A sermon by the Rev. Dr. Ray Pickett, LSPS Associate Professor of New Testament, given in Christ Chapel on October 24, 2006

St. James of Jerusalem – 1 Corinthians 15:1-11

Today we commemorate St. James of Jerusalem , the brother of Jesus and first leader of the Jerusalem church. We don’t know a lot about James. There are a few passing references to Jesus’ family in the Gospels that suggests your basic family tensions and dysfunctions. In every time and every culture brothers will be brothers. The best fights I have ever had have been with my brothers. It’s not difficult for me to imagine a budding sibling rivalry between Jesus and James as young men. Let’s be honest, I don’t know that I would want Jesus as brother. I doubt that anyone would ever feel adequate or up to the task. What’s interesting is that James, who seems to be conspicuously absent from Jesus’ rag tag band of followers in the Gospels, usurps Peter as the chief disciple soon after the death and resurrection of Jesus. I wish we knew more about the evolution of James’ from brother to spiritual leader.

It is ironic that most of the little we know about James comes from Paul. I doubt that James would be thrilled by the fact that we know him mostly through Paul’s eyes. Although the apostle to the circumcised and the apostle to the nations came to terms and appeared to have mutual respect for one another, they also seemed to have different conceptions of what the Spirit was doing. And yet what binds them together according to 1 Corinthians 15 is an encounter with the risen Jesus. We can only speculate about the impact of this experience on James. Was he a disinterested observer of Jesus’ renewal movement who got involved only after seeing the risen Lord, or had he been involved all the while only to be skyrocketed to prominence after the death and resurrection? Perhaps all we can say is that James the Just, as he was known, was a righteous and pious Jew with hopes and dreams for him and his people, and those hopes and dreams were drowned in a sea of grief after Jesus’ execution. But his life took a new direction and his hopes a new shape when he witnessed for himself the power of the ONE who, as Paul puts it, “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist”.

We know more about the impact of the resurrection on Paul than James. He refers to it frequently in his letters, but here in 1 Corinthians 15 he says something very interesting about his own encounter with the risen Jesus: “ Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me”. Translators have softened the force of Paul’s remark by translating the term e;ktrwma as “untimely born” when it is most often used to denote an abortion or miscarriage. Paul probably has in mind the story in Numbers where Miriam and Aaron speak against Moses, and Miriam is stricken with scales. Aaron pleads with Moses, “do not let her be like one stillborn ( e;ktrwma ), whose flesh is half consumed when it comes out of her mother’s womb”.

The term evokes a child gruesomely disfigured as it emerges from the mother -- not a pretty picture! Paul sees himself as that child. For Paul the resurrection of Jesus is inextricably tied to his own new birth. Although we are inclined to romanticize birth, and hence re-birth, the truth of the matter is that birth is always messy and painful business. The term e;ktrwma betrays something of Paul’s own tortured self-understanding as well as the new life born out of struggle and pain. The risen Jesus energizes Paul to become something other than he was, and to engage in the work of grace on behalf of others who viewed themselves as disfigured. By the grace of God I am what I am, and apart from the grace of God I am what I am not.

Paul’s own story of resurrection is a compelling one. However, it is unfortunate that when we speak of resurrection we are so fixated on the officially sanctioned appearances of the risen Christ in our sacred texts that we lose sight of the ongoing reality of resurrection. In focusing on those first encounters with the risen Christ we relegate resurrection to the past. But resurrection always orients us not to the past, but to the presence of the future, to metamorphosis – to what we are becoming. It’s great that the risen Christ appeared to the apostles and more than 500 people. I am happy for them. But what about the other believers in Corinth, in Jerusalem, Ephesus, Rome, Antioch, and so on who never actually saw the risen Jesus and who nonetheless found their own tattered lives being raised from the trash heap of death and despair? What about the Corinthian women prophets who encountered the risen Jesus through the power of the Spirit? What about those slaves who, though regarded as non-persons, as socially dead, were raised from the waters of baptism with a new sense of dignity and freedom denied them by society? What about their masters who now regarded them as sisters and brothers in Christ?

And what about us? Who among us will bear witness to the resurrection of Christ, not by means of argument from texts and traditions but rather by recounting our own messy and painful rebirths? What if instead of trying to persuade the impious that once upon a time God raised Jesus from the dead, we mustered the courage to testify how we too have passed from death to life, from despair to hope, from anxiety to trust, from being cynical to concerned, from being passive, or passive aggressive, to acting in love? What if we were to truly grasp the gravity of our baptism as a real sharing in the death and resurrection of Christ? What if, like Paul, by the grace of God we were to realize that the things we thought we were and the things we thought we wanted were a sort of self-deception that impedes us from communion with the Spirit of Life and with one another.

The first witnesses of the resurrection, which includes a lot more people than the apostles, believed that the resurrection of Christ initiated a transformation that encompassed the whole creation. But how dare we imagine the new creation without reckoning with our own metamorphosis, the re-creation, the dying and rising of our own selves birthed in pain and struggle with one another. When Paul says, “by the grace of God I am what I am, and God’s grace toward me was not in vain”, he intimates that the divine grace that calls forth our new existence requires cooperation on our part. That is to say, it is possible for these experiences of grace not to take effect if we fail to engage in the labor of grace. In other places he talks about this in terms of “co-crucifixion” with Christ, a new identity focused on Christ whose work of self-giving and loving is “for me”. This is the hard work of grace which is a never-ending pattern of relinquishing, receiving, and the practice of loving.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was arguably the greatest philosopher of the 20 th century. He was a mystic and in many respects a tortured soul, an e;ktrwma . What he said of Christianity could just as well be said of resurrection, namely that it is “not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and what will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in a human life”. Resurrection is what happens when we yield to the divine work of grace in the world, and in our own lives.

In the old days when I was in seminary, every one was exposed to Albert Schweitzer’s writings on the New Testament, especially The Quest for the Historical Jesus. The last paragraph of that book is one of the most famous and elegant ever written. This is how he describes the way we continued to encounter Jesus: “He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old by the lakeside, he came to those men who knew him not. He speaks to us the same words, "Follow thou me!", and sets us to the tasks which he has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey him, whether they be wise or simple, he will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in his fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience who he is.” I pray that on this day and everyday you would meet the risen One who is always ever our midwife birthing us into a new way of being and living!