Singposts of the Christian Life

Sermon for September 27, 2009 Proper 21 Text:  James 4:7-5:6 Title:  Signposts of the Christian Life A.  In the days before the advent GPS systems, William Barclay, a British theologian, liked to tell the story about a young boy who thought it might be fun to change directional signs on the road. That is, at an intersection of the road where one sign pointed in the direction of the city of Seattle and another sign pointed in the direction of the city of Tacoma, he'd switch them around.   The boy wondered how many people could he send down the wrong road with the switched around signs?   The Book of James is also about switching signposts, only for James, they are the signposts of the Christian life.  James was written to counterbalance certain misunderstandings that had arisen in the lives of some believers who had read Paul's Letter to the Romans.  Paul makes it clear in Romans that we are saved by faith.  Paul was well aware that no matter how hard one tried to live faithfully to the letter of the Law as expressed in the 10 Commandments and in the 613 additional religious laws that were laid upon the faithful of the 1st century, somewhere along the line, we're going to slip.  We can't earn our way to Heaven.  We are saved by grace, through faith in Jesus Christ, who died for us and who lives forever so we might have new life.    Now some believers took this theological reality to the extreme, saying that if I am saved by faith, then it doesn't matter how I behave, as long as I believe in Jesus.  Indeed, my faith doesn't necessarily have any influence whatsoever on how I interact with other people.  This way of thinking happens all too often even today.    I was in a small rural church one time that had a major dispute about where the pies should be placed in the kitchen prior to serving them for the annual turkey supper. One woman actually left the church community because several new comers to the church had convinced the rest of the women working in the kitchen that it would be more efficient to put the pies on the counter beside the sink instead of the counter next to the refrigerator. "It's not the right way to do it", she said. "We've never done it that way before, and I am not going to be part of doing it that way now.  Those new people are going to ruin this church."  I hardly think the ultimate fate of the Kingdom of God rested on the positioning of a cooling pie, but she was deadly serious.   James addresses this issue by turning the signposts of the Christian life so they point the way to living faithful lives as disciples of the Lord.  Being saved by faith is supposed to make a difference in the way we live.  We are Christians in every aspect of life, not just on Sunday mornings.  James expresses this theme most succinctly in chapter 1, verse 21, where he says.  "Be doers of the Word, and not merely hearers."  Live the life of Christ.  Don't give being a Christian mere lip service, but mean it!   B.  James invites us to recognize that if we want to live as faithful servants of Jesus Christ, we have to live humbly before the Lord.   Now be careful here.  Humility is not self-deprecation, and it does not allowing people to run all over you.  Rather, living humbly recognizes that God is ultimately in charge of my existence.  It is in Him that we live and move and have our being.  He has given me specific gifts.  He has placed opportunities before me to use my gifts.  I am a wonderful and unique creation of God.  God has shaped the circumstances of my life such that I am where I am and who I am at this moment.  Now of course I have free will, but somehow God can work within my free will to shape events so they come out as a blessing, for us and for others.    Now I don't need to tell you that living humbly doesn't come naturally.  Indeed, it is a complete reversal of the way we tend to live.  The opposite of living humbly is living arrogantly.  Arrogant living says that I am in complete and ultimate charge of my life.  What I have I earned by my own efforts.  Arrogant living doesn't even put God in the daily equation of life.  It is self-centered, rather than God-centered or other-centered.  Now I don't have any problems with persons who pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.  But to say God has nothing to do with our lives at all is to deny that Christ is the Lord, and is ultimately in charge of both the world and our world.  James starts out our passage by saying "Submit yourselves to God.  Resist the Devil and he will flee.  Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.  Cleanse your hands…purify your hearts…lament and mourn and weep.  Let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy into dejection."  Now believers are not being called to a sad-sack existence here.  Rather, if we are living life arrogantly, without the Lord, then we are ensnared by the Devil.  We have to recognize this, turn to God, repent of our sin by cleansing our hands, purifying our hearts, and mourning our loss of joy, life, and peace in living humbly with the Lord.  "Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will exalt you."   Now as we have already mentioned, James will have nothing to do with private religion.  To James, if you call yourself a Christian, you have to act like one.  Faith and works are not opposites, but rather are intimately connected.   Real faith leads to real conversion, and real conversion makes a difference in the way we treat others.  In the rest of this morning's passage, James identifies three areas of arrogant, of which I want to look at just two of them.    1.      First of all, in verses 11 and 12, he warns against judging or slandering another person.  Slander always seeks to gain advantage at the expense of another.  It is always an inner judging of another, because it reflects personal hatred and animosity. We judge others when we size up a person by his or her appearance; we judge others when we speak disparagingly against an ethnic group.  Judging and slandering involves simultaneously lowering the neighbor and elevating the self. Therefore, when we judge, we forget the most basic commandment Jesus preached, namely, to love others as we love ourselves.  James calls us to remember that, as the Psalmist says, only God can judge, and that we should only worry about doing the Will of God ourselves. Author H.A. Ironside relates an interesting incident in the life of a man named Bishop Potter. "He was sailing for Europe, and after he found his stateroom, he noticed that another passenger was to share the cabin with him. He chatted for a moment with his roommate, then after a while went to the purser's desk and inquired if he could leave his gold watch and other valuables in the ship's safe.  He explained that ordinarily he never availed himself of that privilege, but he had been to his cabin and had met the man who shared the other berth.  Mr. Potter didn't think he looked like a very trustworthy person. The purser accepted the responsibility for the valuables and remarked, 'It's all right, sir, I'll be very glad to take care of them for you. Your roommate has already been up here and left his valuables for the same reason!'" 2.      Don't boast about our control over tomorrow.  The form of arrogance, described in verses 13-17, is not subtle.  "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."  In other words, with little or no notice, our life can completely change.  We could have a car accident; we could get diagnosed with a terrible illness.  We could lose a loved one.  Many things happen outside our control.   Now James is not saying never plan.  But he does say that planning the future without God is a confidence falsely placed.  It is the quality of the braggart, the boaster, or the foolish loudmouth.  Again, such an attitude pushes God to the side.  It assumes that nothing is outside our control, when in point of fact, many, many things are out of our control.  We can rely fully and completely on our good fortune, or our business acumen.  But James points out that such an attitude is eventually going to run into a brick wall.  We can't even guarantee that tragedy won't happen tomorrow, much less a year from now.  At its core, this attitude views the world as being run solely by us.  But such is not the case.  It is God who miraculously maneuvers life in such a way that His ultimate Will is done.  He is in charge.  We are not.  To recognize that fact is to live humbly.  To ignore that fact is to live arrogantly. In 1969, in Pass Christian, Mississippi, a number of folks were preparing to have a "hurricane party" in the face of a storm named Camille. The wind was howling outside the posh Richelieu Apartments when Police Chief Jerry Peralta pulled up sometime after dark. Facing the Beach less than 250 feet from the surf, the apartments were directly in the line of danger. Peralta yelled, "You all need to clear out of here as quickly as you can. The storm's getting worse." But they all just laughed at Peralta's order to leave. "This is my land," one of them yelled back. "If you want me off, you'll have to arrest me." Peralta didn't arrest anyone, but he wasn't able to persuade them to leave either. He wrote down the names of the next of kin of the twenty or so people who gathered there to party through the storm. They laughed as he took their names. They had been warned, but they had no intention of leaving.   Well, you know what happened.  Camille was one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes ever seen.  At 10:15 p.m., scientists clocked Camille's wind speed at more than 205 mph. Raindrops hit with the force of bullets, and waves off the Gulf Coast crested between twenty-two and twenty-eight feet high. News reports later showed that the worst damage came at the little settlement of motels, go-go bars, and gambling houses known as Pass Christian, Mississippi. Nothing was left of that three-story structure but the foundation; C.  Now we need to point out that James is not just giving us good advice, though he is certainly doing that.  He is also giving us a recipe for successful Christian living.  Here's the thing – not a single one of us has lived a perfect life.  On one occasion when I was an Associate Pastor at a large church, I sat in on a Staff-Parish Relations Committee meeting (this is the Methodist equivalent of the Search Committee) when they were drawing up a description of what they wanted in a Senior Pastor.  Some of the qualities included being a magnificent administrator, a powerful preacher, a skillful counselor, and a constant home visitor.  Finally, after 20 or more qualities where written down, one of the committee members said "Shall we just say, 'Walks on water,' and ask the Bishop to send Jesus?"  No one is perfect.  There isn't a one of us who hasn't been kicked around by life.  Some of us come out of an abusive childhood.  Some of us come out of a history of drug or alcohol abuse.  Some of us might never have gotten the breaks on our job that we thought we disserved.  Some of us might be in trouble now.  All of us need healing from some hurt.  And living the way James spells out is the way to healing and wholeness in the Lord.  Living humbly before God is far from being a dishrag.  It is a way of being in fellowship with the Almighty, of acknowledging that sure, we can live without God, but not forever and not very well.  Living humbly before God is living a life that admits it isn't perfect, but also admits that God doesn't care.  He takes us as we are, forgives us, and brings us healing.  It doesn't happen overnight.  But over time we can know the peace that passes understanding through faith in Christ.  And Church, we need to know that perfect people don't enter into our worship space each Sunday morning.  But broken people do.  Needy people do.  Lonely people do.  And we need to love them and accept them the way Christ loves and accepts us. In Chicago a few years ago a little boy attended a certain Sunday school. When his parents moved to another part of the city the little fellow still attended the same Sunday school, although it meant a long, tiresome walk each way.. A friend asked him why he went so far, and told him that there were plenty of others just as good nearer his home. "They may be as good for others, but not for me," was his reply. "Why not?" she asked. "Because they love a fellow over there," he replied. Jesus said "Come, all who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."  That is a promise we can take to the bank.  Amen. Keith Almond P.O. Box 4388 Leesburg, VA  20177 703-344-3569 almond_keith@yahoo.com