What's Worth Receiving--January 5, 2022

What’s Worth Receiving—January 5, 2022

"If any of you is lacking in wisdom, ask God, who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, and it will be given you.” [James 1:5]

Some gifts are like time-bombs of goodness. When you first receive them, you don’t appreciate their value… and then, sometimes quite suddenly, you see their worth and treasure them (and the givers) much more fully.

I remember once getting a particularly high-quality flannel shirt one Christmas a few years back. And at first, I barely even looked at it. (Christmas mornings can be a bit of a blur in our house, even at the best of times.) Flannel, after all, isn’t regarded as a terribly glamorous fabric, and this one was a pretty subdued plaid at that. In a time when so many Christmas gifts are abuzz with electronics, come packaged with an array of attachments, or connect to the internet, a flannel shirt can seem… well, pretty lackluster. But to tell you the God’s-honest truth, I have lost, broken, or pitched plenty of gizmos and gadgets over the years—and that flannel is still hanging in my closet getting regular use. Its fabric has only gotten softer over the years, but it’s durable enough that I can wear it without worry when I’m working with tools in the woodshop or out for a walk on a brisk fall day. And while other colors come and go out of fashion (I’m looking at you, avocado green, burnt orange, and harvest gold), its simple classic pattern has stayed in good condition. A good flannel like that may not be flashy, but it will serve its wearer for a very long time. It’s a gift worth receiving, even if it wasn’t what I was expecting when I saw the box under the tree once upon a time.

My guess is that you’ve got your own experience with gifts like that—whether it was a piece of clothing you have come to treasure, a kitchen tool you never knew you needed but can’t live without now, a book you were not expecting that has now become a favorite, or the music of an artist you had never heard of but now have come to love. Those gifts are humbling in a way, because they remind us that the givers of those gifts just might know something or see something about us, and about what we need, that we hadn’t recognized in our selves. Those kinds of givers aren’t afraid to take the risk of giving us something we might not fully appreciate at first, and they’re willing to invest the time it might take for us to come around to see their worth. When you find such a giver in your life—a friend, family member, or whomever—hold onto them.

Beyond flannels or French presses, though, there are the unexpected and underrated gifts of God. And that’s where James takes us today. He starts in a surprising direction: “If any of you lacks wisdom, ask God.” It’s not odd that God would be the one to ask, of course, but rather, I think for a lot of us, wisdom seems an odd thing to ask for. After all, I’ve seen more than my share of televangelists insisting that God is here to increase our wealth, give us better jobs and bigger houses, and help us find our ideal romance. I’ve heard Respectable Religious talking heads invoke God to give their political party victory at the next election or frustrate the plans of the incumbent they don’t like, too. And I’ve read plenty of sermons, statements, and messages from celebrity pastors who are certain they have the right agenda to pursue in their culture wars, so they only ask God to help them win, rather than ever stopping to ask God to show them where they might be wrong. But very rarely have I heard it suggested that what we most need is wisdom—a gift that even more rarely leads to money, power, or fame.

And yet, here is James, holding out to us the offer of wisdom as a free gift, like it’s an unopened flannel shirt just waiting for us to discover how much it suits us. He’s one of those givers, it turns out: the kind who knows what we need better than we do ourselves. Or rather, God is. James here is only pointing us to the God who gives wisdom, even if it’s not the gift we thought we wanted, and even though it isn’t the latest, flashiest, or most highly coveted thing around.

So I want to ask us to pause here for a moment and let James point us in a direction we might not have even thought of before. What if we followed James’ lead here and revised our own prayer lives, so that they would be less like wish-lists on Amazon of things we are placing orders for with God, and more like asking God to rearrange what we want and work for in the first place? What if, instead of, “Dear God, please give ME that raise at work so I can renovate my kitchen,” or “Help my political party to win more seats in the midterm elections,” or “Here is my five-year-plan for my life, God—rubber stamp your approval on it and make it happen,” we started with, “Maybe I don’t even know what I should want, or seek, or spend my life on, God. Help me to be wiser, to know and act in light of what YOU see that I need.”

That’s going to change things for us, to be sure. It means asking God to shape us, to help us to grow—the very things we talked yesterday about, too, it turns out—and to make us people whose lives look like Jesus, rather than just asking God for favors and merchandise. It means seeing that the-kind-of-person-I-am is more important than the-circumstances-I-experience-or-the-stuff-I-possess. And it means opening ourselves up to let God rearrange the priorities in our hearts, so that our actions and choices change as well.

After all, wisdom isn’t just about head knowledge—it’s about being able to see the purpose and meaning behind things, as well as knowing what truly matters, so that we act in light of what lasts. Like the old joke goes, “Knowledge is the recognition that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is understanding not to put one in a fruit salad.” We aren’t just asking God for more religious facts, or helping us memorize Bible verses or creeds, or for a more refined abstract systematic theology to learn. We are asking God to help us re-evaluate everything in light of who God is. We are asking God to change the way we see the world in light of Jesus, so that we can live in the world in the way of Jesus. That’s what it means to ask God for wisdom.

Now, I’ll readily admit that isn’t as flashy or dramatic as our usual ways of praying like God is a genie here to grant our wishes. If faced with the choice of seeing prayer as a divine lottery ticket or seeing it as a means of deep self-reflection and change, it’s always going to be pretty tempting to go for the jackpot rather than growth and maturity. But James isn’t selling Super-Ball tickets. He is convinced that God isn’t here to grant our selfish wishes, but rather to help us grow beyond those selfish wishes in the first place.

That’s the journey we’re on with James. This is not going to be a course in how to make God give us what we want. James is interested in letting God shape the things we want—to grow us more into the character of Jesus, to make our words, actions, and choices become embodiments of God’s Reign. And the goal, the point, of all of this, is that we become more fully inhabited by the love of Jesus. Seeking God’s kind of wisdom isn’t about learning clever tricks for getting more money back on your taxes or a better set of time management skills—it’s about becoming the kind of people who live in light of what matters to God, and knowing what things just don’t matter at all, in the end. That might not seem like the kind of gift we knew we wanted—but it turns out it’s easily what we need.

So, let’s dare to open the gift we have been offered and find that like a sturdy flannel shirt you had overlooked, it suits us well to do the work in front of us. Let us ask for the wisdom God knows we need.

O God, give us wisdom—teach us and shape us to want what you want, to seek for what you seek, to be heartbroken over that which breaks your heart, and to act with your motion.