In the Letter of James this week we hear of the importance of showing the same impartiality to others that God shows to us. If God doesn’t make distinctions between rich and poor, neither should we.

Some folks presume everything that happens in church is a result of Father’s whims. Father wants to wear green today! Father feels like reading from Mark! The reality is that the universal church is quite specific about each season and every Sunday, from colors and readings to themes and hymns.

Some people brought a man who could neither hear nor speak and asked Jesus to lay a healing hand on him. He took the man off by himself, put his fingers in the man’s ears and some spit on the man’s tongue. Then Jesus looked up in prayer, groaned mightily, and commanded, “Ephphatha!—Open up!”

My dad and uncle owned a grocery store together. My mom and my uncle’s wife were sisters—two sisters married two brothers. Many years ago, at a family wedding, my Aunt Mary wore an expensive dress my uncle bought her from Marshall Field’s. Mom saved a few dollars to buy her dress from Goldblatt’s, not even remotely a chic store.

In prayer we call upon God to strengthen us in our following of the way of Jesus.

The lectionary selections from the Letter of James drive home the point that Christians should, in the words of last Sunday’s reading, “be doers of the word and not hearers only,” and in the words of next Sunday’s, “faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead.”

Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back in the same box. —Italian proverb