Church on Morgan
Does God Have Favorites?
[MUSIC PLAYING] From Church on Morgan, a United Methodist congregation whose desire is to be a reminder of the beauty of God and each other. This podcast is a collection of Sunday teachings inspired by the revised Common Lectionary and recorded weekly in Raleigh, North Carolina. And now a moment of silence before this episode begins. [MUSIC PLAYING] God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight. Lord, our rock, and our Redeemer, amen. This morning's scripture lesson comes from the book of James. And we'll be looking at an excerpt from the second chapter. You can follow along in your bulletin or just listen. But here now the word of the Lord. This is what James writes. He says, "My brothers and sisters, believers in our glorious Lord, Jesus Christ, you must not show favoritism." Suppose a man comes into your meeting, wearing a gold ring and fine clothes. And a poor man in filthy old clothes also comes in. If you show special attention to the man wearing the clothes, and you say, here's a good seat for you. But you say to the poor man, why don't you stand over there or sit on the floor by my feet? Have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my dear brothers and sisters, has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him. But you've dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who are exploiting you? Are they not the ones who are dragging you into court? Are they not the ones who are blaspheming the noble name of him to whom you belong? If you really keep the royal law found in scripture, love your neighbor as yourself, you're doing right. But if you show favoritism, you sin, and you're convicted by the law as lawbreakers, for whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking it all. So what good is it? My brothers and my sisters. If someone claims to have faith but has no deeds, can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. And if one of you says to them, go in peace. Keep warm and well fed. But there's nothing about their physical needs. What good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it's not accompanied by action, is dead. Friends, this is the word of God for us, the people of God. Thanks be to God. Well, give it to James. I mean, he comes direct. First verse, brothers and sisters, people who claim to have Jesus as their Lord, you must not show favoritism. You must not show favoritism. The favoritism is an interesting word. It's like we all obviously immediately know what it means. We've heard it before, but I was thinking about it. It isn't like if they used to do those thought things where you'd put a document in and the words it sees the most are the largest and the ones are smaller, right? I think if you could do that of my conversations over the last couple of years, I don't even know favoritism would ever hit the radar. It's just a word that has not been getting its work. Maybe it's a word I've been wondering if it's a word that we sort of grow out of. I know who does think a lot about favorites, children. In fact, I wonder if favoritism is the first injustice that we feel or fear in this life? Is this not the beginning for us? That even as a small child, two, three, four years old, you look around at the world and there's this internal instinct that says I get the sense in this house, in this room, in this preschool, in this whatever, that someone else is being treated differently than I'm being treated. And it's not fair. My kids are teenagers now, but I don't think there's ever been a season where it wasn't an ongoing debate of who's the favorite child in our house. And I gladly participate. For three months, I'm like, oh, no. Stella is clearly the favorite. And I think we can all agree. Levi, surely. You see this. And then just when they get comfortable in their roles, we'll be like, I hate to break it to you. We had a meeting, and Levi, you are now absolutely the favorite. There's just-- this is what they obsess about. It might be the first injustice that we feel or we fear. And in many ways, I'm not sure if it's not favoritism, if it's not the root of every ism in this life. I mean, to think about it, like, what is racism or sexism or ableism or any other ism than a moment when we begin to assign value to human beings and say that some humans matter more than other humans. Perhaps favoritism is the operating system that drives so many of these terrible systems that we all suffer from. Last year, our church rented out a movie theater at Alamo Draft House. And about 100 of us went to see Origin, the movie that was made as an adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson's book, Cast. And it broke my heart in some really fresh ways that it's still hard to get over. And if you didn't see it, it's on Amazon Prime. If you don't have Amazon Prime, I'll give you the church password. It is so worth watching. But her thesis is something very similar that, especially in America, sometimes, and depending on where your social location is, you might get stuck in one specific ism. And if you miss that all of them are being animated by the same broken way of relating to other human beings, you can sort of lose your way a little bit. She calls it cast. This was her kind of placeholder for favoritism, that there's a sense in which you get a bunch of humans in a room. And since the beginning of time, we will find ways to rank each other, to assign more or less value to human beings. And it can be on the most arbitrary of kind of details. But we will find a way to figure out who has the most value. And she said the thing that's most insidious about this is that when you're living inside of an ism like this, when you're living inside of cast, when you grow up in a world that sort of nurtures favoritism, over time, it all begins to feel actually quite normal. And it's invisible. It's this long set of behaviors, and reactions, and systems, and laws, and rules that just add up to life as we know it, that you wouldn't otherwise see. But it's the architecture of our society. It's the structure that holds the whole thing together. It's how every moment is negotiated. She says it's like your bones and your body. Though you can't see them, it holds your body together. And the only way to ever make sense of cast, favoritism, any of the isms, is it like a doctor? You have to somehow find a way to get an x-ray of our collective body and to hold it up to the light so that you can see how these things are all held together. And so James-- I was thinking about this week, man. Sometimes we read-- in this room, we'll read excerpts from letters from the Apostle Paul. And people got mixed feelings about that. But one of the early feelings, regardless of how you feel about Paul and some of his perspectives, most people will just be like, he's just sort of hard to follow sometimes. The stuff's so abstract. There's so much big, heady ideas. Like, why can't they just make it plain, talk like normal people? Then you come to a book like James. He talks like a very normal person. You're like, I could use a little more abstraction. I'd prefer if we got a little looser with this for a moment. But he goes, I'm going to give you an example of what I mean when I say favoritism. And I want you to hold on to that. I'm going to give you an example. One example-- we could look at a bunch. But this morning, I feel like we should take our cue from James and at least entertain the example he's giving us. And it's going to be a bit of a stretch, OK? Like, it always is. We are reading an ancient letter that was written 2,000 years ago in a different language than ours in a culture completely different. And so I'm going to ask you to put on kind of your imagination caps for a moment. And just imagine-- this is what he's offering as an example for his community 2,000 years ago. But just try to apparently 2,000 years ago in this other side of the world of people so very unlike us, they were struggling with this thing where apparently people were being treated differently according to their financial circumstances. I know it's hard to imagine. But they were treating people with a higher net worth better than they were treating people with a lower one. And so that's the example of that community's wrestling with. Which made me kind of begin to wonder. I mean, I know that sounds really strange, but could it be possible that our culture would also wrestle with something similar? Some 2,000 years later, is it possible that we might sometimes treat wealthy people differently than we treat poor people? And I don't-- here's just a couple of things I've noticed. And it might just be me. But have you ever been in a room with some really wealthy people? Have you ever noticed how folks often act like they're funnier than they are? Like they laugh at their jokes in a way that they wouldn't laugh maybe at your jokes? You ever noticed how they people act like they're more interesting than they are? Like we just-- we keep leaning in and asking more and more questions of wealthy people in a way that maybe we wouldn't of others. You ever notice how with some-- maybe it's just me. But I've been in meetings, in rooms, in dinners, and stuff, where when it comes to people with significant financial means that we just-- we kind of give them the benefit of the doubt. Like I've been in rooms before with folks who had significant financial means who would say something that like a normal person would quickly and violently get canceled for. But given their bank account, we sort of go surely that's not what they meant. Have you ever noticed that people with significant financial means kind of seem to always have people ready to help them? If their kid gets in trouble, if something were to happen, they got in trouble with the law. There's just a way that this thing sort of kind of fixes itself. There's people who are quick and ready to rally and to support and to figure it out in a way that may not be true for other people. Somebody I've been listening to-- I'm just showing my receipts so that you can mount a good argument against me. But one of the people I've been listening to I've found interesting as of late is this guy Scott Galloway. He's a professor at NYU. And I heard him say this thing not long ago where he said, "In America, to be rich is to be loved. In America, to be rich is to be loved." It seems to me it might not be that different some 2,000 years later, that we may actually treat people with wealth differently than we treat others. Now, this is a part of our story collectively. To get into minutia bit, I'm pretty proud of it. I'm proud of us, Church, I'm Morgan. I'm beyond us. I'm sort of proud of myself. For 10 years, as we've been going, we've tried really hard to resist this because one of the major complaints people have about the Church, like any institution or organized anything, is the way that it favors the wealthy. And so early on, we tried to set up some things to keep that from happening. For example, none of our pastoral staff see what anyone gives. And people find that hard to believe. I literally do not know. What I do know is there will be surprises. That there are people in the room that you assume are writing massive checks who haven't given a dollar and forever, and there are people who you think are giving nothing who are giving plenty. I knew that from previous working ministry where I did see stuff. But I knew early on, I didn't want to know. I didn't want to treat somebody differently based on how much they financially gave. It wasn't about me and that everyone in this place should receive the same. We made a decision to stay blind to that. And it's a hard one to keep at times, but we've committed to that. We made a decision early on that we weren't going to name any of our buildings after significant donors. It's why this place is called Nash Hall and not like Morgan Hall. Right? I came up in religious spaces that did that. And what does that mean about the significance of the value of the people who worship and gather? It may happen everywhere else in the world, but should it happen here? No, so we've stayed blind. We haven't named it. And apparently, I'll just let you in on some inside baseball. Apparently, one of my weaknesses as your leader, pastor as a church, is I'm not that great at developing large donors. In fact, I have a tendency to push them away. And this is a legitimate challenge for us as a church. Sincerely, right? I'm proud that we have pushed back as a church on many of these things. I'm proud that for 10 years, we have gathered with brand new people to our church for a thing called Welcome to Church. It used to be at Capitol Club. Now, it happens in this back corner with Bright Spot Donuts. We say a few things, and then we entertain any wide open question. And we say, bring the hard ones. We are here to listen and to hear you. And we think your voice matters. What is it about this place that you love or is rubbing against you or what are you seeing or noticing or whatever? And I can tell you, I am proud of this. That you are a community who is tuned into favoritism, into caste, into the isms of this life. And there has rarely been a gathering like that of 20 people or more in 10 years, over 1,000 people, where somebody didn't courageously raise their hand at a circle of strangers and say, can you explain to me why it's so white in that room? What's underneath that? What structures and systems are making that happen? There hasn't been a single gathering like that where someone didn't raise their hand and say, can you talk to me about women in leadership and female representation in leadership and on our board and our staff? And how does that work? There has never been a moment that I've gathered with our folks, with people like you, where that ism hasn't been challenged around sexism. And increasingly, I'm grateful that people are asking us hard questions about ableism and how it is that, are we thinking about all abilities and all people when we gather on a Sunday morning? You know what? Not a single person in 10 years and over 1,000 attendees of those gatherings has ever asked me. Where are all the poor people? Why are there no poor people at church on Morgan or at least seem to be very few? I've never been asked that question. I've never been asked about the economic representation on our board or our staff. No one's once asked me, do we have lower income and middle income people in leadership and on our board? Never once been asked that question. Do you think it's possible that not just some people 2,000 years ago when some people outside this building, maybe even some people inside this building, occasionally treat people with wealth different than they treat those who are poor? Like if we hold the x-ray up to the light and we take a quick look, this is really hard for me to admit. I just sat with it this week and I was like, hmm, do I ever, before I could finish the question, the examples just start pouring in. Like just flood. I'll give you one of the least embarrassing, which is shameful. In our current parenting journey right now, our kids are at the season of life where they're choosing their own friends. I got to curate this for a good long run and it was fantastic. I got to pick the parents and the kids. They now pick the kids I get stuck with the parents, maybe, you know. And when my kids, and I know how much of our life hangs on who we hang with. And when my kids come to me and say, I made a new friend at school and they invited me this weekend to go to their beach house. Or my new friend whose dad is the CEO of whatever, or whose mom runs that law firm. Is interested in having us over for a birthday party or whatever. There's a bit, there's this thing inside of me that's like, yeah, yeah, more of that, more of that. Do that. Go sign them up. I'd like to meet these parents. And one of my children says, hey, my friend at schools invited me to a sleepover. And it's a single mom. And subsidized housing. I've got questions. I want to ask a whole lot more questions that I apparently wanted to ask of this other parent two seconds ago. Can we just do it at our house? Can we, right? I know that's crappy. But it's one of like 100 small moments in behaviors of this invisible thing that we live in. Favouritism, caste, right? The value certain people more than other people. And I think, I realized this week, this might be one of the reasons why Jesus so frequently centers children. Because there's just moral clarity to it. When you put a poor child in that situation, I'm like, what did this kid do? That my child can't hang out with them. How is this their decision? How is this their choice? Once they become adults, we all get much more comfortable with it. But the second you take a child and put them in the middle of a situation, it's like, ooh, things get clear. We can feel it. You know what the clearest indicator today is of what your children will make at the age of 30? What you make? Georgetown University did the study recently where they found that the most talented, disadvantaged children have a lower chance of financial and academic success than the least talented, advantaged children. The most talented, disadvantaged, have a lower chance of success in their career than the least talented of advantaged kids. This is why sometimes Professor G says, I mean, these kids just should have made better decisions about what family they were born into. I mean, think about it. You guys made some really great decisions when you decided to be born in the USA in an urban center near universities to be given, I mean, some of you made the great decision to be born men, some of you were born white. You had a whole bunch of really good decisions you made on the way to your sort of success, right? When I read that stat, and this is the part that's like, oh, it's so painful and ironic and difficult for me at this midway point in my life, but when I read that stat, that the most talented, disadvantaged kids have a lower chance of success than the least talented advantage kids, I was like, I've seen that story a hundred times because I'm a kid who grew up in a trailer park, right? So like, I know that story, like in my gut, I know that. I also think the part that's painful about this is that often those of us who've been dealt the best cards we rarely see that we can. We just chalk it up to our hustle and our effort and our whatever, right? It's Jesus to say, those who have ears to hear, let 'em hear. I think this is why in America, this American dream is so powerful and emotional and dangerous. It's why we love that one of our presidential candidates right now worked for McDonald's because if that's true, then surely there's no favoritism. It's these anecdotes, like for some of us to go my God, you could work at McDonald's and become the president, it feels literally like salvation, redemption. This is somebody who at some point wasn't allowed to hang out with other people's kids and now they're gonna run the whole country. This was someone whose parents needed to be checked in on a background check and whatever before there could be a play date, who's now? And so we go, my God, that's just this shy of salvation and what's dangerous about that is, these are the kind of stories that we tell so that we don't have to look at the x-ray, so that we can assume that these factors don't actually work in our country. See, we got somebody from McDonald's who's all the way there. That's a high school teacher. This is clearly about how you show up in the world. So what do you think? Should we eat the rich? (sighs) No. And I'd need you to hear me, a fluent church on Morgan family. That's not what this text is about. James is not writing about wealth. He's not writing about the dangers of wealth. And there's places where you can go that it gets tricky. And we should remember that James was a brother of Jesus whose mother Mary sang songs to him like, "Over-throw the rich, son, overthrow the rich," right? So, but that's not what we're reading today. That's not what this is about. This is about favoritism. This is about treating certain people differently than you treat other people on arbitrary factors. And one example he gives us is the way that class and wealth works. This is not about wealth, it's about favoritism. And the one thing I think many of us have learned over the last five to 10 years of waking up to the realities of the world that we live in is that any form of favoritism, caste, racism, sexism, ableism, the rest of it, that it doesn't just rob certain people of their humanity, it robs all of us of our humanity. So, I've never been rich in the insane standards of our country, I'm clearly rich on the global perspective, but I've never been rich in the ways that, but I have been favored in other ways. I mean, I'm the favorite in my family among four kids, and if my siblings are listening, you know that's true. (audience laughs) I'm the favorite in my family. I am a straight white male who's been favored in a lot of other ways, but you know the way the closest metaphor analogy I have for what this might do even among the wealthy. The kind of maybe most extreme form of favoritism that I've been privileged by, is this job I'm doing right now? I get invited to a lot of great parties that I probably shouldn't get invited to. When I'm sitting at a table with people who aren't related to me, folks act like I'm way more interesting than I am. I stand on the stage and I say things and the room laughs, and I know if I said the same thing at good nights, I'd get booed. (audience laughs) If my kids were in trouble, if I was in trouble, an army of people would come to bail me out and do everything just shy of illegal to set it right. I know what that's like. Here's what I'm also clear about, 20 years in, watching people exit this game. And I don't say this is not about me, I'm making a point, hang with me. But the day that I hang up, the stole, when I'm no longer the pastor of this place, it's all gone. I'm not invited to those parties anymore. Nobody's handing me their beach house. I no longer get the courtside tickets at that great game. I'm no longer interesting at the dinner party and no one laughs at my jokes. It's as gone as the position. I know this is also true for people of wealth. I have some friends who live that world. That they know that the day their money's gone, if the money was gone tomorrow, so would all the invites, so would all the friends, so would all the connections and communities and help and handouts, all of that disappears as well. That's the real tragedy of ism, is that when we decide that certain people are worth more than other people, according to this arbitrary thing, and we all chase that thing, even if it means using or being used by other people, if you're not careful, you will wake up at the end of your life and realize you were never valued at all for who you actually are. That we all have just been participating in this game of using and being used by each other, using and using each other's kids and homes and opportunities and network to get something for itself, but to never actually be valued or seen. And I've told you all of this this morning to remind you of this simple good news. God has no favorites. God has no favorites. Jesus ate with the wealthy and the poor. He ate with men and women, with Jews and Gentiles. There's no first class ticket or status in the kingdom of God. You are seen and valued for who you are, and as the people of God, we've been set free from that nonsense, from all favoritism and forms of isms, that as he says three times, brothers and sisters, brothers and sisters, brothers and sisters, every single one of us on this planet has been made in the image of God, and we have been born into the same family through baptism. And we are being challenged to treat each other that way. I was trying to imagine what this might look like, and this is kind of a crappy example, but it's the best one I got. I went to like emotional rehab a couple years ago. It's kind of, we've been thinking about it lately. Some folks here have mentioned this place before, a place called Onsite, it's wonderful outside of Nashville. I was burned out, broken, whatever. I went there for a week and they helped put me back together. And Onsite is kind of famous for serving VIP clients. So like famous country stars go there, models go there, executives of big Fortune 500, Fortune 100 companies go there, right? And so when you arrive at Onsite for your week of this group therapy experience, the first thing they tell you is you're not allowed to talk about what you do. So nobody can tell anybody what their job career or position is, right? But everybody knows there are freaking rich, important billionaires in the circle right now. And so what ended up happening for a week, what we started with at the beginning is you don't know which person next to you is the important person, it could be me. I could be some billionaires trust fund kid. You don't know. I could be like the, I was imagining the first day, I was like, what do they think I'm like an incredible, like maybe I'm an artist, like a thing you're thinking, what'd I, what a letdown. In fact, I'll tell you on the last day we get to come clean and I'll tell you someone shouted in my face when I told them what I do. But what was amazing about that was for seven days we didn't know who was important and not important so we just treated every single person as important. I'm not saying quit being your nice, generous, fun self with the wealthy people in your life. I'm saying let's just do the same thing for the poor folks too. Like what a dignified human experience that would be if we greeted every single person who walked in here with the same way we would, if there was the person that someone whispers in my ear and goes, they could pay this place off and not feel it, right. If we were that charitable, that generous, that kind, if we gave people the same benefit of the doubt, if we laughed at each other's terrible jokes and leaned in and asked more questions, you're so interesting, tell me more. If we did that for every single person, this is what the kingdom of God looks like. This is what we're being invited into. May we have the courage to look at the systems and behaviors that shape our life and not only rob others of their humanity but us of our own as well. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Thank you for joining today. If this episode has been meaningful to you, would you take a moment to share it with a friend? To support this ministry or learn more about our community, visit us at churchonmorgan.org. (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) [BLANK_AUDIO]