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.