Readings (Track 1)

For the next five weeks the second reading is from the Letter of James. The James who authored this book is St James of Jerusalem, Jesus’ brother, leader of the Jerusalem church, and martyred about ad 62. We celebrate his feast on October 23.

The letter is a long exhortation to the churches. If there’s a unifying theme, it’s the insight that friendship with God and with the world are mutually exclusive. James uses ‘world’ not for God’s good creation, but for the arrangements we impose on this creation that systematically distort and disfigure it—and us.

So why are God and world in this sense mutually exclusive? The world we’ve created is a zero-sum game: if you have more, I have less, so envy, competition, aggression are only logical. How does James bring God onstage? God is the one “who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly,” and–in the verses we read—“Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.” It’s of a piece with what his Brother used to say: “Look at the birds of the air… Consider the lilies of the field…” Our God is a generous God. If we live both believing that and treating life as a zero-sum game, we’re consign ourselves to incoherency. James uses words like ‘double-minded’ and ‘adulterers’.

This sort of incoherency is something many of us have plenty of experience in, and I speak from experience. We track our finances on a piece of computer software called Quicken. It’s all there: checking accounts, savings accounts, credit cards, investments. When I’m working with it it’s difficult not to assume that what’s on the screen is what’s important about our family’s fortunes in the present and the future. Maybe an incense burner next to the computer would help, or a program that would send those birds that Jesus was talking about across the screen periodically. The comfort in all this is a remark Karl Barth makes in the midst of his massive Church Dogmatics, that the difference between the Christian and non-Christian is not that one is righteous and the other a sinner, but that the Christian is a sinner with an uneasy conscience.

Anyhow, back to James. Let’s walk through the text together, as James works at what it means to be a friend to this generous God.

“Every generous act of giving” is from the Father of lights. God is the generous giver. And what does God give? Well,—verse v.18—life: “he gave us birth by the word of truth.” The Father gives birth. There’s a flexibility in the biblical image of God the Father that we’ve lost. Or, if you’re looking for an image of God as Mother, here it is.

“…so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures.” A different fertility image, and also a hint that what God is doing in us is for the benefit of all God’s creatures.

“Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger, for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness.” The prophets had used fruit as an image for the righteousness God sought in Israel; James uses that image: God’s still looking for fruit & your quick speech and quick anger won’t produce it. But I suspect there’s more here. James has just given us the image of God giving us birth. There’s mystery there, and if we’re attentive to that mystery we realize that quick speech and quick anger don’t cut it.

Let me stay with this for a moment. We realize instinctively that there’s mystery, something sacred, in birth. At the same time, we tend to assume that there’s no mystery to the people we interact with every day, or even the one we see in the mirror. What James is doing with this image is helping us to recover that sense of mystery and the sacred. Each one of us is someone God is birthing. We know we don’t understand God; why are we so quick to assume that we know all we need to know about what God’s birthing?

This works the other way, too. We may struggle with a sense of God’s absence. Well, one place to start is by attending to the mystery in God’s creatures. Attend to the mystery of God’s creatures; attend to the mystery of God. Who knows where that might lead?

Back to James. “Welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.” This picks up the word from the birth image and urges us to care for it. We might recall Jesus’ parable of the sower and the different soils into which the seed falls. Guard that seed, that word, Jesus’ brother tells us. (You may recall Mark Twain’s comment that went something like this: “Some people say, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. I say, put all your eggs in one basket, and watch that basket.” That’s what’s in play here.)

How we guard that seed is developed in the following verses: “be doers of the word, and not merely hearers.” Again, James is working themes common to Jesus’ preaching, as in the conclusion to the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew: hearing the word and obeying it is like building your house on the rock; hearing and not obeying is like building on sand.

The last two verses contrast true and false religion: “If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” True enough, we might say, but what an odd combination of themes.

“And do not bridle their tongues.” Why talk about this? His hearers need to hear it? True enough. We could also observe that in practice the tongue regularly has a role when we’re hearing but not doing the word. We may not be doing it, but we’re talking about it. This doesn’t confuse God, but it often confuses us.

[“If any one thinks he is religious, and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this man’s religion is vain.” There’s another dimension to this worth noticing, one I ran across in the middle of Revelation: “the accuser of our comrades has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God” (12:10b). That description of Satan is worth chewing on. Of all the ways John could have described him, he focuses on Satan as accuser. And this description brings us full circle back to some of Satan’s earliest appearances in the Old Testament: the accuser of Job (“Job just worships you because you bless and protect him”), the accuser of Joshua the high priest (see Zechariah 3), and, in the garden, the accuser of God Almighty (“God’s prohibiting you this tree out of selfishness”). All these accusations—through the tongue. So let us watch our own tongues. How often do we accuse, lowering others and thereby—conveniently—raising ourselves up? That’s a habit to discourage—before our noses begin to complain of the smell of sulfur. ]

Pure and undefiled religion? “To care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” We might recall Jesus’ many arguments with the Pharisees: mercy, not sacrifice. More, caring for orphans and widows reflects God’s generous character. And it’s in this context that we need to hear the last part: “to keep oneself unstained by the world.” James hasn’t changed the subject. The world tells us that we’re in a zero-sum game, so more for the orphans and widows means less for me. Believing that, acting on that, is getting stained by the world. Stained by the world: believing that more for the poor means less for me, that acknowledgement of your needs means that mine go unmet, that the most important information about me is in Quicken. Stained by the world: losing any sense of mystery and the sacred as we encounter one another.

I’ve focused this morning on our second reading. What happens if we pull back the camera? At least two things; perhaps you’ll discover others as you reread these lessons later today or later in the week. First, the first reading from Song of Songs and the Psalm give us a more specific image for this generous God: God as Lover. So these readings encourage us to experience God’s generosity as the generosity of a lover. Second, Jesus’ argument with some of the religious leaders ends with a list of things that defile: “fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice” etc. Notice how many of these result from that zero-sum game orientation. If we allow that vision of God’s generosity to form us, to transform us, we’re simultaneously draining the power of a number of these temptations.

“Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.” This, if our eyes are open, is the world we live in. We often say in our dismissal “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.” We can say that also because in this world God is already loving and serving us. In the week ahead we have the opportunity to discover this anew.