One Person to Another... Revisited--March 24, 2022

One Person To Another... Revisited--March 24, 2022

"My brothers and sisters, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and is brought back by another, you should know that whoever brings back a sinner from wandering will save the sinner's soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins." [James 5:19-20]

It's funny to me how often our time with biblical writers brings us full circle, but here we are again, with one person leading another back onto a good path.  That's where things started for us in this devotional journey through James, which we began just at the turn of the calendar year.  In the opening verse of this open letter, James presented himself just as one person like us, an older sibling in the faith so to speak, leading his readers to follow Jesus more closely.  And now, in a sense, James is handing the baton to us as well--now we are the ones invited to help lead people to follow Jesus more closely and to "walk in his ways," as the old confession liturgy puts it.  We who have been directed with James as our guide are now entrusted with the ongoing work of helping to guide others to follow after Jesus, too.  

It's not that we're infallible experts or will never mess up ourselves, and it's not like you only ever move in one direction in the life of faith from student to teacher.  We keep teaching each other, and we keep getting brought back by one another as well when we're the ones who get derailed down a wrong track.  And to be sure, it takes some humility for each of us to recognize that even when we've been living the Christian life for a very long time, we need others around us who can see the flaws and vices we can't (or choose not to) see, who can then help pull us back on course.  It takes the courage to admit we can be wrong, not just in the hypothetical, but when actual instances arise when someone can offer us helpful critique to nudge us into more Christ-like love.  It takes the confidence, too, to know that even when we mess up and have to be shown our mistakes, our sins, and our wrong-turns, we are still beloved.  In fact, knowing that we are beloved all the while is often what gives us the security to be brave enough to face our mess-ups.

That's where James meets us today.  Today is that milestone marker that notes the next leg of the relay where we will keep on going, while James stands to watch us and cheer us on.  He has taught us what he has to teach us, and now he sends us out to keep following Jesus in the context and circumstances of our day, our situation, and our culture.  His goal has never been to try to get us to recreate his first-century setting or the composition of his congregations, and so that cannot be our goal, either.  Like Master Yoda tells fellow Master teacher Luke Skywalker, "We are what they grow beyond. That is the true burden of all masters." We face different terrain, different people, different challenges, different needs, and different culture, and James has just been pointing us in the direction of Jesus' footsteps with his best advice for navigating the terrain.  

It's Jesus who remains the same, whom we both follow, James and us alike.  It's the truth, the way of love, the Reign of God, that we have in common, even if our circumstances are rather different from James' in ways he could not have imagined.  (For one, in an affluent culture like ours in 21st century America, James would look at all of us and see us as "the rich"--we who have roofs over our head, who have such a thing as "disposable income" at all, who possess more clothing, shoes, technology, and food than we know what to do with. And we may just have to squirm for a while as we sit with that truth.)

But as we continue leading and guiding one another to more closely walk the way of Jesus, it's going to be in simple, humble interactions of one person to another, just as James mentored us. So if we want to honor the time James has spent with us, we'll pay attention to the same things he helped us to see: we'll be concerned with avoiding empty talk or hollow gestures when real faith should be showing up in action.  We'll be watchful not to let our possessions possess us, and we'll be on the lookout for how money or power can get a stranglehold on us without our realizing it.  We'll keep holding each other accountable not to slide into the rotten game of selfish ambition where we only do things that will benefit ourselves.  And we'll keep praying for another--while we let that prayer lead us to action in line with what we pray.  (Like Miroslav Volf says, "There is something deeply hypocritical about praying for a problem you are unwilling to resolve.")  James has helped to identify some of the pitfalls and stumbling blocks on this path, not only so that we can avoid them ourselves, but so that we can help to pull one another from the verge of disaster when they get close to the edge of a cliff, too. And we'll do all of that knowing that God's love is not our destination--as though we don't already have it--but rather that we already start from a place of belonging, and that the living God goes with us on the journey.

So today, keep your eyes on Jesus, just like James has taught us to do.  But also, let's keep our eyes on one another for the moment we will be called upon to help with an outstretched arm for someone slipping down the slope or to help someone spot Jesus' footsteps where the way is unclear.  After all, this whole life of following Jesus is something we do together--with saints and sinners who have gone before us, with more of the same (since we're both at the same time) at our side now, and with the living Jesus on the way with us, too--all the way home.

Lord God, help us on this life's journey, not only to follow the way of Jesus in a world full of selfishness, meanness, hypocrisy, and empty gestures, but also to help the people you have put at our side along the way, as we all walk where you lead.

Praying for Rain--March 23, 2022

Praying for Rain--March 23, 2022

"Elijah was a human being like us, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth.  Then he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain and the earth yielded its harvest." [James 5:17-18]

A lot of the time--maybe most of the time, honestly--it's hard to know if the effort you are giving makes a difference, you know?  It's hard to tell if the time you spent on a project made an impact on anyone, or if the words you spoke were of any help to listening ears.  It's hard to know as a parent, a grandparent, a teacher, or a friend whether the lengths you went to in order to show up when you were needed actually stuck in the memory of the ones you love.  And sometimes it's impossible to see whether the gift you gave, or the donation you made to help war refugees, or the note you took the time to write, or the prayers you spoke into the darkness for the sake of someone you love, had its intended effects.  

But every so often you get a glimpse of how your words, your time, your actions, or your prayers, made a difference.  Or you can see how someone else's effort made an impact on your life.  Every so often, you can draw a clear line between the ordinary things we do and a difference that was made for good in the world.  Those moments remind us to keep at it, to keep on keeping on, as they say.  Those are the times that give us the courage and endurance to make the effort in all those other seasons of life when the effects of our actions remain unseen and unknown.

So when you get one of those epiphanies, where the clouds part and you can see clearly that your words, your care, your time, or your work made a difference somewhere, hold it in your mind.  Go back to it on the days you are not sure you have anything of value to give to the world.  Recall it in your mind in those times when it feels like your best efforts keep hitting into a brick wall.  And know that sometimes, yes, we mere mortals get to be a part something big and true and good that God is doing in the world.

All of that was part of Elijah's story.  I know that our writer James here has only given us the slimmest summary of one lone episode in Elijah's long and dramatic saga, but we need to remember that all of it is in his story.  Like with James' reference just a few verses ago to the prophets and Job, this reference to Elijah is a lot deeper than it might seem at first.  It would have been easy (but wrong) to take James' mention of the "patience of Job" or "the endurance of the prophets" as shallow scolding to fake a smile through suffering and call it silent strength.  But as we talked about, that's not really how Job or Isaiah or Jeremiah dealt with their struggles--they endured, but they were loud about it.  They called for justice while they were enduring, and it cheapens their memory to reduce their life stories to mere morality plays about having a stiff upper-lip.

The same is true about Elijah.  Yes, as James notes, he did pray for the end of a three-and-a-half-year-long drought, and yes, the rains came afterward, but he lived through times when he felt like he was frail and powerless, too.  Sometimes, Elijah's prayers brought forth immediate divine response, like a lightning bolt from the sky to consume a sacrifice with fire in front of all the false prophets of the king and queen.  And other times, Elijah was a suicidal mess, convinced he was the only one left who was faithful to God, and running for his life from the king's guard.  In other words, Elijah's faith story wasn't an unbroken string of successes.  He didn't walk around arrogantly assuming that the Divine was on a leash to do tricks for him whenever he said the right magic words of command in prayer.  Elijah often felt like his life's work was wasted, like nobody listened to him, and like all of his efforts made no difference for good in the world at all.  Sometimes he looked like a hero with superpowers... but then a lot of the time he felt like a helpless nobody.

I mention this so that we don't get the wrong idea from James about the reference to Elijah.  James' point isn't to put the old prophet on a pedestal, as if to say, "Look at how powerful Elijah's prayers were, that he could make the rain stop with a mere word!" James isn't telling us that God is there to be our genie or unleash a monsoon every time we pray for rain.  I think James knows his own Bible and wants us to remember that, despite those seasons of deep depression and fear his work was futile, there were moments when it was clear that he made a difference. There were times when God worked through his words--whether words spoken up against the powers of the day, or calling out the religious professionals approved by the state, or offered up in prayer--and it made a difference.  There were times when ordinary Elijah's ordinary actions were caught up in God's extraordinary movement in history.  And when those moments happen, and you are given the clarity to see it, you hold onto them to give you the strength to keep doing good even when you can't tell if you're making a difference to anybody else.  

I think James has the same honest counsel for us.  Look, there will be times when your best attempts blow up in your face, your words fall on closed ears, or extra effort was worthless.  There will be times when you can't see what effect your prayer has on the world around--the cure doesn't come, the war doesn't end, the marriage still ends, the prodigal still hasn't come home yet.  But when you get one of those moments when you can see that God used you--your simple prayer, your ordinary actions, your small choice for good rather than rottenness--you hold onto it, and you remember again why we keep on keeping on.

Sometimes in this life, you pray for rain, and you can't see a cloud in the sky.  Keep praying  for rain anyway.  Sometimes, you give your all, and you can't tell if anybody even saw you tried.  Keep giving your all anyway.  Sometimes, you doubt that God could ever use your small individual actions or words.  Keep acting and speaking in tune with the Reign of God.  And when you get to see how God worked in and through you, remember it for all the times it's hard to see.

I don't know what God has up the divine sleeve in your day, or your year, or your lifetime.  And I dare not pretend that prayer is some quasi-magic art by which you can make God do your bidding.  But I will say that it is worth doing what we know is good and true and worthy, even if we can't see the difference we have made while we do them.  And when God parts the clouds enough for you to see divine fingerprints through your handiwork, let it spur you to keep praying, to keep speaking truth, to keep risking love for the ones who need it.

Keep praying for rain.

Lord God, do your good work through us and give us glimpses of how you bring extraordinary things from our ordinary efforts.  And send a good rain on the thirsty ground and parched hearts.

Our Many Kinds of Broken--March 22, 2022

Our Many Kinds of Broken--March 22, 2022

"Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed." [James 5:16]

There are, it seems, already countless specialists in different fields of medicine.  Maybe you already know something of the challenges of navigating multiple doctors with multiple kinds of expertise.  From your primary care physician to cardiologists, oncologists, pulmonary doctors, endocrinologists, and surgeons, your weekly calendar can already be full just with doctors' appointments.  And that's before we even get to doctors who specialize in eyes, ears, nose, throat, feet, teeth, or mental health.  And of course, there are reasons for each of those specialized disciplines--human beings are complicated, and the more we study how our bodies work, the more each separate area or system of our body can become its own field of study.  That all makes sense.

But it also comes at a cost, doesn't it?  It means that increasingly, different experts compartmentalize our health into different pieces, and treat each almost like it is separate from the rest of your whole self.  If you end up with bad communication between your cancer doctor and your cardiologist, you can end up making one problem worse in the name of curing another.  If your primary care physician can only see you as a body but has no thought for your mind, your depression can go unaddressed while your muscles and bones are in fine shape.  

We can sometimes do the same thing as people of faith, too--and the roles we give to "religious professionals" like pastors can be a part of it, I confess.  We end up not only dividing our bodies into individual areas of specialized study--heart from kidneys, brain from bowels, and so on--but we end up dividing our spiritual lives from our physical lives, too, as though "religion" is cut off from all the actual practical, physical dimensions of our lives as embodied beings.  We end up filtering things like feelings of guilt, sin, hope, and despair with faith, and shunt them into the realm of "spiritual" things, which are for pastors, church services, Bible studies, and prayer request times.  And then the rest of our lives--the actual nuts-and-bolts stuff of life, health, jobs, and family--we give to "real" experts, from doctors to investment advisors to career and life-coaches.  And in the name of tapping the expertise of people with specialized knowledge, we end up making every part of our lives a technical problem to be solved only by the right professional.

But what if there were another way?  What if we could bear our selves--our whole, full selves--to one another, bringing both the things we label "spiritual" and the things we call "physical," along with the social, financial, mental, and familial pieces, and offer strength and help for each other?  What if we found in community together support for mending our many kinds of broken?

I think that's what James is offering here in this verse.  He points us, not to a specialized professional, but to one another, for bearing our many kinds of broken.  There's not a mention of a priest or pastor being necessary, but also notice that James sees our "spiritual" needs going side by side with all of the other needs we might bring to God in prayer. James directs his readers both to confess our sins to one another--something that might be classified as a "spiritual" matter--but also to pray for each other more generically, too.  He doesn't see the Christian community as "just" here for "spiritual" things, while "real-life" things are handled by separate experts.  But rather, we come with whatever things are going on in our lives, and we dare to share them with each other vulnerably, letting others see us with our defenses down, and also trusting that others will offer healing to soothe and help to strengthen the places where we have needs.  There is something compelling and beautiful about that kind of life together.

And like I say, I completely understand the need to have specialized expert professionals offer skilled help in their different disciplines.  But I also think there is something wonderful about the vision James gives, where we attend to each others' needs, amateurs and ordinary folks that we may be, bringing physical, spiritual, social, financial, and family situations to one another, and seeking help, guidance, and support from one another.  That helps the work of a congregation or a pastor to be more than just "the expert I consult for spiritual things" but a community of people like me or you who just share life together, where nobody gets to (or has to) pretend to be the expert with all the answers, but where we each share our own struggles, tell about our failures and the wisdom that has come from them, and offer our strength to carry someone else in their time of need.

Instead of treating our lives as fine-tuned machines that need to be fixed by a different particular specially-trained expert depending on the part that goes wrong, what if we saw our life in Christian community as a gathering of wounded people who are all committed to healing each other, and who are brave enough to risk showing our hurts to one another, regardless of what they are, so that we may be made well together?  That's the kind of community I want to belong to.  I wouldn't care if they had video screens or the fanciest church coffee bar in the county.  I wouldn't care if they had a trendy logo all over their cutting edge social media presence, or the most polished sounding praise band in the state. I want to know that it's safe to let down my guard and bring my whole self--all the facets of who I am and what I need--to the community, where I can find healing for my wounds and can offer help to someone else in their struggles... maybe both at the same time.

What would it look like for us to strive to be that kind of community today?

Lord Jesus, let us be today the kind of community where all are safe, all are honored, and all can be healed.

The Conversation Called Prayer--March 21, 2022

 
The Conversation Called Prayer--March 21, 2022

"Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise. Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven." [James 5:13-15]

No matter where this day finds us, James advises us to pray. At some of these moments, perhaps praying seems natural. I notice in my own moments of worry or sickness that conversation to God comes almost without thinking--I cannot help but pray when I am in need.

But I am slower to pray when the day finds me "cheerful" or things are going well. It is easy to forget God's involvement and presence on those days, maybe because I still flirt with the illusion that I've got things under control. Unlike those days when things are falling apart, unlike the days when I'm stressed beyond coping or find a million things to do swirling around me, on my good days, I can fool myself into thinking that I'm juggling things by my own ability. On the days when grace perhaps ought to be most clear to me, I'm pretty good at not seeing it.

So James's words are a helpful reminder to see God present with me on every day. But maybe beyond that, James offers the honesty of seeing that life is always beyond my grasping it or controlling it completely. On "cheerful" days, cheerfulness is gift--not something I've hammered out myself. And so all I can do on those days and those moments is to respond with thanks and to enjoy the gifts of God. James also would have us see that God is as near as a conversation (whether or not we call it by its religious name, "prayer") at all times--God is not only available when things are falling apart or in crises. To be sure, the living God is present and active in those times of suffering, sickness, and need. But the living God is just as present on my "regular" days--allowing every day to be more than regular, but an opportunity to step further into the gifts and kingdom of this God.

No matter where this day finds us, God is present, and God is opening this day up for us to live as the blessed of God. And in this day, gifts abound for us--if our eyes are open to see them as gifts. In this day also lies the possibility that God might surprise us with the gift of making us to be a gift for someone else and not even know it. Whether we see it or not, God will be giving gifts to us and through us--and so perhaps our first prayer today ought to be for clear vision.

Living and ever-present God, open our eyes today to see your presence around us. Open our mouths today to offer thanks so that, in our saying it, we might recognize your gifts to us for what they are--signs of your grace and love. Open our hands today so that we might be gifted with the chance to be gifts ourselves for all around us.

Our Last Inch--March 18, 2022

Our Last Inch--March 18, 2022

"Above all, my beloved, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath, but let your 'Yes' be yes and your 'No' be no, so that you may not fall under condemnation." [James 5:12]

There's a line from the graphic-novel-turned-movie, V for Vendetta, that stays with me. One character, who had been rounded up and imprisoned by a fictional authoritarian government, says, "Our integrity sells for so little, but it's all we really have.  It is the very last inch of us, but within that inch we are free."  I think that character and James would get along rather well.

It may be strange, in a culture like ours, to spend time talking about how important integrity is, especially integrity and reliability in our words.  But it's all the more important exactly because it is such a rare commodity in the era of social media and being famous-for-being-famous.  Ours is a time when outlandish claims can be made without any way to back them up (nor any interest in doing the fact checking), and they go viral overnight without any concern for whether they are truthful.  Ours is a time when we are used to politicians making wild assertions with the preface of "People are saying..." or "I am hearing that..." but no actual sources to support their claims.  Ours is a time when we have to insist in courtroom proceedings that witnesses swear to tell the truth--and sometimes would rather remain silent than have to make that kind of promise!--because we know people will lie or hedge the truth or conveniently omit things unless there's a threat of jail time if they do.  We live in the era of the fine print, the hidden fees, the impossible campaign promise, and the outlandish bald-faced lies rebranded as "alternative facts."  And when you are used to that kind of atmosphere, it becomes very hard to believe that integrity matters.  It is easy to become bitter and cynical and to give up on the idea that keeping your word is worth the effort.  It becomes very tempting to think that all counts is getting people to believe (or "like" or "share") what you are selling them, regardless of whether it is the truth.

James, like the imprisoned voice from V for Vendetta, dares us to go against the current, even if it means standing alone, and to insist on being people of our word.  In a time when it was fashionable to create "degrees" of truth-telling--where I really mean it if I swear with an oath that I am telling the truth, but if I don't swear it, well, I've got some wiggle room--James echoes Jesus' teaching from the Sermon on the Mount just to be truthful... all the time.  How radical!  How revolutionary!  How counter-cultural!  What if we were people, James dares us to imagine, who didn't need to make a special announcement or assertion of when we were "really" telling the truth (as opposed to the times, say, when we were just sharing a meme because it reinforced our already-existing prejudices and assumptions), because we were committed to honesty all of the time?  What if we didn't have to say, "Ok, this time I mean it!" because we meant our words all the time?

Think for a moment about how that would change our relationships for the better.  No whispers of doubt when a close friend gives you their advice that they are only telling you what they think you want to hear, because you know that they are being honest with you and respect you enough to tell you the truth.  No worries that the salesperson at the car dealership is trying to con you into a model that you don't really want so they can get a bigger commission.  No getting swept up in a conspiracy theory from some shared meme on social media, because you take the time to research and know the facts before you share things yourself.  No need to constantly wear masks around other people to present a more socially acceptable version of yourself--more attractive, or more popular, or wealthier, or more in line with the politics of your neighbors, or with kids doing better in school than they really are--because you are comfortable enough in your own skin not to have to project a fake version of who you are anymore.  That's the kind of freedom of that last inch--the freedom that comes from being people of integrity, all around.  That's the kind of freedom James offers to us when we don't have to play the game of "Do I really mean this?  Will I keep this commitment?"  because we are committed to being honest and authentic all the time.

Part of how we resist the cynicism in our society is to be people who can embody an alternative to it--in other words, in a culture where we suspect everyone else of lying to us or putting a spin on the truth for their own advantage, we can be the people who tell the truth, even when it isn't convenient.  In a culture where people have to go to extraordinary measures to assure everyone that "This time I mean it," we can be the ones who are known for being authentic all the time.  In a culture where it's easy to make outrageous claims without any evidence to back it up, we can be the people who are known for being diligent and thorough to back up what we say.  We can remind people that it doesn't have to be with way, and we don't have to accept a culture of mutual distrust; we can be the difference that reminds people of the alternative of authenticity.  We can be the ones who show others the freedom you find in holding onto that last inch of us--our integrity.

That's what James wants for us, and that's what we are freed to step into today.

Lord God, give us the courage to be truth-tellers, faithful in our promises, and authentic in what we say.

Permission for Weariness--March 17, 2022

Permission for Weariness--March 17, 2022

"Indeed we call blessed those who showed endurance.  You have heard of the endurance of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful." [James 5:11]

Let me say this as clearly as I know how to:  it is okay to be weary.  

It is okay to be upset at the struggles you are going through.  It is ok to be teary-eyed or worn down or frustrated or feeling burned-out from what has been put on your plate to deal with.  It is ok, not only to feel exhausted, but to say so.  It is ok to be done with the old stiff-upper-lip, poker-face kind of pretend toughness that never lets anyone see you bleed.  It is ok to be wearing thin and threadbare, and to feel like you can't keep going.  All of that is part of life, because life itself is difficult.  You know the line from The Princess Bride:  "Life is pain, your highness--and anyone who says different is selling something."  

So if you are feeling worn down yourself--from, oh, I don't know, maybe a worldwide pandemic that made your work life harder and your routines more complicated and your relationships more strained, and your bank account smaller--it is good and honest to be able to say so.  It's not a sign of weakness to say it out loud when you are feeling short on stamina and are tired of keeping on with keeping on; it's a sign that you are brave enough to tell the truth.

That is especially true when you consider that our older brother James here gives us another example of "endurance" in the biblical figure of Job.  Much like we saw yesterday with the example of "the prophets," Job is a complex figure when it comes to "endurance" or "patience."  Like so many of the prophets, Job suffered a lot.  But also like the prophets, he doesn't keep quiet about it.  The entire book of Job centers on Job complaining--both to God and to Respectable Religious People who are supposedly his friends--about how unfair it is that he should be suffering so much when he has been a good and decent human being.  When his friends insist that he must have sinned, or done some wicked thing, or offended God, as the reason for his suffering, Job maintains his innocence.  He refuses to curse God, although he surely calls on God to answer for what is happening.  And while he does endure deep loss, he doesn't keep quiet about any of it, even when it means yelling at his friends that their religious cliches are not helping.

All of this is to say that if we are going to hear James rightly, especially when he invokes a story like Job's, we can't use this verse to silence people who are suffering or police how someone feels in the midst of their struggles.  Sometimes that's how passages like this get used--as sort of a Biblical "back-up" for a lecture about how people need to "quit complaining" or "toughen up" or "walk it off" or "just grin and bear it" when terrible things happen.  You know, too, I'm sure, how tempting it can be to use that same train of thought against anybody whose opinion you don't like.  "Oh, look at what THEY'RE complaining about now!  What a bunch of whiners--they should have to toughen up and get over it like I do in my life!"  Or, "THOSE people are protesting something that I don't find important--they need to just go stay quiet and learn endurance... you know, like Job!"  The trouble is, James doesn't say we have to be quiet about the wrongs we bear in life, or to pretend we like them.  The very case-studies James has given us--from Job today to the prophets yesterday--are precisely examples of people who protested, argued, lamented, and vented their heartaches while they endured them.

So if you are in that place today, if you are feeling beaten down and tired, if you are worried how you are going to keep on going, hear it from the pen of James for you and me today: enduring doesn't mean pretending things are fine.  Enduring doesn't mean I confuse spiritual faith with stoic fakery.  Enduring doesn't mean I have to "get over it" or "toughen up" when my body is weary and my soul is just plain worn out.  Endurance allows for lament and protest--and then, we continue the work to heal where we and others are hurting, knowing that the God who heard all of Job's complaints hears ours as well.  Yes, have endurance, dear ones--the kind that can keep on relying on God because we know God can take whatever angry words we need to throw at heaven, and the kind that can keep hearing comfort from God as well when we have nothing but tears. 

And yes, as the old poet says, it is a commendable thing to be able to "fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run." But at the point where these legs of mine give out, or this heart of mine fails, I trust that far more important than my endurance in the race is God's enduring promise to carry me. 

And that is enough.

Lord God, enable us to endure whatever challenges this day brings--with honesty, with courage, and with faith.

A Restless Sort of Patience--March 16, 2022

A Restless Sort of Patience--March 16, 2022

"As an example of suffering and patience, beloved, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord." [James 5:10]

Okay, here's the thing: if you aren't going to ignore this verse, you can either use it to encourage others (and yourself) to keep on getting into holy trouble when it seems hopeless to keep trying... or you can misuse James' words to scold people into passive acquiescence to evil and silent acceptance of abuse.  And that, my dear ones, would be a terrible case of theological malpractice.

Let's back up for a second.  It's true that over the course of Israel's history, God raised up numerous prophets who were called to speak truth to power, to shock complacent people into a new state of wakefulness, and to envision new hope when all seemed lost.  The faithful prophets were tasked, as the old line puts it, with afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.  And they filled that vocation, not only when it was easy (which was rare) but also when it was difficult.  Prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Micah, and Ezekiel all persisted in speaking up even when it was costly--whether they were upsetting the political powers of the day, exposing the religious hypocrisy of the religious establishment, overturning tables in the marketplace, or calling on their neighbors to practice mercy and justice, they endured.  And yes, that involved a great deal of suffering--holy troublemaking usually does.

So that much is fair to say, and James is absolutely holding up the example of these prophets as examples from whom we can learn endurance and persistence. 

But let's also remember that these prophets were constantly shouting their frustrations at God, too, when the people didn't listen.  As much as we may remember the quaint, "Here am I, send me!" of Isaiah's call story, we often leave out the immediately following verses when God tells Isaiah that he's going to preach to ears that won't listen and eyes that will turn away from the truth.  As much as we may love the hopeful image put on Jeremiah's lips of a "new covenant" with God's word written on our hearts, this is the same Jeremiah who complains to God that the people aren't listening, and who accuses God of tricking him and luring him into being a prophet with an offer he couldn't refuse.   The prophets were willing to endure suffering, that's true, but they sure didn't go quietly into that good night.  They raged--against the powers of the day, against the religious and economic institutions of their day, and even against God when they felt like they had been abandoned by God and rejected by the people.  When things were not fair, not right, or not just, the prophets saw it--and they made noise about it... to everyone.

So whatever the word "patience" means here as James calls his readers to be patient, it absolutely cannot mean silent consent to wrongs being done, or a stoic stiff-upper-lip when they or others were mistreated.  The prophets didn't resort to violence when the king threatened, or the priests banned them from temples, or an angry lynch mob came to terrorize them.  But they sure as heaven didn't pretend they were happy about the mistreatment.  They just refused to sink to the level of their enemies. The prophets were committed not to answer evil with evil, but they sure did call out that evil for what it was when they saw it.  So whatever it means that they were "patient," they also used their voices, their actions, and their pens to protest what was wrong in their society.  The prophets' patience was in their persistence to keep on agitating, to keep on speaking, to keep on challenging, and to keep on questioning what everybody else took as the God's-honest-truth.  As long as that's what we mean when we use the word "patience," then, yes, by all means, let us be patient like the prophets were.

All too often, Respectable Religious People have used the language of the virtue of patience to squash that kind of urgency, and to tell the people of God to be quiet, look away from injustices, and to fake a smile while we wait for our tickets to heaven to be punched.  All too often, Respectable Religion has said, "Being patient means to grin and bear the terrible things that happen to others as well as to yourself until it either goes away on its own or we die and get to the afterlife and don't have to worry about it anymore."  But that's not at all what the prophets did--their kind of patience was the persistence to call out what was wrong, to bear hatred and hardship for speaking up when they did, and to go at it again the next day and the next and the next, for as long as it took.  The prophets never sat back and said, "Maybe things will get better on their own without my saying anything, doing anything, or changing anything."  Rather, they insisted on provoking their fellow citizens, their rulers, their religious leaders, and even other nations, to wake up in the immediate present.

I can't help, when I think of James connecting "the prophets" with "patience," of Dr. King's witness in his powerful (and gut-punching) "Letter from Birmingham City Jail."  For one, King reminds his readers, including a bunch of moderate white pastors who had criticized him, that all too often the word "Wait!" has meant "Never," and that the language of patience has been used by kings and high priests and CEOs from time immemorial to wear out those calling for change.  But then, in a masterful stroke, King reminds us that the work of changing things here and now was not reserved only for a select few ancient prophets but was the calling of the whole church in its beginnings.  King writes:

"There was a time when the church was very powerful.  It was during that period when the early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Wherever the early Christians entered a town the power structure got disturbed and immediately sought to convict them for being 'disturbers of the peace' and 'outside agitators.' But they went on with the conviction that they were 'a colony of heaven,' and had to obey God rather than man. They were small in number but big in commitment.... Things are different now. The contemporary church is often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch-supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent and often vocal sanction of things as they are."

Of course, as King wrote those words, calling for change to racist structures in Jim Crow America, he was also sitting in a jail cell, enduring suffering for speaking up.  That was his kind of patience--a willingness to suffer if need be, but more than that, a willingness to keep on speaking and calling for God's in-breaking newness.  That was not only Dr. King's kind of patience, but that's what James has to have in mind when he calls for us to follow the example of "the prophets" as a model of patience, too.  

So please, let us not weaponize the word "patience" to silence or intimidate people God may well be raising up to speak truth that makes us squirm.  That is not the kind of patience the prophets, ancient or modern, embody.  Rather, our calling, like theirs, is to be persistent, resilient, and relentless in our commitment to speak love in the face of hatred, to practice justice in the face of crookedness, and to value truth in the face of pleasant lies.

May we be as restlessly, fiercely patient in our holy troublemaking as our God-given examples, the prophets.

Lord God, give us the fire you gave to prophets before us, to shed light into shadowy corners, to bring warmth to cold hearts, and to bring down with our witness whatever condemned oppressive structures need to be cleared away to make room for your new creation.

The Promise of Justice--March 15, 2022

The Promise of Justice--March 15, 2022

"Beloved, do not grumble against one another, so that you may not be condemned.  See, the Judge is standing at the doors!" [James 5:9]

There's a line I've heard attributed to John Lennon that goes like this:  "Everything will be OK in the end.  If it's not OK, it's not the end."  You know, for a guy who once dared the world to imagine there's no heaven, he sure did have a keen sense of faithful imagination and confident hope.  He sounds rather like another poetic English voice, who lived about six hundred years before any of the Beatles, remembered by the name Julian of Norwich, who famously said, "All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be made well." 

What John and Julian both seem to have in mind is a hope--or more than that, a deep conviction--that at the last, everything will be restored, set right, and mended.  And it's that idea I think we need to start with, at least if we are going to talk about God as "Judge."  I fear we are predisposed to hear the word "judge" and immediately become either fearful or vengeful.  We live in a culture, after all, where we think of judges' work primarily in terms of setting punishments, determining guilt, sentencing people to prison, or imposing fines.  We have a way, either of fearing what a judge to could to us, or of salivating at what a judge could do to others we think should be locked up with the key thrown away.  But what if that's not ultimately what a judge should be--much less "The Judge" of all things, God?

What if the true work of a judge is to--wait for it, wait for it--restore justice, not merely to slap punishments on people?  What if a judge's job is to sift through the broken shards of a situation and sift out how to put things back together again, so that the ones who are hurt can be healed, those who have been wronged may see things repaired, and even the ones who have caused harm can be corrected and changed so they don't cause harm to others again?  If that's what justice is, and if that's closer to what a judge is meant to do, then the announcement of a judge standing at the door isn't so much a threat to scare us into good behavior, but a promise that someone really is going to make things right.  And when you really do believe that what is broken will be mended, you are a lot less likely to think you have to take matters into your own hands to get revenge as a substitute for justice.  When you really do believe that in the end, everything will be ok--that "all will be made well"--the thought of a judge appearing isn't something to be afraid of, but a reason to hope for justice to be restored where it is lacking.

I want to suggest that this is how to make sense of James' leap from warning us not to grumble against each other to his pronouncement that "the Judge (God) is standing at the doors."  I think this is less about James threatening that if God catches us grumbling, there will be lightning bolts and hellfire to zap us, and more about saying, "Because we believe that God, the righteous and good judge of all things, is here, we don't have to go picking fights with each other."  If I really do believe along with John Lennon and Julian of Norwich that everything will be set right before the end of the great cosmic story, then I don't have to nurse petty grudges or attack other people in the name of "getting what's mine."  

So often, we have been ingrained with the notion (taught to us by teachers of Respectable Religion) that calling God "Judge" is supposed to make us afraid. We're supposed to be afraid of a vengeful God whose righteousness requires us to be sentenced for our sins, or we're supposed to be relieved that Jesus has come on the scene to show us a "nice" God who doesn't care about justice and only says nice things.  But to be truthful, both of those make the fatal error at the outset of assuming that we are supposed to be opposed to "justice," rather than longing for it.  And that's because we let ourselves get conned into buying a hollowed out, threadbare, and empty understanding of "justice" as merely zapping rulebreakers because the rules demand punishing, rather than "justice" as restoring what is lost, setting right what is out of joint, and making things "OK" that aren't yet "OK."  Once we realize we've been stuck with an anemic understanding of justice that way, we can see that there's more to hope for than just condemning sinners in God's vindictive courtroom.  There is the hope of restoration... of reparation... of reconciliation.  There is the hope of putting things to rights.

And once that happens, once we really do see God as the One who is committed to putting things right, then I don't need to spend quite so much time or energy complaining about piddling little things that annoy me about my neighbor.  I don't have to cast myself as judge when I trust that God really is capable of putting things right--and that God is acting to do that.  When my kids are most at each other's throats and hardest to settle down, it's in the moments when they are convinced for whatever reason that their mom and I won't put things right in whatever matter they're fighting about.  When their envy or jealousy or childish ambition tells them that Mom and Dad aren't going to give them each equal sized pieces of cake for dessert, or when they convince themselves that their sibling is getting easier treatment, they grumble and tattle and harass each other.  But when they can see that there will be justice all around--cake for all, comparable consequences, and rules that apply equally--they tend to settle down.  I guess the question is whether they really can trust that the judges (parents) in the household are going to be just with them or not.

For the people of God it's much the same.  When we forget that God will put all things right, we tend to give ourselves permission to "take matters into our own hands," which usually means revenge rather than justice.  When we trust God's promise to make all things well, we can unclench our fists and let God do the work of restoring and repairing.

So today, whether you take it from James, Julian, or John Lennon, know it to be true:  all will be made well.  And if it's not OK right now, it's not the end.  Maybe we can give one another a break and trust that God is committed to justice--that is, to setting things right and making us whole.  That's the reason it's actually good news in the end that the judge is standing at the door.  

Lord God, may your justice flow like rivers.  May your goodness repair what is broken in us, and may we no longer be afraid of your promise to put things right.

Lessons from the Farm--March 11, 2022

 

Lessons from the Farm--March 11, 2022

"Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord.  The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near." [James 5:7-8]

I have never met a lazy farmer. 

That’s not to say there aren’t any in the world—just that it seems, if you are lazy and you happen to be in the business of farming, you either learn pretty quickly that it will take more work than you are willing to do, or you don’t last as a farmer for very long because you just can’t keep it together. There may be lazy farmers out there, but I have to think that they don’t last, or they find something else to make a more regular, less labor-intensive paycheck. As I have heard enough farmers say over the years, you have to love doing it like you couldn’t do anything else with your life, as demanding as it is on your schedule and as precarious as it is to work so hard and still have your profits depend on weather and soil and such.

All of that is to say that when the book we call James gives farmers as an example of patience, it doesn’t mean that being patient is the same as sitting on your hands. Sometimes we think that learning patience is just a nice frilly way of saying, “learning to sit and do nothing,” but that’s not how a farmer practices patience.

Sure, a farmer has to watch and wait for a harvest. Sure, a farmer has to live with seeing small, sometimes imperceptible changes in the seedlings and sprouts day by day as the first leaves poke out of the ground. Certainly, a farmer has to live with the delayed gratification of tilling a field, sowing a crop, protecting it from bugs and pests and disease, and lots more, all through the growing season, all for a harvest that you can only hope for when you are planning. Yes, it requires patience to work at that kind of a life.

But farmers’ days are not spent sitting indoors just peering out at the window looking at the plants. Farmers don’t merely wish to themselves, “Oh, I hope the plants are getting all the food they need—oh, and water, too.” Farmers don’t just work on the day of the harvest—they are working year-round at something, whether to get the field ready, to tend to the crops, or to take care of the other animals and day to day chores on the farm. Farmers might live in anticipation and hope for the harvest when all that hard work pays off, but in the mean-time they work themselves weary day by day as they get to that point. Being patient doesn’t mean twiddling your thumbs—it means you can live in hope and wait until the hope comes to fruition.

That’s what James taps into when he talks about being patient until the coming of the Lord. He doesn’t mean that we Christians can just bide our time, wasting moments and opportunities to share the love of Jesus with people because we are just “being patient.” It means that we trust that in the end, God reigns and the powers of death and evil will not win the day—and it means that in the meantime, which is all the time we have, we keep on doing the work in front of us, even if we can’t see the pay-off yet.

That may be the real key to all of this. Christians practice patience in the sense that we are called to work, to serve, to talk, to listen, to love, and to follow Jesus, regardless of whether it looks like it is “successful” yet or not, because we trust that at the last, God will bring the right “pay-off” or “harvest” out of our work for God’s own good purposes. Farmers don’t till the field because they will eat the freshly tilled soil that night for dinner—they till the field knowing it will make a difference several steps and a good many months down the road when the harvest comes. So even if your tilled field doesn’t look much different than the untiled field that was there the day before, it is worth doing the work of tilling. And even if you can’t see what the crop will look like in the end on the day when you are just planting the seeds, it is worth doing the work of sowing and planting. The pay-off is delayed, but it is worth it. And in the mean-time, there is plenty to keep ourselves occupied with.

Today, there is work to be done for the Kingdom. There are people to share your faith with. There are extra miles to walk with people so that they can see the persistence of Christ-like love. There are humble, even secret, beneath-the-radar kinds of acts of love and compassion to do for people who need them. And there are fences to be mended, too, with the people we have become estranged from. There is surely plenty more to be done, too. And, to be quite honest, even if we do a bang-up job on all of it, it is quite possible that you and I might not get to see the results of it all by day’s end. Maybe not even by the end of the year, or by the end of our lives. But it will have been worth it, because in God’s timing and God’s design, it will come to fruition—it will all be used in the end.

So let’s be farmers ourselves—patient in our ability to live in light of God’s promised future, and still dedicated to doing the work that is laid out for us today until the rains have come and gone and it is time for the harvest.

Lord God, keep us active in the work you have given us to do, and patiently trusting in the work you have promised to do yourself.

Against the Trickle-Down Flow--March 9, 2022

Against the Trickle-Down Flow--March 9, 2022

"Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned the righteous one, who does not resist you." [James 5:4-6]

We've got it completely backwards in our culture, I'm afraid.  James takes it for granted that everybody should be able to make a living to feed their families after a day's work, even if it means lower profits for "the company."  And we live in a time and place in which corporate profits are often given higher priority than the lives of actual people.  James says it's a shame--quite literally, a God-damned shame. Even more shameful is how easily we Respectable Religious people turn the God of the Exodus who freed the exploited workers enslaved by Pharaoh into a mascot for unbridled acquisition.  "God wants us to be rich," we so easily fool ourselves into believing, "and clearly anyone who is struggling to get by is being chastised by the Almighty for being lazy, slothful, foolish, or wasteful."  If that isn't conventional wisdom, I'll eat my hat.

It's the same accursed (but still very popular) conventional wisdom that Wendell Berry called out with biting satire in the opening lines of one of his classic poems:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

Berry has got our number, hasn't he?  So many of the voices America calls "successful" would nod their heads in approval to all that advice, not realizing the poet was meaning to be mocking that mindset for its hollowness.  But of course, we aren't the only late-stage empire to live by the code of "More for me at any cost!"  James was calling it out in the days of the Roman Empire here in these verses.  And there's just no way around it:  James once again reminds us that the values of the Reign of God are quite often the very opposite of those propped up by the powers of the day.  And in a culture that glorifies getting as much as you can for yourself, regardless of who you have to step on along the way, it can sound radical to point in the opposite direction and say, "God's vision is that everybody can have enough, and no one needs to get stepped on for that to happen."

In fact, it is downright scandalous to question that "more" isn't always "better."  Our culture takes that as a first principle and a foundational belief.  We treat the creed, "More is better" like it is one of those gospel truths we "hold to be self-evident," to borrow the language of the Declaration of Independence. (And, as a side note, it is worth recalling that before the language of "the pursuit of happiness" was included in those truths, the original wording was, "life, liberty, and property."  That is, the first draft of our founding document was centered on the quest for "stuff.")  

But James has been beating the drum for quite some time here to say that more isn't always better--not for any of us.  More for me often comes at the expense of you having enough for your needs, and beyond that, more for me isn't even always all that good for me.  We can be drowning in stuff and not realize how our possessions get a stranglehold on us, and meanwhile, others around us are struggling just to get by.  James sees that both of those are signs that something is rotten.  When I decide that my quest for "more" is more important than the people who will go with "less" because of that quest, it is a sign that my heart has become hardened with excess like eating too much bacon will harden your arteries.  That's the piece we often miss--my greed not only harms others who will go without, but it harms me as well, by cutting me off from neighbors God has put in my life as gifts of grace, while it slowly clogs my spiritual arteries at the same time.  Part of helping restore my heart and soul, then, is going to mean making sure those neighbors around me have what they need for life, rather than my endless avarice.  Making sure my neighbors can feed their families is also part of how God keeps my soul in good health, too, it turns out.  We are all connected that way--my well-being cannot be separated from yours, and I can't pursue my own good without also seeking yours.  Whether it is popular to say so or not, that's what James reminds us of: I don't have limitless freedom to get all I can for myself at the expense of others.  That's not what God-given freedom is really about, at any rate.  God's vision is for all of us to be free from hunger, free from fear, and free from captivity to our greed, too.  

How can we dare to break out of that bondage to "more for the sake of more" that our culture worships as an idol?  Well, maybe again Wendell Berry's words offer some help that James would agree with.  In the same poem I mentioned just a moment ago--his work, "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front," Berry offers this sincere counsel:

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Already I can see James smiling, can't you?  The way to break the spell our culture of greed has cast on us is to refuse to accept its terms and to refuse to live by its values.  Do something without seeking profit.  Stop defining success in terms of tax bracket.  Care as much for your neighbors, co-workers, and employees being able to make a living as you do about the bathroom remodel you've got in mind that will wow all your friends.  Give generously, and don't let there be a record that could come back as a bigger tax deduction.  Tell the financial experts you're more interested in how generosity will help grow your soul than in how to grow your net worth.  And remember, as James assumes from the outset, that your well-being is tied up with the well-being of everybody else on God's green earth.  And like the old line goes, if my living simply allows someone else to simply live, that's a trade-off worth making.  

In a culture like ours that tries its damnedest to make greed into a virtue, it's worth a little rebellion to make sure everybody else can eat at the end of the work-day rather than hoarding a bigger pile of "stuff" for me alone. Let's you and I swim against the trickle-down flow.

Lord God free us from captivity to the want for more. Enable us to live simply... so that others may simply live.

The Joker's Sermon--March 8, 2022

The Joker's Sermon--March 8, 2022

"Come now, you rich people, weep and wait for the miseries that are coming to you. Your riches have rotted, and your clothes are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you, and it will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure for the last days." [James 5:1-3]

This is a difficult passage to read, regardless of one's tax bracket.  But it's growing on me in ways that are surprising me. In fact, I think I have come to learn to see the necessary truth in this passage from an even more surprising teacher.  I learned to appreciate James' harsh criticism of decadent wealth from the Joker.

Yes, that Joker: the Batman villain, the ol' Clown Prince of Crime.  In particular, I can't shake the memory of two lines from Heath Ledger's definitive take on the Joker from the 2008 movie "The Dark Knight."  (I know some will complain, with yet another Batman movie being released this past weekend, that there seems to be an endless supply of Caped Crusader blockbusters while everything important is held up with supply-chain issues these days.  But as for me, I keep hoping I'll learn some good theology from the next Bat-movie at the cineplex.)  It's Ledger's version of the Joker, being brutally pummeled by Batman in a police interrogation room, who mocks Batman without throwing a punch back by saying, "You have nothing to threaten me with--nothing to do with all your strength."  And it's that same Joker, later in the movie, who throws a lighter onto a gas-soaked pile of money he's stolen from the mob, in order to send a message, as he says: "Everything burns."  You're not supposed to see wisdom in the villains of a superhero movie, I know.  But Joker--at least this one--has a way of forcing us to see through the lies we tell ourselves as respectable people in a civilized society.  He forces us to see that the things we think make us powerful, important, and impressive are ultimately impotent, empty--a vapor, a breath, ash.

James speaks almost with the same ruthlessly direct honesty to the well-heeled people reading his words as Joker.  He taunts "the rich" the same way Joker does to Batman, knowing that he has nothing to lose, nothing to be leveraged against, and nothing they can take from him.  But conversely, the rich in James' audience have everything to lose.  That's James' point--if you've spent your life piling up money and possessions trying to prove yourself to everyone else, at some point you discover you that all of it crumbles.  All this power, all this strength, all this wealth, but it turns out to be all for nothing.  It doesn't last--it burns.  And on this point, both James and the Joker are in complete agreement with Ecclesiastes--that other fiercely honest voice of the Scriptures--that all the things we can pile up in life, from investments to cars, to real estate to the latest rectangle of technology, all eventually end up in the garbage.  It's all like a vanishing breath on a cold day--there for a moment, and then gone.  

James' point, as we've seen throughout this book so far, is to get us to change our priorities if this is us.  If these words make us squirm, it's a sign we've been putting our hopes on our money.  If James' warning that the rich who have piled up their fortunes on the backs of unpaid labor and exploited workers (see the next couple of verses we'll get to tomorrow) makes us uncomfortable, it's a sign that we're complicit in the same kind of rottenness as James' well-to-do readers. And if we don't like hearing that money and material things won't last, it may well be the evidence that we've become possessed by our possessions ourselves.  James is free from worrying about holding onto a fortune, because he isn't interested in getting one in the first place, much less keeping it.  James is free from obsessing over every day's rise and fall of the stock market, because his life's meaning isn't tethered to the closing bell of the Dow Jones.  He offers us that same freedom as well.

Sometimes Respectable Religious people will get their feathers ruffled when the Bible says things like this.  They'll do just about anything they can to make it sound like James isn't saying what he's clearly saying (or that Jesus isn't saying what he's clearly saying, too, when he talks about the empty idol of Mammon, or tells a story about a rich fool and his quest for ever bigger barns, or announces woe on the rich, too).  But James keeps on telling the truth--to Respectable Religious folks around us, and the ones looking back at us in the mirror.  And his point is simply this: any time we value property over people, we are investing in ashes, rather than in what has eternal worth.  Our neighbors matter to God; our 401(k) reports, to be blunt, do not.  Our siblings displaced by war in Ukraine, or suffering drought in Somalia, or seeking to find shelter in our own county, are infinitely precious.  Our worries about whether our property values will go up next year, are insignificant by comparison.  If we have built our lives on acquiring more, we'll find less and less actual satisfaction when we look back at how we've spent our days.  James isn't trying to threaten us with hellfire after death if you possess a certain amount of money--he's trying to get us to change our priorities about how and why we possess things before death so we won't have wasted our lives on things that go up in smoke.  And so James says it with utter clarity, like the green-hair grinning rogue from Gotham, that it is an utter waste to have all the power, strength, and wealth in the world, but in the end to find they can't do anything for us.  "You have nothing to do with all your piles of stuff," James says, "only the eventual lesson that it all burns, or rusts, or wears out."

Every day we are faced with the choice of whether we will believe what James--and behind him Jesus himself--says about where we place our hearts and our treasures.  Every minute spent trying to build a bigger fortune will turn out to have been a minute wasted.  Every breath spent bragging about how pleasant it is to be insulated from the misfortunes and tragedies of the world because we have wealth will be words we wish we could unsay.  Every day we blocked out and ignored the needs of neighbors by distracting ourselves with "retail therapy" or fussing over the next thing we could buy will be a day we forgot what really matters, what does not in this life.

I can't help but think these days of the closing lines of Ilya Kaminsky's 2013 poem (one which has a renewed urgency in these days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine), "We Lived Happily During the War," which concludes, so powerfully:

In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

If that poem feels like it is mocking us in our affluence, you're right.  But we need voices like this one, even if they must resort to ridiculing us out of our apathy and numbness.  We need voices like James, and even the Joker's, to help us again to love people rather than things, and to place the value of fellow humans made in God's image above the never-ending quest for a bigger profit.  Whichever voice it takes to finally get through to these gold-dipped cold hearts of ours, let it get through the cracks.  May we spend our days on what will matter, after the rest has rusted and burned to ash.

Lord God, turn our hearts to love people and use things, and free us from being possessed by our possessions.

 

Things Left Undone--March 7, 2022

Things Left Undone—March 7, 2022

“Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin.” [James 4:17]

The first thing is the diagnosis. A diagnosis is not a cure, but it sure is hard to stumble into healing without an honest and complete diagnosis. And for that, I am thankful to voices like James, and many others like him, who remind us that our diagnosis as people with "sin-sick souls" (as the old hymn puts it) includes the things we fail to do or the words we fail to say, not just actions like stealing, lying, or killing. Our problem is not merely that we periodically do bad things, but that we settle for so much less by failing to do the good we have the opportunity to do.

And, like I say, there are numerous voices in our Christian tradition that help us to see it. I grew up in Lutheran worship services with a confession nearly every week that all of us in the room had sinned both "in what we have done, and in what we have left undone." Later in adulthood I was introduced to the compelling line of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's, which goes, "We are not merely to bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself." Or, on the verge of entering into pastoral ministry myself, I first read the novel Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, whose narrator speaks the gorgeous but convicting sentence: "I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave — that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm."

All of those voices, from the recent to the ancient, so powerfully remind me that the goal of life isn't just to avoid breaking rules or coloring outside of the lines, but to step more fully into the good that is entrusted to me to do.  God's will for me, and for all of us, isn't just a life that avoids transgressing a single commandment, at the cost of never doing anything good either, but a life that take the leap of honoring other people, loving neighbors, making beauty, encouraging the faint-hearted, and stopping what is unjust.  It is instructive, as I think about it, that the old prophet doesn't say, "What does the Lord require of you but to avoid this list of bad actions?" but rather, "Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God." Those are positive actions we are called not--not merely bad things to avoid to stay on God's "good side."

As helpful as it is to this chorus of voices calling us not to leave good undone in the world when it is our to do it, what gets is me is how mediocre (at best) we Christians--and maybe even especially we Lutheran Christians--do at actually living differently because of it.  Like I say, I grew up in a tradition--and am still a pastor in this same tradition--where, week by week, we all verbally confess that we have sinned in what we left undone and unsaid.  And yet, Lutherans have also often found themselves quite frequently staring at their feet and squirming in awkward passivity when there were wheels of injustice that needed spokes driven through them.  For every Bonhoeffer resisting Hitler's vision and violence, there were ten Respectable Religious Lutheran pastors in Germany all quietly giving their approval to the Reich's idolatrous Christian nationalism and refusing to speak or act to make a difference.  For every Bob and Jeannie Graetz (whose story is awesome if you don't know it) sticking their necks out as the only white pastor and spouse actively and publicly supporting the Montgomery Bus Boycott during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, there were countless more scowling Christians (scowling in the name of Religious Respectability, of course), saying that Christians shouldn't make trouble like that.  In every moment, there is the temptation of doing nothing because we think that keeps us from doing the wrong thing.  And even if we have learned to be good at saying that, we still have a long way to go, at least in my tradition, toward actually changing our behavior and doing the good that is ours to do... even when it is good trouble.

But even if we have struggled to take James' message seriously beyond weekly liturgical lip service, let's dare again to hear him in the hopes he might get through to us deeply enough to move us from inaction and apathy.  Like the well-loved hymn of the 20th century has taught us to pray, "Save us from weak resignation to the evils we deplore... grant us wisdom, grant us courage, serving you whom we adore."

May God give us the wisdom to see what good God is placing before us on our path today, and may God give us the courage to step into it.

Lord God, make us brave to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly where you lead.

In God's Hands--March 4, 2022

In God's Hands--March 4, 2022

"Instead you ought to say, 'If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.' As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil." [James 4:15-16]

It's a humbling thing to say, especially in a culture like ours, but I need to say it: I am not the captain of my own soul... and I am not the master of my own fate.

All apologies and due respect to the poet William Ernest Henley for stomping all over his lines of verse, but it’s just not true. All of us live in the midst of realities beyond our control and bigger than ability to manage. From the pull of gravity and the laws of thermodynamics to the force of the tides and the effects of inflation, we are all subject to powers we don’t get to be the boss of. Pretending we can make the world over in our image is supreme hubris, not to mention terribly foolish. None of us is the master of our own fate, not really—we are all subject to a long list of forces, systems, and structures that we couldn’t get rid of if we wanted to.

But maybe even more fundamentally, the Christian faith should make us question whether the goal in life should be to master our fates or captain our souls in the first place. I say that because for the last two thousand years, Christians have insisted that Jesus, and not anybody else—not even our own selves—is Lord of our lives. To be a Christian is to relinquish final say over our plans, schemes, wishes, and dreams to Jesus’ direction and essentially to say to God with Jesus in the garden, “Not my will, but thine.” The absolutized logic of “You can’t tell me what to do” that is so popular in our culture is at odds with confessing Jesus as Lord, because Jesus calls us to follow him where he is headed. He doesn’t offer himself as a wish-granting genie to take us where we dream of going. And if the Gospels are any indication, Jesus reserves the right to turn our plans and list of life-goals and turn them upside down. To see the stories of Peter, James, John, Mary, Zacchaeus, Paul, Lydia, Salome, and more, it seems that Jesus regularly exercises that right to up-end our expectations.

I think this is what James is getting at when he says it is arrogant to boast about what will “definitely” happen—it assumes both a certainty we do not possess and a claim over the course of our lives that we have surrendered every time we confess Jesus as Lord. Read the letters of Paul, for example, and you'll get pretty frequent asides to his readers where the apostle will say, essentially, "I had been planning to come and see you, but I got arrested again, so we'll have to wait for a reunion until I get bailed out," or "I was intending to go east on my next trip, but the Holy Spirit smacked me upside the head in love and sent me west instead." And that's from a guy who literally wrote a large portion of the Bible!

What strikes me, given Paul, James, Peter, and the rest of the early church's honesty about how often their plans got changed is that they didn't complain or insist on control in those circumstances. They trusted that they were in the hands of Jesus, who would guide them through whatever came their way. They didn't necessarily conclude that God was "sending" bad things their way, or that God was "punishing" or "thwarting" their plans, but rather, they knew that their individual wishes or designs weren't the final say on things. Sometimes it was the powers of the day that changed their plans (like getting imprisoned by the Romans), and sometimes it was a seemingly random turn of events. Sometimes an opportunity opened up that was bigger than they had imagined, and sometimes they found themselves disappointed that a situation didn't turn out the way they had hoped. But in all of it, those early disciples understood that the course of their lives wasn't theirs alone to control--they were followers of the Lord Jesus. And so even when their best-laid plans ran into obstacles or a solid brick wall, they saw their lives held in the hands of God, and they could adapt.

I think this is something we have forgotten in our time, even (or maybe especially?) for people of faith: there is a difference between God holding us through all situations and God promising that our plans will come to fruition the way we want them to. God does indeed promise to hold us, to lead us, and to love us, no matter what may come. But that very clearly leaves open "what may come"--and it may not go according to our wishes, dreams, or expectations. All too often, we let people define "faith" for us as "unthinking belief that what you want to happen will happen," rather than, "confidence that God will make a way out of no way, even if it doesn't look like what we planned for." But God hasn't promised to give us the future we wish for, rather to bring us into the even more beautiful future God has in mind. Realizing that difference also means realizing that I'm not ultimately in the driver's seat. I'm not the captain of my soul--thank God. I'm not the master of my fate--praise the Lord. You and I are in the hands of the one who is making all things new. And that, dear ones, is enough.

It is, to be honest, more than enough--more than all we can ask or imagine.

Lord God, help us to surrender direction of our lives to you, and to accept that we are not the bosses--even of our own lives--that we like to imagine we are.