Drawing Near
James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a
Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth. Such wisdom does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.
Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.
Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.
Like many epistles and sermons of the New Testament, the book of James was written to give warnings, lessons, and encouragement to a struggling new Christian community. These different Christian communities, whether they were in Corinth, Rome, or whatever unknown city in which James’ audience lived, were experiencing the inevitable growing pains that comes with starting a new faith community—disagreements, confusion, misunderstandings.
Last week, remember, James talked about watching what we say to avoid spreading misinformation; we talked about the importance of listening and really contemplating and discerning before we speak or start to spread something online. We talked about on the surface James’ words seemed a little harsh, as if he was just telling us to… never talk; it just kind of seemed like he was wagging his finger at us. Well this week, we sort of get instructions on how to best tame our tongues, as he says, how to best spread truth and love in the world. We do this by being able to differentiate between two types of wisdom, and genuinely asking for the right kind.
A running theme throughout James is the fear of being influenced and tainted by the outside world. He’s worried that this burgeoning Jesus movement is going to get corrupted by the very world they are both trying to escape and also to redeem. In verse 14, James says, “But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false of the truth.” “Selfish ambition,” comes from a Greek word that is very particular and very rare in the New Testament. It’s a word the philosopher Aristotle uses to in his treatise Politics, and it means very specifically the type of ambition that a corrupt and self-serving politician would have. So a politician who runs for office or strives for power, not to better the living conditions of his people, not to make life better for the masses, but to build his own ego and his own wealth. Surely James did not do this unintentionally. He was making a point, a very serious point, that there were people within this new communal, equitable faith community who were being influenced, consciously or not, by the way things worked outside their group. There were some who were striving for power and status even within a group in which everyone was supposed to have the same amount of power, and status wasn’t supposed to be a thing anymore.
And this certainly isn’t unique to the audience to whom James was writing. In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he writes of people using their particular gifts to life themselves up, to try to claim they should have more power than others. (And so a quick aside here—once again we see James being right in line with the teachings of Paul, despite many believing he contradicts Paul). So this was a widespread problem within these new Jesus-following communities. And this was a problem when Jesus was walking the earth as well— one of my favorite Bible stories is when the disciples are all arguing about who’s the best, who gets to sit closest to Jesus, and they don’t realize Jesus has been able to hear them the entire time they’re having this hilariously childish debate. It’s really hard to get out of the mindset of the corrupt and sinful world in which we live. It literally consumes us, so we have make a real effort—another theme throughout the book of James— the effort that it takes to live as a truly good person in a world.
It's so, so hard, right? To try to stay pure from the outside world. I mean, “influencer” is a literal job now. People are paid to try to influence you to buy things, to buy into fleeting trends, whatever new technology will be obsolete in three months. It’s something we have to fight against all the time. It’s exhausting. It drives us to envy and covetousness. “You covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts,” James says in chapter 4, verse 2. This envy, this wanting of things or status, or whatever it may have been was driving wedges between these new Jesus-followers. It comes from this earthly wisdom that James warns against, wisdom that he calls “devilish” or “demonic” in other translations. We impulse buy to get that hit of serotonin, we run ourselves into debt so they we can keep up with the Joneses—it’s this culture of competition and status; it’s a culture of longing and believing we’re not good enough; and it seems like, even when we get what we think we wanted, it’s never enough.
And of course it’s not really about material things. It’s about status and power. It’s about feeling like we’re better than our fellow humans. It’s that corrupting earthly wisdom that does that drives us to be this way, that makes us always want to one-up our neighbor… while Jesus calls us to uplift our neighbor, so that we are all on the same level.
James, like Jesus, seems to be full of a lot of holy contradictions—he’s so concerned about being negatively influenced by the outside world, and yet it’s the outside world that he knows must change; he knows that faith is dead without good works, and so this group must be a part of the outside world without falling prey to its cruel demands. And I think even in a wonderfully welcoming and accepting church like this, one that’s been established for hundreds of years, we still have to take James’ warnings into account.
We come here to for peace, and to escape the noise of the world; and yet, we are called to be the church in the world, to spread our capital-L Love to the world. It’s a fine line, a difficult balancing act, to be both rejuvenated by and filled with the hope of the Spirit in this sacred place; while knowing that there is so much work to be done, and remaining aware of those solemn truths about the evils of the world. We must be always sure we are being motivated by the right things, by heavenly wisdom when we go out to do the work we are called to do.
Those earthly motivations— for things, for status—that’s what we have to watch out for. That’s what we have to be hyper aware of. We have to be aware of those things out in the world, and we have to be aware of them here, even in this sacred place. Because even in this incredible space, we’re still human. And we still all have our own unique ideas about how this church should function; about how this church should move forward in a post-covid world, how we should spend our money, how we should make more money, (it is stewardship season, after all) how I should preach, how we should reach out to the community, how many roast beef suppers to have, the list goes on. Every one of us is unique and every one of us has an opinion. And sometimes those opinions clash… but it’s not about who’s right and who’s wrong; it’s about how we address those differences of opinion, how we confront those conflicts that show what kind of church we are and what kind of wisdom we’re abiding by.
“Those conflicts and disputes…Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you?” asks James. I think, maybe especially when we’re in this sacred space, those cravings are always at war—because we come here to hear the word of God; to be inspired to do good works that are inspired by our faith, to be called by that wisdom from above to bring about an earth as it is in heaven, but we’re not perfect yet, and our egos are always battling with that heavenly wisdom. Most of us come from a week of work out in the secular, materialistic world; and whether we realize it not, we are consumed by it. We have no choice but to be a part of it, to be a cog in the machine. And then we come here and we have to rewire our brains. We have to put in that effort to get back to the place God calls us, to get back to thinking of and praying and working for a world where our first thought isn’t ourselves, but our fellow humans.
And despite James’ encouragement towards perfection, something that sounds very daunting, our goal in this case can start small— it can be simply to make sure we are not wholly consumed by the secular, oppressive world that exists outside these doors. We have no choice to be a part of it, and that’s okay. As long as we can get back to a place where we can imagine, hope, and work for a perfect world, as long as we can hold onto that idealism; as long as we don’t fall prey to the that earthly wisdom that calls us to cynicism and selfishness; that earthly wisdom that drives us towards arrogance and delusions of a higher status, there is hope that this world can be better, and we can be a part of creating that better world.
But to get there, out motivations have to be pure. James makes it clear that we don’t have because we ask “wrongly.” We can’t ask for heavenly wisdom in order to get earthly power. We can’t want heavenly wisdom so that we can prove we’re better than other people. We receive heavenly wisdom when we ask for it knowing that some us may be knocked down a peg or two in the pursuit of true equality. We receive heavenly wisdom when we are willing to sacrifice some of our earthly privileges and wants. We receive that heavenly wisdom when we are open to what is possible. “Draw near to God, and God will draw near to you,” James promises.
According to James, we are made in God’s perfect image, and we must abide by that golden rule, that perfect law, as he calls it, to treat one another as we would treat ourselves, then we must draw near to each other. We must work to understand each other and believe in and trust each other so that we can survive and so that we can thrive. Now, don’t get me wrong, this is a healthy church—I’ve seen churches in crisis, and this is not one them. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t disagreements and misunderstandings. And that doesn’t mean we aren’t vulnerable to the dangers and temptations that lurk outside these doors in the real world. And because of that, we really have to put in that effort to remain a beacon of hope, a shining light of truth in the darkness. We have to think creatively and differently about how we can open ourselves up to God, and in turn to one another, and to the community at large. We have to open ourselves up in new, unfamiliar, and sometimes scary ways.
In thinking about today’s passage in conjunction with stewardship season, I wonder how we can open ourselves up more. I wonder how generous and creative we can be about what and how we give to the church, and in turn, to this community. The world is running on its own earthly wisdom right now, there’s no doubt about that. Many of those who want power in those world want it for ego and for their own material wealth. And so I wonder how we can counteract that in our own small ways here. I wonder how we can work against that within our own community, in ways that will have reverberating effects outside these doors. How can we be the church in the world without being negatively impacted by the world?
We have to be open. We have to be open to and honest about how much we can sacrifice, how much we can give. We have to be open to what kind of time we can give to this incredible place. But more than anything, we have to be open towards one another. We have to listen and brainstorm and get excited about how we can change and grow. We have to be open to new voices and new ideas. And as we open ourselves and draw closer to one another, so God will draw closer to us. Amen.
