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United Church of Jaffrey
October 7th, 2018
James 5:13-18 | Except from “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman
Agonies are one of my changes of garments;
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels . . . . I myself become the wounded person,
My hurt turns livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.
I am the mashed fireman with breastbone broken . . . . tumbling walls buried me in their debris,
Heat and smoke I inspired . . . . I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades,
I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels;
They have cleared the beams away . . . . they tenderly lift me forth.
I lie in the night air in my red shirt . . . . the pervading hush is for my sake,
Painless after all I lie, exhausted but not so unhappy,
White and beautiful are the faces around me . . . . the heads are bared of their fire-caps,
The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches.
James
Are any among you suffering?
So begins this mornings reading from the Epistle of James.
James is not a part of the New Testament that we often hear from. The letter itself begins with James’ salutation. The first half of Chapter 1 verse 1 says:
“James, a Servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Tradition has taken hold of this introduction and connected this letter to the person, often referred to in the Gospels as “James the Brother of Jesus.”
But this, like every claim of authorship in the Bible, is a matter that is debated by scholars.
I won’t wade into that discussion.
I am more interested, this morning, in the second half of that first verse. After James introduced himself, he acknowledges his readers:
“to the twelve tribes of the Dispersion: Greetings.
The twelve tribes of the dispersion?
What does that mean?
The Oxford Annotated Bible suggests that this refers to “Jew scattered outside Palestine…”
I’m awfully academic this morning aren’t I?
Are you wondering if your storytelling pastor has been replaced by his scholarly twin?
I am getting all professorial on you today to make a point…
James — whoever he was — was addressing a BIG audience.
This letter he was writing, was not like Paul’s letter to the Corinthians — it was not addressed to one small community of believers.
This letter was written with the intention of reaching a large audience — if we are to believe this salutation — all the twelve tribes of the Dispersion.
This might mean Jews in Rome, or in Corinth, or in Ephesus or Antioch, or Rhodes — all the far flung parts of the Mediterranean that the shipping lanes of the Roman Empire had deposited the followers of Jesus.
But lets not forget that this letter was written and distributed late in the fist century, when, of course, there was no such thing as email.
Forget email — there was no such thing a snail-mail.
No twitter…
No telegrams.
No postcards.
No pony-express.
There was writing. There was rudimentary forms of paper. That, was about the extent of the technology.
Vulnerable Text
When James (whoever he was) wrote the letter, it is likely that he had very little confidence that his words would ever make it to any of the communities of the faithful to which it was addressed.
Nevertheless, he wrote it.
He wrote… and his words were copied by hand, by the faithful, and rolled in among the scrolls of traveling missionaries, or folded into the leather satchels or tradesman, as they headed off on merchant ships or Roman galleons for long sea journeys.
James wrote
He wrote with the knowledge that his words were vulnerable to all the treacheries of the real world — the thief, the moth, salt wind, the shipwreck.
James wrote in spite of this very real reality that his words might never find its audience.
What would you write, in such a circumstance?
But before you answer that question…
Today
Let’s switch things up, and bring the discussion forward 2000 and 18 years.
Here we are again, in more familiar territory — in our own time, when we have a postal service
We have Fedex and USPS and DHL
We have landlines, and cellphones, and
We have FaceTime and Skype and What’sApp and Snapchat, and Gmail and hotmail and facebook and twitter, to name but a few of the altogether bewildering number of crazy ways that we can contact each other, berate each other and benumb each other.
When we write something, we can feel pretty certain that, with all of the resources at our disposal, the intended people will receive our communication.
And they will get it quickly…
Our leaders can twiddle their thumbs over a device and get a message out to billions of people in less time then it takes to brush your teeth or peel a banana.
But to what end do we employ our vast network of wires and frequencies?
What do we write, given our astonishing capability?
Our children spend most of their conscious hours glued to screens that belittle them, filling them with the toxic suspicion that they are the only ones who are not having a wonderful life.
In 2015, the Pew Research center reported that 73% of American teenagers owned smartphones. In that same period — from 2010 to 2015 — the number of 13-to-18-year-olds who committed suicide jumped 31 percent.
Why is this?
And why has civility disappeared from our civic discourse?
Why is it that, the president of the United States felt empowered to mock a woman who had been sexually assaulted?
And we had to hear that mocking, over and over.
The Determining Factor
Are any among you suffering?
This was the question that James chose to ask.
Imagine…
Imagine that you are an poor tradesman or even slave in some dusty town on the Mediterranean coast.
Your life is one of toil.
You do not know how to read.
Even seeing the parchment upon which the letter was written is an unusual thing for you.
For some reason, you have ended up in a small gathering of people who talk about a distant savior, and someone stands up to share the words of a man named James.
And what does James ask?
Are any among you suffering?
Perhaps it is an unfair juxtaposition that I am making.
Perhaps it is overly simplistic to suggest that our time, with its vast capacity for communication is a time of trolls, and that James’ time — when communication was a matter of great difficulty — was a time of compassion.
To be sure, there are beautiful sentiments expressed on the internet, and the Roman emperors routinely proclaimed wanton laws that caused whole populations to suffer persecution and death.
It is neither era or the mode of communication that determines the difference between a trolling president and a compassionate letter writer…
The determining factor was the teaching of Jesus Christ…
The question “Are any among you suffering?” is a question that naturally grows out of the teaching of Jesus.
For it was Jesus who insisted that the love of neighbor be an expression of the love of God.
For it was Jesus who said that salvation depended on doing such things as visiting the prisoner, welcoming the stranger, feeding the hungry, giving water to the thirsty.
For it was Jesus who told us about a compassionate Samaritan who tended to a victim of violence, and told us to go and do likewise.
Jesus did not have twitter
Jesus did not have FaceTime of Facebook.
It is entirely likely that Jesus may not have even known how to write.
Jesus’ words may have been the most vulnerable of all.
They were spoken into the air, and there, they could have died for eternity.
But they did not die.
They lived.
And they continue to live, in our hearts.
And his words, Jesus’ words, have more power than any word from our Troll-in-chief.
His words have more power than any future decision made by any deeply flawed Supreme Court Justice.
Why?
Because behind his words was a love that inspired generations of compassion.
James was one of the first of these generations — a man who defied thief, moth, salt wind, and shipwreck to ask this simple, deeply caring question:
Are any among you suffering?
Amen.