Friendship with Community

Friendship with Community: A Series in the Book of James
Sycamore Creek Church
James 1:9-11 & 27
Tom Arthur
May 16, 2010

Peace, friends!

What is of lasting significance in your life? And what kinds of things tend to clutter that out? Today we’re continuing in a series on friendship. Our guide for the series is James, the brother of Jesus. James writes a letter that gives very practical guidance to those who would seek to follow Jesus. He also answers this question about lasting significance. Let’s see what he has to say.

James 1:9-11 & 27 (NLT)

9 Christians who are poor should be glad, for God has honored them. 10 And those who are rich should be glad, for God has humbled them. They will fade away like a flower in the field. 11 The hot sun rises and dries up the grass; the flower withers, and its beauty fades away. So also, wealthy people will fade away with all of their achievements…27 Pure and lasting religion in the sight of God our Father means that we must care for orphans and widows in their troubles, and refuse to let the world corrupt us.

James is pretty clear about what exactly is of lasting significance and what gets in the way of it. Friendships within community are lasting. Then there’s a whole lot of other stuff that gets in the way. He adds a little later:

Look here, you people who say, “Today or tomorrow we are going to a certain town and will stay there a year. We will do business there and make a profit.” How do you know what will happen tomorrow? For your life is like the morning fog — it’s here a little while, then it’s gone.
(James 4:13-14, NLT).

James isn’t so big on the clutter of things like money and profit. He reminds his readers that these things are like fog. In the movie Australia Nicole Kidman plays a wealthy wife going to visit her husband’s outback ranch. She flies into Australia and meets the man who is going to drive her to the ranch. His name is Drover. She’s got more luggage and stuff than anyone really needs in the outback. Drover piles it onto his truck and they begin their long journey through the outback. During the trip they have the following conversation:

Drover: I’m a driver. Right? I move the cattle from A to B. Alright, I work on commission. No man hires me and no man fires me. Everything I own I can fit in my saddlebag which is why I like it.
Lady Ashley: Yes, well, it’s all very outback adventure, isn’t it?
Drover: I’m not saying it’s for everyone.
Lady Ashley: No, definitely not for everyone.
Drover: Most people like to own things. You know land, luggage, other people. Makes them feel secure. But all that can be taken away. And in the end, the only thing you really own is your story. Just trying to live a good one.
Lady Ashley: Yes, yes. An adventure story. Mmm. You sound just like my husband.
Lady Ashley is more interested in stuff at this point than where the story of her life is going. The story of her friendships seems cluttered out by the stuff that she’s carrying along with her.

James makes it very clear that stuff and money aren’t of lasting significance. Back in the passage we began with he says: “The hot sun rises and dries up the grass; the flower withers, and its beauty fades away. So also, wealthy people will fade away with all of their achievements” (James 1:11, NLT). How much money disappeared overnight in each of the various economic bubbles over the last several decades? $5,000,000,000,000 (five trillion) was lost in the dot com bubble (http://www.fsteurope.com/news/when-the-bubble-burst/). How about the housing bubble? The economic impact is still being explored and no one is quite sure, but what we do know is that money was here one day and gone the next.

James is talking about wealthy people, but I wonder if we might not also speak about wealthy churches. This is a phenomenon I think goes unnoticed most of the time. What is of lasting significance for wealthy churches? What clutters that out? I’d like to suggest that it is friendship with community that is of lasting significance for all churches. How are we using our money both individually and corporately? Are we using our money to bless or oppress? Once again, James focuses on money saying, “For listen! Hear the cries of the field workers whom you have cheated of their pay. The wages you held back cry out against you. The cries of the reapers have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty” (Text: James 5:4, NLT).

Anybody holding back wages from anyone? It’s easy to let ourselves off the hook on this one, but consider the way that we spend our money. Our culture has a fascination, an obsession, with buying everything as cheaply as possible. This is one reason we love big box stores like Meijer, Walmart, Target, Kmart, and so on. When you go to a smaller store you pay more. So we tend to choose the bigger stores so we can save some money, but do you ever think about how the people who are working there are getting paid? One of the reasons those stores are able to sell things so inexpensively is because they’re rarely paying a living wage to their workers. Our desire to buy cheap often has a dark side: withholding good wages from those who work at these stores.

Several years ago a journalist named Barbara Ehrenreich attempted to live on the minimum wage and found it nearly impossible. She wrote about her experience in the book, Nickel and Dimed. An interesting musical documentary highlighted this experience in a unique way. In this documentary a banker notices for the first time all the people who work at the places where he shops. He notices how little they get paid for the work that they do. The scene can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDgFiW2xtf0.

One way to reflect on this is to consider how much you tip. Once upon a time back in the good ole days a young boy went in to a diner to order some ice cream. The waitress came to the table and asked him what he wanted. He asked how much an ice cream sundae cost. She said it cost 50 cents. He looked at the change he had in his hand and counted it. The waitress got a little impatient as he counted. She could see people lining up at the door. Finally the boy asked how much plain ice cream was. She said that plain ice cream costs 35 cents. He said that he’d like the plain ice cream, so she went and got the ice cream for him. After he ate it and paid, the waitress came back to the table and was surprised to find laying on it two nickels and five pennies. The boy had enough for the ice cream sundae but not enough for the ice cream sundae and a generous (40%!) tip.

Too often we nickel and dime those who serve us rather than giving them a generous full wage. We clutter out friendship with the community so that we can simply have more stuff.

So what if we use our money to bless rather than oppress? What would that look like? James says, “Pure and lasting religion in the sight of God our Father means that we must care for orphans and widows in their troubles, and refuse to let the world corrupt us” (James 1:27, NLT). To take care of the vulnerable in our community, to be friends with them is what it means to use our money to bless rather than oppress.

But even here in our own churches we sometimes fall back into the trap of oppressing rather than blessing. James says, “Suppose you see a brother or sister who needs food or clothing, and you say, “Well, good-bye and God bless you; stay warm and eat well” — but then you don’t give that person any food or clothing. What good does that do?” (James 2:15-16, NLT). Notice that James is talking about “brothers” and “sisters.” That is code language for fellow Christians, those who worship together. Surely we never do this. Or do we?

Dotty and I were meeting for lunch a couple of weeks ago and reflecting together on what she does each week. If you’re in the first service you may not even know this, but Dotty picks up women from the Rescue Mission women’s shelter every Sunday and brings them to worship with her. Sometimes she’s got as many as five or six women with her. Because the shelter isn’t open again until later in the afternoon she has to drop them off somewhere after church is over. She would like to give them a meal of some sort, and sometimes she does, but she doesn’t have the money to always do this. It struck us both that what was happening here was that we were saying to these women in worship, “God bless you”, and then dropping them off and saying, “Stay warm and eat well”! What would it look like if different members of our church took these women out to eat after church every Sunday? What would it look like if members of our church invited these women to their homes for a meal after church on Sunday? Now we’re talking about real blessing and not just talk. Now we’re talking about real friendship with the community, and we don’t even have to go outside our church to find it!

James reminds us of Jesus quoting the book of Leviticus when James says, “Yes indeed, it is good when you truly obey our Lord’s royal command found in the Scriptures: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (James 2:8, NLT). What if we all picked someone up for church who didn’t have a car and then had them over for lunch? Then we’d say “God Bless” and we’d be loving our neighbor too.

In essence, I think that what James is teaching us is that friendship with the community is friendship with God. Friendship with the vulnerable especially, the orphans and the widows and their modern day counterparts, is friendship with God. Your spiritual growth, your worship of God, and your friendship with God is intimately tied to the way that you spend your money to care for the vulnerable and have friendship with the community. Let’s make that all corporate too. Our spiritual growth as a church, our worship of God, and our friendship with God is intimately tied to the way that we spend our money to care for the vulnerable and have friendship with the community.

The Shepherd of Hermas, a very early second century Christian guidebook, sums this all up well saying, “Instead of fields, buy souls that are in trouble, according to your ability. Look after widows and orphans. Do not neglect them. Spend your riches on these kinds of fields and houses.” In other words, have friendship with the community so that you can have friendship with God.