You are Somebody!

“YOU ARE SOMEBODY!” (September 10, 2006)

“For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say ‘Have a seat here, please” while to the one who is poor you say, “Stand there”, have you not made distinctions….?” James 2:2

One of the important lessons in scripture is that while humans look on outward appearances the Lord looks on the heart, as Samuel said when God told him to choose David. Our readings this morning underline this point.

The book of Proverbs says “the rich and the poor have this in common; the Lord is the maker of them all.”

Jesus heals the daughter of a woman of Syro-phoenician origin – from the area we now call Lebanon. Mark says clearly the woman is a Gentile. That made a lot of difference to most people. But when she gives a remarkable answer to Jesus, he heals her daughter at his word, and she went home and found the child well. And in the same story Jesus’ heart goes out to a deaf man and he heals him. Each person, no matter what their background, was clearly “somebody” to Jesus.
And then in our epistle lesson James attacks discrimination in the church and says clearly “has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith”. He chastises those who would treat with special deference a rich person entering the church, while telling someone who is poor to sit at a lesser spot. It is as if James is saying there’s enough of that in the world, let it not be in church.

In the middle ages in Europe there was a strict system of putting people in various “boxes” of which there were basically three: the nobility, the clergy, and the serfs. The Protestant Reformation changed all that. Luther and Calvin and other leaders taught a doctrine that came to be called “the priesthood of all believers”, that each person has direct access to God, with the clergy as guides but not as intermediaries. That went a long way toward saying each person is somebody. In Scotland John Knox and John Buchanan taught these ideas with a vengeance, so that it became the people themselves in their churches who chose their own ministers – a very radical idea.

What is that if not saying they are “somebody”? In the 17th century John Locke, an Englishman, wrote about government of the people and by the people. He got those ideas from the John Buchanan a century earlier. In 1637 King Charles sent his bishops to Scotland to bring people back in line and in St. Giles cathedral a group of women started a riot by throwing their three legged stools at the officiating bishop and driving the bishop out of the church. Those women in effect were saying “we are somebody.” Not long after that, the trustees decided to install pews!

Knox felt that kneeling for prayer or to receive Communion reminded people that they had to kneel before nobles and monarchs and lairds. That may have been what they had to do in the world, he argued, but in church they are children of God and free, so the people will sit for their prayers and they will be served Communion by the church elders while they are seated. Sitting and not kneeling became a way of saying “we are somebody”. The great Scottish philosopher David Hume, who was a skeptic in religion, marveled at how Knox and Buchanan had said the religion of John Knox “consecrated every individual and bestowed a character on him much superior to what forms and ceremonious institutions could alone confer.”

In the children’s catechism in the Presbyterian Church the first question is “who are you?” and the answer is “I am a child of God.” One of the things we hope all our children learn in church is exactly that through Jesus Christ they are children of God and this makes all the difference in how they think of themselves in life.

Lord knows there are many forces out there in the world trying very hard to change that perception of who we are: to get us to think of ourselves as something else – something perhaps just to be used, or just a consumer, or a slave to our passions, or through the existence of prejudice, as someone of less worth that someone of a different skin color or race or background. But the scriptures will not allow of that interpretation. In some countries it is a rigid class system at work, or a caste system, or rigid stereotypes based on gender or race. All of these have the effect of lessening our value in our own eyes, and even the church can go along with it and support it, but in our reading today James says clearly that should not be: “You are somebody!”

The world often can find a way to put us down and tell us in so many words we are nobody. We need to hear regularly that in God’s eyes we are somebody.

Howard Thurman was a Baptist pastor who had a Ph.D. in religion and philosophy and was the first African-American to serve as Dean of the Chapel at Boston University, a position he took in 1953. Thurman and his family were traveling in the south shortly after he was appointed chaplain at the university and they stopped to rest in a park. His daughters spotted a swing set and pulled their father toward it. A sign said, “Whites only, by state law”.

Sadly, Thurman explained that they could not play there. They burst into tears. He gathered them in his warm embrace and he said, “Listen, you little girls are somebody. In fact, you are so important and so valuable to God and so powerful that it takes the governor, the lieutenant governor, and the whole state police force to keep you little girls off those swings!” (from Rosalind Banbury, Presbyterian Outlook, August 14/21 2006, p. 20 quoting Thomas Long, Talking Ourselves Into Being Christian).

There are four words which have said more clearly than anything else that we count. Christ died for you. These may be the four most powerful words to change human conditions ever uttered. Wherever the cross has been truly proclaimed and believed people have understood that in its light everyone who believes on it is lifted up. Christ died for you. Scripture says “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.”

This morning as we begin again with Homecoming and we come to the Lord’s Supper we are careful to examine ourselves, as we should, and to confess that we often fall short of the ideal God sets for us, but though we are sinners we are also, if we confess our sins, forgiven sinners. We are also somebody, because here at this meal which we share not just as a memorial but as in the living presence of Christ himself, who is spiritually present through the Holy Spirit, we are those for whom Christ died and that makes all the difference.