Sermon — September 5, 2021
The Rev. Greg Johnston
There’s a concept in the social sciences called “Dunbar’s number,” named after a British anthropologist, Robin Dunbar. After a broad comparative study of human cultures and of various other primate societies (chimpanzees, and gorillas, and so on), Dunbar suggested that a human being can, on average, sustain about 150relationships, all told. It’s about the size of a Neolithic farming village, or a pastoral-size church, or an infantry company; it’s the number of people you can meaningfully know as family members or friends, colleagues or neighbors, rather than just vaguely-familiar acquaintances. And while social scientists have debated the exact number—maybe it’s only 100; maybe it’s 200, maybe even 250—everyone agrees that the human brain is not equipped to know or care about 1000 others, or 10,000, or a million, let alone all seven or eight billion of us here. Technology moves much, much faster than evolution.
So if you’re feeling emotionally exhausted these days, it’s no surprise. Modern media have expanded the scope of the suffering we can see, but our brains haven’t kept up. We can more or less cope, most of the time, with what happens within our circle of 150. But every day we see and hear of horrors happening to people we will never know and whom we feel we could never help: in Afghanistan and New York, Haiti and California and everywhere in between. And we’re left with what sometimes feel like only bad options: to turn off the news and stay blissfully ignorant of it all; to close off our hearts and only feel compassion for the people we know; or to feel the constant guilt that we’re just not doing enough to make things right, or the nihilistic despair that nothing we could do would matter anyway.
(I’m sorry—I know it’s a holiday weekend. Was that too much?)
In a sense, our lessons this morning are perfect for Labor Day weekend. Proverbs and James set the Biblical standard for relationships across economic class, between what the Bible calls “the poor” and “the rich,” between what today we’d probably euphemize as “the working class” and “the upper-middle class.” Proverbs warns us against treating hired hands unfairly: “Do not rob the poor because they are poor, or crush the afflicted at the gate.” (Proverbs 22:22) Do not, in other words, try to take advantage of someone in a commercial transaction or legal affair, the city gate being the place where day laborers stood to be hired and judges and arbitrators sat to mediate disputes. If you’re better off, you’d better be careful. “Whoever sows injustice,” after all, “will reap calamity, and the rod of anger will fall.” (22:8)
And while working conditions are better than they were three thousand years ago, these teachings still ring true. Last year’s Labor Day report from the Attorney General of the Commonwealth was a chilling read. It documents the $12 million in fines paid in hundreds of enforcement actions on behalf of thousands of workers in 2020 alone, for violations ranging from wage theft to unpaid sick time to child labor violations, a pattern of exploitation so pervasive even in Massachusetts that the Attorney General’s Fair Labor Division needs seventeen attorneys and more than twenty investigators just to keep up.
Then we could move on to James, who brings it from the legal to the social level, from exploitation to discrimination. “My brothers and sisters,” he practically spits, “do you, with your acts of favoritism, really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?” (James 2:1) If someone walks in with nice jewelry and nice clothes, he says to the church, you give them a bulletin and a good pew (and a pledge card!)—but if someone comes in off the street looking a little worse-for-wear, the white-glove treatment’s nowhere to be found. (2:3-4) “You’ve dishonored the poor,” James says, (2:5) and therefore dishonored Christ, the one who taught that when we encounter someone who is hungry, or naked, or sick, we encounter Christ himself. (Matthew 25:31ff.)
And then James goes even further. It’s not just that you shouldn’t discriminate, that you should welcome the poor the same way you welcome the rich. It’s that if you want to “really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’” (2:8) you must share what you have with the poor as if they were yourself. For “if a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food,” James writes, “and one of you says, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?” (2:15-16) Thoughts and prayers without action are empty. Faith without works is dead. (2:17)
Jesus pushes it still further. He leaves his homeland of Galilee and travels to another land, inhabited by members of another culture: to the Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon, then down to the Greek Decapolis, and heals people along the way. The first story is an especially strange one. Jesus seems to insult or demean this Syrophoenician woman, saying that she and her daughter and maybe their whole people are like “dogs.’ This is not Jesus at his best. And yet the woman is unbowed. Jesus gives in. He agrees that his compassion should extend beyond his own Jewish people to the Gentiles, from the “children” of God to the “dogs” beneath the table. His gifts of healing and exorcism can’t be limited to his own village or tribe or nation; he ought to freely share them with the world.
So—and here’s the part where I just leave you feeling bad about yourselves—let us choose a good name instead of riches. Let us not rob the poor but defend their cause. Let us not engage in acts of favoritism but welcome all equally. Let us share our wealth with all who are hungry. Let us go beyond the borders of our own communities to give freely and lovingly to the entire world. Let us tackle together the great challenges of our time: racial and economic injustice, political misinformation and division, mass incarceration and educational inequality, and climate change, and affordable housing, and… too many other things to name.
I know a priest who calls these “salad sermons,” because they just end with “let us, let us,” and more “let us.”
The problem with a salad sermon is not that it’s wrong. We should resist injustice. We should share what we have with the poor. We should care for people who are not like us, of every tribe and language and people and nation. These exhortations are good and holy and true. The problem is that they crush us with their weight. These problems are real problems, they’re big, systemic problems; they feel too big for any one of us to solve. Like the constant churn of bad news that overwhelms our capacity to feel, salad sermons overwhelm our capacity to act, demanding we do everything and leaving us unable to do anything.
But Jesus and James don’t do everything. They do something.
James isn’t talking about Global Poverty in capital letters. He’s talking about this person in front of you right now, and how you treat him or her: about this person who walks into your church in ragged clothes, about this person who is hungry or cold, and what you do when the two of you meet, face to face. Jesus isn’t a global-health professional whose mission is to heal the world. He’s trying, in fact, to go on a retreat—he “did not want anyone to know he was there.” (Mark 7:24) But this woman asks him to help her, and he does. And then he moves on, and heals just one man, and begs them all to leave him be. Jesus doesn’t want to do everything. But he can’t keep himself from doing something.
So that’s my little anchor of hope today. We cannot fix it all. We do not have to fix it all. What we can, and what we should do, is to care for the people right in front of us, the people in our circle of 150, the people with whom we live in relationships, whether they’re geographically near or far.We are not made to worry about the fates of eight billion people around the world. But we are made to walk in love.
There are very different ways to do that. Maybe it’s by making sandwiches or buying groceries for our neighbors at St. Stephen’s, people you can see and hear and go to PTO meetings with. Maybe it’s by supporting Episcopal Relief & Development and their partners in Haiti, our brothers and sisters in Christ and in the Episcopal Church. Maybe it’s by picking up the phone and calling a friend who’s struggling just down the street. Maybe it’s by trying to keep your own kids safe and full and warm for one more week. Whatever it is—whatever small thing it is—it won’t feel like it’s enough. It will probably never feel like it’s enough. But you don’t have to do everything to fulfill the “royal law” of love; you just have to do something, knowing that only Christ the King can really fulfill that royal law, but trusting with all your heart that God will “never forsake those who make their boast of [his] mercy; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Amen.