Good Right Now--March 3, 2022

Good Right Now--March 3, 2022

"Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.' Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring.  What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes." [James 4:13-14]

I am only just now scrubbing the black smudge off of my forehead from Ash Wednesday's stark reminder: I am dust, and to dust I will return.  The Scriptures are unflinching in their honesty, sometimes brutally so, about human mortality and finitude.  Even with the New Testament's assurance of resurrection hope and the promise of Easter that awaits beyond Good Friday's tomb, a writer here like James can say without batting an eye, "You are a mist that vanishes like the morning fog."  James knows well the wisdom of the book often called Ecclesiastes, which keeps coming back to the refrain, "Vapor, vapor, all is vapor!"

Sometimes Christians are so quick to want to find (or invent) silver linings to things that we can't sit still with the truth of our mortality, our smallness, our whole existence being like a breath.  We are quick to blurt out, "But heaven!" or "But the afterlife!" or "But immortal souls!" when sometimes--like, say, the opening footsteps of Lent--we need simply to hear the reality of death which makes the hope of resurrection meaningful in the first place.  We are not only limited, but we are mortal.  We are not only capable of dying, but our grasping for control in the world is so tiny in the big scheme of things.  We like to think that our efforts and accomplishments will be remembered forever, as if they are engraved in stone--but even marble columns and stone statues come crumbling down in time, their writing wiped clean by the wind and weather.  Sometimes we just need to sit with that truth for a while, rather than pretending that either we or our legacies are immortal.  They are not.

Once we have quit trying to convince ourselves (and others around us) that we are in control of our lives and legacies, we can finally getting around to doing something useful with the day.  I think that's where James is pointing us, in today's verses and in the ones that follow.  Our attempts to make an impact for good in the world have to come face to face with our lack of control about the future, which means the question we have to keep coming back to is always, "What good can I do in this day, here and now?"  I can't know where I'll be in thirty years, so I had better not build my life around thinking, "I'll get around to being generous in the year 2050."  I can't assume I'll amass a fortune, and then hoard my money to make a bigger and bigger pile of it now until some ambiguous "someday" when I'll endow some charity and get my name on a plaque.  My goodness--I'm not promised a tomorrow, much less a retirement!  All of that is to say, I think James would warn us against building our plans for life on the false assumption that we know we have a certain amount of time to do things in our lives, whether for our selves or for others. 

What difference does any of this make practically?  Well, for starters, rather than saying, "I'm going to save up a bunch of money for decades, and then when I've made a boatload in investments, THEN, I'll give it away to charity... or the church... or my kids and grandkids. But until then, it's all going in the nest-egg." That makes a lot of assumptions, and it also misses out on the ways I can be generous and joyful now. Or in church life, it can be so easy to say, "We can help take care of our neighbors once the church's pews are refurbished and we've set up an endowment for ourselves," or "We can take on an outreach ministry for helping refugees once everything goes 'back to normal' and everyone who left during COVID comes back like it was before." Or it's the thought, "I'm gonna work non-stop now while my kids are growing up so that I can have more money to give them to go to college."  I mean, sure, it's great to want to provide your kids with a kick-start for their futures, but not if it comes at the cost of never seeing them or being there for them while they are growing up and need the time with you.  I don't need to break out into "Cat's in the Cradle" to make my point, do I?

Because we aren't promised tomorrow, we always have to be attending to how we can be a presence for good in the world today.  It's never that we have to do "enough" to earn a spot in the afterlife--you'll notice James doesn't bring any talk of life after death into the conversation at all here.  He's simply compelling us to be as real and honest as he's being with us. We have this day--this moment, this breath, this chance right now--to be the presence of Christ for someone today.  We have right now to show love, to be generous, to be brave, to restore relationships, to treat people justice and to make amends for where we have failed.  And if we aren't given more than this day (which again, is already a gift of grace all by itself), will we have spent our breath well?

In the end, this is the choice we have.  We can either live in the illusion that we have control over our lives and our destinies, and then set ourselves up for disaster when something comes along that we did not foresee (or were too arrogant to think could touch us). Or we can live honestly with the freedom that we can't rely on a ten-year or five-year plan, and instead use up our minutes and breath and strength every day in ways that show love, that do good, and that reflect the way of Jesus.  I believe James recommends the latter, and so do I.

Whatever else I get to do with my life, for however long I get to do it, I think my mist of a lifespan will have been well spent if it was given to love.  That's where I'm aiming today.

Lord God, with this day we have, enable us to use our time, energy, strength, and care in ways that reflect your Reign of love and justice.

On Not Punching Down--March 2, 2022

On Not Punching Down--March 2, 2022

"Do not speak evil against one another, brothers and sisters.  Whoever speaks evil against another or judges another, speaks evil against the law and judges the law; but if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge.  There is one lawgiver and judge who is able to save and to destroy. So who, then, are you to judge your neighbor?" [James 4:11-12]

There's a long-standing rule among comedians that's meant to keep them from becoming bullies with microphones (which is really more of a talk-radio-host or celebrity podcaster sort of a thing, right?).  It's short and sweet and it goes like this:  don't punch down.  That's it.  

In other words, don't use your platform to pick on someone who is struggling, someone who is at a disadvantage, someone who is without power, or someone without the same platform, position, or resources that you have.  That's what keeps comedy, satire, and comic ridicule from becoming merely meanness or empty insult.  Like the court jesters of an earlier era, good comedians know they can poke fun at the powerful, but they aren't supposed to turn their target sights on people who are just struggling to get along.  Just like you don't kick someone when they're down, you don't punch "down" either.  The kings, moguls, celebrities, and CEOs need people who will deflate their puffed-up egos, and the ones who wield power need to have people who will hold up their actions to the light and, where appropriate, expose what's wrong with them.  But you don't mock someone for what is already clearly a struggle or a challenge for them.  That's basic human decency.

And I think James has something along the same lines in mind here.  He's not giving advice to budding comedians, but he is instructing disciples who are trying to grow in their faith.  And even though James has had plenty of strong words for the folks he saw entangled in hypocrisy, greed, or crookedness, he has been vigilant not to "punch down" at people. He doesn't prop himself up by belittling others and he doesn't launch mean personal attacks to denigrate others.  He can criticize behaviors, actions, and attitudes without humiliating people by name, and he doesn't hit people where they are already hurting.  And that's what he's modeling for us as well.

It can be really difficult to know how to take the New Testament's repeated warnings not to judge or condemn others, especially knowing that sometimes Jesus or the apostles will have sharp criticism for people they disagree with--and we're left wondering, "Well, are we supposed to do that, too, or not?  And where's the line between correcting one another and holding one another accountable, which the New Testament calls us to do, and judging others?"  If we're not supposed to judge others, do we just give a pass to the cruelty and rottenness all around us?  On the other hand, if we're given free rein to nitpick everybody else's choices around us, we'll end up telling people they're going to hell for matters of personal preference--and there are plenty of folks who have been burned by Respectable Religious People telling them they are under nothing but condemnation.  The Church has collectively earned that reputation for being judgmental rather than gracious, and that's something we need to repent of, too.  So what's the deal here?  Where are we supposed to speak up, and where are we supposed to be silent?  What counts as "judging" and what counts as helpful "correction"?

In all honesty, I think this is where the old comedians' rule is helpful: if we are aiming our attacks "down" at someone--trying to push someone else down, attack them personally, or belittle them, in order to push ourselves up, we are in dangerous territory. James recognizes that's when we're putting ourselves in the role of "judge" and "lawgiver," and those two roles are only for God.  So when our words and actions have the thrust of pushing ourselves up, inflating ourselves, or putting someone else lower than we are, we're judging.  It's about claiming power and authority for ourselves that we don't have, and using the appearance of having that power to make someone else feel rotten and us to feel good by comparison.  And that's really just being a stinky human being.  It's true whether a talking head does it on television or the radio, whether it's someone posting crude garbage on social media, or coming out of your or my mouth.  That's punching down, and that's what James warns us against.

But that also means that there's a place for helping to hold one another accountable, or for speaking and acting as advocates on behalf of those who are most suffering, struggling, or under attack.  When a bully is beating someone up for their lunch money, it's not right to say, "Well, I'm not supposed to judge whether this is good or bad, so I'll look the other way."  And it's also a cop-out to say, "That guy who is getting beaten up probably did something bad once, so what about that?  Maybe this is justified."  It's easy to mangle the idea of tolerance for others into nihilism that says, "I can't speak up against evil, because who am I to judge?"  There has to be a way, for example, to look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine and say, "No--this is not OK, and we need to find appropriate ways to stand against it." And while there's certainly room for criticism to come back at ourselves and say, "Haven't there been times when our country has been the empire seeking to justify doing unsavory things, too?" that doesn't preclude also saying a clear "No" to a column of invading tanks and incoming missiles to civilians in, say, Kyiv.  We aren't supposed to punch down in judgment, but we aren't allowed to let ourselves off the hook for standing with those who are oppressed, in danger, and hurting.  Jesus, after all, simultaneously refuses to condemn the woman "caught in adultery" in the story from John 8, but he sure does shame the angry mob of bullies who were trying to goad him into stoning her to death.  Jesus doesn't "punch down" at a woman who is in a vulnerable position, but he sure does disarm the ones who are threatening her.  And that's the key, I think.  We are called to speak for and stand with the ones who are threatened in the world, but not to attack others as a way of making ourselves feel more important or powerful.

Are we going to get this wrong sometimes?  Yes.  That's also part of the beauty of being open to mutual correction and accountability.  Where you catch me stepping out of line and have to help me see that I'm out of step with Jesus, that can be helpful--and part of what keeps that from becoming judgmentalism is when the flow can go both ways, and we can each give and receive feedback.  When I get it wrong--either saying too little or going too far--I need other people who can help me recognize that and to recalibrate.  We do this together.  That's what James' role is in all this, too--he's not stepping into the role of judge to condemn us to hell if we overstep our bounds sometime or are slow to speak up sometime when we should.  He's here to guide us along the way as a fellow follower of Jesus, subject to the same God who is the rightful judge and lawgiver alongside of us.  He's one more trusted voice listening to us and telling us, when we need the reminder, "Don't punch down."

It's good to have honest friends like that--even if they lived twenty centuries ago.

Lord God, keep us from weaponizing our words and puffing ourselves up, and keep putting people in our lives who will help us to speak and act in love.

A Necessary Lament--February 25, 2022

A Necessary Lament--February 25, 2022

"Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.  Lament and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy into dejection.  Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you." [James 4:8b-10]

On most days, we'd probably want to skip over verses like these and find something happier and peppier to talk about.  On most days, we'd look for a way to sweep this passage under the rug or fold them into whatever comes next in this book so we don't have to spend any time living with these words.

Today, somehow, it feels right--or at least necessary--to hear these words... and to make ourselves sit with them for a while, without moving on to something we would frame in a plaque and mount on the living room wall.  Today, as the news announces the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by Russia, an event we have been watching build and brew like a storm on the horizon or a car accident in slow-motion, it feels like sorrow is the right place to be.  As we shudder to recall how similar these headlines feel to the history we learned once upon a time of conflicts that built and became "world wars," it feels like mourning is the only honest place to be.  And as we dare to put ourselves in the shoes of those whose homes are now unsafe, whose streets are being overrun with tanks, and whose families are now fleeing for danger, it feels like lament is exactly what we need to do.  Perhaps there is an unexpected--and also uncomfortable--grace in the timing for us that we have to deal with these words of woe from James on a morning like this.

Grace may seem too strong a word, or out of place, for talk of lament--but I believe lament is ultimately about telling the truth.  And truth is always good, even when it makes us squirm or sorrowful at the same time.  The truth will set us free, but to loosely paraphrase the line from Ted Lasso, it will upset you first.  Maybe both are two sides of the same coin.  And when terrible things are happening, whether under your own roof, in our community, across our country, or around the world, we need to be able to say so.  We need to be able to name terrible things as terrible things, to grieve what is awful about them, to own whatever roles we have in contributing to them, to turn from them and set things right where it is ours to do so, and to lament them.  We need to be able to be sorrowful for the things in life that warrant sorrow, rather than thinking being people of faith means faking a smile everywhere we go.  We need, as the old line goes, to have our hearts broken over the things that break the heart of God.  And it is grace then, to have someone shake us and stop us from fiddling while cities burn.

James doesn't specifically have a foreign war between Russia and Ukraine in mind when he calls on his readers to lament and weep, of course.  But he has been calling on us to wake up to the ways we--particularly we who claim to follow Jesus--so easily slide into the thinking the world calls "conventional wisdom" where might makes right, greed is celebrated as the means to success, and bullies can be praised as "geniuses" for preying on anyone they can find to pick on.  And while one hopes we can recognize those things when they are playing out in front of us in real time on the news with cruise missiles and tanks, James also calls us to take a look within ourselves at where the same impulses can get a foothold in us.  The "logic" that leads an autocrat to invade a neighboring country in the name of his own national interest is the same mindset we can so easily baptize for ourselves in slogans like "MY group/interests/country first!" or "It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, so we've got to get all we can for ourselves!" And James sees all of it as lamentable, so he speaks the truth we need to hear to allow us to lament.  We may not be invading another country at the moment, but the logic of empire and conquest is always tempting right here for us as well. And naming it as something to weep over hopefully means we will not fall for that temptation the next time it presents itself to us.

Today, my prayers are for the people of Ukraine displaced and threatened by foreign invaders who have invented a pretext for why their actions should be permissible.  My prayers are for those who are victims of others' greed, ambition, and the insecurity that drives people to think they need to look "tough."  And at the same time, James pushes me to lament all the ways I have fallen for the same logic before--thinking that might makes right, that my interests (or my group's interests) are superior to someone else's, or that it is permissible to take what I want because I can, regardless of who it steps on in the process.  Those things in me are lamentable, as well as the tragedy of a world on the brink of war.  James would also be the first to remind us that prayer is never the end of our calling--only the beginning.  To pray our laments over war, greed, and bloodshed also wakes us up to be ready to act--to welcome those who will be displaced as refugees, to call on aggressors who also name the name of Jesus to repent of their actions, and to repent ourselves of the ways we have fallen for "Me-and-My-Group-First" thinking, too.

So let us pray--honestly, sorrowfully, and reflectively--and then let us be ready for how God moves us in to act in light of our prayers.

Lord, have mercy.  On those who are in harm's way this day.  On us where we need the grace of truth-telling about ourselves.  On this whole world you love, despite our violence.

Navigating the Rapids--February 24, 2022

Navigating the Rapids--February 24, 2022

"Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you." [James 4:7-8a]

Look, here's the thing: there's a lot in this life we don't have control over... but we do have some choice, some agency, in this life.  And where we do, it matters what we choose.  It matters, where we move--more in tune with the way of Jesus or less... how we move in rhythm the cadences of Christ, or out of step with his peculiar goodness in a world full of mean. And so, yes, while we are all held in the sway of bigger influences than our own power, it's worth using whatever pull we have, even as meager as it may seem, to step more fully into alignment with the heart of God.

Acknowledging both sides of that is important.  Yes, there are things we don't have control over in our lives, and they exert a certain influence on us, no matter what. Some of those are just the accidents of history and the quirks of our own particular life stories.  We live in the twenty-first century, in the days of late-stage capitalism, citizens of the current superpower/empire of the day, and that affects our lives in ways we cannot avoid.  We are influenced by the internet and international relations.  We are affected by cultural behemoths like Amazon, McDonald's Walmart, and Apple.  We are touched by cancer diagnoses in our families and patterns of addiction in our social circles.  We know the well-worn pessimism of living in the Rust Belt where I live, and we have learned from experience that everyone's selling something and every seemingly great deal has got a catch.  We know and move through the world through the lens of our racial, cultural, gender, and socio-economic categories--these are things that exert a pull on our lives like the moon's gravity pulling on the oceans to make the tides.  All of those things, and surely a great many more, are constantly tugging on us, moving us in one direction or another, or several at once, and we didn't ask for them or sign up for them.  They're just there.

Beyond that, too, we can say that evil has its own gravitational pull--whether we think of it in terms of the devil, or the nudging of sin inside us, or the power of wicked systems and structures, the "powers and principalities" that the New Testament talks about, or all of the above.  We're susceptible to the power of each and all of them, seeking to move us away from the ways of God.

And on the flipside, Christians are convinced that God also draws us, with grace like gravity, pulling us into movements that echo God's own motion in the world.  In fact, we dare to believe that God's pull on us is not only the first but the most important power at work on us--it is God's powerful, prevenient goodness before we've done a thing that claims us in grace, that loved us into being, that laid down God's own life for us at the cross.  So it's not all bad news that there are powers bigger than our own that move and influence us.  Our only hope, honestly, in the end, is that the pull of God's grace is more powerful than even our own ornery, stubborn hardness of heart, and that at the last God's love will get through to us even in our most hell-bent opposition to God.

But, to come back around full circle, just because those forces--both social and spiritual--are at work beyond our power or control, it doesn't mean we can just give up and ride aimlessly wherever the current takes us.  We have the ability to influence our orbit, so to speak, so that we move away from the things that are bent on our destruction, and closer to the Love who is calling us home.  

Or maybe it's helpful to think of ourselves like a magnet with two poles--we have the ability, depending on how we are turned, to repel some things and to draw other things.  We can use the force of the magnetic field to cling to something, or we can use it to push something away.  And of course, also like a magnetic field, the strength of the pull or push increases the closer you get to another magnet.  In terms of our relationship with God, the closer we get, the stronger the pull to be drawn even closer into God's embrace.  To be sure, God's pull is already drawing us in, simply by God's own grace, but in addition, the closer we let ourselves move, the more fully we'll be swept up into connection with God, too.

We can't wish away the powers out there that are bigger than ourselves that exert influence over us and shape the direction of our lives like the course of a river.  But we can make choices about how we navigate the rapids.  And where we feel the pull of the world's meanness, or our own internal self-centeredness, or the voices we can only call "demonic," attempting to lead us into the rocks or over a cliff, we can use the paddles in our hands to steer away from those currents.  The people in our lives who reflect the way of Jesus are worth watching, listening to, and learning from.  The voices in the wider culture that do the opposite are ones to stop giving our attention to.  We might not be able to change everything about the circumstances we are in, but we can use whatever power we have to steer in a good direction, toward the channel that is leading us home.

The question that is worth asking on a day like today is simply this: what is worth using our strength on, however much or little it really is?  Where will we paddle the canoe we are in?  What will we move closer toward, and what will we seek to repel, while knowing we are always still held in the grip of grace, and that God's goodness holds us all the while?

Lord God, hold us close.  Hold us close.  Hold us close.

 

Grace All the More--February 23, 2022

Grace All the More--February 23, 2022

"Or do you suppose that it is for nothing that the scripture says, 'God yearns jealously for the spirit that he has made to dwell in us'? But he gives all the more grace; therefore it says, 'God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble'." [James 4:5-6]

God doesn't give up.  Not on you.  Not on anybody.  Ever.

Look, these verses from James are dense.  If they seem difficult to wade through in English, trust me, it's even trickier to make sense of in the Greek.  There are a handful of very different ways verse five can be translated, and they each would mean very different things--digging into them is probably a separate conversation for another time, and probably only for folks who are interested in the inside baseball of biblical translations.  So if that's your burning desire, send me a message and we can unpack the exegetical stumbling blocks of these verses.  But in the mean-time, for the rest of us, let's make sure we don't miss the forest in all these trees.  For all of our wayward stumbling after other loves and other allegiances, God doesn't give up on us, and instead gives grace all the more in the pursuit of bringing us back home.

In yesterday's passage, we saw how James used the image of us being "adulterers" in our dalliances with the world-system and its "What's-in-it-for-me?" mentality. That was actually putting it delicately (James is a bit more provocative in the Greek he uses--again, inside baseball), but the idea was that when we go chasing after the world's agenda of self-interest and deal-making, it's like we're cheating on God.  We're made for a good relationship of faithfulness and love with God, which also expresses itself in the ways we relate to our neighbor.  But when we break those relationships in the quest for "more," we break God's heart like a jilted spouse who has been left for a younger replacement or a causal fling.

If it surprises you that we could break God's heart like we're cheating on God, it's worth remembering that the Hebrew Scriptures often depicted the relationship between God and the people as a marriage--one in which the covenant people kept running off with literal idols, love-affairs with whatever powerful empire was on the scene, their wealth, their power, and their own weapons.  Over and over again, it was the people who kept breaking faith with God... and over and over it was God who kept seeking the people out again and saying, "I love you."  Over and over again, the people realized they had ruined a good relationship in their quest for something else, something "new," or something more glamorous.  And so it was, time and again, that the ancient people of Israel and Judah came to learn that God doesn't give up.

The followers of Jesus see that same amazing idea going even further in the cross--that it is in the cross of Jesus that God goes all the way to death for us.  In the crucified Christ, God literally gives it all to seek after us, with a fierce love and what Brennan Manning termed "the relentless tenderness" of Jesus.  So even when we blow it by chasing after other (lesser) loves that will never really love us back, there is the presence of God, right at our side, like a welcoming father welcoming home a lost son, like a spouse with open arms ready to start over, giving grace to begin again.  Like the repeated refrain from the song "Maps" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, God keeps calling out us, "Wait--they don't love you like I love you." And even after we've learned the hard way and gotten our hearts broken (and broken God's in the process by leaving), God "gives all the more grace," because God just doesn't give up on us.

What can you do when you've been met with a love like this?  What can any of us do but see ourselves, not in our worst moments of failure and unfaithfulness, but as beloved all the same, and to let ourselves be loved, be forgiven, be claimed once again?  What can we do but let such Love take hold of our hands and lead us away from the dead ends we kept wandering into?

Like another wistful anthem once put it, "True love will find you in the end--don't be sad (I know you will), don't give up until... true love finds you in the end."  Maybe we can just stop running today and look up to discover the unexpected reality of grace: God has been seeking after us all along.

And God doesn't give up.

O Lord, your love keeps seeking us.  Give us the courage and grace to take your hand.

Setting Our North Star--February 22, 2022

Setting Our North Star--February 22, 2022

"Adulterers!  Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God." [James 4:4]

Okay, first things first--and this one definitely needs to be said first:  while it's never a good idea to make yourself an enemy of God, God always reserves the right still to love us when we do just that.  

Today's verse comes on strong in warning us not to put ourselves on opposite sides with God, and we'll see that's for good reason.  But all that said, we can't forget that at the heart of Jesus' teaching (and life) is the core conviction that God loves even those who have made themselves God's enemies.  That's what the cross and the Sermon on the Mount are all about.  So if we find ourselves worried we have slid into opposition toward God, remember that we can never be outside the grip of God's grace and goodness.  Even when our backs are turned to the divine, God reserves the right to keep seeking, finding, and gathering us home.  We can't forget that while we're focusing on the details of this verse and lose the forest in the trees.

Now with that said, we also need to hear James' stark reminder that God's "way" and the world's "way" of doing things become mutually exclusive at some point, and there are places where choosing one means saying "No" to the other.  Rather like the stories of Jesus' temptation by the devil in the wilderness, we find in our own lives that saying "Yes" to the way of God means saying "No" to an alternative path or way we might have gone, even if it looks enticing.  And if you have to pick in this life between being where Jesus is, or being anywhere else, it's always better to go where Jesus is--even if that means saying "No" to the old patterns, the old routines, and the old life we knew.

James has just been talking over the last several verses about the competing kinds of wisdom out there--the "world's" kind of wisdom on the one hand, versus God's kind of wisdom on the other.  And we've heard James underscore the contrast there between the world's Me-First, What's-in-it-for-me? kind of mentality and the way of God, which basically turns that inside out and seeks the good of others rather than being bent in on ourselves. There's really no way to pursue both approaches in life: either we'll be bent in on our own selfishness (Luther used to call this being "incurvatus in se"), or we'll be oriented outward toward God and neighbor.  But those two ways of living point in opposite directions, so choosing one is, by definition, to reject the other.  Of course, in the course of our lifetimes, we are constantly changing sides, switching teams, rerouting, and going back and forth that the path of our lives looks like a toddler's scribbly mess.  But James keeps calling us to leave behind the selfishness-is-success transactional thinking that the world usually celebrates, and instead to let our lives be oriented in line with God's kind of wisdom, which has Christ-like love as our North Star. That's the choice.  That's the contrast.  And it's an everyday decision, often every hour and every moment, how we will receive what the day is bringing us, and how we will answer back either with envy or empathy, selfishness or grace.

While we're being honest, James would push even further to see that there's not really a "neutral" position of taking no sides in life, either.  Like Bob Dylan sang, echoing Jesus himself, "You gotta serve someone."  Or as the Jesuit theologian Pedro Arrupe put it, "To be just, it is not enough to refrain from injustice.  One must go further and refuse to play its game, substituting love for self-interest as the driving force of society." To walk oriented in the way of God means to be committed to doing justice, to practicing mercy, to loving people with God's own self-giving love that smiles to see other people happy rather than needing to pull others down to prop itself up. And that is, of necessity, going to mean turning away from a whole other approach to life, rooted in looking out for your own interests first, grabbing what you can even if it's cheating others, and caring only for your own immediate well-being rather than the good of everybody.

That, we should be clear, is what James has in mind by "friendship with the world."  It's the alignment with that way of thinking.  It's when we live our lives accepting the Me-and-My-Group-First mentality that the world calls "conventional wisdom," rather than daring to walk out of step by following God's alternative path.  It's when we no longer question the talking heads who advise us to get more, want more, fear others more, and hoard more, but decide that we like what they tell us.  It's when we decide we'd rather not listen to Jesus' words announcing blessing on the poor, lifting the last above the first, calling us to serve rather than dominate, and laying down his own life for his enemies rather than killing them.  All of that is what James has in mind when he warns about "friendship with the world."  It's NOT that he wants us to sequester ourselves from the supposedly "sinful" folk, or that he's against dancing or bowling or tattoos, the way sometimes Respectable Religious people like to distance themselves from the ones they think are the "sinners."  James doesn't want to see us stop loving the people around us--rather that he doesn't want us to swallow the kind of thinking that the powers of the day take as gospel-truth.  

So we'll be committed to doing good, but not just to other Christians--to everyone, including folks who will never darken the door of a church building on Sunday morning.  We'll be committed to making sure everyone in our community gets enough to eat, regardless of whether they have ever cracked open a Bible, belong to a different faith altogether, or are convinced they'll never believe in any faith.  We'll seek to make sure there's a way for everyone around to have a roof over their heads and a safe place to raise their kids, and we'll be willing to contribute our resources to do it, regardless of whether they've ever prayed a prayer.  James doesn't want us to stop loving and doing good for the people around us in "the world," regardless of whether they share our faith; he just doesn't want us to fall for the conventional wisdom of "the world" that conflates selfishness with success.

With every day, including this one we are living right now, we are given choices about what will be our North Star and compass orientation--whether the way of life charted out by a God who journeyed with formerly enslaved wanderers and exiles, or the way of the tycoons, moguls, and deal-makers.  And when we have to pick between people or profits, personal convenience or practicing compassion, welcoming strangers or fearing them, we'll understand what James means--at some point it becomes clear that one approach to life rules out the other, and we cannot help but take one path and turn from the one not taken, like in Robert Frost's famous poem.

He was right, Frost--it really does make all the difference.  What paths will we walk today?

Lord God, guide us on your path, and direct us in your ways of loving the world around us without falling for the world's games.

Before the Mirror of Erised--February 21, 2022

Before the Mirror of Erised--February 21, 2022

"You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures." [James 4:2b-3]

We're not used to asking the question, "But why do you want this?" over any of our wants in life, are we?  Maybe it's time we did.

There was a beautiful bit of storytelling in the first of the Harry Potter novels, where we are introduced to a plot device called "the Mirror of Erised."  When one looks into the mirror, one sees what one most deeply desires (right, so you probably noticed that "Erised" is just "desire" backwards, but this is a children's book, so it's allowed to be a little on-the-nose).  Anyway, the mirror ends up being a sort of test, or safeguard, to prevent nefarious wizards from stealing the legendary "sorcerer's stone"/"philosopher's stone" which it hides, exactly because of what it shows you.  

Here's how the set-up worked in the story. If you were wanting the stone as a means to a selfish end--say, to outlive your enemies, or to make a fortune in gold--the mirror would only show you that fantasy, not the stone itself, which was just a step along the way in your scheme.  But someone who only wanted to restore the stone to its rightful keeper and prevent it from being stolen by a certain Dark Wizard (who shall not be named) would see exactly where it was, and could hold it in their hands to retrieve it.  In other words, it wasn't enough to want the stone--it was about wanting to possess it for the right reason.

And like I say, that whole concept--of there being "good" and "bad" reasons for having something--is rather foreign to our ears.  We are so much more used to thinking we are entitled to want whatever we want, and there isn't really any more thought put into it. We live in a culture where "because I want it" is reason enough to pursue a thing, scheme to get it, or envy someone who does have it.  And we have a harder time hearing James suggest that sometimes we aren't given the things we are sure we want... because we want them for the wrong reasons, or with the wrong motivations, or with a selfish bent in our hearts.

James, in other words, was doing the Mirror of Erised trick before it was cool--in fact, millennia before it was first dreamed up for a children's novel. James forces us to ask, "What do we really want it for?" over everything we find ourselves desiring.  You'll recall that in the previous verses, James called us out for the attitude of endless wanting that leads us to justify taking from others. And here the train of thought picks up, as James says, "You who are so focused on getting some particular thing--instead of trying to take it from someone else, ask God for it!  And if the answer is "no," maybe that says something about why you want it, and maybe God knows it wouldn't be good for you to have.

In a culture like ours that offers to super-size our fast-food order, or will bombard us with endless ads for things we are "supposed" to want, it's hard hearing James tell us we aren't entitled to have something just because we want it.  But we need him to remind us--at least I know I do--that having more stuff for my own gratification isn't a worthy life goal, honestly.  If my reason for having something is just to have it, as a status symbol or for the sake of my own greed, then it's actually not healthy for me to be given it.

But on the other hand, if the reason for having something is that it allows us to use it in some way that helps others or to love someone else or to care for the world God made, well, then we are tapping into its full potential--and ours.  If I want a bigger house just so I can look down on my neighbors who have less, or so I can wallow in my own opulence, I doubt that's a goal God can get behind.  But if having a house with a spare room allows me to use it to welcome relatives from out of town, or the foreign-exchange student who needs a place to stay, or to welcome foster kids, or to offer safety to a newly settled refugee, well, that changes things.  If I want a more expensive car just to be a status symbol, that somehow rings hollow and empty; but if I need a safer car that costs more, or a car that's more expensive because it burns less fuel, maybe it's a good choice.  James isn't here to insist that he needs to approve every purchase you want to make or every goal you want to pursue in life, and neither am I.  But he does insist that we have to ask the question that rarely ever even dawns on us: "Why do I really want this... and is it actually good, for me and for others, if I have it?"

I have a hunch that asking that question over all of our lives will change us.  It will affect the things we buy on impulse with the click of a button from our favorite online retailers.  It will lead us to think about whether we want something because we actually need it, or whether it's because it's trendy at the moment.  It will lead us to appreciate what we have, rather than always wanting more, newer, bigger, shinier, or costlier models.  And it will probably lead us to take care of what we have--repairing and mending rather than pitching and buying new--more than we were used to.  And I have a hunch that all of those things will make us more content in our souls than we are in our endless fever of affluenza, constantly seeking more and more, while feeling less and less satisfied with what we have.

Today, if you're feeling magical about it, imagine you are starting the day standing before the Mirror of Erised--what will it show you that you really want, and is it a noble thing to want in the first place?  Or, to be a little less fanciful, what is worth wanting, and what things that we've been told to want just aren't important after all?  James offers us an unexpected freedom in leading us to ask a question like that.  What will it look like for us today to live in that freedom?

Lord God, help us to see ourselves and our wants with honesty and clarity--and shape our desires in the heat of your love.