Ninth Thursday after Pentecost, Proper 11, Feast of St James; Just As We Are

Lessons: Psalm 34; Jeremiah 16:14-21; Mark 1:14-20

Today is the Feast of St. James and I must admit that before reading the correct lessons I read the propers for the ordinary Thursday, proper 9.  So I have a mixture going.  In the ordinary propers we find Acts 15:1-11.  The image here is Peter dealing with the early tension between the original Jewish believers in the Resurrection and Messiahship of Jesus and the gentile population now coming to faith.  The issue was whether the gentiles needed to keep all the practices the Law required of Jews including circumcision.  This later was repugnant to gentiles not to mention painful. Speaking of the faith conversion of the gentiles, Peter states:

And God who knows the heart bore witness to them, giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us; and he made no distinction between us and them, but cleansed their hearts by faith. Now therefore why do you make trial of God by putting a yoke upon the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe we shall be saved through the Lord Jesus, just as they will."   Acts 15: 8-11

The application of Peter’s argument is relevant for any cultural advancement of the Gospel.  Each time a different culture is opened to the love of God we know in Jesus Christ, there is a weighing out of what is central and core to the Gospel and what is not.  Peter resolved that neither circumcision nor dietary laws incumbent on Jews were required to enter into relationship with Christ and the free flow of God’s life giving love. A certain adherence to the moral code of care between believers, of truthfulness, of sexual fidelity, of uprightness of life was expected.  But even this must not blur the reality that each of us comes to God in Christ as we are seeking to know and be moved by Grace; the free unearned love of God offered to ground and guide us.  His deeper concern was that both Jews and gentiles must remember the law was a guide that was an aid but failed to create in us the perfect pattern of God’s love followed.

In my last parish I had a number of Africans that held customs strange to Westerners. Some of these the missionaries had told them were to be gotten rid of to be Christian.  One was they were to cease ancestor worship.  Another was they were allowed only one wife.  I noticed early on that “honoring the ancestors” was not the same as worshiping them.  At an after baptism party, before the time of prayer and hymn singing, a libation was poured on the carpet and words spoken as a symbol of honoring all who had gone before.  I was far more sensitive to the ruining of a rug or a hardwood floor beneath in that moment then I was to a distortion of faith.  It struck me this was not much different than our customs of naming our children after a generation past.  I am a ‘third’ out of this custom.  The primary difference was that the understanding that we build one generation on the strong shoulders of the one before was what was being honored. Our connection to Christ generation to generation was honored.  This would similarly show up at any life passage.  Each time I was reminded how much we are effected by our long past to good or ill.

I learned that as much as the outside message bearers thought they knew what was essential to conversion, the message receivers would do their own work to sort out what was right and wrong by the Gospel.  Sometimes both would agree.  Sometimes the recipient of the Gospel would find a different understanding knowing what was in their own hearts. In some places God was already tutoring them in deep values outsiders missed. I was also enriched by what they retained of their culture, what it taught me to newly value as a human.

So I am reminded that on this feast of St. James as we read the Gospel call of the twelve disciples, it was not following the rigors of law that caught the first disciples and made them “fishers of men.”  The bait was a strange sense of embodied love, the announcement that we are of such value to God that our errors in action and thinking could be both forgiven and tutored out of us, or wooed out of us by grace or enriched by grace.  The bait was that God comes among us in our flesh.  This bait was found in Jesus, yes, but also in themselves in renewed loving attitudes and actions.  “Follow me,” was not so much a physical movement but movement by compassion into outlooks and actions daily assumed.

Mostly I have come to believe, when we look at another experience of being human that may differ from “my experience,” we are to ask the “other” what customs do you perceive need to be altered to be consummate with the Gospel?  What ones need to be blessed?  What ones will help you grow into God? What ones stand in your way?

Perhaps at least this verse is true of the hymn, “Just As I Am.”

Just as I am - Thou wilt receive,
Wilt welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve;
Because Thy promise I believe,
-O Lamb of God, I come!