The Trouble in the Mirror--January 13, 2022

The Trouble in the Mirror--January 13, 2022

"But one is tempted by one's own desire, being lured and enticed by it; then, when that desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and that sin, when it is fully grown, gives birth to death. Do not be deceived, my beloved." [James 1:14-16]

It's that punch-line from the old Pogo cartoon:  "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

When things go wrong in our lives, we can be so quick to find someone else to pin the blame on. And of course, it's easy to point fingers elsewhere; that lets us off the hook for doing the hard work of honestly looking at our true selves to see our own weak places, struggles, failures, and flaws.  If I can find someone else to be the scapegoat, or somehow blame God or the devil or the alignment of the planets for my troubles, I can cast myself as a virtuous hero, or at least an innocent victim.  I don't have to even consider the possibility of being the villain--or at least, being complicit in or partially responsible for the messes around me. But James is here to hold us accountable once again, and he tells us that the source of the trouble is looking back at us in the mirror.  

James is also here to help us see how seemingly little things can metastasize in us like a cancer until they consume us.  He uses this powerful image of a wrong-headed desire giving birth to sin, and then sin in turn bearing death as its own offspring. It's a powerful reminder that most of the time in our lives, we may not intend to commit atrocities, but we bear responsibility for letting little evils fester inside us because we think they're "not that bad."  No one ever intends to create a monster--that's the premise of every monster movie.  But when we let ourselves off the hook for small hatreds, little instances of selfishness, and socially acceptable sins (or even lauded ones--like "Greed is good!" from the movie Wall Street), they have a way of possessing us slowly but surely.  And together over enough time we find ourselves capable of terrible things and systemic evil with roots that reach down deep within us.

The seeds of that kind of rottenness are all around us, ready to germinate and sprout in any soil they can find.  It's the way a little insecurity about yourself and your own worth can grow into a need to make yourself feel superior to others... which can fester into bigotry about whatever group of people you decide you want to look down on... which in turn becomes permission to dehumanize other people, overlook it when they are mistreated, or justify terrible things being done to them.  It's the way a small amount of unchecked envy grows into an obsession with getting more money and more stuff... until it cuts us off from meaningful relationships with other people and tethers us to jobs we hate but have to stay in because we have to keep making payments on loans for the things we have or always striving for more things we don't have yet!  It's the way a dose of ego gives rise to "Me First" thinking that can become cold and callous to the needs of neighbors, and again, we end up justifying monstrosities that can be done to others in the name of putting "Me and My Group First."

If you think I'm being melodramatic, bear with me for a moment.  Think of how many atrocities of history became systematically entrenched because people (who often thought of themselves as "good" and "decent" and even "religious," mind you) allowed little evils and justifiable cruelties spread like tumors until they had a stranglehold on whole societies.  From apartheid in South Africa to Jim Crow segregation in the American South to the practice of chattel slavery that was woven into the fabric of our national history from its inception, terrible evils became possible when people individually and collectively decided to let their greed and illusions of superiority metastasize into political and economic systems.  Crimes against humanity like the Holocaust, the genocides in Rwanda and Sudan, or our own national history against Native peoples, all had their genesis in attitudes of avarice, delusions of some divine "right" to take things from others, fear of a group deemed the dangerous "enemy," and then the cowardice of people who were watching it all happen but refused to risk their comfort or safety to change things or stop the momentum.  We're even watching right now as the pandemic continues to wreak havoc in people's lives--as well as to take their lives--how much worse we humans can make things when a little bit of self-centeredness ("Nobody can tell me what to do to help protect someone else's health!") keeps growing and spreading and festering, giving a virus a chance to keep mutating and spreading itself, making existing treatments, remedies, and inoculations less effective against new forms and variants.  All around us--and within us--is the evidence that we human beings keep giving ourselves permission to think and act in sinfully self-centered ways that start out small but all too quickly become overwhelming catastrophes.  And all too often, we make things even worse by wrapping our rottenness in flags and crosses to convince ourselves that vice is somehow virtuous after all.

James isn't trying to hurt our feelings by telling us this--he's just being honest.  A little unchecked hatred, prejudice, greed, avarice, or selfishness goes a very long way.  They can be rooted out, like the noxious weeds they are, but that takes both the time and effort to do it, and the willingness to see what's growing from the soil of our hearts, and what has wrapped its tendrils around the ways we work, think, talk, and do business.  

The good news, which we deeply need after all this heavy stuff, is that this isn't the end of the conversation.  James isn't telling us about the dangerous growth of sin because there's no hope--he's telling us that the first step toward healing is truth-telling, and that starts with looking at ourselves and the ways we are each letting tumors of sin grow and spread unchecked in our spirits.

If there were no way of dealing with the malignant power of sin in our lives, James wouldn't have bothered to write.  If we were doomed to let our worst impulses devour us from the inside out, he could have saved his breath.  But because James thinks it is worthwhile to warn us about the power of letting our pet sins become monstrosities, it also means there is hope for us that we might be cured of this cancer.  It starts with honesty--the honesty that God makes possible for us, because we know we are accompanied by a God who is looking to be our encouragement rather than our executioner.  James is blunt with us here--"Don't be fooled!"--because he knows a good surgeon who can cut away the things that would overpower us and kill us if left undisturbed.  When we can be honest about the places inside us that need to be excised, we can open those most vulnerable deepest parts of ourselves to God and say, "I think I'm part of the problem--here, help make me well.  Make me whole.  Make me wholly good, like you."

May God give us the courage to make that our prayer today... and to mean it.

O God, we are part of the problems around us, and most days we barely have the courage to admit that much.  Purify us and cut out all the rottenness within us that would otherwise consume us, that we might be fully alive and reflect your goodness into the world.