James
1:1-18
September
9, 2012
William G. Carter
My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any
kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of
your faith produces endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, so
that you may be mature and complete, lacking
in nothing.
If any of you is lacking
in wisdom, ask God, who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, and it
will be given you. But ask in faith, never doubting, for the one who
doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind; for the
doubter, being double-minded and unstable in every way, must not expect to
receive anything from the Lord.
Every generous act of
giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with
whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. In fulfillment of his
own purpose he gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a
kind of first fruits of his creatures.
My
good friend Bill McSwegin is gone a few years now. When he was among us, he
made his way around the churches to see how they were doing. That was the kind
of job he had – pastor to the pastors, executive pastor to the presbytery. And
he regularly used a phrase on Sunday morning to greet the preacher after the
sermon. He came up with a twinkle in his eye, moustache twitching, and he said,
“That was a perfectly adequate sermon.”
Perfectly
adequate. What did he mean by that?
A
perfectly adequate sermon – maybe that means the sermon you get today is as
good as it gets. It fulfills basic needs, and not much more. The preacher
showed evidence of wrestling with the scripture text, found a couple of nuggets
worth sharing, did not trip over the tongue more than a half-dozen times, and
wrapped it up in a suitable time frame. Perfectly adequate.
Remember
the last time you went to a perfectly adequate restaurant. The menu was
predictable. The food was served without much of a wait. The wine was not
watered down. The service was competent. You were not hungry when you went out
to the parking lot. Perfectly adequate.
Imagine
saying to your friends, “I have perfectly adequate children.” What would that
mean? I suppose it could mean a lot of things. They eat their vegetables. They
keep their rooms clean. They manage low B’s on their report cards. Best of all,
they remember your birthday.
So
what would it mean to say we have a perfectly adequate church? Perhaps it
suggests that a respectable percentage of the pews have somebody sitting in
them. Most of those assembled look pretty modest; the women are strong, the men
are good looking, and the children are above average. An adequate church has
reasonable expectations. They know every Sunday is not a jazz revival. The
notes of the first choir anthem of the season land where they should. The
offering plates reveal a post-vacation bump. And everything goes along as it
always does. Perfectly adequate.
Except
it sounds a little different when Brother James says it. The phrase he uses is
“lacks nothing.” The church “lacks nothing.” They have been through some
testing. They show some endurance. They reveal themselves to be perfectly
adequate. They “lack nothing.”
We
know people like this, don’t we? His wife is sick. The diagnosis catches them
by surprise. She needs critical care. He goes every day to sit with her, even
though she cannot do much more than sleep. But he goes every day. Eight in the
morning, he pulls on his jacket, takes the car keys out of his pocket, and
drives down to her room. He does that every day for two weeks. She looks at him
with silver eyes and says, “You don’t need to push it. I’m not going anywhere.”
He smiles silently and takes her hand.
One
afternoon the doctor stops in to say, “I think we see a turn for the better.”
All those prayers have gotten them through the vigil. A few days later, they
both return home, worn out but relieved. They are different people. They have
gotten through.
James
writes to Christians who have been slogging through it for a while. Not quite a
hundred years, but they have stuck around through the bumps on the road and the
boredom of the straightaway. He begins this collection of Christian advice by
noting simply that faith can be lived without a heightened sense of drama. We
don’t need a lot of wattage. Don’t need to bring in a bevy of excitable people
(whom James calls “unstable”). Don’t need to chase after things that entice us;
these, he reminds us, are empty temptations. No, says James. Stay the course.
Keep your wheels on the road. We are perfectly adequate in our endurance.
This
is the voice of stability. We see it in those people who just keep going. God
works on them over time. Have you been to the anniversary dinner? People are
honored for keeping long promises. There may be little about them that is
flashy or exhilarating. Hollywood will never make a movie about their lives. Perhaps
an unstable culture would consider them boring. But James seems something
healthy, something steady, something that matures over time. And those around
them are changed mysteriously for the better.
Endurance
is the first sign of a perfectly adequate people, a perfectly adequate church.
And to burrow down to a deeper level, what makes endurance possible is the
ability to receive. It’s the spiritual ability that knows everything we need
over time is offered as a gift from heaven. Perfectly adequate people learn to
receive everything from God.
James says, “If
anybody is lacking in wisdom, ask God, who gives to all generously and
ungrudgingly, and it will be given you.” Later on in the book, he says, “Is
anybody among you suffering? Go ahead and pray. Are any of you sick? Call for
the elders of the church and have them pray, and the Lord will raise you up.”
There is something important here. Prayer is the practice of dependency. We do
not pray because we are competent. We do not pray because we are complete. We
pray because we depend on God. We pray because it is God’s generosity that
makes us adequate.
This is one of the
great paradoxes of the spiritual life. The strongest Christian is the one who
depends most on God. The most competent Christian is the one who prays for
forgiveness every day. In a do-it-yourself, pull-yourself-up society, this
doesn’t make any sense. But it is a profoundly Christian truth, uttered by
Jesus as the opening line of the Sermon on the Mount. “Blessed are the strong”
– no, he doesn’t say that. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven.”
It reminds me of that
Bible story from a few weeks ago. Jacob is running away after swindling his
brother. Exhausted, he puts his head on a stone and goes to sleep. And what
does he dream? A ladder extending between heaven and earth. And what’s
happening on the ladder? Angels going up and coming down. There is a circular
activity between heaven and earth.
As a preacher friend
points out,
Overflowing generosity
is the quality that describes the triune God. From God’s very being, all gifts
of every variety flow freely and generously upon us. The usually somber John
Calvin gushed that he “that he was ravished with astonishment” at the
generosity of God, whose love knows no bounds and whose mercy is everlasting.
(Have to love that phrase: “ravished with astonishment”!)[1]
We pray in our need,
and James says, “Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from
above, coming down from the Father of lights.” God’s generosity makes us
adequate.
Beyond
endurance, beyond dependence and receptivity, there is one particular gift that
James encourages us to pray for. It’s the gift of wisdom. Wisdom. That is an
unusual word. It’s not the same thing as intelligence. Some of us have met
smart people who aren’t very bright. They park their car beneath a falling
tree. Fred Craddock, the preaching professor, used to describe the student who
got a 4.0 and missed the point. Or the expert in Bible Law who approved of
Jesus when he said we should love our neighbors, but who really didn’t want to
see a Samaritan as his neighbor.
When
the Bible speaks of wisdom, it speaks of an applied knowledge. Wisdom is
holding together the “knowing” and the “doing.” It is a gift of experience; go
around the track a number of times and you learn how the track moves. Wisdom is
a gift from God, a holy insight that stitches together the word and the deed. As
James declares in his letter, “If people think they are religious and cannot
bridle their tongues, their religion is worthless and they deceive themselves.
Pure religion is to care for the needy in their distress.” The Word from above
is expressed in the deed down below.
Have
you known the person with that kind of wisdom? I think of the college professor
with a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh, intelligent and well-read, as
smart as they come, and his professional specialty was working against
discrimination in any form. A successful Sunday School graduate, he went to
seminary, aiming to become a preacher. But he quickly became disillusioned when
the teachers in his Christian school were silent as his country got entangled
in an unjust war. So he took that disillusionment as God’s call on his life to
go in a different direction. He is smart, humble, and completely integrated.
I
think of the woman who wears out her knees in prayer. She prays for the sick,
she prays for the healthy, she prays for the people who don’t think they need
it, and she prays for her pastor and his ex-wife. Every day she prays, and you
can see it in the light in her eyes which never diminishes.
I
recall the teacher, looking at retirement, wanting to stay active and do
something significant with her life. So she gets dirty mucking out houses that
were flooded down river one year ago today.
And
I think of the internet photo that somebody sent me yesterday. It’s a picture
of a restaurant receipt. A young couple with kids discovered that their meal
was paid for. The donor wrote on their receipt, “Somebody once paid for our
diner when we were young parents and it made a mark on us. The foundation of
this gesture was good parenting. Keep up the good work. Time goes by so fast.”
These
are glimpses of pure and unstained religion, lived out in Christian wisdom,
holding together the Word and the deed. And should this happen among us, we
would be a perfectly adequate church – enduring, receptive, and wise.
(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.
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