LIFE MATTERS 2: A Study From The Book of James
January 11, 2015
Alice in Wonderland is one of the most beloved and well-known stories of the last 150 years. If you haven’t read the book, you have probably seen the movie or a live show. Disney produced an animated version of Alice in Wonderland in 1951 and Tim Burton produced a live action version for a movie in 2010. Oddly enough, each of these movies and many live shows have turned two stories into one. Lewis Carroll, wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865, then he wrote a sequel in 1875 called Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There.
These stories have some similar themes and some that are completely different. They have some characters who are similar and some that are completely different, yet they have been compressed into one story for many audiences. So much so, that people don’t appreciate each of the books as their own story. In the first book, the theme of size is a frequent concern as Alice grows and shrinks in size. In the second book, time often moves in reverse and the speed of things is quite different. Two different books with different characters and different themes conflated into one amalgamation of Cheshire cats, queens and fantastical worlds.
This mainly happened because the great success of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland largely enveloped the lesser success of the second book. The first book has the name recognition and everyone seems to forget about the differences and nuances of the second book. That actually happens more than you know.
Last week, I introduced you to the book of James. I introduced you to this book as the official minority report of the New Testament. Like Lewis Carroll’s first book, most people have read Paul’s letters and are enamored with the themes in them. The book of James is the second book, an afterthought subsumed into the overwhelming success of Paul and all that he said and wrote. Because of that, I told you last week, James gets homogenized and bent to agree with the letters of Paul. James seems to be offering up a whole different angle on following Jesus than Paul does, and not just Paul, but also Peter, the author of Hebrews, John, Martin Luther and really just about everyone else. Paul says it is by grace you have been saved through faith. Hebrews says by faith people are saved. John says all you need to do is believe in Jesus. Martin Luther said, “Sola fide,” by faith alone you are saved.
Then we have this minority report, one that says quite boldly in 2:24, “You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.” We can bend it and stretch it to make it sound congruent with Paul et al, but that’s simply not what James says. While others are focused on what Christ did for us, the saving grace of atonement, James spends just about the entire book talking about works. Faith without works is dead. Control your tongue. Take care of widows and orphans. Don’t show partiality. Care for the poor.
Last week as I introduced you to this book, my encouragement to you was simple: don’t try to make James fit. Be okay with a little bit of incongruence. Our natural bent is to systematize our faith and construct systematic theologies and that is okay, at least the heart of it. The heart behind that is wrapping our brain around God. As I told you last week, God gave us James for a purpose. While God invites us to wrestle with knowing him, the moment we think we have our brain wrapped around him is the moment he likes to surprise us. The moment we systematize God and form a cogent religion for God that boxes him and controls what he will do is the moment we drain him of his divinity. When God becomes completely predictable, chartable and manageable, that is the moment he is no longer God, so he gives us minority reports. He undermines our thinking. He rattles our theological cages. The reason I know he is like this is because when he came in incarnate form as a carpenter in Nazareth, he constantly poked holes in expectations and traditions. In the midst of the disorientation, the common refrain was, “Follow me.”
James is the lesser book, the less well-known follow up to a smash hit. Our very own personal Through the Looking Glass and What James Saw There. Today I want to remind you of the two interpretive tools I gave you last week, 1) to view this book and really all of the Bible as a piece of art, not a technical manual, but a piece of art that speaks on different days in different ways. God’s word is inspired and authoritative, and yet we need to be okay with tensions and even disagreements within this book. 2) Occam’s Razor, the idea that James can be explained with the simplest explanation possible. The more you try to make James perfectly fit with Paul, the more you neuter his inspired words and provocative art. That too is a gift to us, for some on certain days, we need to see God’s grace dripping from the pen of Paul, but other days we need a smack between eyes of James’ prophetical proclamations.
Today, James invites us into the looking glass to see as we have not previously seen. To see ourselves as we have not previously seen. To see God as we have not previously seen.
James 1: 22-27
As I told you last week, James is seemingly all over the place. In these short six verses, he covers orthodoxy versus orthopraxy, he covers identity in Christ, he covers religion and what God expects from us, he covers morality and he covers controlling your tongue. That’s just about as many topics as there are verses. Some people read James and think he is causing trouble creating a central argument, but I think these six verses today are centered around the looking glass, what we see and what is reality.
In Lewis Carroll’s second book, it begins with Alice pondering what is on the other side of the mirror in her house, another world possibly? Like the rabbit hole in the first book, it proves to be a portal to a whole other world. Thematically this world is inverted, time moves in reverse. Most everything is opposite of what your instincts tell you it should be. Early on, Alice meets with the White Queen and they have this exchange:
“I can't believe that!” said Alice.
“Can't you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again, draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There's no use trying,” she said. “One can't believe impossible things.”
“I dare say you haven't had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
In this moment, Alice stares in the looking glass and sees a world filled with impossible possibilities, an implausible counterintuitive worldview. I think James is suggesting the same. I think it is the hinge for this passage. James tells us to peer into the looking glass of God’s law and find a whole unseen world. Everything that James suggests is counterintuitive, impossible possibilities. That’s really the crux of faith, seeing the unseen, trusting in God’s design over your own.
We are in the second week of our Life Matters series. Life Matters is something we do at the start of each new year to remind ourselves of some important truths. Many churches spend a lot of time talking about eternal life and what happens when this life is over, but we know Jesus also talks a lot about what we do now. In fact, he said he wants us to have abundant life. At SFC, we believe Life Matters, but we know you have a lot of options for fulfilling that pursuit of life. All through this valley, people are taking their best swing at life. Some people are looking for abundant life through consumption, more stuff, more sex and more money. Some people are looking for abundant life through significance at work, so they pile on the hours in hopes of leaving their mark. Some people are looking for success through hedonism, so they pursue leisure at all costs and try to soak up everything the Bay Area has to offer. In all of these things, none of these people are looking for emptiness but they often find it. None of these people are looking for a dead end or the top of the heap only to find that there is nothing there.
G.K. Chesterton said it well when he said, “Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.” That is not some weird pseudo spirituality. In a few short lines, he is describing the human condition, people looking for life in all the wrong places. Even in the church, people find themselves busy knocking on a lot of doors and still missing life.
At SFC we are trying to keep it simple. If you want to follow Jesus, we think you need to pursue three things: Life in God, intentional Christ-centered worship. Life with Others, practicing your faith with other believers. Life for Others, serving and sharing in the name of Jesus. This is not a bare minimum checklist but rather the indispensable steps of discipleship.
We will spend two weeks on each of these life goals. Today and next week, we are going to be talking about Life in God. We will be staring into the looking glass; James says as much. He centers it on this idea of Christians as doers of the Word. While this may sound like a mundane sermon (do what God tells you to do), you don’t realize how really rare this is. The discussion today is about orthodoxy versus orthopraxy. Orthodoxy is believing the correct things. Orthopraxy is doing the right things, and you can’t have one without the other.
If you want life in God, see what he sees and you’ll love what he loves.
At the heart of this passage, are two major ideas. We have this over-arching idea of the looking glass, God’s perfect law, and when we look into it, we see what God sees. James is talking about the Law with an upper case “L,” the Old Testament laws and rules, all 613 of them. We talked about this last year when we went through the book of Deuteronomy but God’s law has become much maligned by Christians. We have made it a false dichotomy of sorts. We talk with great disdain about how we are free from the law and we now live under grace. The law is about rules and grace is about a relationship.
The problem of course is that Jesus said he didn’t come to do away with the law but to fulfill it. Even Paul, the man we attribute such disdain for the law, calls the law a custodian for us, a governor. As I told you last year, the law in the Old Testament could become oppressive but its original design was so that we would thrive. The recurring phrase in Deuteronomy, when it talks about God’s law says to do these things “so that it will go well with you.”
That’s what James had in mind. That’s even what Paul had in mind when he said the law was a custodian, a governor. Counterintuitive though it is, God’s law is for our joy, for our thriving, so that it will go well with us. That’s why James says to look into the perfect law and not just be a hearer but a doer, to take God seriously and have faith that he has your best in mind. James picks up that same theme, be a doer and a hearer, and when you do, you will be blessed. This is an unabashed statement.
If you do look into his perfect law, you will hear several recurring themes which you are now called to do. James picks up on a few recurring themes: Watching your tongue, keeping yourself morally clean and caring for widows and orphans. Let me tell you how those are all connected. We have talked about this many times before, but God’s law is often written in terms of what not to do, and a lot of preaching and moralism leads us to think, “Don’t break this law…don’t break this law…don’t break this law.”
You are actually to focus on what you do want, and what you don’t will pass away. That’s why James encapsulates this passage by saying pure religion is to care for orphans and widows…and then to be unpolluted from this world. He doesn’t say be unpolluted by this world and…take care of widows and orphans. Care for these weak ones is given primacy. He starts with our calling and then secondarily…makes sure and stays unspoiled by the world. Here’s why: When you love what God loves, you’ll also hate what God hates. That statement is not necessarily true the other way around. You can hate all the right things and not love God. In fact, when you hate some of the right things, you also end up hating some of the wrong things, and hating becomes your thing. Widows and orphans in this culture were weak and lowly; there were no social services to help them. There were systemic issues that made widows and orphans the lowest creatures in the culture. If you love them, you’ll hate sins like greed, selfishness and pride because when you love the least of these, it will cost you all of those.
If you want life in God, see what he sees and you will love what he loves.
That’s easy to say but hard to do because we rarely stare into the looking glass. Our eyes often drift to the world around us, and most all of it is calibrated to make you pursue abundant life by knocking on all the wrong doors. This is done overtly in some ways and insidiously in others.
Overtly, you have things like the media pushing you and pushing you to knock on every door except the one that matters. Every commercial, every ad and every time you see your neighbor get something new; but far more insidious is the dualism that rules our modern world. Actions are often separated from beliefs. We know what we “believe” from the Bible, but it doesn’t necessarily impact on our lives. Many times when presidents mess up now, we still vote to re-elect them because it doesn’t matter what they have done, just that they have the same ideology as us. Orthodoxy over orthopraxy, it’s all what you know, not what you do.
We have become a culture obsessed with information. One of the great things to happen in the last few years is Ted Talks. In one sense they are fantastic. Interesting people give interesting talks on interesting subjects, but the results end up not being that different from going to a movie. A few chuckles, a few tears, maybe an epiphany and then a round of applause at the end. We store the knowledge and move on. Our culture is moving this direction on multiple fronts. We are a world full of knowledge with far too little application.