A Reflection from the Rev. David Hoster
St. James was the original “put your money where your mouth is” sort of saint. He’s also a candidate for patron saint of equality. Finally, and most importantly, he connects everything good about us straight to God like a main circuit cable.
As apostolic credentials go, not too shabby.
Thus, in James’ own words, “every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.” Generosity and goodness do not come from us. They do not take us to the next level as though we had accumulated enough points to level up in a computer game. Rather, we are graced to be a channel through which the overwhelming generosity of an unmoved mover floods out into the world healing, nourishing, creating. It is our greatest joy to be any part of such movement.
“Let the believer who is lowly boast in being raised up,” James writes, “and the rich in being brought low, because the rich will disappear like a flower in the field.” Flowers are beautiful and demand: look at me—but only for a little while. The goodness of God, expanding the hearts of the poor, is the true measure of vitality in human existence. Don’t be misled by power’s impressiveness. It is heart that counts.
“Be doers of the word and not merely hearers,” James writes, for “those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act—they will be blessed.” Generous action confirms our true liberty—liberation from self—and solidifies us in the generosity that flows through us from the Father of Lights.
The first two chapters of James are among the clearest, simplest, most mature expressions of our response to God’s love anywhere in scripture. Taken as a whole, they easily define the mission of a congregation of souls gathered together on the mission of Jesus in the name of James. James expresses the wisdom required of hearts who make the darkest, most difficult journeys in life, enabling us to:
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Still singing that song, we persist on the hard journey today. The very rich reap windfall profits from Covid while minimum wage “essential” workers are exposed to the deadly virus in their struggle to survive. Q-Anon and 4-chan-inspired white supremacists shoot at Black Lives Matter demonstrators from the shadows, while anonymous federal forces storm demonstrations in Portland snatching people off the streets without respect for rights. Our government puts its foot down on the accelerator driving us ever deeper into territory ruled by the pandemic.
No doubt: the hard journey continues.
John Lewis and the Rev. C. T. Vivian, who took up the journey in their younger days, have now handed it on to us. The mature souls who take St. James to heart follow their lead. We are neither blinded nor seduced by the power of the wealthy—they are flowers in the field. We are not full of ourselves, proud of our progressive credentials or swollen with righteous outrage—we are channels of goodness that flows from a source far beyond our authorship. And we are not content to be mere hearers of bright-sounding words—we are doers.
For the news is good. The long, dark journey from 1619 to the present has begun, at last, to turn a corner. A majority of the nation has finally realized that Black lives really do matter. Perhaps consciousness is building that the wealth of a nation cannot be built on the backs of vulnerable minorities to the benefit of a single, privileged ethnicity. Perhaps, even, the time is coming when a diverse people can build their wealth on peace and cooperation amongst themselves, the wave of the future on a planet that has filled up and which can no longer afford aggressive identities based on nationality and race.
If so, perhaps we will turn a corner on the journey begun when the earliest Christian communities raised up the lowly and brought low the rich.
If so, such goodness comes down to us from the Father of Lights.
If so, it will happen because people like us, people called together in the name of St. James, decided not only to be hearers of the word, but doers of the word as well.
The Rev. David Hoster
