“Standing at the Back of the Church”

James 2: 1-9

September 6, 2009 + Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ

400 Glenwood Drive

Chattanooga, Tennessee 37404

Some years ago, when I was younger and more stupid than I am now, I had a brilliant idea. I was serving a church where at every Sunday worship service the back pews were nearly always full and the front pews were nearly always empty. “Why not reverse this inequality,” I thought to myself? “Why not move the congregation forward about six rows? They could see and hear me much better.”

So the next Sunday I asked the ushers to use some of those velvet ropes to cordon off the last six pews of the church. When the congregation arrived, guess what happened? That’s right. When people came into the sanctuary, they picked up the velvet ropes and sat in the back pews just as usual. I never tried that one again!

What a contrast when Barbara and I were in Istanbul, Turkey two years ago. We arrived at one of the large mosques we wanted to visit just at noon on Friday, the time of the most important service of the week for Muslims. When the call to prayer was announced over the loudspeaker, men rushed to the mosque from all over the neighborhood – hundreds of them. And they hurried – almost ran – inside in order to stand together, shoulder to shoulder, as close as possible to the front. When I asked our guide about this, he said that standing in the front at worship showed the sincerity of one’s devotion. Try suggesting that to a contemporary Christian congregation! Few people want to be in the front of the church.

Strange, isn’t it? That’s not the way it works at athletic events. People pay big bucks to sit as close to the teams as possible. So close, as Jerry Seinfeld said in one of his programs, you can smell the sweat. I even understand that in major market cities such as New York and Boston, people bequeath their choice season ticket seats for the Yankees and Red Sox to their children. The rest of us pay our hundred dollars for a Braves ticket, parking, a hot dog, and a coke, and then sit in a seat so high up we get a nosebleed.

And think what we feel when we are going on a long airplane flight. We are welcomed aboard and then have to pass through the First Class cabin to our seats forty or fifty rows in the rear. There they are, all the first-class people sitting in their big leather seats, sipping their champagne, burying their noses in their first-class magazines, trying their best not to notice the teaming herd of bottom class cattle thronging past them. It seems that wherever we go in this world of ours, distinctions are going to be made on the basis of how much money we have. The rich always get to sit up front.

The funny thing is that it used to be that way in church way back in the first century. The writer of the Letter of James says too many churches he knew had established their own first-class seating policy. Remember that Christians in those days didn’t worship in church buildings. That would have been too dangerous given the persecution of the Roman Empire. Instead, Christians met in homes. Homes then were like homes now: there was never enough furniture for a large group. Actually, the first century, most homes had far less furniture than we do today and that was what created the problem. James says that when two people came to worship and one of them had gold rings and fine clothes and the other was dressed in dirty work clothes, the rich person would be ceremoniously ushered to a seat in the front row while the poor person would be told to go stand in the back.

The community of Christ is supposed to be different, isn’t it? We are supposed to be a demonstration of the equality God wants for the entire human family. God who has a soft place in God’s heart for the poor, the lowly, the last, the least, the left-over. In his time, the author of James saw an incredible irony. His readers curry the favor of the rich and powerful, yet it is the rich who sue them and drag them into court.

Why do we confer celebrity upon the merely wealthy? Wealth may be the key to power in this world, but as our text says, “Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith, and to be heirs of the kingdom that God has promised to those who love God?” God has a different way of assessing the value of people and it has nothing to do with their financial bottom-line.

I heard of a pastor who once dressed as a street person when he was asked to be a guest speaker at a church. He sat on the steps out front as everyone came to church. The people ignored him and some even tried to get him to leave. After a while, everyone wondered where the preacher was. Following the reading of James 2: 1-9 while the choir was singing, he walked slowly down the center aisle and pulled off his shabby outer garments to reveal his suit underneath. Then he stepped into the pulpit and simply said the benediction. Not a word was spoken on his chosen text, this passage from James, and not a word was needed. He says it was a very effective sermon on the passage, and I believe him. I, lacking such courage and daring sense of theater, rely on my imagination of that scene, and it almost gets me there.

A couple of years ago, Frank McCourt published the unforgettable memoir of his growing-up years as the poorest among the already poor pre-World War II people of Ireland, titled Angela’s Ashes. In a sequel, entitled simply, Tis, McCourt continued his story, now of a poor, sick, hungry Irish immigrant with a chronic eye infection, adrift on his own in New York City. It speaks eloquently to this very issue which James brings into high relief. It was Christmas Day, and McCourt found himself all alone in his strange, adopted city:

“I can stand at the window all day looking at the happy people with children by the hand going off to church, as they say in America, or I can sit up in the bed with Crime and Punishment and see what Raskolnikov is up to but that will stir up all kinds of guilt and I don’t have the strength for it and it’s not the right kind of reading for a Christmas Day anyway. I’d like to go up the street for Communion at St. Vincent Ferrer’s but it’s years since I went to confession and my soul is as black as Mrs. Austin’s glug. The happy Catholic people with children by the hand are surely going to St. Vincent’s and if I follow them I’m bound to have a Christmas feeling.

It’s lovely to go into a church like St. Vincent’s where you know the Mass will be just like the Mass in Limerick or anywhere in the world. You could go to Samoa or Kabul and they’d have the same Mass and even if they wouldn’t let me be an altar boy in Limerick I still have my Latin my father taught me and no matter where I go I can respond to the priest. No one can scoop out the contents of my head, all the saints’ feast days I know by heart, the Mass Latin, the chief towns and products of the thirty-two counties of Ireland, songs galore of Ireland’s sufferings and Oliver Goldsmith’s lovely poem ‘The Deserted Village.’. . .

The people who go to St. Vincent’s are like the ones who go to the Sixty-eighth Street Playhouse for Hamlet and they know the Latin responses the way they know the play. They share prayer books and sing hymns together and smile at each other because they know Brigid the maid is back there in the Park Avenue kitchen keeping an eye on the turkey. Their sons and daughters have the look of coming home from school and college and they smile at other people in the pews also home from school and college. They can afford to smile because they all have teeth so dazzling if they dropped them in snow they’d be lost forever.

The church is so crowded there are people standing in the back, but I’m so weak with the hunger and the long Christmas Eve of whiskey, glug and throwing up I want to find a seat. There’s an empty spot at the end of a pew far up the center aisle but as soon as I slip into it a man comes running at me. He’s all dressed up in striped trousers, a coat with tails, and a frown over his face and he whispers to me, you must leave this pew at once. This is for regular pew holders, come on, come on. I feel my face turning red and that means my eyes are worse and when I go down the aisle I know the whole world is looking at me, the one who sneaked into the pew of a happy family with children home from school and college.

There’s no use even standing at the back of the church. They all know and they’ll be giving me looks, so I might as well leave and add another sin to the hundreds already on my soul, the mortal sin of not going to Mass on Christmas Day. At least God will know I tried and it’s not my fault if I wandered into the pew of a happy family from Park Avenue.” (pp. 59 ff.)

Today we begin what we generally refer to as the “Program Year” in the church. People are back from summer vacations. It’s also the time when visitors begin to check out churches. Actually, that’s already starting to happen, have you noticed? All kinds of people visit churches for all kinds of reasons, but one thing they have in common. They want to know if they’ll be welcome, just as they are, just who they are. I hope we will continue along our path of hospitality, welcoming those who come our way, no matter who they are, or who we think they are. Some of them, thank God, may want to sit in the front of the church. But if some of them want to sit in the back of the church, please slide over and make room for them!