyone from full participation when we meet as Church, nor should we as Christians in our individual dealings with people in the world withhold belongingness based on a standard that God does not recognise. No, as ambassadors of God The Gracious One we should always show respect. Human economic systems are not trustworthy measures of character, nor or relative prospects to engage more fully in discipleship. Neither are the biases of popular opinion and celebrity-making trustworthy. Many among the rich and famous are exploitative and are therefore unfit to be favoured over the poor or back-room volunteers anyway, and in Jacob’s experience it is the self-satisfied who speak against the glorious name into which we were baptised. Think about those voices in news-media and social-media who mock ideas of equitable standards of care for the downtrodden and support for the left-behind. Think about how we prefer to hear the opinions of a celebrity (it doesn’t even matter which one) on human rights issues than we hear the opinions of scripture. The Church is not to act like that with regard to the value we find in people, rather the Church is to display the love of neighbour as for self as the scriptures clearly state in Leviticus 19:18.  Jacob suggests that it is foolish (James 2:5-7), unlawful (James 2:8-11), and lacking in mercy (James 2:12-13) to favour the wealthy over the dispossessed, since the wealthy often gain their wealth through dispossession of the poor by exploitation and extortion. Why would the Church honour that? Why would you welcome such a snake with joy, especially at the detriment of the one coming to us for welfare or asylum as a direct consequence of local snakery? If it’s good enough for Moses to proclaim justice it’s good enough for me, and when Jesus says the same thing that leaves me in no doubt of what I should say and do as a disciple, let alone a pastor-teacher.

What we read in James 2:10-13 connects the specific example of practising economic justice and hospitality for the broken with the greater truth of keeping the whole of God’s law. To act without regard for God’s justice is to go against everything that God is for. To follow the world in injustice is just as sinful as to murder or fornicate; you can’t pick and choose which parts of the Way of God to focus upon and be righteous in, the life of discipleship is all-or-none. This is why Jacob wrote in James 2:14-26 that the way Christians live is just as important as the way Christians think; it is not possible that a follower of Jesus has Christian thinking without Christian living.

We cannot be in any doubt that practical help for the dispossessed is necessary when injustice is seen; more is required than well-wishes and good intentions. Listen to Jacob, if you are not thoughtful in the mindset of God, and you are not prayerful in the compassion of Jesus, then your pastoral care will be misguided. You must think and pray before you jump in; however, jump in you must (albeit thoughtfully and prayerfully), because without the jumping what practical assistance are your thoughts and prayers? If you are not doing the helpful and restorative thing, then by whom will the prayer of your guts, the aching of your womb, be answered? (And no, the answer is not “God” with a resigned flick of your wrist, because God uses the Church as God’s hands and feet.) This is why your theology is so important; your ideas about who God is and what God does, especially what God does in and for the world God loves, must not get in the way of your work for the Kingdom in the world. The mission of the Church, to extend the influence of God’s will in the world and to speak aloud the truth of the One whose way leads to life, needs doers.

Across the books of Hebrew Tradition, we read widely about Jewish heroes who showed their belief in God by obeying God in action and not only in theology and rituals. This is the continuing history of Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD. Rabbinic teaching for a temple-sacrifice religion deprived of its temple showed that God’s way is active; that a new Judaism was required, and it has now spent the last two thousand years talking about, writing about, and getting on with and working for justice. The way of Christ for Christians, modelled in the writings of Jesus’s brother Jacob, is no different. Of course, we should try to live justly, and many Christians from the days after Jesus until our today have made a good fist of it. We are saved for Eternity by grace, but others are rescued for now by our actions because a faith without action is no faith at all, and religious action without understanding is no faith at all. As plainly as Jacob can make it, he goes right to the heart of Judaism and says that even the core creedal activity, the one thing above all things that makes you a Jew, to recite Shema, is not enough. Hear the words of James 2:14 in The Passion Translation, what good is it if someone claims to have faith but demonstrates no good works to prove it? How can this kind of faith save anyone?

We are solely justified by faith but remember that John the Evangelist understood faith as “trusting belief”, and Paul understood faith as “faithfulness” and remaining loyal to what and to whom you hold. What James objects to is a “faith” defined as written or spoken formulas, as if we are justified by the profession of assent: we are not. This is why Christian activity, “works”, is not an effort to earn salvation, or a test to exclude anyone who cannot complete the requirements of Torah, but is more about the evidence of faith in fruit. You are saved by grace; and others know about your salvation because you are loving to all without restraint, and without human-centred bias.

If faith as Jacob used the word really can be thought of as a synonym for trust, then the Syrophoenician woman in today’s story from the Jesus Traditions shows incredible faith in Jesus. To some extent we don’t know who she is; I say that not only because this is the one time we meet her in scripture, (other than in the same story told in Matthew 15:21-28), and she isn’t actually named, but because as a Syrophoenician woman she could be either of two things. One thing we know about her is that she is not Jewish: she doesn’t follow the religion of the Jews and she is not a descendant of one of the Twelve Tribes. A Syrophoenician, self-evidently, is a Phoenician from Syria, as opposed to a Phoenician from Egypt. She is an indigenous woman from the coastal region north from Israel, which is where Jesus has taken the twelve to get away from Israel. She is a Canaanite, and here is the one of two things, either she is a disadvantaged First Nations person (a Canaanite displaced by the Israelites), or she is a highly advantaged noblewoman connected with the Roman Empire. Jesus calls her a “dog”, perhaps more bluntly (but accurately) he calls her sick daughter a “puppy”: the insult is there and it is clearly heard. In Australia Jesus might have called her a rat, or perhaps a dingo, a pest and not a pet; a grotty, bin-scabbing feral thing. Whether this is because she is native, (think of how some people speak or have spoken about First Australians), or whether it is because she is part of the imperial elite, (a parasite and a coloniser, think of how some Palestinians and their allies speak of Israelis today), Jesus does not want a bar of her, of her sick daughter, nor of any horse she rode in on. Yet with trusting belief and faithfulness this woman full of faith says, “yes Lord, but isn’t God gracious”, and shows what she believes by her actions. “I trust in a holy and generous Father,” she says, “so why can’t I ask him for love as his answer to my need?” Her faith is not formulaic and she challenges the formula of Jesus. No she is not one of the daughters of Israel’s sons and she has no claim under the covenant with Abraham. Yes, she concedes, she probably is looked upon by these Jewish men as a parasite, either a dole-bludging blackfella or an extortionate memsahib; but if God is good and the Messiah is standing right here in Tyre, then why can’t God be good to her? Jesus commends her for her faith, points to her as an example of faithfulness, and grants her daughter’s healing.

James 2 reads that God does not show favouritism, even if in Mark 7 we find that Jesus did in the moment. Maybe he was baiting the disciples and the woman; maybe the human Jesus got it wrong, (he was after all on a break after a busy few weeks and might have been tired), but ultimately Jesus spoke as Ther Word of God to commend faith as evidenced by practical trust. Jacob wrote and Jesus said that what we do demonstrates what we think to be true about God, and gives evidence of God’s faithfulness in response to our faithfulness: God will come through when we trust God to ask and not interrupt the miracle.

Your faith will not get you into Heaven, only God’s grace can do that. However, your faith can point to how capable Jesus is as saviour, and that might be enough of a demonstration to others that they will choose to trust in Christ and ask to receive that same grace. So, get on with it. If you profess love for God, go and love the world as Christ loves you, because that is also how Christ loves the world.

Amen.