Father of All Law, Mother of All Sin

September 10, 2006 Text: James 2:1-17

My neighbor tries to start his old, rickety truck, whose springs are shot and whose bed always is full of some kind of junk or other. The truck won’t start. Urrm, urrm. The starter turns. Urrm. Again. And again. Finally it catches. He backs up, just missing clobbering the car behind, then surges forward, just missing mine in front. I surprise myself by thinking: “what is wrong with that person?”

What is wrong is that he is poor, that he needs his truck for his work but can’t afford to fix it, that he has a bushy mustache, that he dresses oddly, that he looks strange. What is wrong with him is that he is not me, not like me. What is wrong is that he is different.

I have sinned. There is no sin in seeing this man. There is sin in judging him.

We are creatures blessed with sensitive detectors. The rods in our eyes can detect a single photon. Our ears if any more sensitive could hear the random motion of the molecules in the air. Our brains are pattern detectors. What impinges on our consciousness is change, motion, and edges. We are creatures designed to detect borders. To detect differences.

Isaiah promises sight to those who cannot see. Hearing to those who cannot hear. In the golden age, when those who are injured and wounded will walk, when those who cannot speak will speak, when the wilderness produces fruit, then perception will be restored to those whose eyes and ears are broken. It is occasion for rejoicing.

And yet, our abilities and propensities for distinguishing one thing from another get us in hot water. In the hottest water. We see other people as different than we are. We see them as “not people.” So we can buy and sell other people without seeing them as people, as real people. People, that is, like us. We can put other people in camps. We can bomb other people’s cites and kill them. We can keep other people in poverty, or not rescue them from poverty.

We can do this because something is broken in us, some other kind of detector, that would detect the anguish and despair that we know we would feel if we were them, those other people. We don’t see them as we see ourselves. We don’t see them as we see those whom we know well—our friends and family, for example—those whom we love.

“Love your neighbor as yourself.” James reminds us, reciting this half of the basis of all law in scripture. You do well if you really fulfill this fundamental commandment, he says. “But,” he says, “if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors.” The emphasis here is on the second part of the commandment. “Neighbor as yourself.” The opposite of “love your neighbor as yourself” is not “hate your neighbor.” It is “see your neighbor as different than yourself.”

“Love the Lord your God will all your heart and soul and mind,” is the first half of the commandment. But the second half does not just say “and love your neighbor, too.” The prime commandment is not “Love God and your neighbor, too.” The second half has this kicker: “… as yourself.” “…as yourself” is the unexpected part and therefore the powerful part.

For James, loving one’s neighbor as oneself is the father of all law. And for James, partiality—judging some folks to be better than others, to treat some people differently than others, to show deference to some and to show others disrespect—for James this is the mother of all sin. From this all sin towards others flows: covetousness, murder, dishonor, theft, the human side of the Ten Commandments.

And this fundamental commandment is a necessary part of being a follower of Christ. “Do you,” he asks in his letter, “Do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?” He cannot conceive how treating others in any way differently than we hope to be treated ourselves can be reconciled with Jesus for those who follow Jesus.

Maybe this is the original sin. In the garden, after eating the apple, Adam’s and Eve’s “eyes were opened, “it says in Genesis, “and they knew that they were naked,” and as a result, they put on some clothes. It is not their nakedness that is the issue. The sin, or maybe it was the result of the sin, was that they recognize a distinction that was not there before. It is not that they suddenly noticed a difference in each other than they had been blind to before. It is that the difference was suddenly important.

Ever since then, our difference detectors have been working overtime. A writer in New York, writing for tomorrow’s anniversary of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, wrote that in the days following the attacks, “a single source of solace emerged amid the dread and grief: a great upwelling of simple solidarity. Here in New York, and in … Washington, that solidarity took homely forms. Strangers connected as friends; … political and civic leaders of all parties and persuasions stood together [and, I should add, religious leaders, too], united in sorrow and defiance.” And he goes on to say that that solidarity was not confined to New York City but extended worldwide.

Yet within months all this unity, all this recognition of common humanity in suffering, vanished. It shattered into thousands of distinctions, between good and bad, east and west, Christian and Jew and Muslim, and between one kind of Christian and another and between one kind of Muslim and another. Now the world stands in splinters. It is if we cannot bear for long to be the brothers and sisters that God created. We have walked out of the garden.

We are really good at seeing differences, even where there is nothing to see. Catholics in Ireland detect Protestants, Shiites detect Sunnis. Lutherans used to detect Mormons but evidently have forgotten how. Thank God.

Do we see what God does not? Is God, all knowing, blind to things we see so clearly? Are God’s eyes less sharp than ours? Or is it that God chooses not to see? That through some kind of Godly moral strength God pretends not to see?

Or is it that we see and then we judge. “What is wrong with this guy?” I say. That’s a judgment. But when God sees God does not judge. That the differences that seem so big to us seem to be nothing of import to God. They are not important. They do not make a difference to God.

The psalm tells of the salvation of the world, an age—the kingdom of God, we would say—when the people who are oppressed and live in sorrow are restored. This is the same world that James writes about in hope. What kind of world is it, he asks, when someone can see a “brother or sister naked and lacking daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your full,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs”? What kind of world is it when the rich are respected for being rich and the poor despised for being poor? What kind of world is it where I mock my neighbor for his troubles? This is a world where we do not treat our neighbors as ourselves for we do not see them as like ourselves.

This is our world, but it is not God’s kingdom. It is not the kingdom that Jesus preaches. Or promises.

In God’s kingdom, the kingdom we hope and pray for, James says, mercy triumphs over justice. Our eyes are opened and our ears unstopped and our “neighbor as ourselves” detectors begin to work.

James saw in Jesus a constant reminder that we are all in this together, brothers and sisters. As we announce in the words of Paul each week: There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female. We are all one in Christ Jesus. All neighbors, like ourselves.