No more bread for you! Seriously, aren’t you glad we
don’t have another passage about the Bread of Life this week? I know I am. But
the Gospel once again seems to be about food – in this case, what kind of food
you should eat and what kind of food that you should avoid.
But I think we’ve talked enough about anything
food-related for a while, so I’ll give you a break. Instead, we are going to
turn to an Epistle that doesn’t get much attention, the epistle we just
heard…that of James.
Now, if you were a Lutheran, you’d not spend ANY time
with James’ epistle, because Martin Luther thought that it didn’t have much to
offer. He called it an epistle made of straw, and followed a long line of folks
dating all the way back to the early Christian scholar Eusebius, in saying that
this epistle really didn’t belong in the Christian canon.
But I think there are some surprises for us if we look
at James, and this week’s passage is rich with them. Before we look closer,
though, let’s recall how we ended up last week. We talked about metaphor as a
way of helping us understand who Jesus is. We also talked about metaphor as a
way of understanding how we do what God wants us to do. We shifted from the awareness
that God is present to us in a very profound and immediate way, to the urgent
need to do something in response to that awareness. It’s that human shift from
“I get it” to “well, now what?”
And James, this epistle made of straw, is all about
the “now what?”
Let’s look at where he begins: “Every generous act of giving, with
every perfect gift, is from above.”
Put another way, everything that you
do that is generous, that is about helping someone else, that is openhearted
without expecting anything in return, is something that comes through you to
others because God planted the seed in you to do it. Every good thing you do is
not something you came up with out of thin air. God put that capacity for good
in you. It is all about the doing.
Now I’d like to believe that I do good
things because I’m a wonderful generous good-hearted person, but James says,
“well, yes, sort of…but it’s really because God made you to be a generous
good-hearted person, and God is inspiring you to do this good stuff.”
Gee whiz, sort of takes me down a peg,
doesn’t it? Here I thought it was all from me…but maybe it is really not me,
but God working through me in a marvelously subtle way.
James says we are a sort of “first fruits of God’s
creatures,” that we are made by God to be good in this way. Okay, now I feel a
little better.
But if I am made by God to be this way, how do I
explain the fact that I’m not all good and generous and sweet and holy 24-7?
Hmmm…perhaps because God made me wired to be good, but
God also gave me the opportunity to choose to be good, which means that I may
slip sometimes and choose to be not so good.
James gets that. He understands that although we may
have been created to be the best and brightest of God’s creatures, sometimes we
take our fabulousness way too seriously, and in those moments we are much less
likely to do good for others, and much more likely to do good for ourselves,
because, after all, don’t we deserve it? I mean, we’re pretty fabulous, right?
Yup, except when we’re not.
So James stops talking like a theology professor, and
starts talking like your least favorite Sunday School teacher, giving out a
list of do’s and don’ts. Commandments of sort, right?
“Let everyone be quick to listen, slow
to speak, slow to anger; for your anger does not produce God's righteousness.
Therefore rid yourselves of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness, and
welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your
souls.”
Listen.
Don’t talk so much. Don’t get angry. Stop being wicked. You’re not so
important. Turn to God’s word. That will get you back on track.
And
why do we want to do this? So that we are back to being as fabulous as God made
us to be.
And
what is the fabulousness that God built into us? Being generous and loving to
others. Helping others. Fighting for others who cannot fight for themselves.
Being, as James said, doers of the word, not just
hearers. Acting on what God has implanted in us as his beloved creatures and
has reinforced through Jesus’ words.
Now here’s where we might get a little confused,
because Jesus says over and over again (and the Apostle Paul reiterates it even
more sharply in his teachings) that we can’t possibly do enough to earn eternal
salvation…only Jesus’ death on the cross is big enough to save us. It is only
by believing that we can be saved.
But James says in no uncertain terms that we should do
good works. That doing good works is what God made us for.
Does that mean that we have to do good works to earn
eternal life? It seems like a contradiction in terms, since Jesus says that the
only way we get into heaven is in believing in him and what his death on the
Cross means.
But is it really?
How many of you have gotten a gift of a box of
chocolates? There may be a moment when you first open the chocolates that you
think, “I’m going to hide this box so nobody else in the house can have one.
They’re all mine, my present, and no one gets any but ME!” It’s tempting to do
that, because the chocolates are so good and you love them so much…and then you
expend a whole lot of energy on keeping them hidden, never eating them around
any other member of your family, or you eat them all at once and you feel
pretty queasy. But there may be a different response. You open the chocolates,
and you say to the person who gave them to you, “Why don’t you have one?” And
your gracious and appreciative response, which is a way of saying thank you, is
an act of generosity to the giver. Or you save the chocolates, knowing that
your sister who has been going through a difficult time could use a lift, and
you simply give them to her. And your generosity, the way God wired you to be
generous, is a gift from God, channeled through you, to your sister. It’s a
moment when you pay attention to what God has done in you and told you through
Jesus, and you fulfill what God made you to be. You may not be consciously
thinking about your act in that way, but that is what is behind it.
Now here’s something that is important to note about
these moments when we fulfill what God made us to be: they rarely happen in
church on Sunday.
And that’s alright. Church is the place where we are
reminded about what God made us to be.
But the place where we live it out is in our everyday
lives on every other day of the week. It is when we share the chocolate in the
office, or help a co-worker who is struggling on a project without being asked.
It is when we tell someone who has told a joke that demeans another person,
“You know, pal, that’s just not funny and it’s not appropriate. I think you owe
our friend here an apology.” It is when we tell the cashier that she has
shorted herself a dollar, so that she doesn’t get into trouble at the end of
the day when she has to reconcile the cash in her drawer. It is when we think
first about someone other than ourselves.
When we think of it this way, it does something
special: it hallows our everyday lives. It makes them holy.
Holiness is suddenly not something that is reserved
for an hour or so on Sunday morning. It is every hour of every day…our
awareness of each of us being God’s most precious creations.
It is that awareness that inspires our acts, that
causes us to be “doers of the Word, rather than hearers.” As we sense God’s
love in how he made us, we do things to fulfill our promise not because we are
afraid of God, or think we won’t get to heaven unless we do enough good deeds,
but because the only life that makes sense is a life joyfully responding to
that great love. We can’t simply sit in the pews and say “yes, I hear, and
that’s all very nice.” We simply must go out and do what we are made to do, in
grateful response to the One who created us. We are doers not because we must,
but because we cannot NOT be doers in the face of the way we have been blessed.
Doing good deeds is not the same thing as earning your
way into heaven. Paul was right. We cannot do anything that would
counterbalance Jesus’ gift of salvation by his death. But we can celebrate the
gift that was given, in the same way we offer a chocolate back to the giver of
the box of candies, in appreciation, in thanksgiving, in joy.
How will you act in this coming week to live out what
James advises? Is there one place where you might need to listen rather than
speak, avoid getting angry, give without expecting anything in return? Is there
someone who might need a hand or a smile? Where will you be the fulfillment of
what God made you to be?
The gift of living this way when we are not in
church might be to bring new meaning to our time when we are together in
church: this is the place where we are reminded of who we are, what we are
meant to do, how we are loved and forgiven, and how we are energized to go out
into the world yet again, and do it all for another week, and another.
In God’s eyes, you are a gift. Live like you believe
it.
Amen.
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