As we see the divine gaze in the human mirror of each other, we accept the unconditional absolution and love of God and the desire to do better in offering that same love to all those around us. We need to change our ways of being and seeing, and then we need to make amends.
Silence. There may be as many forms of it as there are words in a language. And I’m beginning to wonder whether all sorts of silences, not just the reverent and prayerful ones, are worth paying attention to when we come across them in scripture.
In many ways, the cross is a symbol for Ubuntu. The four points of the cross can be seen as arrows pointing outward to embrace and connect Jesus and all humanity in all directions, south, north, east, and west. The four points can also be seen with arrows pointing inward to acknowledge that we each bring unique gifts to Jesus and to each other, and that we are somehow more because of each gift, and more importantly, because of each person.
So James looked around. And he saw fellow Christians, who said that they believed in the radical leveling of humanity in the way of Jesus, where there was supposedly no longer Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free. And yet here were Jesus’s people arranging themselves according to the same old criteria the world had always used. He could tell by their seating charts and the deference they paid to certain kinds of people who dressed in certain ways that they didn’t believe what they said they believed. It’s not that you have to do good works to prove you have faith. It’s just that, no matter what you say you believe, what you actually believe will always win out. Always. So all James is really asking is that people stop deceiving themselves. Start there. With the truth your life is telling all the time.
The Song of Songs and Reverend Al teach us that there is an intersubjectivity to our lives and that we are all in this together. The Song of Songs reminds us that God longs to relish that kind of connection with us, and yearns for us to relish it with each other. And God longs to end our anxieties, to fill us with hope, and to inspire us to be that hope.