Justice, Mercy, Einstein--February 1, 2022

Justice, Mercy, Einstein--February 1, 2022

"For judgment will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment." [James 2:13]

For an awful lot of my lifetime, I've been under the impression that judgment and mercy were opposites.  Like matter and anti-matter, I thought that both law and grace were important and powerful realities, but that they would annihilate each other if they dared to touch.  

"Judgment," I was always told, was about punishing bad behavior out of the need to restore balance to some cosmic scales of justice somewhere, requiring a payment of an eye for an eye and a wound for a wound.  "Grace," on the other hand, I figured, was the opposite--a sort of reckless or mushy disregard for justice that let crooks get off scot-free and allows evil to go unchecked.  And therefore, to my mind, these qualities were mutually exclusive.  You couldn't have both at the same time--either there was righteous judgment or there was amazing grace, but never both.  "Justice" was the strict schoolteacher with the ruler to slap your knuckles for talking out of turn, and "mercy" was an overindulgent grandparent spoiling the kids with candy to ruin their suppers.  You had to pick sides and leave the unchosen virtue behind.

Both of those, James would tell us, are wrong.  They are caricatures, to say the least, which means that they are exaggerations to the point of distortion.  But if all we've ever known are those skewed misunderstandings of "judgment" and "mercy" that turn justice and grace into opposites, then James' statement here in today's verse will sound like nonsense.  

Making things worse, at first James sounds like he is reinforcing that terrible split between judgment and mercy; it sounds like he's threatening us with merciless judgment as punishment--and for the crime of being merciless, at that!  And then at the end, when he says, "mercy triumphs over judgment," it sounds once again like this is some kind of contest, where either justice or grace can come out on top, and that you get one at the expense of the other.

But maybe we can set our preconceptions aside and consider the possibility that both justice (and the related idea of judgment) and mercy (and its synonym grace) are two sides of the same coin, and that both of these are dimensions of the goodness of God.

The ancient prophets of Israel and Judah, after all, certainly saw justice and mercy as compatible. Micah famously declared that what God really required of people was "to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God" (Micah 6:8).  He didn't assume you could only get justice or mercy, but never both; he takes it as a given that both are possible.  The same goes for prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and even the commandments of the Torah--they all call for the people of God to be people of both justice and mercy.  In fact, sometimes the provisions of the Law that we might think of as "charity" were understood as matters of justice in the Mosaic covenant.  Things like forgiveness of debts, restoration of land lost to foreclosure, provision for the poor, refuge for those fleeing violence, and welcome for foreigners were all understood in the Torah to be matters of justice.  

Jesus, too, sees "justice" and "mercy" as intertwined--they are both the "weightier matters" that he wishes for the Respectable Religious Leaders of his day to focus on, rather than trivial ones.  His story that we call the "Good Samaritan" about a foreigner who offers help to a man left for dead by robbers is all offered as an explanation of how to keep the Law's direction about caring for neighbors--it is about justice, in other words, as much as it is about "showing mercy."  Even his parable about workers who are all paid the same at the end of the day, no matter how long they have worked, turns out to be about "what is just" (see the landowner's wording in Matthew 20), and not merely about "showing charity."  His other parables, like the rich man and Lazarus, and the Great Judgment (that we sometimes call "The Sheep and the Goats") with its haunting refrain, "As you did it to the least of these, you did it to me," show the same--for Jesus, whatever "justice" means cannot be separated in the end from whatever "mercy" really is.  

Frederick Buechner was onto something, then, when he wrote, "Justice also does not preclude mercy.  It makes mercy possible.  Justice is the pitch of the roof and the structure of the walls.  Mercy is the patter of rain on the roof and the life sheltered by the walls.  Justice is the grammar of things.  Mercy is the poetry of things."  Or perhaps we could say that when someone is being stepped on, oppressed, or taken advantage of, it is a matter of justice (not merely "being charitable") to stop the aggressor and restore the person who has been harmed.  But mercy opens the door for those who have been stepped on not to seek revenge but instead to reconcile and make new, good, mutual relationships with those who had been oppressors.  Maybe, as Buechner writes elsewhere, "The worst sentence Love can pass is that we behold the suffering that Love has endured for our sake, and that is also our acquittal.  The justice and mercy of the judge are ultimately one."

It sounds like judgment to hear that God will pull down the powerful from their thrones, and it sounds like a matter of justice that the lowly will be lifted up.  But it is also mercy to discover that the formerly lowly ones are not installed as new dictators to start the same old cycle of oppression all over again, but rather that God is creating a whole new order of things where, like a dance in endless circles, we take turns serving and being served, washing feet and having our feet washed as well.  Like Einstein discovering that light is both a particle and a wave, the voices of Scripture show us that justice and mercy are ultimately of one piece in the goodness of God.  Call it a sort of Theology of Relativity, I suppose, but God's justice and God's grace are inseparable.

Somehow, James assures us, the justice of God and the mercy of God are intertwined--even if from our vantage point now, they may seem opposed or incompatible.  God will not let crookedness or oppression get the last word over the victims of the world--that is a commitment of God's justice.  Neither will God let that same crookedness or oppression be the last word about the victimizers of history, either--that is the promise of God's mercy.   Both are about God, rather than human actions, getting the last word.  And maybe that is really where our hope lies--that God who is both just and gracious, will always get the last word over us.  

We don't have to pick and choose one or the other, mercy OR justice, grace OR righteousness.  They embrace in the character of God, and they are both at the heart of the way of life we are invited to step into--the life we call the Reign of God.

O God, shape us by both your justice and your mercy, and allow us to walk humbly with you all our days.

Our Whole Selves--January 31, 2022

Our Whole Selves--January 31, 2022

"For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. For the one who said, 'You shall not commit adultery,' also said, 'You shall not murder.' Now if you do not commit adultery but if you murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty." [James 2:10-12]

Okay, let's be honest.  The whole concept of "The Law" (you can hear the capital letters when you say it with gravitas) sounds pretty ominous.  But it's not meant to. Maybe we need to examine why talk about "The Law" or "God's Commandments" can make us tremble with fear rather than smile with grateful appreciation the way you would watch a sunset or view a painting in a museum.  Because ultimately, I think the issue is with us, not with the Law.

I think a lot of us grew up thinking that the Commandments from the Bible were something like a final exam in school: as a set of basically unrelated questions on which you would be graded over all as either acceptable or as a failure.  Examinations, of course, are meant to evaluate us--to see whether we have learned enough, memorized the facts sufficiently, understood the content adequately, and whether we can recite it all back on demand.  And in a sense, a thorough test is intended to find everyone's weak places, to see what lessons you grasped, and which ones you have yet to master.  The point of an exam is to judge your worthiness.

The upside of an exam like that is that your grade is based on how well you do overall.  If you really blow it when it comes to listing state capitals, you might still be able to make up for a low score in that section if you do fantastically on the true-or-false section, or if your answer to the essay question is stellar.  You just have to hope your average is good enough to pass.  But still, the point of the whole exercise is to determine worthiness based on getting a good enough average score.

So, think about how that affects our understand of God if that's the way we understand "The Law" and "The Commandments."  We're going to end up thinking that God is only here to evaluate us--that God is basically a scowling teacher looking for ways to get us to fail, or at least to make us reveal our own inadequacies, so that they can be identified and circled with red pen.  We'll also end up thinking that what really matters is just whether we do well enough to pass--that the test is only a way of getting us a good enough grade to move on to the next level.

The biblical writers don't think about "The Law" that way--in fact, maybe it's better not to even translate the notion of "Torah" as "Law," but as "instruction" or "direction."  The Torah was intended a complete way of life, and everything fit together in a cohesive whole.  God's individual commands--things like "Do not murder," or "Do not steal," or "Love your neighbor as yourself"--were not isolatable from one another, but part of a whole web that made up a way of acting, thinking, choosing, and living together. Unlike a final exam in school, where you could conceivably do poorly in one section but well enough on others that you could still get a passing grade, the biblical writers see God's Torah (Instruction) as a whole seamless entity.  You don't get to say, "I did fine at not cheating on my spouse, but I've been a real jerk to my coworkers--don't I still get a passing grade?"  You don't get an overall grade that allows you to make up for envy and greed in one area of your life with extra prayers or rituals on another part of the exam.  It's not like that.

That's because God's Instruction isn't meant to judge us, but to shape us into something--something made in the likeness of God's own justice and mercy.  The commandments aren't a test to see if we are worthy of a passing grade.  They are the strands out of which a whole way of life are woven.  Think of it less like a test in the classroom and more like a clay pot.  If the pottery has a crack in it, even if 99% of it isn't cracked, the pot will still leak, and the whole thing is no longer useful for holding water.  99% is a fantastic test grade, but a boat that is only 99% leak-proof is still going to sink from that one-percent that's letting the water in.

James wants us to see the individual commandments as part of a whole that, taken all together, is intended to form us into a certain way of life.  We don't get to pick and choose which commandments to be graded on, and we don't get a pass on breaking some in the hopes of doing better on others.  In other words, James wants us to be people of integrity--who are shaped by love and justice in every area of our lives, rather than just some, while we hope that our strengths outweigh our weaknesses when it's grading time.

We live in a time when it is very easy to try and compartmentalize ourselves and our character.  We say things like, "Yeah, that public figure is a terrible liar and mean-spirited person, but I like how he projects 'strength,' so on the whole, I support him." Or, "No, I don't like how that person treats women, but he seems good with money, so I still look up to him."  We allow ourselves to divide our own character up into pieces, as if you can do poorly in one area of our lives but do well enough in others to still get a passing grade.  But that's all still final-exam thinking, when James doesn't see any of this as a test in a classroom.  James sees our lives as an organic whole, where every area is connected to every other area.  The way I treat my neighbors is connected to whether I speak truthfully or keep promises faithfully, and both of those are connected to how I love God.  These are all interconnected, because they are all part of our whole selves.

Today, then, let's allow James to shift our thinking about commandments, laws, and instructions.  Let's move away from fearfully thinking of "The Law" as God's way of evaluating who is "good enough," to instead seeing God's Instruction as part of how God makes us into people of integrity, who act with love and justice, with truth and humility, in every area of our lives.  It's not about getting a passing grade on a test--let's not worry about tests or grades or passing.  It's about letting God make us whole--patching the cracks in our pottery, and filling the leaks in the boat.

That way, even "The Law" turns out to be a gift of grace... which is exactly how the biblical writers think of it.

Lord God, make us whole, and shape us in your likeness to be wholly holy.

Beyond Sentimental--January 27, 2022

Beyond Sentimental--January 27, 2022

"You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors." [James 2:8-9]

Love isn't really about whether we feel like it or not.  Seriously.

Somewhere along the way most of us learned (wrongly, James would argue) that love is basically an emotion--in particular a feeling of liking someone, but with the dial turned up to eleven.

You could hear it in our thinking already when we were kids in elementary school, when the local gossip around the bike rack at recess was all about who "likes" whom (friendship), who "LIKE likes" whom (a crush), and who "LOOOOOVES" whom (whatever children think romance looks like).  We learn to treat "love" as just the high end of a continuum of liking someone, and we treat it as something just about as dependable as a fifth-grade courtship as well.  If love is a feeling, after all, you can only be expected to do kind things for the ones you love while you "feel" like it, which may not last for very long at all.

And maybe, in some way, some part of us still struggles with letting that childish thinking go as we enter into adulthood.  I know plenty of adults who are still stuck in that mindset that love is a feeling for people you like, and of course that makes it terribly easy to bail out on romances, friendships, and other commitments as soon as they don't "feel" like sticking around or working things out.  I know even more adults, including folks who have been going to church all their lives, who find Jesus' command to "love your enemies" completely baffling and nonsensical, because they can only hear "love" as a stronger form of "liking," and by definition they can't "like" their enemies.

That much is a fair point, of course--it's meaningless to command someone to feel a certain way about someone else, and even more ridiculous to insist you have pleasant feelings for someone you really find detestable.  But what if we were wrong back at the bike rack in fifth grade when we thought that love was merely a feeling?  What if we're still wrong when we equate "love" with the flurry of chemical reactions from endorphins firing in our brains that we call emotion?  And what if, beyond the shallow sentimentality that we usually settle for when talking about love, there is something with substance that doesn't depend on our flighty feelings?

I want to suggest that this is where the Scriptures are pointing us.  James is certainly pointing us in that direction, but he's hardly alone. He, along with the commandments in the Torah and Jesus himself, sees love as something more than a feeling that must come first before action.  For all of the biblical writers, love is the commitment to do good to another--and that doesn't have to depend on whether you "like" that person or not.  And because it's not first and foremost about getting your own emotional needs met, it is something that the Torah can instruct us to do for everyone--all who are our "neighbors" (which, again, is everyone, to hear Jesus tell it).  If the commandment, "Love your neighbor," is about my feelings, it loses any meaning when a new family moves in next door who shout all the time, set a hateful sign laced with profanity in their front yard, play loud, terrible music into the wee hours of the morning, and whose dog eats my prize petunias.  But if loving my neighbors includes even the bad neighbors whom I do not like, then it's got to be about more than my emotional response to them.  It's about my willingness to do good for others, to seek their well-being, even before my own.

And really, this is it.  This is what makes the way of life marked out by the Scriptures so beautiful, so compelling, and frankly so countercultural.  When love is defined by who or what I already like, it will by definition be about partiality--only those I already like, or who are alike enough to me, will be eligible for love.  And those who don't make the cut won't be worthy of love.  But when love is about seeking and doing good for others regardless of how I feel about them at the moment, I can love everyone who crosses my path, because their likability is bracketed out.  It's not about whether I "like" someone, or whether they can do favors for me, or whether we are enough alike that we belong to some social grouping.  I can show love even to people I deeply dislike because love is no longer seen as a reward for being sufficiently likable, but simply a reflection of God's choice to love them and me both.

So in our verses for today, the situation that seems to have come to James' attention is about discrimination between rich and poor.  And James' point here is that the people of God are called to show love regardless of whether someone can do favors for you or looks more expensively dressed or has a bigger house than you.  We are called to seek the welfare of all people, which means especially caring for those whose well-being is at risk.  That's why James sees showing partiality as such a violation of the commandment to love--it's one more way of reducing love just to "who is likable enough to warrant my care and attention."

Of course, we still struggle with exactly that same kind of partiality and sifting of people based on their wealth--you know exactly the ways people talk about "good neighborhoods" and "bad neighborhoods," or the ways we build little gated communities (to keep out undesirables, of course), or the ways the needs of poorer communities never seem to get the attention that the up-and-coming suburbs do.  We live in a culture that teaches us it's in our own self-interest (for future resale value!) to make sure that no low-income housing developments get built near "us" and "our kind of people." And we just shrug it off as inevitable when the schools in the neighborhoods and communities with lower property values are falling apart because they bring in less income from property taxes compared with the communities where the millionaires live.  We're still doing exactly what James warned against, but we just act like there's nothing to be done about it--as though we can't be expected to seek the well-being of others, who we don't even know, and who live in those "other" parts of town. 

None of this is even to begin to look at the ways we are still doing the same along racial and ethnic lines, even in our own day.  Or the ways we still often use gender, language, and physical ability or disability, to decide whose needs matter more than someone else's.  James shines a spotlight on all of this and says, "This isn't what love for your neighbor looks like!  You are supposed to be looking out for each other's interests, even when you don't know the other person, or even when you know them and don't like them!"  When we settle for the childish definition of love as just "liking people a lot," then by definition we'll only ever seek the interests of people we know, have something in common with, and like.  James, however, along with the rest of the Scriptural writers to be honest, sees love as more expansive--something not dependent on me knowing, liking, or agreeing with someone else. Love means we still seek good things for others, regardless of whether we are alike or different, whether we look, talk, and think the same or not, and whether we like each other or not.  And every time we divide our communities, our country, and our world into "Me and My Group" over here, and "Those People" over there, however the lines are drawn, James says we are running counter to the call of love, because love isn't merely liking or sameness.

James calls all of that a failure to love, because it is showing partiality.  James calls us to more than that.  He calls us to "fulfill the royal law"--to love genuinely, which means actions more than feelings or empty talk.  And it means leaving behind the childish notion that love is reducible to "liking" what is familiar, rather than love as seeking the good of the other, regardless of how you feel about them in the moment.

Today is a day for us to grow up, then, to move beyond immaturity, and to step deeper into the love we've been called into from ancient times, as old as the Torah's instruction, "Love your neighbor as yourself" and Jesus' direction, "Go and do likewise." If it feels difficult at time, or we are awkward in our learning how to love beyond sentimentality, that's ok.  Growing up is like that. And growing up is exactly what this moment needs of us.  It's what we need most for this moment, as well.

Lord God, help us to grow in love beyond flighty feelings or self-interest--help us to love like you.

What Is Given--January 26, 2022

What Is Given--January 26, 2022

"Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him?  But you have dishonored the poor.  Is it not the rich who oppress you?  Is it not they who drag you into court?  Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you?" [James 2:5-7]

Somewhere in the recesses of my memory I come back to recollections of ninth grade geometry class, and how our teacher instructed us in the art of the geometric proof.  You could deduce the value of an angle or determine whether two lines were parallel, or demonstrate a whole host of other mathematical conclusions, all with a set of learned theorems, rules, and principles.  And at the bottom of it all were these statements we learned,  called "axioms," which were taken as bedrock assumptions.  

I loved that idea--that there were some things you didn't have to prove, but just seemed so self-evident that you could start with them as a "given," and then build on them to reach a variety of other conclusions.  Back in geometry class, the list of "axioms" is pretty short, but powerful.  Old Euclid, the ancient Greek mathematician, only had seven, and they are pretty fundamental.  His axioms were things like, "Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other," and "If equals are added to equals, the whole are equal, too."  Basic stuff, but, also, things that you need to be able to take as a given if you want to get anywhere else more interesting in geometry.

But Euclid got me thinking.  What we take as a "given" is pretty important.  What we consider so fundamental that we don't even feel the need to argue it is still worth spending time looking at, just to remember what everything else is built on.  Checking in with our "axioms" helps us to avoid mistakenly reaching nonsense conclusions that violate those fundamental principles and postulates or accidentally thinking we've proven that 1 + 1 equals 3. And it's actually this talk about axioms that makes me pay attention to what James here takes as a "given."

Notice the way he asks his question at the start of today's passage.  "Hasn't Got chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom?"  It's a rhetorical question whose answer James assumes is a given.  He takes it as an axiom that, yes, God is always picking the ones regarded as "nobodies" and lifting them up into positions of honor and restoration.  God is always looking out for the poor, the broken-hearted, the empty-handed, the overlooked, and those who have been denied justice, in order to renew, rebuild, and revive them.  This is just at the core of who God is, because for James, we can't get away from the particular story of the God we know in the story of Israel, who has a thing for picking "losers"--at least in the world's eyes--and blessing them.

It's old man Abraham, childless wanderer (with frequently wobbly faith), who becomes the covenant partner.  It's a nation of enslaved and oppressed people living under the lash of Pharaoh whom God liberates and leads into a new home.  It's overlooked Hannah who is blessed with a child and a hope.  It's runt of the family David who is chosen to be king. It's the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner who are repeatedly given special protections in the Torah's social safety net.  And by contrast, it's always the arrogant bullies, the hoarders of wealth, and the heads of empires whom God takes down, from Pharaoh to Nebuchadnezzar to even Israel and Judah's own worst kings.  You can't talk about the God of the Bible without getting into the question of God's character, and that includes God's particular commitment to lifting up the lowly and caring for those most in need.  

James takes all of this as a given--it's an axiom that God will have a particular care for the vulnerable. Now, to be fair, not every notion of God (or "god" or "gods") can take that as a starting point.  The ancient Greeks basically pictured Zeus, Hades, Poseidon, and the lot as arrogant humans with superpowers--they were capricious, self-interested, and didn't particularly care about looking out for the nobodies.  The philosophers like Plato and Aristotle spoke sometimes of a god-like "unmoved mover," but they didn't dare imagine that this impersonal being had compassion or empathy for the marginalized.  Even the "God" we invoke on our money in this country is usually thought of as a generic cosmic clockmaker, like so many of the Founding Fathers imagined, who set the universe up and set it running, but didn't get much involved beyond that.  James has a rather different set of axioms about God: he takes it as a given that the God of the universe is the same One who freed enslaved Hebrews, made away for the immigrant Ruth, and gathered exiles home.  And with that as a starting point, yes, James takes it for granted that God will choose to make the last first and the first last.  That all fits exactly with the particular character of God we meet in the Scriptures.

So now James can come to us with the open question--what will we do, if we are daring to let our hearts be shaped by God's?  If the God of the Scriptures is committed to feeding the hungry (and, if Mary's song is correct, sending the rich away empty), then where will or priorities be?  On helping people hoard more for themselves, just because they can (or in the name of some abstract notion of "freedom"), or to help the folks who are just looking to feed their kids?  On giving preference to what will help the Dow Jones close at new record highs, or making it possible for all the kids in your community to have decent education?  On making our own piles of money for future luxuries, or helping our neighbors to have coats for winter weather?  James sees the answers all flowing out from the starting point of who God is, like a geometric proof flowing from a set of Euclid's axioms.  When you know who God is--and what matters to God--you'll use your energy, money, time, and love in the same direction.  And because God's way, over and over again in the Scriptures, is to raise up the "losers" and dethrone the "winners," we'll be called to cast our lots with the ones labeled "losers" by the world, too.

When we remember who God is, we remember who we are.  And since the Scriptures take it as a given that the living God puts the last first, our trajectory for the day is laid out for us already, too.

What will it look like today for you and me to set our course based on the table-turning ways of God of the Exodus and the exile, rather than the gods of excess and empire?

Lord God, let all of our lives flow out of what we take as a given in your heart for those who are most vulnerable in the world.

Troubled... In A Good Way--January 25, 2022

Troubled... In A Good Way--January 25, 2022

"My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?  For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, 'Have a seat here, please,' while to the one who is poor you say, 'Stand there,' or 'Sit at my feet,' have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?" [James 2:1-4]

My former preaching professor back in seminary used to say that a good sermon has to trouble you enough to make you squirm, as well as speak grace strong enough to make you weep.  Everybody likes the second half of that.  Rarely do we recognize how much we need the first.  James is here to trouble us, but in a good way.

Jamesis an honest fella, and he knows how to trouble us enough to make us squirm... and then some.  He tells the truths we would rather ignore, and he does it out of a deep place of love for the folks who are getting stepped on by that very same willful ignorance of ours.  Like the prophets of ancient Israel, who were willing to call out the wealthy and the powerful for their mistreatment of those most in need, James cares about the actual lives of those who are being pushed aside in the community of Jesus.  And he won't stand for it.  For James, this isn't about some abstract principle of "fairness" or whether the Christians in his community have the "right" to treat others however they want in the name of "freedom."  For James this is about the very real, very particular lives of neighbors, who are being made second-class within the church itself, and James sees that such discrimination runs counter to the heart of Jesus. This is about embodying love and embodying the way of Jesus.

The way James phrases his question here gets me every time.  He just comes out swinging and says, "Do you really even believe in Jesus if you are discriminating against people because they are poorer than you?" I think for a long time, that question made me bristle, because I didn't like the idea of somebody (never mind it was somebody speaking with the weight of the Bible's own authority!) questioning the sincerity of my faith because of some issue I saw as "secondary."  

And that's just it: I think for a lot of us (but certainly in my own experience) we learned Christianity as a set of correct facts about God to be believed, memorized, repeated, and organized into a system.  We called this "theology," and were told that questions about how we treat other people were called "ethics," and that these were really secondary, or bonus, matters compared with "what the Gospel is REALLY about."  After all, growing up in a tradition that emphasized that we are "justified by grace through faith apart from works," it only seemed logical that we should spend all our time making sure fellow Christians believed the correct facts about God in order to be saved (which, it turns out, is not really what "justified by grace through faith" means anyhow).  Talk about how we treat other people seemed like we were saying that doing good deeds could save you, and we were CERTAINLY not going to say that!  And after all, if we started meddling in talk about how we treat other people, that could very quickly become political (gasp!) or affect the way we actually lived our lives, gave our time, and spent our money (double gasp!).  It was so much easier to treat Christianity as a set of religious facts and dogmas one had to believe correctly in order to be "justified by faith" rather than say that following Jesus demanded a certain way of treating other people.

The trouble is (and already I find myself squirming again), James reminds us that we don't get to separate how we act from how we think and believe.  Saying "I'm saved by good theology so we never have to talk about ethics" is nonsense two times over--for one, because it assumes we are saved by our good theology in the first place, and secondly because it assumes you can split what we believe about Jesus from how we live our lives as his disciples.  And we can't--they are two sides of the same coin.

James questions how we can believe in Jesus if we are disregarding the poor among us because Jesus is so clear in his concern and love for those same faces.  Saying that being a follower of Jesus is compatible with looking down on the poor is like saying you support shooting sprees in Jesus' name or nuclear war for the sake of the gospel, or that your devotion to Christ is the source for your racial bigotry.  This is not a matter up for debate to James, but has to do with the very heart of the Jesus we say we believe in.  Jesus, after all, has a particular set of commitments and a particular character--he chooses love over hatred, healing over hurting, self-giving over domination, liberation over oppression, and sharing abundance with the poor rather than hoarding wealth for oneself.  Over against all the voices of celebrity preachers of the "prosperity gospel" Jesus clearly takes sides with the have-nots of the world, announcing "Blessed are you who are poor," and "Woe to you who are rich" in Luke's gospel, and lifting up the ones regarded as nobodies by the well-heeled and wealthy.  For James, this is such an obvious and essential piece of who Jesus is that to miss this is to misunderstand what Jesus is all about.

To say we believe in Jesus--especially to give him our allegiance as "Lord"--means we seek more and more fully to align our hearts with his, and to let our lives embody his character.  And because Jesus' heart is oriented toward honoring the poor and lifting up those the world treats as disposable, we are called to do the same.  That's a part of who Jesus is... and therefore who we are, as people who confess Jesus as Lord.

And so, if we are going to be people whose lives embody the way of Jesus, then our actions and attitudes need to reflect Jesus' priorities, too.  So James doesn't let us get away with just having the intellectual belief that "God cares for the poor," but insists that our actions embody that care, too.  We don't get the right to look down on people who are on public assistance or rely on school lunch programs to feed their kids, or to dismiss people struggling to make ends meet as "lazy" or "unintelligent."  We don't get to assume that people who live in low-income housing are going to use any money they have for drugs or alcohol or some other vice--not even when it is politically fashionable to do so.  And James calls us out on giving positions of privilege and honor to the people from wealthier backgrounds, too--he insists we show respect and love to the ones most in need.  

That means getting to know one another, too--rather than just treating anybody as part of some faceless collective we dismiss as "the poor," we are called to get to know each other's stories, to honor people with the gift of our time, to show respect to the folks who can't do anything for us in return, and if anything, to give preference and advantage to those who have less than you or I do.  As Gustavo Gutierrez put the challenge to us, "So you say you love the poor?  Name them."  It's easy to remember the names of those who can do you a favor or are well-connected.  But love calls us to get to know the stories of the people right down the street, the folks across town, the people who walk past our church buildings but wonder if they will find a welcome if they walk through the door because they have nothing to put in the offering.  James won't let us off the hook for making those things a priority, because he knows they are a priority for Jesus.

Today, then, let's do the hard work James calls us to do.  Let's have an honest look at ourselves, even if it makes us squirm, to spot the places we are still harboring prejudices and assumptions about people.  Let's be done with belittling anybody's job or treating it as "unskilled"--let's be done with cracking jokes about "flipping burgers" or "entry-level" work.  Before writing someone off as lazy or lacking motivation, let's commit to getting to know someone's story, and seeing their faces. Rather than using "blessed" as a code-word for "rich," maybe it's time to dismantle once and for all the anti-Jesus notion that having more money is a sign of God's favor. And then finally, for today, James challenges us to use what we do have--our own wealth, our influence (yes, including our votes), our time, our energy, and our love--to seek the benefit of the ones the rest of the world treats as disposable, regardless of where they are from, what they look like, how they dress, or what they do.  For James, those are all signs that we really believe in Jesus, because those are all things that reflect the heart of the Jesus we say we confess as Lord.

And if all of that makes us uncomfortable, fine--it's ok if we are troubled.  Because along with that trouble comes this grace enough to make us weep: ours is a Lord who is always looking out for the welfare of those the world treats as nobodies, because ours is the Lord who sees everyone as somebody.  Following that Lord just means we'll take it seriously enough to live it out in our own choices as well.

Lord Jesus, align our priorities with yours.  Let us love our neighbors around us with your kind of priority for those treated as nobodies by the world.

Recovering the "R" Word--January 24, 2022

Recovering the "R" Word--January 24, 2022

"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." [James 1:26-27]

I've heard it so often, I've lost count: "I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious."  My bet is you've heard that line, too.  Maybe you've said it yourself.

The description, "spiritual-but-not-religious," is one of the ways folks express two things at once: for one, how frustrated, disappointed, and hurt they have been with organized religion like churches, congregations, and the industry of "Christian" products out there, and at the same time, how these folks are still open to the idea that there is more to life than shallow consumerism and hamster-wheel drudgery.  For a lot of folks who identify themselves as "spiritual but not religious," they are open to the idea that God is real, and maybe even find Jesus compelling, but have been so let down before by church abuse, religious bigotry, blatant hypocrisy, and the co-opting of faith by political parties that they feel that "The Church" (or any one theology, tradition, denomination, or religious faith) is more trouble than it's worth.  

These folks are aching to connect with more than just the shallow stuff of life, but they feel like they've been burned before somewhere along the way, maybe by someone who told them they didn't really belong, or spewed hatred while convinced they had God's endorsement on their bigotry, or had turned the Infinite Mystery of God into a neat-and-tidy system that rang hollow.  Maybe they're rightly skeptical of Respectable Religious Leaders (pastors like me included, as well as celebrity church figures on TV, or those who entwine themselves with elected officials or political candidates) who seem to have unquestionable answers, and can bear no doubt or divergence from an "official" version of orthodoxy.  Maybe the folks who are "spiritual but not religious" just think any time we try and pin down the divine we are likely to just be making idols out of ourselves.  Nadia Bolz-Weber has put it so powerfully before:  "People don't leave Christianity because they stop believing in the teachings of Jesus. People leave Christianity because they believe in the teachings of Jesus so much, they can't stomach being part of an institution that claims to be about that and clearly isn't."

So, yeah, if you have ever found yourself in the position of describing yourself as "spiritual, but not religious," there are plenty of folks of integrity, compassion, and yes, of faith, who are right there with you.  In fact, it seems to me that James himself, this co-writer of the Bible, has a lot of sympathy for folks who have been let down by the rotten things people say and do in the name of "religion."  If you've ever been let down by the ways Respectable Religious folks seem so unlike Jesus, James is right there with you.  

But James points us in a rather different direction.  He is out to recover the "R-word" by reclaiming what "religion" is all about by pointing us to the practice of love in public action.  James doesn't just say, "If you are disappointed with religion, then let's all do our own thing and hope it makes us feel closer to the divine."  I think that's because James is not naive, and he knows that we are just as likely to be self-absorbed and hypocritical on our own as we are in groups.  And James' problem with "religion" doesn't seem to be the idea of committing to a certain way of life--he just wants to make sure that our way of life is rooted in love for the most vulnerable rather than showing off our piety to impress others (or God).  So he sees a value in the habit and rhythm of regularly engaging in certain practices that help us grow in love and help our neighbors--in fact, I dare say that's what James thinks the heart of "religion" is.

If our default definition of "religion" has to do with mindless repetition of empty words, or making dogmatic proclamations for the sake of keeping people out, or ritual acts we think God needs us to perform in order to keep us out of hell, James says we need a different definition, not to give up on the word itself.  Interestingly, many think that our English word "religion" comes from Latin roots that mean something like "what you are bound to"--as in, what are the things that bind us to God and to one another.  In that case, the right question to ask is, "What is worth binding our lives to?"  We human beings can't help but devote ourselves to something; the trouble is that so often we devote ourselves, either to lesser things or outright garbage.  We give our time and attention (and money) to countless screens, large and small.  We give our allegiance to political ideologies that bring out the worst in us and nurse the apathy and cruelty in us. We recite whole litanies of arrogant and cruel words to one another on social media, insisting we are doing it to defend the cause of righteousness, when really we embarrassing ourselves and spoiling for a fight.  We turn our focus onto ourselves, our self-interest, and our own benefit.  And then we have a way of dressing all of those things in the language of God to justify ourselves.  Well, yeah, of course that kind of "devotion" is rotten!

James reminds us, though, that just because human beings often dedicate their lives to terrible things (or hypocritical things), it doesn't mean the problem is with the idea of being dedicated or devoted to anything at all--it's about what we are willing to devote our lives to. And for James, since none of this is about impressing God, the thing to devote our lives to is the ways we care for those most at-risk and vulnerable in society.  Caring for "orphans and widows" is a sort of standard biblical shorthand for God's command that we look out for those who are on the margins in society.  In the Hebrew Bible (what we call the Old Testament sometimes), there was a standard, recurring principle of providing for "the widow, the orphan, and the alien/foreigner."  For James, who sees his audience as the outsiders and aliens living in the midst of a hostile world, the addition of the third, "foreigners," was redundant.  But in directing his readers to care for "orphans and widows in their distress," James points us to look out for the needs of those who are least able to provide for themselves and to take their well-being as our own responsibility.  James is directing us, in other words, to what modern-day culture calls "social justice." 

For James, that kind of "religion" is always done as an expression of the character of the God we believe in.  It's never about earning points with that God (that ends up turning other people into pawns in my chess-game to "win" eternal life, rather than people worthy of love and care just by virtue of being alive).  But it's also never just about private "feelings"--the kind of "religion" James cares about takes concrete, practical, and public action to care for the people most on the margins around us, because that is where God's heart it pointed, too.

And if that's what James would have us devote our lives to, well, that's something worth binding ourselves to, I think.  That's the kind of "religion" that matters, because it is essentially about loving God and loving our neighbors--knowing that we and our neighbors are beloved of God already.  James isn't here to give up on the idea of "religion"--just religion done badly, done selfishly, or done hypocritically.  And if I use the slogan "I'm spiritual but not religious" to rationalize withdrawing from the needs of my neighbor in the pursuit of my own "inner peace" or fulfillment, I'm missing the point, too, from a different direction.  That's why James takes the approach of recovering the R-word--he's ready to give up on all the ways we distort religion into some kind of pious posturing, but he still sees worth in our regular practice to love our the most vulnerable neighbors around us.  And the more we make a habit of seeking the well-being of the most at-risk among us--whether it's those more likely than you to get sick with preventable illness, or those more at risk of not having enough to eat, or those most in need of encouragement and love--the more we are shaped by love... for love.  That's worth giving our lives to--because that's also what makes us more fully alive as well.

So if you're at that place of being disappointed enough with organized religion that you are ready to give up on the whole project, know that you've got James at your side--but that he points us all the same to a recovered sense of what "religion" was meant to be all along.  It's always been about love--the love for God that is expressed in the concrete actions of love for the marginalized folks around us.  

When love for neighbors takes form beyond empty wishing or mushy feelings, that's what religion is meant to be: using these bodies of ours to care for the bodily needs of everyone around us.  And that--well, that, I can see myself giving my life to.

Lord God, bind us in love toward you and those people whom you love who are most in need of knowing your love.  Let that be our religion, and let it be well-pleasing to you.

Muscle Memory of the Soul--January 21, 2022

Muscle Memory of the Soul--January 21, 2022

"But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act--they will be blessed in their doing." [James 1:25]

"It's like riding a bike." You know that saying, I'm sure.  You've heard it a million times, and you've likely used it a million more.  It's our shorthand for talking about those skills that come back to us, even after not using them for a long while, because the knowledge for how to do them somehow resides deep within us. Even if we can't intellectually explain how we know what to do or how we rediscover those skills that are buried and waiting to be dusted off again, it's like our bodies know, even without consulting our brains.  Your legs "remember" how to pedal, and your hands "recall" how to use the handlebars to steer, and--voila!--you are riding a bike again, even if it's been a long time since you were on one.

In fact, that experience can feel so much like your body is actually remembering that we sometimes call this phenomenon "muscle memory."  It's when we learn an action so thoroughly and repeat it so often that our bodies can do them without our consciously thinking about it anymore.  And it's true of riding a bicycle, playing a musical instrument, typing at a keyboard, or playing a sport. It's true of every time I watch my daughter do a cartwheel, and she tells me she just "knows" how, since she's had the practice of doing gymnastics, even though it boggles my mind to see her do it so seemingly effortlelssly. There comes a point when you can stop thinking about how you are doing something, and you find that you are just... doing it.  It's like the knowledge is inside you, like our bodies themselves have the skill within them.

And for pursuits like those, from music to athletics to typing to carpentry to bike-riding, that's really the goal, isn't it:  to internalize the skill to the point where you're not looking at a book or an instruction manual any longer, but can just use that skill like it is the most natural thing in the world for you.  The goal is for muscle memory to allow you to ride without having to tell yourself, "Left pedal, right pedal," and for your hands simply to know where the keys are for a C-minor chord, or your fingers to perform the trill at the end of a Baroque composer's flourish.  It's not reckless or random action, but we do it without having to stop and think about what we are doing, either, because the awareness is in our bodies themselves.

That's how James thinks of the life of faith, too.  The goal is that we become people who so internalize the cadences of God's Reign that it becomes a part of us. It's for us to become so in tune with the movements of the Spirit that Christ's kind of love has the feel of muscle memory for our souls. James imagines the way of Jesus guiding our movements like an eight-year-old girl fearlessly doing backflips across her living room floor because it seems like the most natural thing in the world for her to be doing.

That's who I want to be.  Don't you?

I want to be the kind of person who sees the customer ahead of me in line at the grocery store when they are panicking with embarrassment when they realize they won't have the money to pay for all they have laid out already and then to help cover the costs for them.  I want to be the kind of person who can tell from a friend's social media posts that they are really struggling, and then make the effort to reach out to them. I want to be the person who can take the criticism of others because I'm willing to hear the truth, even when it means admitting where I've messed up, and I want to be the person who is brave enough to tell the truth, too, even when it is costly.  I want to be the sort of person whose face naturally becomes a welcoming smile to new faces, whose words make strangers feel welcome, and whose presence in the room makes others feel at ease.  I want to be the kind of person who doesn't need a bracelet to remind me to ask, "What would Jesus do?" because it's become like second nature to strive to be in tune with his mission.

That's what James is after here.  He wants us to be people who can follow after Jesus like we are riding a bike--that is, to be people who know it in in our bones, rather than constantly having to check with a book or a hymnal or a script to know what to do.  Like any kid on a bike will confirm for you, you don't have to be able to understand the physics of momentum or calculate your velocity in order to ride.  You just have to know the feel in your legs of putting one foot forward and then the next, and let your muscle memory carry you from there.  James wants us to be people who don't need to consult the bicycle instruction manual every time we want to get on our ten-speed, but can ride freely and naturally because our bodies know how to show love for neighbors without having to have a Bible study or a church meeting about it first.  James wants us to know the freedom of having so internalized the love of Jesus that it prompts the way we care for others, take additional steps to attend to their needs, open our eyes to see the folks we might otherwise overlook, and to do all those things with the joyful movements of a kid who knows how to do front handsprings.

So, like any of those skills, the way to build the muscle memory is to keep at it.  We practice the way of Jesus, and we repeat it, and we practice it again, until it becomes a part of us.  Until our bodies know that love. 

How will we practice the way of Jesus today?  Let's get to it.

Lord Jesus, teach us your way, not merely in our heads, but with every movement of these bodies, and in each action we choose with these minds.

Children Already--January 20, 2022

Children Already--January 20, 2022

"For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like." [James 1:23-24]

It all comes down to this: remembering who we are.

That's it.  Remember who you are. Those four simple words carry an awful lot of weight there.  But there is good news to be heard in them.  The idea of "remembering who you are" takes it as a given that you are already something good and worthy of being.  We may be forgetful from time to time.  We may not live up to the fullness of our identity.  We may be hoodwinked by the voices of others telling us and selling us on the notion we are not acceptable, not worthy, not beloved, or not children of the living God.  But those are all mistakes in believing what is already true about us.  We are God's children; what we are called to do in our day to day lives and choices is to remember that, to remember who we are, and to live like it is true.

Again, I know it can sound so simple--maybe even simplistic--but something profound is going on here in these words from James.  And if we hear him correctly, we'll no longer be under any illusion that he's trying to sell us some scheme for earning God's love with enough good deeds.  It's not about earning something in order to become acceptable, or to achieve the coveted status of being God's children. Sometimes we slide into that kind of thinking (or accuse James of teaching it), and we make ourselves into spiritual Pinocchios, all striving to become "real" boys and girls by our own moral self-improvements.  We end up talking about the Christian life as though it were a spiritual self-help project, where the end-goal is to achieve the status of "righteousness," and making it to the level of being called God's children.  And we end up inventing our own lists of actions, attitudes, shows of piety, and even partisan political bona fides, that are required of us in order to attain that spiritual status, like we are earning a spot in the afterlife or applying for membership in heaven. 

But James doesn't approach things that way.  Not at all. He doesn't start with a list of things we have to do in order to become children of God, or to earn some "good boy" or "good girl" status.  James has already said that God has already given you birth as a beloved child, and as the "firstfruits" of God's new creation (1:18).  In other words, he begins taking it as a given that God has given us birth, that we are already made God's children, and that this is the identity we operate out of, not something we have to work our way into.  When you know your identity, then when someone says, "Remember who you are," it is the most empowering and free thing you can do. You aren't trying to achieve a status that is out of your reach; you are living and operating from the identity you already have. 

So James isn't telling us that if we don't behave well enough or follow the rules closely enough we'll lose our shot at winning God's love or acceptance.  He's saying we already have both, and therefore all we need to do is to remember who we are--we are children in the family of God.  Our lives, then, will take on a characteristic family resemblance to the heart of God.  We'll have the same care for the vulnerable that God has.  We'll have the same commitment to honesty and integrity that God has, even when it is costly to tell the truth.  We'll have the same love for people around us that God's heart has for them.  And we'll grow more fully into those because they are our gifts already as children of God, not something we have to achieve our way into.

On the days when we really seem to struggle with being the kind of decent, loving, kind, and trustworthy people we want to be, James' advice isn't that we have to beat ourselves up or stress ourselves out rehearsing our failures.  He points us instead to the character of God--look again at the way God loves... remember again what God's own goodness is like... turn your focus to God's justice and mercy--and from there, remember that these are all your inheritance already.  They are part of the family resemblance, so to speak.  They are who you are, already.  The question is only ever whether we will trust that we are indeed who God says we are, and step into that way of life.

Today, then, this is enough--no more and no less--remember who you are.

Lord God, give us the capacity to remember that you have made us your children, and to own that identity full and deep.

An Arabesque in Waiting--January 19, 2022

An Arabesque in Waiting--January 19, 2022

"But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves." [James 1:22]

It's all well and good to have sheet music sitting at your piano, waiting to be played--as long as you actually take the time to play it.  Otherwise you've just got a lot of black squiggles on pages that aren't good for anything, and a lot of silence.  The joy is in making the music, not merely possessing the paper its printed on.

I remember that every time I walk past the piano in our living room.  Earlier in the summer, we had to move all the furniture out of our first-floor rooms so we could install new flooring, and that meant packing up all of our collected piano music and boxing it up until the work was done.  But long after the room was put back together and all the furniture returned where it was supposed to go, we still hadn't gotten around to playing anything at the piano. When you get used to an absence of music for long enough, you just sort of forget that it's there, waiting to be played.  Piano keys get dusty, and schedules get full of other things.  

And then, for whatever reason, one day in the fall, I found myself in the room where we had left our boxed-up sheet music and started looking through it.  There were favorites from decades past in my life, from Broadway musicals to classical repertoire to hymnals in all sorts of colors.  And they were all still sitting in the box, because we hadn't gotten around to unpacking it. Staring back at me was the cover of a collection of piano pieces by Claude Debussy, a personal favorite, and as I thumbed through it, recalling the sound of the melodies and the memories that went with them, I realized what I had been missing.  I got up, book in hand, and sat down to play, and to see if the notes would come back to my fingers.  And even though I was a bit slow and rusty, I mustered an attempt at the French composer's "Arabesque No. 1," and something came alive in me again--something I didn't even realize I had been missing.

I know that the New Testament writer James lived about seventeen centuries too early to have played the piano, and even longer to have heard anything by Claude Debussy, but I think he's trying to tell us something much the same here.  The beauty of the music is in the playing, not merely the possessing of the pages.  And the beauty of God's word is in the ways we embody its cadences of mercy and justice, not merely owning a Bible, or even a bookshelf full of them.

Now, to be sure, there's nothing at all wrong with having or reading your own copy of the Scriptures--of course not!  After all, when you're learning to play a piece of music, you need the notes on the page so your brain and hands can learn how it goes.  But merely owning a set of black squiggles on paper in a bound volume makes one neither a pianist nor a disciple--it is the attempt to practice these things that makes the difference.  It's not even that we have to get all the notes right or follow the way of Jesus without stumbling--there's something beautiful to be experienced even if our fingers are rusty at the keyboard or our hearts are a bit stiffened from not being stretched wide with Jesus' love.  We get better the more we keep at it.  We come to embody the music, the beauty, the goodness. With a musician, there comes a point where the notes seem to come from our fingers, and for disciples of Jesus, there comes a point where you can just see the face of Christ in someone's actions, words or love, even when they're not quoting a Bible verse at you.

James wants us to experience that beauty and goodness in our own lives as well, so he reminds us that if all we ever do is hear the Word (or read it or merely own a copy of it), we will be missing something vital.  Hearing the Word is a first step--after all, we aren't making up the Reign of God out of whole cloth on our own.  And we need repeated, even continual, renewal in the Word, just like a learning piano student has to keep sitting at the keys with the music in front of them as they learn it.  But if the book is never opened--merely possessed--then our religious posturing is a sham.

It's easy (and rather cliche) for Respectable Religious people to bemoan how much they wish "they would put the Bible back" into public life (who or what the nebulous "they" refers to is never quite spelled out, but "they" are, to be sure, the enemy).  But to be very honest, sometimes you just get the impression that those voices just think the mere existence of Bibles makes a difference in the kind of people we are becoming, as if just having one on your coffee table or in a classroom or a city hall is a noble goal.  James tells us not to fall for that thinking--that's like owning the sheet music but never playing it.  And I suspect James would tell us, and the voices of Respectable Religion in our day, that it is vastly more important that we dare to live what's in the book, rather than just insisting it be "put back" in public places.  Rather than just complaining that "nobody reads the Bible anymore" or that the Ten Commandments aren't posted up in every city hall or courtroom, maybe it would be more honest if each of us would make an honest attempt at the sorts of things the Word calls us to: doing justice, practicing mercy, and walking humbly.  Rather than waving the Bible around as a prop or a token symbol of dominance (which, let's be honest, is often how Respectable Religious Folks mis-use it), James calls us to embody the Scriptures' vision of welcome for strangers, love shown to the unlovely, care extended to the most vulnerable, restoration for those who have been deprived or excluded, and a willingness to go above and beyond for the good of our neighbor... even when it is inconvenient.

After all, if I just hold up a book of sheet music to someone who has never heard the pieces inside it and say, "What you REALLY need is to pay attention to this composer!" I'll most likely just be met with an indifferent shrug.  But if I can sit down at the keyboard and play the notes that have been waiting to be heard, even if I'm rusty while I play, then people around me will get a feel for the music and want to be drawn into its beauty, too.  That's what the Christian life is meant to be: playing the music for listening ears around us, even when we don't get it perfectly, so that others will want to join in the song, too.

Today, let us put our hands to the keys and live the way of God's goodness with our hands and feet, our wallets and our wristwatches, like it is all an Arabesque in waiting.  The world is waiting to hear the tune.

O God, move us from merely possessing copies of your word to being captivated by your vision of justice and mercy, and letting the beauty of that vision be experienced by others around us.

Preparing the Ground--January 18, 2022

Preparing the Ground--January 18, 2022

"Therefore rid yourselves of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness, and welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your lives." [James 1:21]

You can't force a flower to grow or blossom by sheer willpower or brute strength.  The seed has a power all its own, taking cues from the weather and transforming sunshine and rain into life sprouting up from the ground.  But you can at least remove obstacles that could hamper those new green shoots as they push their way up to the light.

That might be a humbling realization for a would-be gardener, but it's actually rather empowering.  Once you can be honest about what is NOT in your power to do, you can spend your efforts where they will be fruitful--on the things that ARE in your power to do.  Like Niebuhr's famous prayer asks, when we have "the wisdom to know the difference" between what we can and cannot change, we can do something productive with our time and energy.

And that's what James is after here.  It's not within our power to make God's word for each of us grow, like a tall oak or a redwood, into maturity within us.  That lies in God's hand and God's power to accomplish. And like a seed growing beyond human effort, God is able to make that happen just fine all on God's own.  But what is within our ability is the weeding of our souls to remove the thistles and thorns that would get in the way of the good growth God gives.

Just a few verses earlier, James had described the way a little rottenness (or, to use the more theological-sounding word, "sin") festers and grows, almost like a cancer, from seemingly small impulses and attitudes into actions, which in turn become habits, which again in turn can consume us.  That can sound ominous, and maybe even hopeless--again, much like a cancer diagnosis can sound at first.  But, like the work of surgeons or chemotherapy to root out tumors where they are starting so that they do not spread, James here is telling us that we do have some agency in pulling up the things that would grow and fester in us otherwise.  Like a surgeon removes gangrene or a gardener pulls out weeds, we do have the ability to tend to our souls.  That doesn't make something good grow by itself, but it does make room for something good to spring up.

Notice here that none of James' thinking here has to do with winning God's approval, earning God's love, or racking up enough points or merits or gold-stars on our permanent record to "get in to heaven."  It's not like that.  For all the bad press James can sometimes get for talking about the importance of what we do to live out our faith, you can see for yourself that he's not suggesting if we do a good enough job that then God will love us.  Rather, James is talk about us clearing the ground in our lives so that, as the song puts it, our hearts can be "good soil, open to the seed of Your word." 

What would that look like in real life?  Now that's a good question.  The metaphor is easy enough to understand:  "Pull the thistles and briars out of the ground so that there will be room for something good to grow."  But what exactly does that mean?  It means, like in your garden, we take the time to make it a regular practice to survey the ground and get rid of what shouldn't be there. When I catch myself being crude or hurtful, even to people who aren't in the room, I call myself out on it. When I've put up some rude, hateful, or profane message on my bumper, my social media feed, or my flagpole, I'll realize that those things not good for my soul and take them down. When I notice that certain voices in my life--whether on TV or radio or social media or wherever--have a tendency to bring the nastiness out in me, or to rile me up over things that aren't worth it, I make the choice not to give them my attention.  When I notice that I'm not sensitive to things--words or attitudes or actions--that other people are really upset or offended by, maybe it's worth investigating whether I've gotten used to weeds in my soul that are causing harm to others without my awareness.  Again, like a good gardener would pay attention if other people were yanking out some plant from their garden beds that I didn't realize was dangerous or noxious, we can listen to and learn from others around us who can help us see things in our blind-spots and recognize them as weeds.  Doing any of those things takes effort, time, humility and honesty--and yeah, any of those can seem in short supply these days.  But they are what allow us to see the soil in our hearts truthfully, and to let the ground be ready for good things to grow.

Today's calling then--one that may begin again today but needs to continue over a lifetime--is just that: to get the ground ready.  Day by day, our prayer can be to ask God to help us see the places where little, socially-acceptable evils are trying to choke out the good growth, and then to have the courage to pull out those pet sins by the roots.  We don't do it with the fear that if we mess up we will no longer be loved, and we don't do it as some attempt to earn heavenly prizes.  But rather, like anyone who knows the joy of watching something good grow up out of the ground--from a field full of wheat to a tomato plant in a back-yard pot to a sunflower in your yard--we prepare the fields of these hearts so that God can make something wonderful blossom in our midst.

Lord God, give us the courage and persistence to remove the thorns and thistles from our souls, and grow something good in us today.

The Courage to Listen--January 17, 2022

The Courage to Listen--January 17, 2022

"You must understand this, my beloved; let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; for your anger does not produce God's righteousness." [James 1:19-20]

Let's be clear about a few things today.

For starters: if, hypothetically, my car doesn't want to start in the morning, no amount of kicking the doors, pounding on the steering wheel, or shouting at the chassis will get it moving. The energy of my temper tantrum simply cannot be converted into forward momentum or internal combustion. In fact, it would be accurate to say that a car is powered by an entirely different kind of physical energy than futile kicking and frustrated cursing. I may indeed feel upset that the car isn't starting as I find myself later and later to work, but I do need to be clear: no amount of hitting the car's doors or dashboard will translate to a purring engine.

Now, if we are clear on that much, we should say something as a corollary. Just as my personal meltdown is of an entirely different kind of energy from the precisely timed controlled explosions inside the cylinders of a car's engine, my anger is simply useless in terms of generating God's kind of justice... God's kind of righteousness (side note: the Greek word James and the New Testament both use that is translated "righteousness" is also the same word for "justice." These are not separate categories or ideas in Greek).

In other words, my outraged bluster powers God's justice as well as my punching the car generates internal combustion. Which is to say, not at all.

James here says that in about as plain a way as you can say it here in these verses, but it almost seems that we don't really believe him on that point. (Funny how religious folks can be so very particular about "getting back to the Bible" but when the Bible says something we do not want to have to deal with, like exposing the impotence of our anger, we ignore it or pretend the Bible is talking to someone else.) Somehow, most everybody in our culture has bought into the damnably stupid thinking that if someone else upsets me, I must "save face" by unleashing my unbridled anger at them so that I won't look "weak." We have swallowed the lie, hook, line, and sinker, that "real" power has to shout angry words back when someone has done or said something to offend you, or that the only way to appear "tough" is to keep insisting on getting the last word, the last glare, or the last punch.

How many times have we seen or heard the teenage boy muddling his way through high school and convinced that if someone upsets him, he needs to hit first and ask questions later in order to prove himself?

How many times have we seen (or been) the one who seems so desperate to provoke a fight on social media that they keep lobbing angry words, or name-calling, or making threats and denouncements, while being totally unaware that every additional post, every additional bombastic outburst actually becomes more and more of an embarrassment, less and less persuasive, and increasingly pathetic?

How many times have we been pushed to ignore or shake our heads or debate about whether or not to respond to someone on the fringe of our circle of acquaintances because we simply couldn't believe the vitriol coming out of their mouths--the refusal to see others as made in the image of God, the refusal to hear why someone else thinks the way they do, the refusal to listen, because listening feels scary and threatening? And then--the question we never really want to ask ourselves--how many times have I said (yelled), posted, "liked", "shared" or approved of something that was so drenched in blind and futile anger that it made someone else stop listening to me? How many times has self-righteous anger on my side and self-righteous anger on someone else's side kept both of us from hearing what the other has to say?

People who might have been willing to listen to a perspective they did not share are quickly turned away and get defensive, and then they shut down any attempt to hear where you are coming from. That is to say, anger-powered outbursts of immature name-calling or threats draped in the presumption of rightness are simply impotent--they cannot accomplish anything or move a thing forward. They are the interpersonal equivalents of punching your car to make it run.

The Biblical writers offer us some counsel for when we find ourselves in such situations (and we will). While it is absolutely true that sometimes anger is the right response (like the old line says, "Hope has two lovely daughters whose names are Anger and Courage--anger at the way things are, and courage to change them"), there is a difference between anger that fuels constructive action and just plain outraged bluster. One is powerful, and the other is impotent. One comes from a place of being in tune with the Reign of God, and the other, as James says it, simply cannot produce the justice of God. Before we automatically baptize our own anger and outrage as being "the good kind," it is worth taking a moment seriously to ask whether we are fired up because are really attuned to justice, or whether we really feel insecure and threatened. Because here is a dirty little secret: most of the time, we (wrongly) assume that MY anger is always the "righteous" kind, when it is really more likely to be the "frightened bully" kind. The less I am willing to seriously look at my own anger that way to test it out, the more likely it is because I already know that I am just a scared, cornered bully in that moment and don't want to have to face it.  Like James Baldwin says, "I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain."

So the New Testament's James counsels us to do the brave thing and deal with that pain, by daring to listen more and speak less. When someone else is spewing something outrageous and vitriolic, it is far more effective in the long run to let their own impotent rage hoist them by their own petard, rather than returning fire on their terms. Once you engage someone else's impotent anger on their own terms, you have already given away the contest, because impotent anger colors our vision so that we can only see ourselves as "winning" the argument and automatically dismiss the other as a "loser." It's like declaring that sky is red and then putting on red-tinted lenses so that all you can see is red in the sky; at some point, you lose the ability to recognize that you are selectively filtering out any input to the contrary of what you already think.

When we, as James puts it, are "quick to listen," we defuse and de-escalate. So often, the impotent, car-punching, plate-throwing kind of anger comes from a place of feeling threatened or insecure, and we feel threatened when we think we are being dismissed or ignored or told we are unimportant. When someone else says something (or posts something, or tweets something, or whatever) that seems soaked in that kind of insecure anger, they are almost always spoiling for a fight--but if our response is not to return "sound and fury" in kind, to borrow Shakespeare's phrase, but rather to stop the other person in their tracks and say, "Tell me about what leads you think that," a clever thing happens. First, it refuses to accept the terms of impotent anger that this is a "fight," and second of all, it compels both the other person and you, the speaker and the listener, to think through why each of you think the way you think. It is a way of disarming someone who is expecting you to disrespect them (so that then they can feel justified in treating you or others with further disrespect), and it is a way of refusing to give them ammunition to use against you any longer.

I am reminded of something Dr. King used to say about the core philosophy of his nonviolent resistance during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. King wrote in 1957, "the nonviolent resister does not seek to humiliate or defeat the opponent but to win his friendship and understanding. This was always a cry that we had to set before people that our aim is not to defeat the white community, not to humiliate the white community, but to win the friendship of all of the persons who had perpetrated this system in the past. The end of violence or the aftermath of violence is bitterness. The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation and the creation of a beloved community."

That kind of response is both radical and powerful--the opposite of futile and impotent anger. The idea is not to condone or keep looking the other way when someone is boiling over with infuriated nonsense, but to engage in a way that seeks the good of all, and that allows the possibility that I might learn something myself, too. If I enter the encounter listening, then no matter what, there is the possibility of something good coming from it: either it defuses impotent anger from the person I listen to, or it compels me to hear and recognize something I did not recognize before myself. Listening is risky in that sense--it allows the possibility that I don't have all the right answers yet, and that I might need to learn something from someone I disagree with, and it also surrenders the right to hit first and ask questions later. Being "quick to listen" requires the courage to be vulnerable... and let's just be honest, most of us are simply not that brave all of the time.

James' direction is even more important when the stakes are high--when we are talking about things we hold dear, and when we are talking about our highest allegiances. Sometimes we grudgingly agree to listen on matters of no consequence--ice cream flavors, taste in music, style of clothes, or whatever--but then we think that when it comes to God, we have to shout more loudly because we have to defend God's honor. But as Stanley Hauerwas put it so well, "Never think that you need to protect God. Because anytime you think you need to protect God, you can be sure that you are worshipping an idol.” Or as another old line has it, you defend God the way you defend a lion--you get out of its way.

Today, we are going to run into people--some in the flesh, and some through countless screens and devices--who will strike us as impotently angry. They will be lashing out because they feel threatened (whether they know it or would say it that way or not), because they feel insecure (whether they would admit it or not), and because they feel like they have been told they do not matter (whether that is justified or not). Our calling is not to sink to the level of impotent anger. It is always to take the higher road, even when the angry shouting voices go low. That may not feel "fair," but our calling is not simply to settle for "I hit you because you hit me first," but rather the creation of the beloved community.

So when someone says something that provokes a spark of that outrage or head-shaking disgust (and that will happen, too), what if you and I dared to try what James suggests. What if we paused and listened, thereby refusing to reinforce the expectation of the angry voice who is expecting to be ignored so they have excuse to retreat to their own echo chamber, and what if we asked, sincerely and honestly, "I'd like to listen to how you come to that position. Tell me what you think, and why..." Sometimes the question itself compels someone to realize that the conclusions they thought were obvious are not so obvious to everyone, and sometimes it pushes them to re-examine what leads them to their own opinions. Sometimes even, people come to see that the things they always assumed were the "righteous" answer, or the godly position, may not be on the solid footing they thought. And sometimes you as the listener learn something you were not expecting, either.

Answering impotent anger with impotent anger creates no forward motion--it is really just competitive venting. It is scorched-earth warfare at its worst.

Responding to impotent anger with a willingness to listen is not conceding that you are wrong--but rather, it is a chance to defuse someone who is spoiling for a fight about the color of the sky with their red-tinted glasses on, and a refusal to give them permission to run back to their own echo chamber still convinced that they are right.

Today, let us dare to practice the powerful act of listening.

Lord God, let your justice come about, but give us the humility and grace to see that you don't need our blind yelling to make it happen. Give us the courage to be vulnerable enough to listen.