Adult Bible Study Online

Honoring all people

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Lesson text: James 2:1-13
By: Omar Eby
Email: ebyo@emu.edu

“I have been so busy building my church that I have not cared about the poor,” Rick Warren told pastors in Kigali, Rwanda, and Central Africa. “I have sinned and I am sorry.” (“The New Evangelicals,” The New Yorker, June 20, 2008, p. 30).

One applauds this pastor of Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, and author of The Purpose-Driven Life. One rejoices with his follow-up letter to a network of 136,000 pastors, urging them “to put pressure on the Bush administration to increase foreign aid, provide debt relief, and reform trade rules to help the global poor.” Such proclamations by leading evangelicals makes my spiritual spine tingle.

But still I loath an attempt to lead again a Sunday school class on a lesson about wealth and poverty. I, a solidly entrenched member of the comfortable middle-class North American Mennonite family, feel like a fraud. Some of us seem heartless, willfully ignorant about the poor of the world, and defensive about our McMansions.

We declare that our wealth is God’s blessing. We resist being informed about our corporate, capitalistic enterprises in which we’ve invested our God-given monies. We say nothing about the enormous profits of oil companies and their multimillion dollar payments to corporate leaders.

We Americans can get very defensive when our private medical practices are compared to the socialized medical care of our Canadian neighbors. We toss off with laughter the pharmaceutical companies’ ceaseless bombardment about erectile dysfunction, sleep aids, and arthritis creams, saying nothing about the multimillions (or is it billions?) spent on advertising, while millions are without medical coverage. Only Jesus could say, “The poor you will have always with you (Matthew 26:11).” Would these be examples of “specific problems of social and economic partiality that exist”—as queried by Adult Bible Study writer, Reta Halteman Finger (p. 67)?

I am further heartened to read in The New Yorker article that 85 evangelical leaders and megachurch pastors signed the Evangelical Climate Initiative statement, which said in part: “Millions of people could die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors.”

“Honor all people; don’t discriminate,” James in essence writes. But then declares that God has the right to discriminate: “God chose those who are poor . . . to inherit the kingdom” (v. 5). Still, that does not scare us North American Mennonites who are rich in the eyes of our brothers and sisters in Zimbabwe and those on our Indian/Native reservations/communities.

This message relates to the Adult Bible Study. For additional information on Adult Bible Study or Adult Bible Study Teacher, send email to info@mpn.net. To order either publication call Mennonite Publishing Network at 1 800 245-7894.