Loved By Love

"Playing Favorites"

James 2:1-17
September 6, 2009

My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious
Lord Jesus Christ? For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your
assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of
the one wearing the fine clothes and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one
who is poor you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions
among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my beloved brothers
and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs
of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored
the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? Is it
not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you?
You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, “You shall love
your neighbor as yourself.” But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted
by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has
become accountable for all of it. For the one who said, “You shall not commit adultery,”
also said, “You shall not murder.” Now if you do not commit adultery but if you murder,
you have become a transgressor of the law. So speak and so act as those who are to
be judged by the law of liberty. For judgment will be without mercy to anyone who has
shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment.

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have
works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and
one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not
supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works,
is dead.

When Joe Namath, the quarterback who would become famous for making a guarantee
that his underdog New York Jets would beat the Baltimore Colts, when he showed up
for his recruiting visit at the University of Alabama in the early sixties, the head coach
Paul “Bear” Bryant did something he rarely did—and that was to allow this incredibly
brash, incredibly confident young quarterback from Beaver Falls, PA to walk up the two
story tower from which Bryant watched his football team practice. When the players
heard the chains of the entrance to the tower rattle, they were stunned to see Namath
being escorted by Bryant up the stairs, something they had never seen Bryant ever do,
and certainly something they had never seen him do with a player, which is to join him
up in that tower, the place where a lot of Alabamians thought God must have resided.
They talked for almost forty minutes, recalled Namath’s future teammates, and days
later Namath would join the Alabama football team as one of the most prized catches of
that’s year recruiting class.

Namath and Bear Bryant shared a deep bond, despite that fact that Bryant had never
seen anything like Joe Namath—cocky, sometimes arrogant, supremely self-confident,
and quite the fashion plate, with hair way too long for Bryant’s taste. But he saw talent
in Joe, and he saw a bit of himself, I suppose—someone who had had tough childhood,
a father who had been absent, and who were deeply loyal and protective of their
mothers. Bryant was known as a disciplinarian, a man’s man, a guy who got his
nickname “the Bear” because while in high school he wrestled a bear in his home state
of Arkansas, for which he was promised a dollar for every minute he could stay in the
ring with it, and though he did it for a minute, the man skipped out of town with the bear
and the promised dollar. With Namath, he gave a bit, he was not as tough with Namath,
thinking that he needed a more gentle touch, but, let’s face facts: he was also Bryant’s
star quarterback, an incredibly gifted athlete who just simply won games for Alabama.
Bryant wasn’t just modifying his tough guy style with his players to help Namath—he
was interested in winning games with this boy, and win they did, together, but Bryant’s
favoritism was self-serving even as he was being a father figure to Joe. Now for Joe
Namath, Bryant could do no wrong, and was one of the few men in his life that could
ever rein him in.

But during Namath’s time at Alabama, he could never understand the disturbing and
terrible racism of the South, especially in that era, though he gave Bryant a pass for
being a creature of his time and place. Joe Namath had a close African American
friend since childhood, and so it was a mystery to him, this irrational division of the
world between black and white, especially in the South. When African Americans
began the difficult job of integrating the University of Alabama, when Governor George
Wallace was at the school house door, at Foster auditorium, trying to block the
registration of a black student, Bryant was nowhere to be seen—in fact he was on
fishing trip in Wyoming at that time. But Namath took some of these beleaguered black
students under his wing, and intentionally showed them friendships, eating with them
when it was rare for a white Alabama student to do so.   Vivian Malone Jones, one of
those earliest student,s and the only one to have toughed it out from those first few
students to actually get a degree from the University, always noted that Joe was awfully
kind to her. When talking about Joe’s mentor, she commented that, of course, Bryant
could have done something, could have integrated the Alabama football team earlier—
people would have done anything for Bryant, even that early in his career at Alabama.
But as much as Bryant was a disciplinarian and in complete control of his football team
and would stomach no wavering from his way of doing things, he was also a man with a
feet of clay when it came to the people in power—he favored them, even the George
Wallace’s of the world, even as he kept his distance from them, and so he waited and
waited until he felt integration could happen on his team, without much cost to him or
his status as a sort of living God in the state. He was a great man in many ways, and
certainly a great coach, and a father figure to many men, certainly to men like Joe
Namath, who especially needed that kind of figure in his life, but he was not as tough
and brave in the world outside his team as he probably should have been—he favored
the people in power, the people who kept him in power, and who adored him.   Instead
of choosing the weakest and most vulnerable to stand beside, he did what many racial
moderates of his era did—he left the argument to others, when, in fact, their voices
were needed during that time.

(above was gleaned from the book Namath: A Biography by Mark Kriegel)

And that exemplifies one of the great problems with favoritism, of choosing one over the
other, of leaning one way or the other when it comes to human beings, and that is that
we’re really actually choosing ourselves and our self interest, when we pick one over
the other. Certainly that is what Bryant did when he gave Joe Namath a bit more room
than he would have normally given another player, and it’s what he did when he
overlooked what the powers that be were doing in Alabama around race during the
sixties—he wanted to be in their favor, he didn’t want to make waves by choosing sides,
and so he chose to stand by people whom he may not have agreed with. What Joe
brought to Bryant’s team was enough for him to ignore what he would have probably
never ignored in another player, and what the people he often consorted with brought
to his need to be adored, so to speak, was enough for him to ignore their bigotry. He
sometimes favored power over principle, at least in this case, and so he exemplified the
real truth about favoritism: when we pick one over the other, we don’t do it simply
because someone might need a bit more of our attention, or our help—it’s because we
have skin in the game, so to speak, we have ulterior motives that sometimes we are not
even aware of. We actually choose ourselves when we choose favorites, when we say
this one should be attended to more than that one, that this child is more important
than the other ones.

Again, I don’t think is all that conscience, that we sit around thinking like this, picking
out a favorite daughter, knowing that we are choosing them because they fill some
unspoken need in us. People are rarely that conscience of their actions, their
decisions—but we mustn’t be ignorant of our motives, our unspoken and sometimes
simply unconscious needs, in our picking of one person, one group over another. I
think that is what bothers the author of our Scripture today, this picking and choosing
that is going on in this early Christian community, this unspoken need not being
articulated in our showing of favoritism. Clearly something was happening, something
that showed up in the ways people were treated when they were gathering in
community with each other—and the writer is disturbed by it, and says so in this text.
People weren’t just being good to the guy who drove up in the Porsche—OK, not
literally, of course—because they were enamored by the wealth that the car hinted at—
they were thinking in terms of themselves, of what use this wealthy person could be to
them. Or, if they were slightly nobler, slightly more team-oriented, they were thinking
about how useful this person might to the team, to that early Christian community, in
terms of prestige, in terms of dollars, in terms of influence. They have become, as the
writer says, a judge with evil thoughts—a person who rules in favor of one person over
another because of motives that have nothing to do with the facts on the ground, so to
speak.

And yet according to this text, God chooses favorites as well, but the ones God that
chooses are not the Joe Namaths of this world, or the George Wallace’s, they’re not the
winners of this world, the people in power, but the Vivian Malone Jones, the poor of this
world, whether literally or figuratively. God does choose, God does choose favorites,
and so did Jesus—but he kept choosing people that wouldn’t get him anywhere—it’s
like he kept befriending people that would absolutely be no use to him—the prostitutes,
the tax collectors, the untouchables of his time. If favoritism is all about choosing
ourselves, about picking out people to pay special attention to because they will
somehow be useful to us, then Jesus kept picking people that would hurt him, get him in
trouble with the powers that be—and one could really argue that ultimately he picked
those that eventually got him killed, because the powers that be were threatened by his
choice of his friends and companions and fellow travelers. You can’t turn the world
upside down and not think that the people you just put on the bottom of the pecking
order aren’t going to resent it—and make you pay. And they did just that, with Jesus.

Now, you have to know that the book of James, from which are text is derived, has had
a tumultuous history in the church. It was not always an obvious pick to make it into our
canon, and Martin Luther once wanted to kick it out of the Bible because he could not
find in this text his great mantra, “by faith alone,” that is, we are saved not by the good
we do, but the good that God has done in Christ Jesus. But in James, what we do does
matter, and how we practice our faith matters as much as the faith we claim to have, the
good that God has done for us and with us. And the writer tells us that a faith that is
not followed by goodness, not followed by good works of some sort, well, that is an
empty faith, full of empty words, and a flashy piety that Jesus spoke so much against.
And the way that we most exemplify our faith, in the context of the book of James, is
shown by those we favor, those we have the most empathy for, the favorites we
bookmark, so to speak. If we treat people right, if we love ALL people as if they were
useful to us, as if they were our neighbors, even if they are not, and we treat them as if
they had some usefulness to us, even if they do not, then we are following the royal law
that the writer of James speaks of here.

And yet, I don’t want to romanticize the poor, the disinherited, the “no-bodies” of this
world—I don’t think that is what the text is saying. No one is claiming sainthood for the
Vivian Malone Jones of this world, or the ones with no health insurance, or the ones
with no food on the table, or the ones with no power in this world. No, the reality is that
the ones without in this world are not perfect, though there is no claim of perfection on
their part, no pretense that what they have or don’t have is somehow a mark of God’s
love for them—God doesn’t love the nobodies in this world because they have nothing,
because they are nobodies or so says the world about them—no, God loves them
because God loves us all, and not because of how useful we are to God. We are loved
because God chooses to love us, rich or poor, the powerful and the not-so-powerful.
However, however, as this text says here, what God does do through the nobodies, the
marginalized people of this world, the poor in spirit, and power, and hope, is to show
the power of God to change this world, to upset its categories, to take the cross, that
emblem of shame and criminality, and transform into a sign and symbol that God can
do anything with anybody—anybody!   Our work in this world is to love as God loves, to
love others as if they were all our favorites, as if we were all somebodies in this world.
Now, the world may not see us that way, the world may count as nobodies, as unworthy
of being one of the chosen, but that is not how God sees you and me, and the people
we struggle to love—what God sees is someone worth taking time with, working with,
struggling with, even despite our brashness, our arrogance, our anger, our bitterness.
What we are asked to do is to remember that every time we choose the ones that are
hard to choose, the ones that are nobodies favorites, we actually choose ourselves, we
choose us, we do as God does with us, which is to love us as we are, not because we
are useful to God, but because we are just loved, period, loved for who we are, and
who we will one day become. Amen.