The Adventure of a Lifetime--February 17, 2022

The Adventure of a Lifetime--February 17, 2022

"But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace." [James 3:17-18]

There's an old cliche that says heroes are boring, but villains grab our attention... that virtue is dull, but vice is alluring.

Everyone says that fiction about heaven is dull because it must be plain and drab and homogenously pristine, but imagining hell makes you a best-seller. (Plenty of folks have also noted that people remember the Satan figure from Paradise Lost, who says, "Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven," but its sequel, Paradise Regained doesn't get the same recognition, or that Dante's grotesque imagery of torture and punishment in his Inferno stick in the memory better than the perfections of the celestial city in the end of his Divine Comedy.)  Just a few decades ago, countless moviegoers waited for years and paid for an awful lot of movie tickets to witness the origin story of a classic villain like Darth Vader in the Star Wars prequels of the 2000s. Whether it was worth all that fuss or not, well, that's a conversation for another day, but shows like Breaking Bad or its spin-off Better Call Saul, or even Marvel's Loki series all make big bucks telling the stories of villains being, well, villains.  Rottenness is profitable show business, it would seem.

So here's my question: is it true?  Is wickedness more interesting, and righteousness just plain dull?  Is Billy Joel right when he sings, "I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints--the sinners are much more fun" in his anthem, "Only the Good Die Young"?  Or maybe, is there really something even more compelling about goodness that just often goes overlooked?  I'm convinced that James believes so--and he is out to convince us as well.

James showed us in yesterday's verses how the way of life centered on only asking, "What's in it for me?" eventually comes up empty.  The kind of mindset rooted in what James called "selfish ambition"--the attitude where everything is a deal or a transaction--ends up eroding trust, destroying genuine love, and leaving us hollow inside, both as individuals or as entire societies.  And in all honesty, that story gets really tired really quick.  

More to the point, I think every day of our lives in this "Me-And-My-Group-First" kind of culture reminds us just how suffocating and stifling it is to be surrounded by voices that just keep shouting, "You can't tell me what to do!" while they baptize selfishness as "good business sense."  I think, despite sales at the box office, deep down we know that it's actually evil that is monotonous and tedious.  (Maybe the last ten years or so of superhero movies have shown it to you, too--there's only so many times you can watch a supervillain try to blow up the world before you decide you don't need to see the next sequel do it all over again.)  I think we are actually really tired of the kind of "worldly wisdom" that is only driven by greed and envy.  But maybe our problem is that we just don't know how to imagine anything different.

This, I think, is really what James is driving at in today's verses.  He offers a foothold for us to explore for ourselves what an alternative to the world's fake wisdom would actually look like.  He helps us stretch our faithful imaginations to picture a different way of life one that isn't obsessed with shallow self-interest. If yesterday's verses were a sketch of the predictable pattern of tragedy that unfolds when we base our lives on a What's-in-it-for-me mindset, today he offers us a glimpse of the opposite: a life lived in light of God's kind of wisdom.  James looks to the heart of God's own character, knowing that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is gracious and merciful, patient and truthful, just and generous, and he dares us to imagine our own lives shaped by that character, too.  

And honestly, that kind of life is a lot more compelling to me than the same old talking heads on TV trying to sell us on the Me-and-My-Interests-First mentality.  That gets old. But the possibilities that open up from a life of being peaceable with neighbors who are different but with whom we can still live and interact? They are endless.  The kind of authenticity from leading lives where we don't have to pretend or be hypocrites anymore?  That sounds freeing and refreshing!  The kind of life where we take turns helping each other reach the good things we are seeking--that sounds like a good way to spend our days, doesn't it?  I can't imagine that getting old, but rather that as familiar as it got, it would be endlessly new as we reached wider and wider to include more and more people in the embrace.  

The amazing thing to me in all this is that James doesn't hold all of this up as just some afterlife pipe-dream.  He doesn't suggest that lives marked by peace, gentleness, and mercy are reserved only for our days after death in heaven.  He sees this way of life as something we are invited into right now, because this is simply what it looks like to live our lives in line with the sort of wisdom that takes God as its starting point.  When we start with lives centered on the God whose very nature is self-giving, who is patient and gentle with us, who is generous even to strangers, sinners, stinkers, and enemies, then yeah, our actions and habits will take on those traits as well. 

And that kind of life doesn't sound boring at all to me--in all truthfulness, it sounds like the adventure of a lifetime.

Lord God, lead us in a path that follows your own kind of wisdom, out of the dead-end dull routines of selfishness we've been trapped in for so long.