James 2:1-10, 14-17; Mark 7:24-30
September 6, 2009
As a child it always confused me a little that the day we were celebrating work, Labor Day, people stopped working. Of course now I know, it isn’t about just celebrating work, or giving workers a break. Nor is it about mourning the end of summer. It’s about celebrating what labor unions do when they are at their best.
When labor unions are at their best they’re striving for justice for all workers. They are helping us recognize that we sometimes undervalue the work of people who are contributing much to their employers and our society. We under pay and under insure people who work hard every day. And we don’t take care of those who can’t find work at all. We do this for all sorts of reasons – and it is complicated. It’s not just greed. Sometimes it is racism or classism, sometimes it is ignorance, sometimes it is convenience, and yes, sometimes it is greed. But mostly, I think we have a fairy tale notion of work in this country and so we don’t even see the realities of work for so many people in our world.
Whether we are conscious of it or not, most of us believe that hard work pays off. If you work hard, you move up the ladder. If you work hard, you get rewarded with salary increases. If you work hard you get health insurance, and you can pay your bills. If you work hard, you will have dignity. That’s what we believe – that’s what we hear – that’s what we teach our kids.
All of this is exposed as a lie as soon as you spend any time with day laborers, or in a sweat shop, or working a job that pays nowhere near living wage. The truth is how hard you work in some jobs has absolutely nothing to do with how much you get paid, or job security, much less promotion. And no matter how much internal dignity one might feel, there are some jobs that just are humiliating.
I have seen what life is like for strawberry pickers. I spent time with them and listened to them talk about their lives. I promise you they work harder than I do – a lot harder. And they don’t have a bathroom across the hall that they can use any time they want. They can’t leave to take their child to the doctor. They can’t sit in the coffee shop while they write their sermon. And they get paid pretty much ½ of what I get paid. ¼ if you count all the benefits.
The truth is, I got this job because of privilege. Yes, there are other reasons, but if I had been born in El Salvador to a family that had no land and lived day to day not knowing where food would come from, I think it is safe to say I would not be the pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Grinnell. Much more likely, I would be working in the strawberry fields in California. I would be working harder, and my life would be harder, and I wouldn’t have most of the luxuries I now enjoy.
Labor unions – at their best – expose these arbitrary inequalities and show us that people should be valued – no matter what their job is. And Labor Day is meant to celebrate any progress we make on valuing people not based on their job, or even how hard they work, but because they are people. Labor Day is more about the value of human beings than about work. And so it is with our passage from James.
Just as we often think Labor Day is just about “work”, so we think this passage from James is about how hard we are supposed to work. And that’s understandable. “Faith without works is dead,” James declares. To be a good Christian, you have to work hard. You have to give lots of money, you have to work in a soup kitchen three times a week – you have to start an after school program. And the more you work, the more you contribute, the better Christian you are. It seems like this is what James is saying.
But, that’s how we see it from our context where we believe the more you work the more you get and the better you are. James is talking about something else. James’ letter, like the work of unions, is about exposing and correcting inequities and calling us to task when we value some people more than others.
When you look at the beginning of our passage, you see what James means when he talks about our “works”. His concern is favoritism, exclusionary thinking, and all the consequences that follow. “My brothers and sisters,” James writes, “do you, with your acts of favoritism, really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?” It is valuing some more than others that James thinks is a sign of dead faith. But here’s is where the focus of James’ letter differs a bit from the focus of Labor Day. When he tells us that faith without works is dead, he’s not talking about the work we do in our jobs or at the church or on a committee; he’s talking about the work of abolishing the practice of treating some people better than others.
Our gospel story makes this same point. I have to tell you, though; it’s a bit more jarring than James’ letter because it seems Jesus is the one with the dead faith, at least by James’ standards. And that’s a hard sell for most of us – that Jesus would ever have anything but a strong faith. Yet, here’s the reality:
When our story begins, we’re told that Jesus had left one region for another, leaving his friends and the crowds behind. And when we got to Tyre of Sidon, he “entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there.” He hid. I’m sure he was tired. He had just spent time with the Pharisees arguing about the law, and that’s tiring work that doesn’t get you very far. So, he hid. But then, when our compassionate, kind, gentle Jesus was approached by someone in need, he tried to avoid her and worse, in an almost teenager fashion, he called her a name: He called her a “dog”. There is no Greek exegesis that can get us out of the fact that Jesus was not offering a compliment – he was calling her scum. And of course he then refused to help her. As blasphemous as it might seem, I think James would pronounce Jesus’ faith as dead – at least at first. And I think we would have to agree with him.
This woman was an outsider – a Gentile. Jews simply did not have anything to do with or say to Gentiles. And Jesus was a Jew. At this point in the gospel of Mark, Jesus believed he was called to minister only to the Jews. “Let the children be fed first,” Jesus says, “for it is not fair to take the children’s food and give it to the dogs.” The children he is talking about are the Jews – the Israelites. They are the favored ones. They are the important ones. They are the ones he was called to heal, liberate, free and save. The Gentiles are not his concern.
I’m sure Jesus was tired that day. That’s probably why he was hiding. And that’s understandable. We all need times of rest. Without rest, we will become useless in whatever we try to do. The problem was not that Jesus took a rest from his work – that was not the sign of a dead faith. The problem was that when he was met by a woman he could help, he wouldn’t do it because she wasn’t one of his own. Jesus was showing favoritism – the exact kind James believed was a sign of dead faith.
So Jesus illuminates the problem James is addressing. At the same time, with a great deal of help from the Syrophoenician woman, he also shows us the way to break through this favoritism. We know there’s no clever way to excuse away Jesus’ initial behavior in this passage. As much as we wish it weren’t true, he hid, he avoided, he derided. It’s there and we can’t change that. But that’s not the end of the story. Jesus changed. His worldview changed. And consequently, his behavior changed. And it happened for two reasons:
First, the Syrophoenician woman, for the sake of her child, crossed every boundary possible to risk relating to Jesus: ethnic, gender, class, religion. She made the first move and that opened up an opportunity for both of them to be changed. Then, Jesus let her into his life. Jesus allowed this foreigner to change his world view. Basically, she preached to him – a brilliant, one sentence, put every pastor to shame sermon. And hearing this sermon changed Jesus. His faith was given life again, just as the woman’s courageous actions and insistence on equality gave new life to her daughter.
Ultimately we change because of relationship – especially relationships with the ones who we think differ from us, are less than us, or are better than us. We need to listen to the strawberry workers when they say they are working too hard, under too harsh of conditions and still not making it because they have no power to advocate for themselves. We need to hear a sermon from the person we think is lazy and won’t just get a job, work hard, and get off the welfare rolls. We need to listen to the woman from Mexico, here illegally, whose child is sick and is demanding that she is as worthy of care as the son of the CEO of Goldman Sachs. None of this says we have to do more, be more, serve more, give more, work, work, work, work, no matter how tired we are, how little we have to give, how limited we are by life’s circumstance. It’s not about achievement, it’s about change. And that change comes when we erase any lines we have drawn to define our circle of concern.
These lines – like the line between the Syrophoenicians and the Jews are really just imaginary. Why do we care about Americans more than Mexicans…it’s because of an imaginary line called a border. Why do we care more when “middle class” people are hurt by the economic crisis than when the “working poor” lose their jobs? Why is the life of a friend more valuable than the life of a stranger?
These aren’t exactly rhetorical questions. There are actually reasons we draw these lines that are understandable. One is that we draw lines in order to manage the unmanageable. We have to choose because there is no way to take on the life of each and every human being. And in choosing, we have natural inclinations that kick in – we choose those who most resemble us. But the Syrophoenician woman challenges us just as she challenged Jesus. We have to at least ask the question: Where are our borders of concern…and why are they there? Put more bluntly, why do we value some people more than others?
Last year, when I was driving with my family to Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, we stopped for dinner at a roadside restaurant in the middle of nowhere. It was a sit down restaurant much like a Village Inn. In our little traveling band, we had six adults and four children, ages 7, 5, 2 and 1, and we had been in the car for hours. I’m sure I don’t have to go into much detail for you to appreciate that we were hungry and just a tad bit grumpy by the time we stopped.
I don’t remember all the details of the meal. But what I do know for sure is that our waitress was not good at her job. Orders were lost, the food we did get was very slow to come, it seemed like hours passed between visits to our table, and her table side manner…well let’s just say she fit in well with our grumpy little band.
When it came time to pay the bill, and thus time to tip, I know what was going on in all of our heads: the tip is meant to reflect how good the service was. And so people were wondering, calculating, what tip would reflect the quality of service we received that night. But for some reason, in that moment, I realized how crazy that is. Why is that woman, who is likely in a job she is not good at simply because she needs to be in a job less worthy of pay than I am?
I couldn’t stop thinking about her as we drove on that night. I tried to imagine her life – the good things and bad things. I tried to imagine what I would be like as a waitress if that was the only job available to me. Not a pretty picture, I guarantee you. Finally, I tried to imagine being her friend; what she would say to me after she got off work. What I would know about her life and how I would likely respond. I hope and pray my tip that night had absolutely nothing to do with how well I thought she did or didn’t do her job.
Tomorrow is Labor Day. It’s an opportunity to think about the lines we draw, the judgments we make about how worthy someone is of good pay, good benefits, and a job they enjoy. We can celebrate the successes of the unions throughout history in addressing inequalities and injustices in the work place. At the same time, as Christians, let’s also think about how these same inequalities affect our own actions toward others. Where do we show favoritism? How alive is our faith when we meet an outsider in need of help? How good are we at putting ourselves in another’s shoes, joining in relationship with them in order to have our worldview changed?
That’s our work. Seeing people…really seeing them and understanding what their lives are like. That’s the work of faith. James is right: without that work, our faith will wither and we will be hiding and avoiding and deriding and denying people the things they need to truly live. But if we, like Jesus, are open to change and are ready to listen to people who are “outsiders” to us, then we will grow in faith. Our faith will be alive, just as Christ is alive in us and in the world. Have a blessed Labor Day. Amen.
