St. James's Day 7-27-08

©Holly Lyman Antolini

Lections: Jeremiah 45:1-5; Ps. 7:1-10; Acts 11:27-12:3; Matthew 20:20-28

Awake, O my God, decree justice; let the assembly of the peoples gather round you...Let the malice of the wicked come to an end, but establish the righteous; for you test the mind and heart, O righteous God.  AMEN.

I don't know about you, but I pray those words of Psalm 7 with some fear and trembling, especially at a moment in history when so much that we have taken for granted - our hegemony in the world; our prosperity; our economic dominance; our national safety - seems fragile in a new way and also seems under the world's scrutiny - and our OWN scrutiny! - in a new and discomfiting way.

Nevertheless, these words of Psalm 7 are OUR words, the words of the lectionary specifically for US, as THE PEOPLE OF ST. JAMES'S, on the Feast Day of St. James's.  So are the words of Jeremiah, that warn us, "Thus says the Lord: I am going to break down what I have built, and pluck up what I have planted - that is, the whole land."

If all that "plucking up and breaking down" weren't enough to make you a tad uneasy about OUR CALLING AS A CONGREGATION, there's our poor patron saint, James the Great getting MARTYRED in the Acts reading - the very first Apostle to do so -"killed by the sword," says Acts, by the descendent of the very King Herod who tried to slaughter the baby Jesus among the "innocents" in Bethlehem, ‘way back in Matthew Chapter 2, before Jesus had had a chance to accomplish ANYTHING Messianic.  Of course, Jesus survived the attempt.  And James the Great, beheaded though he eventually was, had managed to survive twelve years after Jesus' own crucifixion before succumbing, and is reputed to have proselytized as far away as Galicia, in Spain.  Whether HE made it that far or not, his RELICS - his bones, to be frank about it - are CREDITED with having made it all the way to Santiago de Compostela in Spain - that's SAINT "Iago" or "Diego," both Spanish words for "James," OF THE APOSTLES, de Compostela, setting in motion a centuries-long tradition of PILGRIMAGE to visit the holy shrine of St. James the Great in northwestern Spain 

How IRONIC that our James acquired the title, "James the Great!" (That's "the Great" as distinct from "James the Less," the other James in the apostle line-up, or "James the Just," the "brother of our Lord," the first Bishop of Jerusalem, who is credited with writing the New Testament Book of James.)  In one sense, the title "James the Great" seems only appropriate.  After all, James, son of Zebedee, was nicknamed by Jesus, along with his brother John, "Son of Thunder," "Boanerges."  No doubt about it: James and John were thunderous hotheads.  In Luke's Gospel, when a villageful of Samaritans fails to show proper hospitality toward Jesus, the brothers growl, ‘Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?"  So that Jesus, who is trying to make exactly the OPPOSITE POINT, has to REBUKE them. They always seemed ready to throw their weight around, and to jump forward to be in the front row, at Jesus' "right hand," as their ambitious mother solicits for them in God's ultimate kingdom.  They show up at peak moments - on the mountain of the Transfiguration, at the healing of Jairus' daughter, in the Garden of Gethsemane.  Only Peter rivals these brothers for being "first" in everything.  Certainly James might eagerly have claimed the title "Great."

But then Jesus spends our whole Gospel story trying to teach James that he'd better be careful, seeking after GREATNESS because GREATNESS IN GOD was not the same as GREATNESS IN EMPIRE. "Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink?" Jesus asks James.  It seems not a terribly portentous question at the time.  And James and his brother John answer eagerly and quickly, "We are able!" With THAT, they get the rest of the disciples' goat, for sure.  The other ten start grumbling about "ambitious upstarts" immediately. "Who do they think they are, anyway?" 

But Jesus KNOWS that the Sons of Thunder have no CLUE what he is asking them about the cup that they will, indeed, ultimately, drink.  A mere six chapters later, in the Garden of Gethsemane, just before his arrest and crucifixion, Jesus himself prays, "My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want."[Matt. 26:39, 42]  GREATNESS in God equals suffering, Jesus instructs James and his brother John and their mother and all the disciples, sometimes bitter suffering, and a SERVICE SO DEEP it amounted to SLAVERY!

Now a call to "slavery" CANNOT sit COMFORTABLY with us AMERICANS, not with OUR HISTORY with regard to SLAVERY.  "Slavery" in THIS country is an unequivocally BAD WORD.  It calls up images of DEPENDENCY, SUBMISSION, ABUSE, POWERLESSNESS, EXCLUSION, DEHUMANIZATION, EXPLOITATION, TORTURE, CRUELTY.  Whether our ancestors were on the "UP-SIDE" or the "DOWN-SIDE" of our history of slavery, we all still bear its wounds at all levels and in all corners of our society.  We suffer still from the divisions and inequities of its legacy of racism. We are still in recovery from the wounds of slavery, every one of us.  We still seek healing.

So why would Jesus choose such an onerous term for what we are called to do as followers of God's Love made manifest? He has just dismissed the dominating high-handedness of the elite hierarchy in the imperial world in which he lived.  He has condemned the tyranny of the imperial "great ones." WHY wouldn't HE, of all people, wish to abolish slavery in ALL its forms? Instead, he says, "Whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave."  WHAT IS HE GETTING AT?

I wrote this sermon with a little icon of sorts on my computer desk top: a painting by Rembrandt van Rijn of Saint James the Elder.  I admit, I got it off the Wikipedia page for James the Great.  The page points out that Rembrandt depicts James as a pilgrim, with his symbol the scallop shell on his shoulder and a pilgrim's hat beside him.  This James is not the upstart bounder of Matthew's Gospel.  There's not the slightest hint of brashness left in him.  He is James AFTER the Crucifixion, after the humiliation of having given in utterly to fear and abandoned his beloved Jesus to the Cross.  He is James after the Resurrection, when against all probabilities, Jesus reappeared, most manifestly alive, and stunned his followers by FORGIVING THEM for abandoning him, and breathing peace and new courage into them, transforming all their notions of worldly power completely.  He is James who has trekked all the way from Jerusalem across the Mediterranean and over the Pyrenees to Galicia, spreading the good news of Christ's abiding power of new life to all he met.  He looks to me as if he's possibly even in prison, awaiting the sword's stroke that will behead him, ready literally to turn his life over for Christ.  His face is worn.  He has drunk the cup of suffering. His eyelids and the corners of his mouth are lowered, though his eyebrows dance up so that his expression is not one of sadness but rather one of peaceful resignation, even with a hint of joy.  The fingertips of both his hands, caught strikingly by the light which also lends his face such poignancy, are just touching in the gentlest prayer.

Like Nelson Mandela AFTER his 27-years-long imprisonment on Robben Island, this James of Rembrandt's is a James who has learned in the crucible of fire what greatness REALLY is.  It is a James no longer in need of convincing the world or himself of his own worth or bravery.  His worth is assured simply in the very fact of his being, because his being is held in God. It is a James for whom everyone ELSE'S value and everyone ELSE'S well-being is what matters, a James for whom the primary thing is to convince the rest of humanity - every person he encounters on his long pilgrimage - of that person's own value and belovedness.  It is a James who has been forgiven much, and whose fund of forgiveness has increased and increased until it is itself bottomless. HE IS EVEN GOING TO FORGIVE HIS MURDERERS.  You can feel it.

This is our patron, my dear fellow St. Jamesians.  It may be that we, like Jeremiah and Baruch in the Old Testament today, are trembling on the verge of some truly terrible moment when our whole worldview, our whole definition of progress is undergoing collapse, as was the worldview of Jerusalem's citizens in Jeremiah's time, descendents of King David, when the Babylonian conquerors were pouring over the walls.  It may be that we will be called upon to drink a cup of suffering we can hardly imagine now.  But no matter what comes, with James the Great to show us the way, which is the Way of Jesus Christ, the Way, the Truth and the Life which conquered Death, we can sally forth as pilgrims into a brand new servanthood, willing to be SLAVES of each other's well-being, willing to give up all our definitions of power for the sake of each other.  And I mean, not just for those we already love and esteem, but for EACH AND EVERY OTHER IN THE WORLD, in "that spirit of self-denying service by which alone we may have true authority among God's people."  AMEN.