Sermon 9/2/12

Scripture James 1:17-27

The style of James seems like a collection of wisdom saying which makes his message seem a little disjointed.  Today I’d like to unpack some of them in our current context of Labor Day weekend marking the end of our summer and the time that children return to school and when we celebrate the economic and social contribution of workers with a long weekend, picnics, and maybe one last summer road trip. 

It is a turning point in the calendar that points toward fall, and it does seem like fall is early this year.  Yet even though the days grow shorter as fall approaches, and a new academic year begins James reminds us that God does not change as the seasons do. 

There is a call and response in the African American church where one person says, “God is good,” and another responds with, “All the time.”  James writes, “every good gift and every perfect present comes from heaven; it comes down from God” (1:17).

God’s very nature is good, so it impossible for God to do anything but good we can be sure that everything that is truly good has its root in God. 

Yet because we are finite we cannot fully grasp God’s infinite goodness.  And so God accommodates us by revealing his love for the world in bits and pieces so that we gradually come to understand him but because God is always beyond our understanding God planted the word in us: faith in Jesus Christ. 

James challenges us to not just hear the word and believe the word, but to also do the word putting it into practice.  To let the faith planted in us grow and bear fruit in our lives.  Just as Jesus is God’s word in action, we too are called to be both hearers and doers of faith as we practice our religion.  And this is hard to do.  The world works to make us forget what we are to do as God’s doers of God’s word.

Often times our work lives, our Monday through Saturday lives, seem so separate from church.  At a preaching workshop I attended this spring the presenter shared with us a drawing that illustrates this separateness.  Some church members had drawn it to express the struggle they felt as part of a Sunday school lesson. 

The drawing shows a church building on one side of the paper and a city with skyscrapers on the other.  Between them is a person straddling a deep ravine. The person’s hands are in an outreached position with one hand touching one of the tall buildings and the other reaching out towards the church. 

This image shows how these people feel torn between their obligations to work, family, school, sports, and church.  And how they feel as if they are more connected to that which seems concrete and tangible rather than that which is mysterious and holy. 

In an ideal world all these would mesh and fit together like gears in a machine.  Our Christian values would shape our lives outside the church.  But they don’t.  First of all we do not live in an ideal world, God’s ideal will not be realized until the new heaven and new earth. 

Second, we are people corrupted by personal and corporate sin, this keeps us from integrating our lives, causing us to forget the way that God has called us to live when we are faced with the stress and pressure of competing obligations. 

Causing us to forget that every good gift is from above.  Causing us to forget that goodness and faithfulness are not confined to Sunday but are available to all of us in our homes, work, schools, volunteering, and community. 

Work is stressful: there are expectations for us to perform, some of them are realistic and others are not.  We have deadlines and quotas to meet.  And today there is no guarantee that a job will remain secure. 

Vocations like farming that rely on the weather seem especially stressful.  If it is too dry the crops won’t grow, if it is too wet the farmers can’t get the hay or the wheat in.

At school, teachers and students are under pressure to perform to pass tests, play sports, and keep up with their peers.

All of this: deadlines, layoffs, worry about the weather, and the pressure to perform causes anxiety.  And when people get anxious they start to get impatient and impatience often leads to anger. 

The challenge is to not just think faith but to do it in all these stressful situations where people are watching and expecting us to go along with what we are told to do even if we do not agree with it.   

And when under stress it is so easy to be slow to listen, quick to speak and quick to anger.  James is right; the results do not bring about the righteous life that God desires for us.  So he urges us to be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger.

He writes about not just accepting but acting upon the word that is planted in us.  This word is similar to finding the artist’s signature on a piece of artwork that tells us who did it.  But with all great artists you often tell who did the painting, sculpture, musical score, even how a musical piece is played because it bears their imprint, their style on it. 

This is how it is with us being created by God, our actions should be such that it shows that God created us and planted his word in us just as we can tell that a Monet painting was indeed painted by Monet instead of Picasso.  Or we can tell the difference between a Beatles tune and a jazz selection by Louis Armstrong.

Our lives should reflect God who created us and it is so easy for us to forget that especially when we are angry or in a hurry. 

All of us have said things or done things in anger or frustration that we regret.  This regret is a gift.  Hopefully the regret is enough to make us try to reconcile the wrong we have done or the hurt we have caused, in order to try restoring the relationship.  

This is seeking forgiveness.  We do this in our prayer of confession because even though we are forgiven we continue to sin, because of our human condition.

So let’s go back to the image of the person standing over the chasm between church and culture or our Monday through Saturday lives.  I am thankful for this person, I am thankful for you because despite the pressures of anxiety and stress you are reaching out, seeking something that you know that the world cannot provide.  Thankful and excited that you are reaching out in God’s direction as we live in a world that is full of brokenness and sin, the abuse of power. 

But this image makes the assumption that God is limited here at the church on this side of the chasm.  However God is everywhere.  God is in your home, your workplace, your school, God is present before you get there and will grant you peace if you seek it. 

The church can be a refuge or a place where we seek guidance as we try to orient our lives toward God’s word.  It can help us to gain ways stand up for the vulnerable out there in the world.  For it is here that we gain perspective for dealing with the injustice of the world and reconnecting with what is Holy, that which is good. 

As the new school year begins and schedules become busier than they were in the summer, remember that God is with you always ready to catch you when you stumble.  So that when we realize that we have not been as patient as we would have liked we can seek forgiveness and try again to listen a little more quickly and slower to speak so that we can act in love and in doing so reflect God’s imprint on us so that people will know that it is God who planted his good word in us.  

Rev. Michael Fry preaching

at East Bethany PC

September 2, 2012