Beyond the Dragons--January 6, 2022

 

Beyond the Dragons—January 6, 2022

“But ask [for wisdom] in faith, never doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind….” [James 1:6]

I’ve got to be honest here: this passage feels like it should come with one of those warnings you read about from ancient maps where they drew monsters near the uncharted waters and unknown lands with the words, “There be dragons here.” At the very least, these seas have some dangerous rocks to navigate without running ourselves aground.

Let’s just start with this: remember from yesterday that the conversation is about asking for wisdom specifically. James started out this train of thought with the opening invitation, “If any of you is lacking in wisdom, ask God…” We have not changed subjects here in today’s verse, so this is not an open invitation to treating God like our personal heavenly vending machine. And this is not about saying, “If you didn’t get what you prayed for, you must have doubted and therefore disqualified yourself.”

Let me say that again: this is NOT biblical permission to tell someone that if they didn’t get the thing they prayed for, it must have been their fault for doubting or not believing hard enough. We do NOT get to pull this verse out of context to use as a weapon to club someone whose grandmother died or who just lost their job to say, “Well, this bad thing wouldn’t have happened if you would have been praying harder and without doubting.” Not how it works, and not what James is saying. But wow, you can sure see how someone might abuse this passage in that way and weaponize the Bible like that if you took these verses out of their context. That’s an easy temptation to fall into, but it will come back and bite us in the hindquarters if we do. There be dragons down that way.

All right, so if we’re a little clearer about what this passage doesn’t mean, what ARE we supposed to do with it? Let’s start with the context—James had been talking about asking God for wisdom. “If you are lacking in wisdom, ask God,” he had said. So far, so good. So when we ask God to give us wisdom, number one, it means we are going to have to trust God’s ways and God’s time for doing that—and we should be prepared that it’s a long-term kind of gift that often takes time to receive and grow into. It’s not a magic spell. Asking God for wisdom is not like Cinderella asking the Fairy Godmother to go to the ball and getting an instantaneous change of outfit, footwear, and transportation. It’s rather like the old joke about asking God for patience—one should be prepared that God will put people and situations in your life that require you to learn patience as the way of getting it. Wisdom isn’t a magical knack or a lucky hunch—it is a gift that takes life experience to receive, understand, inhabit, and put to use. It’s going to take both the patience to let God give it in God’s good time… and the faith to trust that God knows what God is doing in the mean-time.

That, I believe, is the spirit in which we need to hear James’ insistence that we not doubt after we’ve asked. It’s not that God will cancel the gift or cut off the flow of generosity as punishment for not believing well enough—it’s more like the need to keep walking the trail even if you’ve never been on it, trusting that the guide who is leading you along the way really can get you home. If I ask an expert hiker to help me get to the top of a mountain, and then part way up I bail out and decide I don’t trust them to get me to the summit, I’m in for a world of trouble if I go off from the way they are taking me on to go wandering on my own. Or, to borrow James’ nautical imagery, if I’m on a voyage in the open ocean with only a compass and the night sky to guide me, I am destined to be lost at sea if I keep changing course because I don’t trust the North Star or my navigational tools any longer. And that’s another good way to end up running into those dragons…

Becoming wise is a journey to a destination, rather than an instant change. It requires trusting the One who is leading us. In our own lives, too, then, to trust God to give us wisdom means we dare to commit ourselves to God’s direction for the long haul, not just for a quick fix. Because there are going to be times in the short-term where it looks like the way of Jesus doesn’t make a difference or is only for fools.

Let’s be honest about that, too. It will often seem like answering meanness with goodness is a waste. It will often seem like refusing to return evil for evil makes you look weak. It will feel like nonsense to give away our treasures in money so that others may simply eat and have shelter—that means losing profits! It will feel foolish sometimes to take additional steps to care for others or keep strangers safe, and they may even ridicule or mock you for the effort. Plenty of loud voices of conventional wisdom think it’s lunacy to turn the other cheek because they’ll tell you, “It gets you nothing.” And in the short-run, it sure may look like that. Trusting God to teach us wisdom means being willing to say “No” to those self-appointed experts and keep on walking the way of Jesus nevertheless.

So that’s where we’re being led today: the way of Jesus, even if the loud voices of blowhards around us think it is nonsense. And our calling is to trust that God’s kind of wisdom is what we most deeply need, even if the watching world sees it and thinks it’s utter foolishness—even if other Respectable Religious voices think it makes us look weak, too. So rather than head along the trail with our guide only part of the way up the mountain before heading on our own thinking we know better, today’s a day to keep going where our God leads us, all the way… even past the reach of the dragons.

O God, enable us to trust your kind of wisdom even when it runs up against the expectations of others who think your kind of love and justice are foolish or unprofitable. Enable us to trust your timing as you lead us on your way.

Who We Are Becoming--January 4, 2022

Who We Are Becoming—January 4, 2022

“My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking in nothing.” [James 1:2-4]

So here is a difficult but solid realization I have come to as a parent: if I had to choose, I would rather my kids grow up into mature and decent adults than happily immature jerks. I would rather they become responsible and compassionate humans than coddle them into childishly expecting they are the center of the universe. I would rather they grow into thinking of others and knowing the value of persistence, even if it comes at the price of having to struggle sometimes, or even fail. In a culture that has taught us only to pursue some mirage called “happiness,” I would rather my children choose for themselves to pursue love, justice, wisdom, and courage.

And so, I suspect, would every decent parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, or mentor who cares about a child.

The difficulty of that choice, however, is knowing then that there are going to be times when you cannot—or do not—prevent them from experiencing hardship. Being a parent, a teacher, or a mentor means knowing you are not there to win a popularity contest or be your kid’s “friend” all the time, but that your bigger picture goal is to see them grow into maturity. So rather than doing your kid’s homework or science project for them, you choose that they will have to learn long division through practice. Rather than letting your kid get away with bullying or bigotry at school, you choose that they have to face the consequences that come with their words and actions. Rather than handing them everything they say they want (and insulating them from the experience of delayed gratification), you choose for them to go through experiences that will teach them diligence, hard work, persistence, and the value of sharing what they have with others. Rather than teaching them to look out for their own interests first, you choose for them to practice habits that will be considerate of others—from holding doors to helping strangers to wearing masks, even when no one is “making” them. Those and a thousand other choices mean that the young folks we love will have to experience difficulties, even including times when we could have stopped those hardships in the short term, but instead chose to go through those difficulties with them.

Now, to be clear, it’s not that raw suffering by itself teaches anything. And it’s not that we merely want to “toughen up” our kids by making them endure pointless stress, extra labor, or forms of hardship while we put our feet up and sip tropical drinks. But we do believe that every time we are given one of those situations in life when it would be easy to cheat, or to be selfish, or to lie, we are also being given an opportunity to choose wisely and maturely, too. When your child tells you about how scary it was to stick up for the kid who was getting picked on in school, you feel both a bit of sadness that they had to deal with a situation like that, and also a swell of contentment to see that they chose well and faced the fear to do the right thing. When your kid comes to you and admits they broke the flower vase in the living room rather than blaming it on the cat or their sibling, you’re somehow a little less upset because they did the brave and truthful thing of telling you rather than passing the buck. And when you hear the weariness in your college student’s voice because they stayed up all night studying so they could ace the final exam, you know they learned something about the value of giving it their all in addition to whatever the subject matter was.

I think all of that is the right frame of mind for hearing James’ opening message here. “Consider it nothing but joy,” he says, when we are going through those difficult times. That might sound odd, until you think of what it’s like to be the parent, the mentor, or even the older sibling, who wants to see you grow into maturity. James doesn’t want us to suffer a certain amount just to make us “tough,” and he doesn’t say that present hardship can be traded in for heavenly rewards or earthly prizes. But he does know, like any good teacher, that we grow because of those times we have to decide to do the right thing even when it’s the hard thing.

Maybe that’s just it: if you know what it’s like to be proud of a child for doing the right thing, the good and decent thing, even when it’s difficult, then we can understand why James would have us “consider it all joy” when we are in situations to do the right thing… that is also the hard thing. Responding with respect and love when you’ve been treated with rudeness and rottenness isn’t easy—but it’s a sign you’re more mature than you were before if you can pull it off. Taking the time to put yourself in someone else’s shoes rather than arrogantly assuming you know it all is difficult—but it’s evidence you are growing in wisdom. Going the extra mile when others are bailing out, listening to someone you disagree with, risking your reputation by loving the unloved ones around you… these are all difficult, and often painful, things to choose. And yet, they are the kind of things that make our lives more like Jesus—they are practices that direct our lives to be more like his. And every chance life gives you that can shape your heart to love more like Jesus is one worth taking. It is something worth getting excited over—even worth “considering it all joy.”

That’s what this is all about. Not pretending that random suffering is fun or that heartache is an investment for the afterlife. But that every time we face the choice to do the hard but right thing, there is the joyful hope that God is growing us into the mature selves we were meant to become, like a seedling straining through the soil line to put forth a leaf as the sun’s warmth draws it skyward. If our version of Christianity has ceased caring about whether we are becoming more like Jesus (even while insisting we are just as infinitely beloved at our least Christ-like moments, too), we are missing something vital about what makes the Gospel actually “good” news.

For whatever hard choices are in front of us today, James offers us the perspective of seeing those difficult situations as the seedbeds of joy, because they are the very places God works best to help us mature into being people whose love looks like Jesus.

O God of all our days, use the challenges of this day to make us more fully like Jesus, and let that hope bring us joy today.