Thursday, September 17, 2015

James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a

Year B - Pentecost +17 or Energy to Witness 17
September 20, 2015


Wisdom from above and cravings from within is a model worthy of Paul in all its dualistic majesty. At least one way we have of experiencing this reverses the model so we find wisdom is our natural state and what visits us from above/beyond are all those not-us temptations. Neither of these move us along as there is always one more source of blame.

Another way of talking about this is simply to draw near. May above and within draw near to one another.

A measure of this drawing near is how we attend to the vulnerable (including those aspects of our own life that have been and remain vulnerable to discounting and discarding). In days of yore the mantra for this was “widows and orphans”. In today’s world with Social Security and a variety of more and less successful “safety nets” there are a host of substitutes. One going on in my neck of the woods regards homelessness (internal refugees within our capitalist/maximized-profit economy and class/caste culture). In the gospel pericope we might have Jesus setting a homeless person in the midst of privilege-debating disciples.

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