James – Page 2 – Salvaged Faith

Words and Deeds

Posted on September 2, 2012Leave a comment

How many of you have facebook?

How many of you have no clue what facebook is?

One of the great things about facebook is that you can connect with people from various parts of your life all at once. And my friends span the spectrum from extreme liberals to die hard conservatives.

I don’t have to watch one second of campaign coverage and I can tell you who was speaking, where and when and what lots of different types of people thought about it.

Today, we find ourselves on the Sunday between our two major political party conventions.

And on facebook and in person, I have seen people laugh and cry, jest and jeer, shout praises and mutter criticisms… folks have been angry or excited and rarely anything in between. Some are accused of lying. Others of ignorance. Some people are called stupid. Wealthy has become a bad word – as has the term poor. We point fingers. We refuse to accept blame. We pass around the buck. And rarely are we making these arguments in logical, coherent, calm conversations.

Politics sure brings out the worst in us… doesn’t it?

Or is it just that politics takes all of those pent up feelings we carry around with us every day and it crystallizes our differences, our frustrations, our anxieties?

I started out by asking about how many of you have facebook, because the nasty behavior I see in politics is an every day occurrence in social media.

But it’s also an everyday occurrence in our school hallways.

And in our bars and restaurants.

And around our dinner tables.

And in our private conversations with other people.

The truth of the matter is… we have forgotten how to talk to one another.

This isn’t simply a secular problem. The same thing is seen in our churches as well.

I had more than my share of church politicking this year, as I had the honor of representing our conference of the UnitedMethodistChurch at our quadrennial global gathering.

One thousand United Methodists from all across the globe gathered in Tampa to make decisions about the future of our church and our mission… and a lot of what we did was stand up and make speeches and refuse to listen… which in turn led to a failure to act. We talked our problems to death and in the end have little to show for it.

Each of our denominations has similar meetings – from session and presbytery meetings, to district events and conferences. And it doesn’t matter if you are Methodist or Nazarene or Congregationalist or answer to a pastor or a pope – we don’t always agree and it isn’t always a pretty conversation.

I wonder if that kind of contentious debate about what it means to “be the church” is what led James to write his letter to the people of God.

I think he looked around at the arguments, and the infighting, and the trials people were going through and he felt called to say something… to refocus our attention on what really matters: the word of God that transforms us all.

The passage that Morrie read for us this morning comes from the first chapter of this letter.

A huge problem James discerns is favoritism and conflict between different classes of people in the church… so he starts out by leveling the playing field: we all have tests and trials.

What separates us, James writes, is that some of us stand firm in our faith in the midst of those trials… and some of us are tossed about with every fad and sea change. It doesn’t matter if you are rich or poor…those who stand firm are the ones who are blessed.

Now – this matters, because James goes on to describe how every good and perfect gift comes from God.

What doesn’t come from God are our own cravings, our desires, the things that we hold on to more tightly than we hold on to God.

I want to do a quick thought experiment with you… think of one thing that you hold onto tightly in your life: maybe it is an addiction… or your schedule…maybe it is a way of doing something in the church… or an everyday object like your cell phone.

Imagine that one thing… that thing that you can’t live without…

Now, ask yourself – and be truthful now – how many times in the past year has that “thing” caused conflict?

How many times did it lead you to yell at someone?

How many times did it cause you to act out of character?

How many times did you miss the opportunity to grow in your faith or your relationships because you were too stubborn to let go of it?

James writes his letter to the people of God because they are so focused on what they want and what they think and what they believe that he no longer sees the true word of God in their midst.

They have deceived themselves into thinking that they had the truth – when all they have done is distort God’s word into something dirty and foul to suit their own needs.

And then… they argued about it. They argued about who was more important and who was right. They argued about who was included and who should be forgotten. They argued about how much time they had to put in and why they didn’t need to get their hands dirty any more.

And in doing so, they exchanged the gift of life and peace and love of God for the cares and desires and sin of this world.

You know what? We have, too.

If we were to be truly honest with ourselves, we encourage our youth to use their fists more than words… and teach them to use words that pack a punch that could hurt the toughest soul.

We teach our children they deserve to have everything without regards to the cost.

We as adults are quick to judge when we encounter someone with different political view points. We make assumptions.

We close our doors to the neediest around us and put a check in the mail to make ourselves feel better.

We spend our days working hard so that we can have the finer things in life and then are too tired to enjoy them.

We use and abuse one another so that we can get ahead.

We ask the question, “how will this help me?” more than “how can I help others?”

No wonder the spirit of discourse around us has crumbled. Internally focused, afraid of one another, distrusting of the systems that are supposed to help and support us, wary about the future….

Those words do not describe a people, a community, a nation that has the saving word of God planted within.

The question is what do we have to clear out so that the good and perfect word of God can take root in our souls again?

James has a few solutions for us.

First of all, we need to recapture a spirit of humility. We need to recognize that we are not God’s gift to this earth – but imperfect vessels that the word of God can transform.

Humility means that we treat the word of God as a gift, and not something that we deserve.

Humility means that we make ourselves low so that others might be raised up.

Humility means that we put another before ourselves.

Humility means that we are quick to truly listen to what another person has to say before we butt in with our own thoughts and feelings.

Second, we need to practice every day the words that we hear at bible study or in prayer group or in worship.

David Lose, who writes for Working Preacher, says: “Sunday is not the most important day of the Christian week.” It is every other day, the in-between days that truly show whether or not that saving word of God is taking root.

James tells us that too often we hear the word of God and do not do it. We listen to the sermon on Sunday morning and then go out and forget everything that we heard.

We need to study the word and put it into practice. On Monday morning, we need to let kindness rule our actions. On Tuesday evening, we need to let God’s patience rule our heart. On Thursday afternoon around the water cooler, we need to let the gift of God’s love rule our conversations. In every small act of every single day, we need to let that heavenly gift of God shine through our lives.

Lastly, we need to be careful about our words.

James calls us to listen… but when we do finally speak, we need to ask whether our words are rooted in anger or in love.

Do the words we use come from the word of God planted within? Or from the desires of our imperfect selves?

Are our conversations pleasing to our Lord? Or are we trying to impress others?

In verse 26 of our passage for this morning, James writes, “If those who claim devotion to God don’t control what they say, they mislead themselves.”

Our words matter. They can be used to hurt or to heal. They can be used to encourage or to tear down. They can be used to expand God’s kingdom or to erect barriers for the Holy Spirit.

We who are gathered here represent the people of God in Marengo, Iowa. And our words and our deeds matter. They represent to the world who God is and how he desires us to live.

In your conversations on facebook and in real life… in your actions towards strangers and your best friends… do people see the good and perfect gift of God in your life?

We often cling so tightly to our stuff, our issues, and our solutions that we can’t open our hands to receive the amazing and beautiful gifts of God.

Let go. Open your hearts and your hands to welcome the word of God. And then live it out in every moment of your days to everyone you meet.

Say yes to compassion. Say yes to forgiveness. Say yes to patience. Say yes to kindness and joy and love and peace. Let them take root in your soul and flourish in your life.

If we do… this world truly will be transformed.

Amen.

Send Me!

Posted on August 30, 2009Leave a comment

God said, “Whom shall I send?” And immediately, without hesitating, without knowing what on earth he was getting into, Isaiah responded, “Here I am, Send ME!”

Now, I have thought and thought and thought about this sermon. In some ways, it is the inspiration for this whole series on worship – because fundamentally, I believe that what we do in worship gets us ready to say yes. What we do in worship helps us to place God at the center of our lives as we praise. What we do in worship helps us to let go of the pasts that weigh us down. What we do in worship re-presents us with the Word of God. And ALL of those things prepare us, shape us, form us, so that when God cries out, “Whom shall I send?” we will all cry together – SEND ME!!!!

If you look at the structure of our worship services – about a third or more of our time is spent responding. We respond to God by lifting one another up in prayer. We respond to God by giving generously to the work of Christ’s church in the world. We respond to God by coming forward to the table of the Lord and sharing in the heavenly banquet. We respond to God by heading out into the world with a blessing. And the most important part? We respond by living every minute of our lives between 10:00 on Sunday morning to 9:00 the next Sunday in a way that says yes to God.

That, my friends, is the tricky part. We read in James that we are supposed to be doers of the word and not hearers only. That we shouldn’t just talk about loving God and others, but we are actually supposed to go out there and love God by loving others.

As we have talked about all this month, the core of our gospel message is: God loves you, God forgives you, and God has a job for you.

Every single day, in a thousand different ways, God is inviting us to participate in the reign of God’s kingdom. Just on Thursday as I sat down to write down some of my thoughts, I was struck by four invitations in particular.

1) Mary Lanning passed away on Thursday morning and I heard God say, “Whom shall I send to comfort those who are grieving?”

2) The rain kept falling all day Thursday and I heard God say, “Whom shall I send to fill sandbags in Palo and Central City and Marion and bring hope to those who are flooded?”

3) I looked at some of our curriculum for Sunday School, and I heard God say, “Whom shall I send to teach the high school class and provide support and encouragement for our young people?”

4) Our lay leadership team met on Thursday evening, and I heard God say, “Whom shall I send to serve the people of this church in Marengo, Iowa?

Now – in school, I was always the kid who wanted to answer all of the questions. And so I’d be sitting there in my seat, eagerly raising my hand, halfway standing out of my chair so the teacher would notice me.

That’s kind of how I picture Isaiah. He just had something AMAZING happen to him – He is standing before God and in spite of all the things he has done in his life, he has lived through the experience. Even more than that – he was forgiven, given a whole new lease on life. And now this same God that is full of grace and mercy needs someone to help him out. And Isaiah raises his hand and says “Hey God!!! I’m over here!!! Send ME!!!!!!”

If I took each of those questions from Thursday individually and just stood up here and asked them, I would be willing to bet that you wouldn’t be eagerly responding. I myself have gotten out of that habit of eagerly saying yes to things that come along. Our lives are so busy. We have legitimate reasons to be gone. We are already committed to many good and wonderful other projects. We are serving the community through our jobs or through the school already.

We have lots and lots of good excuses.

Or are we just letting ourselves off the hook?

There is a twenty year old young woman is a missionary in Uganda who has adopted 13 children who have been orphaned. She also shares God with the people in the village through bible studies and worship. One day recently, she was handed a baby that she thought was dead… until the baby breathed. The mother had HIV and had stopped breastfeeding the 9 month old, for fear of passing it to her child, but there was no other food for the baby or the mother to eat. None, at all. The missionary pleaded to take the baby to a hospital, scooped the infant up in her arms and also purchased formula.

She brought the child into her home to nourish the little girl back to health. She wrote “For the first 24 hours, I could hardly stand to look at sweet baby Patricia … The hurt and the hunger in her lifeless little eyes was simply unbearable…”

“I am sad and I am angry…but this is my blog and I am going to say what I feel like. I am MAD. I have been sad and broken for these children for so long and it has finally turned into a hardened anger… I am angry that in the “Pearl of Africa” and the most fertile region of it at that, a mother has literally NO food to feed her baby, not to mention herself or 6 other kids. I am angry that the result of this is that these sweet ones suffer in their innocence.

“I have said it before and it still holds true: I DO NOT BELIEVE that the God of the universe created too many children in His image and not enough love or food or care to go around. In fact I believe that He created the Body of Christ for just that, to help these little ones, the least of these. And I believe that except for a handful, the Body of Christ is failing…

“According to several different resources, there are 168.8 million needy children like … Patricia. Seems like a big number, huh? It shouldn’t, because there are 2.1 BILLION people on this earth who profess to be Christians. Jesus followers. Servants. Gospel live-ers. And if only 8 percent of those Christians would care for just ONE of these needy children, they would all be taken care of.” (http://kissesfromkatie.blogspot.com/)

Katie the missionary is right – there are 2.1 Billion people on this earth who profess to be Christians… but Gospel live-ers? That might be a different story.

In our epistle from James, his main concern is that people aren’t living out their faith. They aren’t letting God’s truth become planted in their lives. And in verses 22-25 he gets to the root of this problem. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you are a listening when you let the Word go in one ear and out the other. You have to ACT on what you hear! If we just hear the word and do nothing about it , then you are like someone who looks at themselves in a mirror, walks away and two minutes later has no idea who they are or what they look like.

It’s the same wisdom that school teachers know well. Edgar Dale once said that we remember 10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, 30% of what we see… 70% of what we discuss with others, 80% of what we personally experience and 95% of what we teach others.

We can spend all the time we want reading the bible or listening to sermons – but if we aren’t actively engaging with the Word of God – if we aren’t discussing it with one another, and living it out – then we quickly forget what God has said.

Real religion, James says, is reaching out to the homeless and loveless in their plight, orphans and widows in their distress, and keeping oneself unstained by the world.

Real religion is for merely 8% of us Christians to live out the gospel by caring for the orphaned, hungry, homeless children of the world.

Real religion is speaking up on behalf of the “least of these” in our country – the homeless, the unemployed, and the underinsured.

Real religion is listening for who God wants us to care for here in Marengo, Iowa and getting on board behind it 110%.

And… real religion is clothing ourselves not with excuses for why we can’t do something, but with the whole armor of God.

The thing I realized, just this week as I felt God calling me to speak up and say something concrete about health care reform, is that it was incredibly scary. I felt very ill equipped and I was incredibly worried about what other people might think. About what you might think.

Perhaps you have noticed this, but I tend not to take sides in big issues. I would be willing to bet that most of you don’t know who I voted for in the past three elections and that most of you would be surprised at the answers. And that is intentional. Because I take seriously the call in James to be quick to listen and slow to speak. I have been working very hard at biting my tongue so that I can be the pastor to all of you: republicans and democrats, liberals and conservatives, libertarians and well, whatever the opposite of a libertarian is.

But when I read from Ephesians the passage about being strong in the Lord and the strength of his power, I felt like God really wanted me to respond. In particular, verse 12 spoke to me because it reminds me that our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh – this is a life-or-death battle with cosmic powers. In this debate about health care, we are not enemies because there is a more important battle to engage in.

“But in the framework of hope for God’s kingdom they [stories of Jesus healing] cannot be forgotten, for in that framework they become reminders of hope.
“All severe illnesses are heralds or foretokens of death, and we have to see Jesus’ healings as heralds or foretokens in just the same way: they are heralds of the resurrection… In every serious illness we fight for our lives. In every healing we experience something of the resurrection. We feel new-born, and as if life had been given back to us.”

– Jurgen Moltmann, Jesus Christ for Today’s World.

(remainder of sermon to be posted later)