VESPERS COMMUNION MEDITATION September 10, 2006 Catherine Knott Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church James 2:1-17   Growing up, I always checked out fairy tale books from the library. My uncle was a librarian and would often look around for the latest edition of the Grimms’ Brothers stories that had been compiled into a collection. There was even a little bookstore not far from where I lived, which was shaped to look like a little Tudor house with a bright green door and which was appropriately called “Black Forest Books.” There they sold many German children’s books, stories of imagination and beautifully crafted illustrations on thick, glossy pages. “King Thrushbeard” was one of those stories that I remember vividly. It sticks with me, maybe in part because it has such clear Christ-like overtones that it sounds like a juicy and inviting complement to James’s letter. Perhaps it comes from a yet-to-be-discovered selection of apocryphal writing, soon to be discussed on a Discovery Channel series. Though no, it is a fairy story, one which I read over and over when I was in kindergarten. King Thrushbeard has all of the elements of a good fairy story to it. There’s this terribly proud princess: haughty and uncertain that she is going to like any man who ever comes by to seek her hand in marriage. She’s the kind of princess who shows up a lot in these stories: spoiled, demanding, and entirely unable to be pleased. Her father, the king, in a great haste, wishes to find her an appropriate husband, even as he knows his daughter is going to reject every possible suitor who comes in from the metropolitan area of Chicago. No banker, CEO, or consultant is going to satiate this gal. No human being will do the trick. In exasperation, the king decides that’s it. The next living male human person to walk on their premises is going to be her husband, no exceptions. So what happens? You can probably guess this part. An old fiddler, some guy who hasn’t bathed in three months, shows up at the door. He probably has warts. She, being an obnoxious princess, isn’t going to want to have anything to do with this guy. However, she has to marry him. No exceptions. So they get married, she kicking and screaming the whole way. She asks one of her servants from her posh castle by the lake to come with them to this guy’s crowded, little one-room apartment on a side of town she’s never seen before. On the way over, they have to walk. No bus, no CTA; they walk. Along the way, she actually recognizes some pretty breathtaking sites. They pass a lovely grove of trees by the lakeshore. “Who does that belong to?” she asks her fiddler husband. “Oh, King Thrushbeard,” he replies. “Gosh,” she replies. “I should have married him. I bet he’s one of those rich guys I rejected. Now I’m stuck with you.” They go a little bit farther and she sees another breathtaking scene, a large pond with ducks. Same question, same answer. The Thrushbeard name just keeps coming up. Finally, they get to the little apartment. She, as a princess, is disgusted. The fiddler asks her to help out with a little housework, since there are no servants to do it. She’s not even sure how to use a dust rag. Her hands are so delicate and princess-like. He asks her to fix him dinner, but she’s disgusted by the look of raw chicken. The list goes on. She burns toast, sets the oven mitts on fire, etc. Well, her husband needs her to work, as both of their incomes will enable them to live. He won’t be able to afford rent with just one paycheck. So he sends her off to work for King Thrushbeard, this time as a kitchen maid. As imagined, it doesn’t go over real well. “What do you mean I have to mop the floor?” she laments to the head cook. “And set the mousetraps?” Time goes on in her illustrious kitchen maid career. Eventually, a big dinner comes up where she has to serve. She attempts to clean herself off, though keeps stealing scraps of food to take back home. As she’s moving around in the main corridor picking up goodies, she comes face to face with this famous King Thrushbeard. Imagine her embarrassment. This is the guy she would have gladly married—and is probably one of her many rejected—and now he sees her stealing his food as one of his servants. “I’m so sorry,” she exclaims, putting back some of the caviar from her pockets. “It’s alright. You know me,” he says calmly. “We got married, remember?” She looks up and sees the face of her husband, the fiddler, in this king in front of her. “What?” She stands amazed, not really sure what to think. “I disguised myself as a fiddler. I wanted you to learn not to treat people with partiality. You needed to learn to refrain from judgment before I could publicly announce our wedding.” I realize we don’t usually see this pop up in the apocryphal writings, but it seems to be getting to the second chapter of James nicely. The second chapter of James begins with a very clear address: “Do you, with your acts of partiality, really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?” The Greek seems to stick to that word. Partiality. Favoritism. Judgment. So we look at ourselves as we read this passage. How do we show partiality? Favoritism? The text gives an account that is all over scripture, the distinction between rich and poor. Obviously it’s something we can’t run away from, no matter how hard we try—in scripture and in our everyday lives. We judge one another based on many distinctions: race, class, education, socioeconomics, gender. As Christ has warned us again and again, we need to be very careful when we make these kinds of assumptions, for the truth is, we don’t really know that which distinguishes us from our neighbor. Like the audience of the book of James, the princess in our earlier story saw someone she thought to be lesser than and judged accordingly. Who was the better person in the story in God’s eyes? King Thrushbeard, better known as that guy by the window she wanted so badly to judge and reject. Naturally she was as happy as a lark when he turned out to be king, but knowing those Grimm Brothers and their penchant for Christian allegory, we are able to look into this story even closer. King Thrushbeard is a kind of Christ figure in that story. He is the king of all in sight, in all of the land, sea and sky, but she has no idea. He comes to us as a fiddler, as a vagabond. Christ Jesus, as we recall, did not have a lofty position in his life on earth. The God of all things preferred environments that would have the rest of us scratching our heads. There’s delicious irony, here. A woman is judging he who really plays the Christ figure in the fairy tale. We’d all look a little ridiculous if we started ranting to God, proclaiming judgment on the Divine, though I admit, it’s easy to do. The truth is, the concept of us proclaiming judgment and showing partiality towards anyone is ridiculous in God’s eyes. This is another theme we see showing up in scripture perpetually: “Take the log out of your own eye before removing the speck in your neighbor’s.” “Whatever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.” In our fairy tale, when the princess said rotten things to the fiddler husband, she was also saying it to the King. When we show partiality to one, we are abandoning the God in the other. This is not all merely ridiculous, though; there is transgression involved. Further on we read in our text that he “who does not commit adultery but murders has transgressed the law.” We might look at this example and think that the two sins are different from one another, though when one is violated, the law as a whole has been transgressed. It is a steep charge, clearly, though we must also remember these words arrive alluding to the same God as found in the person of Jesus Christ, who says in the book of Matthew, “Be perfect as your father is perfect.” Now, of course, we are human. By our very humanity we are not perfect. However, we are to look towards such perfection and examine closely all those things that we do to transgress our God, neighbor, and one another. It’s pretty clear—judgment of others comes quite easily for us. So what do we do when we lean towards judgment, proclaiming assumptions on each other or ourselves when they are but assumptions? Remember that there is one royal law that is to be followed and that is the law of God found in perfection through the person of Jesus Christ. Someone may have many rings and an enormous bank account, or perhaps is street savvy and well respected by all around, but no one, no one gets to be the one we follow, with the exception of Christ. No one gets to worship money, fame, education, or power. Those are not part of the royal law. The one to whom we show partiality is our God, who writes in his law, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” That is the creed to which we put the highest priority. And when we do that, our faith is also authentic. To claim that “faith without works is dead” is to understand the idea that when we proclaim that we are going to put all stock into something but then go about our usual activities of judgment and favoritism, we’re not really being faithful, are we. Faith is an enormous jump into something risky. When we are faithful to the Lord God, we decide that we are going to love with great vigor. We decide that we are going to risk unabashedly. We also have decided that we are going to be merciful to one another. This, of course, means mercy is extended to all people, not just those whom we love or those who are going to give us a good job offer. This means instead that we are going to be merciful as God is merciful, recognizing that whatever we do unto one another or even ourselves, we do unto our Lord Jesus Christ. And if we’re still attempting to look for tales, stories, or biblical evidence to cite this claim, let us then conclude with words found in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians: “There is no longer Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for we are all one in Christ Jesus.” Thanks be to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, world without end. Amen.