Audio Recording
Three weeks ago we started looking at James and if
you remember in that sermon I worked mainly with verse 1:21 which reads:
“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.” I think that verse is the key to
unlocking the Book of James. Everything
he has to say deals either with the first part of ridding ourselves of the bad
stuff or with the second part of welcoming or showing hospitality to God’s
presence in and among us.
In that sermon I dealt with the
implanted word and if I were to sum up its message a sentence or two it
would be that God the Father has spoken into
us the new word of the New Creation he
wrought as Jesus Christ, God the Son become human, by implanting his very self,
God the Holy Spirit into us, and because the Holy Spirit is in us we are
therefore bonded to Jesus in such a living and dynamic way that we share with Jesus
in his relationship with God the Father.
Thus, we are born anew and made be God to be his adopted children. We have to welcome with meekness this new
life-transforming relationship. It saves
us. Indeed, it is salvation.
With that background, we come to James 4:5 where
James says God is jealous for this new life giving relationship we have with
him through Jesus in the Holy Spirit.
James writes: “Or do you suppose that it is for nothing that the
scripture says, ‘God yearns jealously for the Spirit that he has made to dwell
in us’?” To let you in on little secret,
that verse exists nowhere in the Old Testament.
James is either quoting from a book we know nothing about or he’s doing
what we do quite often, stating a general theme of the Scripture as if it is an
actual quote.
In my opinion James is pulling this one out of the
ether of the first and second of the Ten Commandments which say: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of
the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods
before me. You shall not make for
yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or
that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or
worship them; for I the Lord your
God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the
third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast
love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my
commandments.”
The Israelites were constantly
turning away from the LORD God to worship other gods and so God would bring disaster
upon them to bring them back. I don’t
want to sound like a Bible-thumping bummer, but I think James is bringing this
warning to us. God is a jealous God. He wants this relationship that he has
implanted into us to thrive and not be stunted by what James calls “friendship
with the world”. James even goes as far
as to use hurtful words in verse 4 to make his point: “Adulterers! Do you not
know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of
the world becomes an enemy of God.”
Adultery is probably the Old Testament prophets’ most pointed analogy
for the Israelite’s idolatry.
Friendship with the world is James’ term for idolatry. His people would not have been making idols
and worshipping them as did the ancient Israelites. What James is referring to is the conflict
and disputes in their midst that have arisen by their clinging to the values of
the world rather than the gentle way of godly wisdom that arises from focusing
on welcoming the implanted word and doing the work of making peace, of doing
reconciliation. James writes at 3:17-18:
“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.”
If you remember from the sermon two weeks ago, James’ community was
showing partiality to the rich and powerful and shaming the poor in their midst
and this behaviour in the end was nothing more than a blatant display of a lack
of faith in God’s promise to give his Kingdom to the meek and the poor. They were to be making the ways of the coming
Kingdom a reality in the midst of their Christian fellowship, but instead they
were playing by the values of the world by exalting the rich and powerful at
the expense of abasing the poor.
Therefore, their fellowship lacked righteousness, lacked “peace”, the
peace of Christ.
James quite pointedly explains to his people where this conflicted-ness
in their fellowship is coming from. In
3:14 he points out that it is from bitter envy and selfish ambition, from
people who have a mind to build a social ladder in the church so they can get
on it and climb and covet the power of the people the believe to be above them
and judge those they believe to be beneath them. At the beginning of chapter four James asks
where these conflicts and disputes come from.
He answers – one thing you need to know about James is that he chooses
Greek words that exaggerate what he is saying in order to overstate his point
so that we really get it – these conflicts come from the hedonistic pleasure we
get from fighting amongst ourselves. We
get envious and crave the status that others have and so we act hatefully even
bully others to the extent that open disputes arise. That’s the way of the work place even for me
and my work place is the church. It was
the way things were when I was in High School, and university, and
seminary. It’s called being liked or
popular. It’s striving for the promotion
and feeling entitled to a raise. It’s
being the smartest, the prettiest, the fastest… the –est of everything. It all boils down to me getting my way because
I am powerful; i.e., I am a god. To James this is the way of the world and it
is enmity with God and thus has no place in the fellowship of God’s beloved
children.
If I were to try to sum up what James is saying here in a pithy little
saying in a way that sounds like James would sound today, I think he’d say, “Whenever
people get together in groups they immediately set about establishing a pecking
order in status – God hates that; especially in Christian fellowship where he’s
caused his own Spirit to dwell. Beloved,
we are children of God, not a pack of dogs.
So let us draw near to God. He
really is here. Let us be gentle with
one another. Let us be humble and serve
one another. Let us consider the needs
of others before we go striving after our own. Amen.”
