SERMONS

By Rev. Anthony B. Robinson, Sabbatical Minister
James 1: 17 – 27

August 30, 2009

Today’s reading from the Letter of James is the first in a five week series. James has been an oddly controversial book, occasioning a good bit of argument. Martin Luther famously dismissed James as “an epistle of straw.” He preferred the solid bricks of, say, Romans or Galatians.

The problem is that James is replete with little moralisms, phrases like “be doers of the word and not merely hearers,” or “true religion is caring for widows and orphans in their distress.” There’s little of Paul’s deep thought about the complexities of the human heart or God’s radical grace.

I have mostly agreed with Luther, feeling and arguing that we needed more focus on God and God’s doing and less focus on us and our doing.

But times and seasons change. We live now in the era of Dr. Phil and Judge Judy, and various other dispensers of straight-forward advice and exhortation. Before us all, they implore their often sheepish charges with exasperated, if rhetorical questions. “What were you thinking?” It is, however, obvious they weren’t thinking at all.

A somewhat different way to put this is that there was a time when pastors were trained for counseling with the idea of going easy on judgment and advice in favor of accepting all. The message was that “Here there is no right or wrong, only total acceptance and unconditional grace.”

But times do change and the culture has shifted. If pastors of an earlier generation were prepared for the person who said, “I know what I am supposed to do, but I just can’t do it,” we increasingly live in a culture where the problem is that people don’t apparently know what they are supposed to do. To put it in somewhat larger terms we appear unsure, deeply confused, about what a life of moral substance looks like or consists of.

An indication of this shift came at the movies. At some point, theater operators began to find it necessary to state norms and expectations for proper behavior that prior generations would have assumed was common knowledge or common courtesy. So now, before the show gets rolling, there’s a list of do’s and don’ts. “Don’t throw your trash on the floor, do put it in trash containers.” “Don’t carry on a conversation with your buddies during the movie.” “If your child begins to cry and fuss, don’t pretend he is someone else’s kid–deal with it.”

My wife, Linda, a school principal, has become known for the crisp mantra of advice with which she concludes each morning’s school announcements, “Be safe, be kind, be smart.” Dr. Johnson, the famous man of letters, said, “Never be afraid to remind people of the obvious; it is what they have most forgot.”

So the Letter of James reminds us of what some take to be the obvious. It drove Luther up a wall for it seemed to him to turn faith into a matter of works, all the things you had to do and so to undermine grace.

But James is really more than hectoring or judgmental moral exhortation. Like a number of other biblical books, James is a genre known as “wisdom,” or “wisdom literature.” Proverbs is another such book as is Ecclesiastes. Wisdom is different than knowledge, smarts or information. Wisdom means “skill in living.” What a concept! A person who is wise and discerning is one who is “skilled in living.”

In today’s text James has at least three words of straight-up, “thanks-I-needed-that,” advice for his readers and for us if we would gain and demonstrate skill in living.

Let me give you the headlines, then we’ll come back and dig into each story. First, don’t blame others. Be careful about putting your own stuff or issues onto others, about blaming others for problems or challenges that are yours to deal with. Second, lead with your ears. Be quick to listen but slow to speak. Listen well and deeply. And third, let your faith be expressed in acts of care and kindness for the most vulnerable, for those just hanging on to life or dignity by a slender thread. Biblical shorthand for the most vulnerable is “widows and orphans.” Okay, now let’s dig deeper.

Headline number one: be careful about blaming others. What James actually says is “Don’t blame God,” and we even have to go back a couple verses earlier than our reading starts to get the whole thing. It seems that some folks in the congregation were thinking and claiming that God was the source of their trials and temptations. If God were really good, such things wouldn’t happen. God would take care of it.

To which James says, “No way. God is not against you but for you. Every good gift comes from God. With God there is no variation or shadow due to change. God’s love is constant, trust this and face into your challenges and temptations, and when you’re under pressure endure.”

I’ve broadened this first word of wisdom to “Don’t blame others,” because we do seem as likely to blame other people as to blame God when life gets hard, when we are frustrated or disappointed. It’s someone else’s doing; someone else’s fault.

A couple weeks ago there was a remarkable essay in the Sunday New York Times from a woman, a writer, in Montana. It was titled, “Those Aren’t Fighting Words, Dear.”

It told the story of a marriage that threatened to tear apart but didn’t because a wife wouldn’t let her husband blame her for his unhappiness. Out of the blue and after twenty plus years of good marriage, her husband announced, “I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did. I’m moving out. The kids will understand. They’ll want me to be happy.”

Remarkably, the woman on the receiving end of this sucker-punch, ducked it. She answered her husband, “I don’t buy it.” Incredibly, she didn’t take it personally. She added, “What can we do right now to give you the distance you need, without hurting the family?” Her husband was prepared for everything but this: non-violent, non-reactive resistance.

She managed this gutsy response because, as she writes, “I simply had come to understand that I was not at the root of my husband’s problem. He was. If he could turn his problem into a marital fight, he could make it about us. I needed to get out of the way so that wouldn’t happen.”

Of course, it wasn’t quite that simple. In fact, it wasn’t simple at all. But this wise woman did recognize what was going on with her husband before he saw it himself. In a nutshell, he’d gotten to a place and time of life where, in the world of his work and professional achievement, he was no longer a rising star or even a particularly brightly shining one. Some of it was the economy, some of it was aging. All of it was life.

She had other bracing words for her husband. When he said, “The kids will understand, they’ll want me to be happy,” she said, “It’s not age-appropriate to expect children to be concerned with their parents’ happiness. Not unless you want to create co-dependents who’ll spend their lives in bad relationships and therapy.”

A woman after James’s heart! Shape up. Don’t blame others when you have stuff to deal with. Don’t pick a fight with someone else to avoid dealing with your own hard life challenges. “What can we do to give you the distance you need, without hurting the family?”

To judge from my experience as both a pastor and a congregational consultant, something like this happens all too often in congregations. Someone who is unhappy with their own life or perhaps not having the power or success they once did, may deal with it by creating fights or problems in the church. The minister has made me unhappy. The church has let me down. Or it’s someone else’s job to make me happy and whole. “Happiness,” Lincoln famously said,” is an inside job.”

Sometimes in the church when someone expresses unhappiness or disappointment, we fly into action trying to fix it. There’s probably a place and time for that. But there’s also a place, as Dear Abby would often say, for “Minding your own business,” in the best sense of those words, paying attention to what’s really going on and taking care of your business not blaming it on others.

James’ second word, good then and good now, is “Lead with your ears.” That’s Eugene Peterson’s translation of this verse of today’s reading in The Message. Listen to the whole verse, according to The Message: “Post this at all the intersections, dear friends: Lead with your ears, follow up with your tongue, and let anger straggle along in the rear.”

I had a friend who used to point out that God gave us two ears but one mouth. In case I had missed his point, he would add, “Which means God intends for us to listen as least twice as much as we speak.” Lead with your ears. Listen long and well before you speak and longer still before you speak or act in anger. James doesn’t say there’s no place for anger. There is, but it should be held in reserve, used sparingly, not our regular stock-in-trade.

Listening, really listening, isn’t easy. I often say to preaching students that “Good preaching begins with good listening.” Listening is work because it means quieting our own agendas, answers, pre-occupations and paying attention to another, whether that other is a biblical text, another human being, or God.

For people of faith there is that added dimension: listening for and to God, what some call the practice of discernment. A justly famous Biblical story, the story of Pentecost from the Book of Acts, is framed by two questions. The first question is, “What does this mean?” It is asked by the astonished pilgrims who fill Jerusalem as they hear the Spirit-filled apostles speaking of God’s mighty acts in all the languages of the world. “What does this mean?” “What’s going on?” “What is God up to?” That is where discernment begins, by seeking to understand what God is up to.

Only much later in the Pentecost story is the famous second question asked. “What then shall we do?” Before asking what we should do, we are taught to listen, to ask what’s going on, what is God up to?

The shape of a moral life is a listening life, one that pays attention, one that asks “What does this mean?” before jumping to action or pressing, to “do something.”

A popular story, a kind of modern parable, reminds us how easy it is to not pay attention, to fail to listen and understand before we judge or act. According to this story, two battleships were on maneuvers at sea. The weather was bad, so at nightfall the captain of one remained on the bridge to keep watch through the patchy fog. Shortly after dark, the lookout on the wing of the bridge reported, “Light bearing on the starboard bow.”

“Is it steady or moving astern?” called the captain.

“Steady, captain,” said the lookout, which meant that the other boat was on a dangerous collision course with the captain’s ship. The captain called out to the signal man:

“Signal that ship: we are on a collision course: advise you change course twenty degrees. A signal came back, “Advisable for you to change course twenty degrees.” The captain said, “Send: I’m a captain! Change course twenty degrees.”

“I am a second-class seaman, sir,” came the reply. “You had better change course twenty degrees. By this time the captain was furious. He spat out, “Send: I’m a battleship. You change course twenty degrees.”

Back came the flashing light: “I’m a lighthouse.”

“Change course twenty degrees,” muttered the captain.

“Lead with your ears, follow with your tongue, and let anger straggle along behind.”

James’s third word to the wise, his third word for those who would gain skill in living is the word for which he is most well-known. “Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.” James reminds us that faith without works is dead. Listening leads to doing, to action. Faith is not just concepts and the test of faith is not simply right belief or “orthodoxy.” The test of faith is also “orthopraxy,” or right living. Faith is not simply a series of truth claims. Faith is expressed and embodied in our living.

Once, an Amish man was out working in his field when a tourist happened by. The visitor, a Baptist of some variety, didn’t want to miss an opportunity to make a witness. So he stopped, went up to the fence and addressing the Amish farmer called out, “Brother, are you saved?”

The farmer looked at him but said nothing. The Baptist repeated his query, “Brother, are you saved?” Finally the farmer, digging in his pocket, took out a scrap of paper and pencil and began writing. He then handed the piece of paper to the Baptist man, saying, “Here are the names of ten of my neighbors. Go ask them if I’m saved . . . I could tell you anything!”

Being saved or in grace would be demonstrated in his way of living, something his neighbors could more reliably report on.

Back when people used check books, a friend used to say, “Don’t tell me what you believe; let me take a look at your check book and I’ll tell you what you believe.” How are those things which we claim to believe given real expression in our lives, our choices, the spending of our money and our time?

Again, from Eugene Peterson’s translation, The Message: “Anyone who sets himself up as ‘religious’ by talking a good game is self-deceived. This kind of religion is hot air and only hot air. Real religion, the kind that passes muster before God the Father, is this: Reach out to the homeless and loveless in their plight, and guard against corruption from the godless world.”

Sometimes people latch onto a verse or teaching like this and take it to the other extreme. They say faith, beliefs, don’t matter at all. “I don’t bother with all that theology stuff,” some say, “I just care about doing good, helping people in need.” James isn’t saying that. He isn’t setting works against faith, it’s not an either/ or, but a both/ and. In my sermon two weeks ago I tried to indicate the difference it makes in real life to believe that Jesus was fully human, which is a belief, part of theology.

Notice too the kinds of things that James stresses, “caring for widows and orphans in their distress.” Or in Peterson, “the homeless and loveless in their plight.” That’s not very spectacular, is it? It isn’t filling stadiums with impassioned believers. It isn’t dazzling works of faith healing or miracles that garner headlines. It isn’t even dramatic rescue missions to people far away.

It is caring for those who are in need. It is concern for the most vulnerable. It is seeing those that are easy to overlook, even invisible.

Last week a man called to ask for help; he couldn’t pay the rent. We did a little checking and made arrangements to write a check to his landlord. When he came by to get the check, Joanne who manages our office, engaged him in conversation, learned a little about his family and children. She told him about the pre-school here. She invited him and his family to the upcoming church retreat. I was quite touched by that. Sometimes we put people in the category of “have-nots” who need our help, but we wouldn’t think of sharing our lives. Joanne didn’t do that. “You might be interested in our Retreat.”

Today Catherine and Naomi have reminded us of a simple opportunity, to help out in the church school, work with the kids. Not spectacular. No headlines but important. And in the weekly announcements, Richard Tupper told us that volunteers are needed at the food bank. Again, not spectacular, but real. James saying, “Don’t be hearers only, but doers of the word, caring for widows and orphans,” meaning the most vulnerable.

In the on-going debate over health care we’ve heard a lot about alleged “death panels,” and pulling the plug on Grandma. What we don’t hear is that the plug is already being pulled slowly every day on people with no health care at all. We don’t have to conjure up fantasy horror stories, but pay attention to the real homeless and loveless who already exist and need basic medical care if they are to have a chance at a decent life.

Three words of wisdom for today and for all days. Three words of wisdom for those who would gain skill in living. Go easy on blaming others, deal with your own stuff; lead with your ears, listening twice as much as you speak; and let your faith find expression in actual acts of care and kindness.

Maybe Luther was right, this is small ball. But then we serve a Savior who was born in a manger, walked a dusty road, and died as an outcast. What the world counts small or insignificant, may be great and glorious in the sight of God.