Br. Keith Nelson

James 4:1-10

I want to crack these scripture passages open by sharing some things I’ve gleaned lately about ethics from a rather unlikely pair: a wildly popular content creator on TikTok and an early eighteenth century Quaker. Bear with me!

Alexis Nicole Nelson is a foraging expert and an advocate for growing and eating local food based in Columbus, Ohio. She creates irresistibly funny videos, and her sense of wonder for the earth is contagious. But Nelson, who is a Black woman and a vegan, also offers powerful insights about the complex relationship between our food choices, our privilege or lack of privilege, and the ethical conundrums we all face as consumers in an industrial society.  As she points out, the adoption of moral self-righteousness around what we choose to eat or not eat is woefully misguided because when it comes to balancing harm of other humans, harm to animals, and harm to the environment, no food choice is ethically perfect. And yet, Nelson continues to passionately educate others about harm reduction in relation to food-ways, because while perfection is impossible, doing better is attainable. We can continue to improve our own choices and build a lower-impact food culture while remaining humble and empathetic.

John Woolman was an early eighteenth century Quaker abolitionist who would have agreed wholeheartedly with Nelson’s ethic of harm reduction, as well as her generous recognition of our moral interconnectedness. Woolman spent his life learning about, then resisting and educating others to resist the transatlantic slave trade. He renounced land-ownership; he gave up wearing dyed clothing in an age when the dying process relied heavily on slave labor; he declined to receive hospitality in the households of slave-owners. All of these choices set him deeply at odds with the culture of colonial New England and the elites of old England to whom be brought his message. And yet, like Nelson, Woolman had little patience for a posture of self-righteousness. He won over his opponents with respect, empathy, and wholehearted commitment to practicing what he preached, however inconvenient. While he felt that moral purification was at the heart of what it meant to follow Jesus Christ, he recognized that a final state of moral purity was not possible for anyone. For Woolman, purification was a dynamic force that compelled a person to listen to conscience over custom, rather than being lulled into an easy friendship with the world.

In Mark’s gospel, we encounter Jesus’ familiar words about striving to be greatest and first. It’s easy to see how his teaching applies to overt friendship with systems that put profit over people and that further embed structural violence as a way of life. I don’t think that the disciples, who had given up everything to follow Jesus in his path of downward mobility, were intent on being first and greatest in that particular way. And yet as those who are seeking the kingdom are drawn inevitably into a spiritual counterculture, there is a different striving to be greatest and first which can insinuate itself.

This can take the form of a moral self-righteousness that turns every ethical choice into a black-and-white decision, and then signals its own virtue with a litany of the right decisions made or attitudes adopted.

What is so refreshing and empowering to me about the wisdom of Alexis Nicole Nelson and the witness of John Woolman are the ways they live out their respective messages with both integrity and with an abundant recognition of moral finitude. This term comes from the philosopher Brian Henning, who argues that we need a better term than hypocrite to describe everyone who falls short of every moral goal. He writes: “[T]hose who earnestly pursue but fail to achieve their moral ideals are morally finite.” In contrast, a hyprocrite contradicts their own values but easily accepts the gap between moral ideals and moral actions. To know moral finitude is to be intimately acquainted with the “troubled spirit” that the Psalmist describes as the “sacrifice of God,” and the “lamenting, mourning, and weeping” encouraged by the Letter of James: “Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.”

But perhaps it is also akin to the finitude and limitation known by a child, the exemplar Jesus sets before those who would be first and greatest in their righteousness. It is a child’s blissful unconcern with the status and virtue signaling of the world that Jesus commends, and a child’s dependency that must make the most of circumstances utterly beyond her control. To be last of all is to be acquainted with those who are most vulnerable to harm, whether in daily life or by choices of compassionate solidarity. Jesus teaches a humility and an empathy that has its priorities right, and leads to more freedom and more joy.