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Jakobus 2: 14-17, 25-26

Dutch version

Broeders en zusters, wat heeft het voor zin als iemand zegt te geloven, maar hij handelt er niet naar? Zou dat geloof hem soms kunnen redden? Als een broeder of zuster nauwelijks kleren heeft en elke dag eten tekortkomt, en een van u zegt dan: ‘Het ga je goed! Kleed je warm en eet smakelijk!’ zonder de ander te voorzien van de eerste levensbehoeften - wat heeft dat voor zin? Zo is het ook met geloof: als het zich niet daadwerkelijk bewijst, is het dood. (…) Werd niet ook Rachab, de [sekswerker], rechtvaardig verklaard om wat ze deed, toen ze de verkenners ontving en langs een andere weg liet vertrekken? Zoals het lichaam dood is zonder de ziel, zo is ook geloof zonder daden dood.

English version

Brothers and sisters, what good is it if someone says he believes, but he does not act on it? Could that faith maybe save him? If a brother or sister has hardly any clothes and is short of food every day, and one of you then says, “Good luck! Dress warmly and eat well!” without providing the other person with the basic necessities of life - what good does that do? So it is with faith: if it does not actually prove
itself, it is dead. (...) Was not Rahab, the [sex worker], also declared righteous because of what she did, when she received the messengers and allowed them to leave by another route? Just as the body is dead without the soul, so also faith without deeds is dead.

Speech

So I chose this bible text for our church service for a couple of reasons and I want to chat about that a little bit.

For the last three months we have been reading these violent and aggressive texts by Henricus Carolinus van Byler. You have just heard one about ‘rightness ’, there will be two more texts read, about ‘rightness’ and ‘nature’. Reading these texts was quite heavy stuff.

One of the things that stood out to me was how this text initially felt very distant to me: the language and the spelling is old. I mean, it’s written almost three hundred years ago and you can feel that.

But the more time we spent reading these texts, the more they started to feel contemporary. Through the appearance of the texts, through the aesthetics that made it feel old, ideas came popping through that were very recognizable.

Basically all the fearful imagery that conservative rightwing parties are creating of us queer people right now, were there. Including the intersections of queerphobia with racism, white supremacy and xenophobia. The basic structure of these systems is still the same as back then. So there is a direct line between this book and the times we’re living in now.

This bible text that we just read, from Jakobus 2 or James in English, was one of the texts cited by van Byler. It’s quite ironic that he quotes this text, in which a sex worker, Rahab, is referenced as a positive example, as an authority, as someone to follow. Of course, on the same page he condemns sexwork as something that belongs to the devil. But it shows not only contemporary texts written from queer perspectives, but also old texts that inspired van Byler himself, speak against his dehumanizing rhetoric. That’s just something I found interesting and I think we need to be careful with: when it comes to the christian tradition there have alway been ways of weaponizing it into something oppressive, but there have also always been ways of working with it towards liberation.

The final reason I chose this text for today is because of its emphasis on doing something. The text says that having faith is not enough, it needs to translate into practice. And I think this is very urgent right now, in our current political context. We all have things we believe in, things that hold value for us, that we really need to keep fighting for if we ever want to see them true. And it’s just really not enough anymore to only think and talk about these things. We need to organize and get together in order to create a livable world for all, starting with a free Palestine.

When i think of our reading group it gives me hope when it comes to this. We all came from different backgrounds, culturally and spiritually, and found ways of being together with these differences. The sharing of our stories, our bruises, our pain, but also the sharing of beauty and desires, changed something. It literally mattered: as in, it changed our way of being together, the way we related to each other. So yeah, I guess that’s all I wanted to say: let’s keep showing up to this kind of work and look for unexpected collaborations, working together towards a world full of justice and liberation. <3