CALL TO WORSHIP | Psalm 25:1-10
To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul.
O my God, in you I trust; let me not be put to shame; let not my enemies exult over me.
Indeed, none who wait for you shall be put to shame; they shall be ashamed who are wantonly treacherous.
Make me to know your ways, O Lord; teach me your paths.
Lead me in your truth and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all the day long.
Remember your mercy, O Lord, and your steadfast love, for they have been from of old.
Remember not the sins of my youth or my transgressions; according to your steadfast love remember me, for the sake of your goodness, O Lord!
Good and upright is the Lord; therefore he instructs sinners in the way.
He leads the humble in what is right, and teaches the humble his way.
All the paths of the Lord are steadfast love and faithfulness, for those who keep his covenant and his testimonies.
Song #1 – New Every Morning by Porter’s Gate
Song #2 – Mercy by Chris Renzema
Dismiss Kids
PRE-SERMON READING | James 2:1-13
My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory. For if a man wearing a gold ring and fine clothing comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in, and if you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, You sit here in a good place, while you say to the poor man, You stand over there, or, Sit down at my feet, have you not then made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor man. Are not the rich the ones who oppress you, and the ones who drag you into court? Are they not the ones who blaspheme the honorable name by which you were called? If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, You shall love your neighbor as yourself, you are doing well. But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. For he who said, Do not commit adultery, also said, Do not murder. If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty. For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.
SERMON |
Good morning everyone, it feels like it has been a while since I’ve done this, and I’m feeling a bit rusty, to put it lightly. Still, as always, I’m certainly glad to be with you in this way, as I enjoy the change of pace and the honor and privilege of sharing in God’s word with you all. So, thank you Sam for leading in song, to make space for this…
If you would, turn in your Bibles with me to James 2:1-13. As you turn there, I want to warn you: this text begins with what sounds incredibly simple. But, like so much of the rest of James, what seems straightforward on-the-face-of-it, turns out to be deceptively so. Because this text is an uncomfortable mirror held right up to our faces.
I actually want to draw your attention to this word: “face.” Think about everything that word conjures, means, invokes: the human face, or the sur-face of something… the mere appearance of… simply the front of something. Or as a verb, to turn towards, to expect something—to face it… to own up to something (as in “to face up to”).
Today, I want to suggest that the face… is a summons.
Hopefully this will make sense by the end.
Ok, so let’s begin, verse 1. James begins with who Jesus is.
My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory.
Apparently, this has been famously argued over—namely, that the phrase “of glory” stands in apposition to Jesus Christ.[1] In other words, Jesus isn’t just glorious; He is the Glory—the sheer, blinding manifestation of the divine presence among us. Recent commentary is a bit more cautious, preferring “our glorious Lord,” but he insists the phrase is remarkably fitting here precisely because we, as Christians, give far too much glory to mere human beings.[2]
If Christ is the divine Glory, partiality isn’t just bad manners, being rude at a party. No, it is a direct contradiction of our Christian confession. Think about the absurdity of it: a church honoring the expensive ‘look’ of this or that persn or those with resources that could benefit the church… all while ignoring the poor, even though the God revealed Himself to us in the crucified, lowly, and impoverished figure of Jesus Christ? The problem isn’t just that the poor person is mistreated—though that certainly matters; it is that the church has forgotten where the real Glory is!
The Greek word translated “partiality” here is central (some of your Bibles may have “favoritism”). The Greek word for partiality (prosōpolēmpsiai) literally means "receiving the face." It names the act of evaluating a person by their prosōpon — their social face, their presented surface, their display, the mask and/or profile by which the rest of the world sees them. In a fallen world, we evaluate a person by their presented social surface—the “face” by which ‘the machine’ orders them—rather than by the dignity and election of God.
The twentieth century philosopher Emmanuel Levinas gives us a helpful lens here I think. While Levinas did not write from a Christian perspective, he was after all a Lithuanian-French-Jewish philosopher, he does help us name the issue. For Levinas, the face is not merely a visible object, not just a surface to be read, ranked, assessed, or managed. Rather, the face opens up and into incredible depth. The face is the place where another person interrupts all my categories, refused objectification, and thus calls me into responsibility.[3]
Moreover, the face is not just what I see.
The face is what sees back.
This, it seems to me, helps us understand what James may be getting at. The rich man and the poor man both enter a community with a certain ‘face,’ a peculiar kind of appearance but that community does not really encounter their depth. The community only sees the mere sur-face, the label: Rich. Poor. Impressive. Burdensome. Useful. Costly. Honorable. Disposable.
James, of course, gives us our example. Continuing…
2. For if a man wearing a gold ring and fine clothing comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in, 3. and if you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, You sit here in a good place, while you say to the poor man, You stand over there, or, Sit down at my feet, 4. have you not then made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?
Now, don’t misunderstand me: the assembly’s sin is not that they noticed the difference. James does not suggest a kind of naïve blindness to poverty, class, or social power. Instead, the sin is allowing that mere appearance, the sur-face, to govern how a community accepts and values people. We don’t become faithful by pretending poverty and class distinctions don’t exist. We become faithful by receiving new eyes, new hearts, and new minds—by learning to see what God sees, and believing what God says is true about the person in front of us. The work of faith is not naivety or blindness. Faith is re-trained sight.
Faith sees the poor man not merely as “poor,” but as an heir of the kingdom. Faith sees the rich man not merely as “important,” but as a neighbor under the same royal law. Faith sees the face as an invention to immense depth, not surface; faith at work sees the face as a summons, not a category; as a person, not resource.
Look again at verse 4. One commentator suggests the verb in, here, “making distinctions,” points to an inner dividedness—a split mind, looking back to Chapter 1—a faith fractured by a petty, worldly standard.[4] Professing faith in the person of Jesus but still seeing through the world’s metric of honor, class, and prestige isn’t just snobbery; it is a fractured perceptual system, a divided heart and mind.
Besides, partiality is often just fear disguised as prudence. The wealthy, polished, affluent family seems to stabilize the community, while the poor person feels like a burden. Of course, we are not limited to speaking about money—though that is the immediate context—wealth can take many forms. The point is that we sometimes run a quick ROI analysis to determine who is worth our time, who gets our attention, our presence… based on the value return we think they represent. James exposes that cold, corporate calculation for what it is: “evil thoughts.”
Because… the face is a summons.
James also insists that the poor are not merely objects of our pity; they are the very ones God has chosen to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom. Recall Jesus’s words from the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the poor.” Thus, James doesn’t speak of a simple class reversal where the poor are flattered and the rich are demonized. He is asking: will we begin to recognize and receive people by way of God's choice design, or continue to see through the world's superficial, status and prestige system?
5. Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he has promised to those who love him? 6. But you have dishonored the poor man. Are not the rich the ones who oppress you, and the ones who drag you into court? 7. Are they not the ones who blaspheme the honorable name by which you were called?
This is what happens when we refuse the invitation into the depth of the face. We do not merely make a bad social calculation. We objectify the other person… dehumanize them. We absorb them into our own private or collective story of usefulness, or threat, inconvenience, or ladder-climbing. The poor person becomes "a problem." The rich person becomes "an opportunity." And neither is allowed to stand before us as a neighbor, created in the imago dei whose existence is more mysterious and profound than our categories.
We might think all this a bit dramatic. But hear me out.
Last November, some researchers from Google DeepMind published a paper on the possibility of personhood for AI systems. (Now, this is a whole thing, which I don’t have time to go into, but…) What I found most interesting, was their historical re-telling of how our notions of personhood have evolved over time, and how we arrived at the particular understanding of person that is common today. Beginning around 200 years ago or so, a fairly significant shift took place—influenced primarily by the rise of shopping as a cultural practice and individual, autonomous voting legislation—which gave most of us our unthought assumptions concerning personhood:
the figure of the autonomous chooser, an ideal forged in the cultural crucibles of the marketplace and the voting booth… On the one hand, they are the rational, utility-maximizing actor of classical economics-a kind of Homo economicus… On the other hand, they are a being defined by expressive choice… the chooser who leverages their 'unalienable rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness' and the freedom to form their own social affiliations to construct a meaningful life according to their own tastes.[5]
Consumer culture trains us to look at the world and the people in it as a series of options for the self. Who do I want? Which relationship benefits me? Which person increases my comfort, my status, my security, my brand, my freedom?
Perhaps, worse: this idea of personhood assures us that it is a path to freedom. Freedom from limits. Freedom from obligation. Freedom from need. Freedom to curate the life, the image, the church, the social circle, the family, the spiritual experience, the community, the relationships that best expresses ME.
But that is not liberty. It is bondage.
8. If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, You shall love your neighbor as yourself, you are doing well. 9. But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. 10. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. 11. For he who said, Do not commit adultery, also said, Do not murder. If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law.
If my freedom requires me to reduce your face to a surface, if my freedom requires me to treat you as a cost, a threat, a tool, a customer, a donor, a demographic, a problem to manage, or an opportunity to leverage, then I am not free. I am enslaved to the same old economy of fear and status. I am not seeing you as a person.
The royal law steps into the middle of the consumer gaze and says: No. That face is not inventory, it is not an accessory, or social capital. That person is not raw material for your comfort, your platform, or your security.
James invokes the Royal Law: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." (Ref. Deuteronomy 6 and Jesus’ pronouncement in Matthew 22)
This is the law that holds the whole law together. It exercises regal authority over all other laws—it is the supreme law of love, the Old Testament law fulfilled and filtered through Jesus. Love God, love neighbor.
Law and liberty are not mutually exclusive. They are not contradictions. The law of love is the shape of liberty. The royal law does not constrain freedom; it rescues freedom from self-absorption, from the excesses of our individuality. It frees me from the exhausting project of arranging every social circle, every dinner, every circumstance around my own advantage, and it frees me to receive the other, the face of the other as a person before God.
Consumer society and its ideas of personhood cannot give us the law of love. It can give us choices. It can give us upgrades, new gadgets. It can give us novelty and convenience. It can give us the illusion that nobody has a claim on us unless we consent to the transaction. But it cannot give us love. And it cannot give us the kind of liberty that looks at the vulnerable person and is not threatened or inconvenienced. And it certainly cannot give us the kind of freedom that is able to accept our own vulnerability, and to see ourselves as poor in need of a Savior.
The royal law and the love of neighbor is entirely incompatible with partiality. James is blunt: favoritism is willful sin. It is an active choice. James refuses to let us write it off as a personality quirk, a cultural habit, or administrative necessity. No. Faith that sees rightly, faith at work… speaks differently, sees differently, thinks differently, listens differently, protects differently, accepts differently, and belongs differently.
Faith at work sees the face differently… it recognizes the face is a summons.
Which brings us to the final few verses:
12. So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty. 13. For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.
The law of liberty is not lawlessness. It is the law fulfilled in Jesus—who takes possession, becomes Lord of, our whole life. It sounds strange to even say, but the gospel places a kind of demand for obedience written on the human heart, as we come to know more and more of God’s will for us. Verse 12 is jarring because it refuses to separate our freedom from our judgment. The free are still judged. If we were not free, there would be no basis for judgement. Our speech and our actions matter. We cannot confess faith in the Lord of glory and then evaluate relationships using a metric of utility, return, and convenience. The law of liberty frees us from the world’s vicious, consumeristic calculus so we can love without partiality, but it also judges whether that freedom has truly begun to shape our lives—our actions, our words. And this is a good thing! In Jesus, Mercy triumphs! In Jesus, the judgement is mercy. Which is precisely why we are called to impartiality, to radical acceptance, and to non-judgement!
Unfortunately, though, many of us still see through judgmental eyes today. We do it when we subtly exclude people based on their race, disability, age, politics, or simply the clothes they are wearing. We avoid. Look the other way. We may not literally say, “Sit under my footstool.” But we decide whose emails get answered. We decide who to sit with—and who not to… We determine whose pain gets the benefit of the doubt, whose complaint is reasonable. We decide whose questions are thoughtful, whose mental illness is handled with patience. We decide whose poverty is judged as irresponsibility, and whose wealth is automatically interpreted as wisdom and prudence.
We should ask ourselves, right now… Whose presence makes me feel important, and whose presence makes me feel burdened? Why?
Verse 13 again:
“Judgment is without mercy to the one who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment.”
Curiously, James uses the specific word mercy rather than the more generic word for love, as a way of saying, perhaps, mercy is the exact form love takes when it confronts suffering. Mercy is the real, practical, pragmatic activity of love.
The triumph of mercy is not mere sentiment. It doesn’t erase the warning, the obligation; but it does allow those caught up in the story of salvation, those united with Christ in the work of God’s mercy to stand under the warning, and to receive its invitation: for a community that has received mercy can become merciful.
Mercy is what happens when judgment stops reducing the face to mere appearance. Faith at work recognizes the depth: the suffering I cannot fully see, dignity I did not bestow, a history—past present and future—I do not control, and a summons from God I do not get to ignore, and mercy moves in as the activity of love. Judgment impatiently says, “not worth my time and attention, not a good ROI.” Mercy says, “this is my neighbor.” Judgment reduces the person to a shallow, superficial, surface. Mercy receives the person before the face of God. Because we now see with eyes of faith, impartial, free, merciful.
Mercy, triumphant, receives the face as a summons. And mercy has a face.
The face of Jesus Christ, the Lord of Glory, who did not come to us with worldly prestige, who was despised and rejected, who was treated as disposable, who was dragged before unjust courts, who was stripped, mocked, and crucified outside the city. And there, in the place of exclusion, the mercy of God was revealed.
[Grab communion elements]
This bread and this cup tell us that mercy has triumphed over judgment. Not because judgment was ignored, but because Christ bore it. And now we who have received that mercy, are free to be merciful in return.
REFLECTION |
Reflection Questions:
• Do I see by the worldly facade, or by the divine Glory?
• Has the mercy I've received become visible over judgment? Do I see it?
• How am I responding to faith at work within me? What would tomorrow look like if I responded to and with the faith at work within me?
CORPORATE CONFESSION & COMMUNION[6] |
(Celebrant)
The table is ready,
here waiting for your arrival.
It is the table of company with Jesus,
and all who love him.
It is the table of sharing,
with the poor of the world,
with who Jesus identified himself.
It is the table of communion with the earth
in which Christ became incarnate.
So come to this table,
you have much faith
and you who would like to have more;
you who have been here often
and you who have not been for a long time;
and you who have tried to follow Jesus,
and you who have failed;
come.
It is Christ who invites us to meet him here; on the day made for us, at the table he prepared for us.
Invite People to the Table to Receive the Communion elements
(ALL)
Loving God,
through your goodness
we have this bread and juice to offer
which has come forth from the earth
and human hands have made.
May we know your presence
in this sharing,
so that we may know your touch
and presence in all things.
We celebrate the life that Jesus has shared
among his family of faith through the centuries,
and shares with us now.
Made one in Christ
and one with each other,
we offer these gifts
and with them ourselves,
a single living act of praise.
Amen.
Song #3 – Kingdom of God by Jon Guerra
Song #4 – Altogether Good by Citizens
BENEDICTION | 2 Corinthians 5:16-21
As we rest in the day made for us, we prepare to enter into the work for which we are made [LIGHT THE CANDLE], remembering…
From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer.
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.
All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation;
that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.
Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
[1] Craig L. Blomberg and Mariam J. Kamell, James, Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2008), Kindle, 106-107.
[2] Douglas J. Moo, James, rev. ed., TNTC (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015),121.
[3] See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).
[4] Moo, 122
[5] Joel Z. Leibo et al., "A Pragmatic View of AI Personhood" (Google DeepMind, 2025), https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26396.
[6] Adapted from Common Prayer: a liturgy for ordinary radicals, 564