Friends
Peace be with you.
One summer in seminary, I went to a bar with a group of seminary students from various denominations who were all studying hospital chaplaincy. We were all involved in a summer program called CPE, or Clinical Pastoral Education, and were at a wrap-up conference processing what we had all learned. In general it was not a great use of time so we decided to unwind and complain a little at a local watering hole in the town that was hosting us, Grinell. I remember feeling a little out of place as we walked in, wearing a dress shirt and pants in what most people would call a dive bar. After a couple of drinks, I was about ready to head for the door when I felt this hand on my shoulder and heard a voice from someone standing behind me say something like “I’ve been listening to what ya’ll have been talking about and I want to let you know I think it’s terrible that you’re here and that you’re all going to hell.” Somewhat stunned, I started to turn around but I knew already that the person was a forty or fifty year old woman who had been playing pool with two men nearby. Some women sitting with me who were training to be ministers in other denominations started to engage her by asking her questions about herself and she calmed down a bit and admitted she didn’t practice her religion anymore because she felt she was just too sinful. She said, in fact, that anyone who would hang out in a bar was just too sinful to go to church. I listened for a while and, when there was a lul in the intervention, I said to her that it was possible to come in and have one or two beers and then leave. Unfortunately, either because I was a man or because I was Roman Catholic I’m not sure, that must have triggered her because she got angry again and told me that was impossible. You only go to a bar to get drunk and do sinful things and we were all sinners for being there. I had had enough at that point so I decided to leave. The next day, when I talked to some of the people that stuck around, they said they tried to continue to engage her because she was so broken but it was futile. She was unwilling to admit the possibility of anyone entering that bar and entering the kingdom of heaven. The pastor she had growing up had taught her that and there was no changing her mind. Still, there are times when I’ve wondered if more of my time was spent in the local bar getting known and trusted by the people there, if there would be more conversions than by just sitting in the confessional hoping people would show up. But if I did that, what would you all assume about me?
We begin this week with the book of James, a book that could be summed up with the phrase “Be doers of God’s word and not merely hearers.” This book is often invoked by Catholics to answer the protestations of our Lutheran friends who will misquote St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians by saying “We are saved by faith alone”. The trouble is that each letter had its own purpose. Whereas St. Paul was worried about people believing that they could be saved without faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus, St. James is worried that some believe that salvation means you don’t need what is classically referred to as “charity” or love. If you get a chance today or tomorrow to sit and read the entire first chapter of James, you may be struck by two things. First, like our Lord in the gospel today, St. James believes that evil comes from the inside of a person not from someone else’s influence. St. James would not be in favor of the excuse that the devil made me do it. Second, St. James believes that faith is a free gift offered to us by God but that, if we don’t put that free gift to use, it will be wasted. He says it’s like a person who looks at himself or herself in the mirror and, when the person walks away, she or he forgets what she or he looks like. That used to sound impossible to me until I lost my hair and, yet, still have dreams where I do have hair. I wake up and quickly realize that it was a dream because I had hair and, therefore, I’m not going to be late for my final exam in biology. Somewhere in my subconscious mind, I’ve forgotten what I look.
So what’s the solution? St. James concludes this chapter with the same two suggestions we hear at the end in the second reading; “To care for widows and orphans in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained in the world.” So, care for those who have no one else to care for them and, yet, remain holy and unstained by the world in the process. It is possible to do both. We can care for people who may be rough around the edges or who are sinners, while also keeping our lives focused on holiness. The truth is that a lot of people who walk into bars do so because they intend to sin, to drink to excess or hook up with someone or get into a fight with someone. And you probably should be concerned if your priest was spending a lot of time down at the bar claiming to be doing so to get converts. Priests can be alcoholics too. Still, I think it’s too easy and too comfortable to use concerns about contact with some place or someone as reasons why we don’t treat someone with love. Keeping ourselves undefiled has more to do with what is happening in our heart, than it does with where we are at or to whom we are talking. Are we seeing the image and likeness of God in every person we meet and the God who is always with us even in the dark valley and the shadow of death or are we too worried about seeing the devil to be doers of the word and not merely hearers?
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