God’s Message
Suppose that God wanted to tell each and every human in the world, “I love you.” And so at the start of the day, God made a beautiful sunrise, the dark deep indigo of the night sky blossoming slowly into violet and pink and orange. “I love you.” The birdsong in the trees. “I love you.” Little flowers popping up—even in the unlikeliest of places, such as sidewalk cracks and clogged gutters. “I love you.” In the middle of the afternoon, lengthening shadows offering a cool, shady refuge from work. “I love you.” The gentle murmur of a creek with clear, cold water. “I love you.” At the end of the day, a stunning sunset, followed by a velvety black sky spotted with the sparkling twinkle of stars. “I love you.”
Who would hear God’s message?
Would it be heard by the business-people glued to their laptops, talking forcefully into their phones? Would it be heard by the lawmakers gathered in meeting rooms? Would it be heard by the couple embroiled in conflict?
Would it be heard by the little children? The boys and girls without any agenda but to explore, to discover?
“Welcome with
Meekness the Implanted Word”
In today’s scripture, James picks up on the idea that the church are a people who have recognized themselves to be beloved children of God. Just as on the banks of the Jordan River, Jesus heard God say, “You are my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased” (Luke 3:22), so followers of Christ have been given “birth by the [same] word of truth” (Ja 1:18). Christ has helped us to hear God’s message, “I love you.”
James wants, however, to ensure that we keep hearing this message, that it doesn’t get lost amid the noise. So he offers a few instructions:
19 You must understand this, my beloved: let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; 20 for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness. 21 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.
Benedict of Nursia, who lived in the sixth century and helped to develop the monastic rule by which monks and nuns would seek to grow in their faith, writes, “Every day, we begin again,” hinting at the idea that people of faith are always beginners, never experts. In a similar way, beloved Zen master Shunryu Suzuki advises his followers: “Always…keep the beginner’s mind. … In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.”[1]
In our scripture today, James offers similar counsel, urging his fellow followers of Christ to listen more than they speak, which is not unlike advising them to adopt the posture of a beginner rather than an expert, the posture of someone who is learning rather than someone who knows it all. His instruction to be “slow to speak, slow to anger,” even suggests a certain connection between anger and speech. Frequent speech may betray a spirit of anger. I think I could attest to this. Anger generates many grievances and self-justifications, a never-ending commentary on how something or someone else is wrong and there’s little I can do about it. Anger is the fantasy of control through words. (In this way, frequent speech may betray a spirit hell-bent on control.)
I think back to those folks in our opening thought experiment who missed out on God’s message, “I love you,” because they were otherwise engaged in angry speech, or in the fantasy of control. The folks who hear God’s message, on the other hand, are the beginners, the curious, the explorers, the little children with no agenda. “Welcome with meekness,” James writes, “the implanted word that has the power to save your souls” (Ja 1:21). It’s a way of saying Listen. Open yourself. Make yourself available.
Sometimes small groups and reading circles have strict guidelines in place to limit speaking to one person at a time. (They may even use an object, like a round stone, which must be held in order to speak.) I’ve discovered in settings such as these a certain holiness. When only one person can speak at a time, their sharing becomes sacred and everyone else is invited into a posture of deep listening. They become receptive to wisdom that isn’t available otherwise. It is similar in the quiet space of prayer and meditation, where we might suddenly receive an inspired idea that would have never come if we’d been speaking.
“Not Hearers Who
Forget but Doers Who Act”
22 But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. 23 For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; 24 for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like. 25 But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act—they will be blessed in their doing.
I do not think it is a coincidence that James chooses as a metaphor for hearing God’s word, the idea of looking into a mirror. If we return for a moment to the banks of the Jordan, we see that what Jesus heard from God was essentially a word declaring who he was. “You are my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased” (Luke 3:22). And James says we are given birth by this same word (Ja 1:18). So then, to hear God’s word is indeed like looking into a mirror. We see our truest selves. We see that we are beloved children of God. To have seen ourselves this way and then to go live as though it’s us against the world, as though we must secure our little sliver for ourselves, or as though we’re competitors and must take as much as we can, is indeed like looking into a mirror and then forgetting who we are.
What strikes me about James’ advice, however, is that he doesn’t simply prescribe remembrance as the antidote to forgetting. He doesn’t say, “Keep reading scripture, keeping reminding yourselves of who you are.” What he says, instead, is to be “doers of the word” (Ja 1:22). The best way to remember who we are is to live like who God has told us we are. Conventional wisdom and common sense tell us that we think our way into a new way of living, but the truth seems to be the opposite, actually. We live our way into a new way of thinking. The more we live like beloved children of God, the more we will leave behind our old ideas—that we and others are competitors, that we and others are fighters and scrappers for whatever we can get—and instead we will come to inhabit the truth that we are beloved children of God.
I experienced this truth—about living my way into a new way of thinking—when I began the practice of relocating bugs and critters from inside my home to the natural world outside. For example, when I encounter big hairy spider that naturally fills me with a feeling of repulsion, but then I carefully put a cup over top of it and slide a sheet of paper underneath it and take it outside, I find myself looking upon it with almost tender eyes as I set it down on the ground. To be sure, my repulsion of spiders has not been cured, but it is being changed, simply by the act of showing care for them.
In a similar way, I have a friend who shares the story about a person who really got on her nerves. She decided that she would begin to pray for this person every day. Slowly but surely, she discovered that she was beginning to see this same person with compassion. They even became friends. Her action—her regular prayer—changed the way she thought about herself and about this other person.
“To Care for the
Needful”
James wraps up today’s scripture with a summary statement, again advising against speech and instead advocating for action. He insists that the measure of faith is not what a person says but what they do. “Orphans and widows” may seem rather specific, but in the Jewish tradition from which James is writing, it is shorthand for needful people. Again and again, in the Old Testament, God implores that Israelites care for the stranger, the orphan, and the widow. These are people who have no natural networks of support.
If you watch advertisements, you’ll likely notice that the underlying promise of many products is that they will make you “feel good.” People who want to feel better about themselves are enticed to think that if they have this or that product, this or that experience, then they will finally feel good. But James is revealing a counterintuitive truth. Feeling good doesn’t come from what we have or from the power we exercise or from our reputation in front of others. (In fact, we have plenty of evidence that people who have these things, desperately want even more. Chasing possessions, power, and prestige is apparently like drinking salt water for your thirst.) Feeling good comes, rather, from doing good. When we live as beloved children of God, showing others the mercy and compassion our Father has for us, then we begin to feel different about ourselves. We remember who we really are.
This World Cup, I’ve read and heard a number of stories that I would describe as “feel-good” stories. There were the people in Lawrence, Kansas, who decided to show hospitality to the visiting fans from Algeria by putting up Algerian flags in their shop windows and by learning how to say “Welcome” in Arabic. There was the city of Boston falling in love with the Scottish fans, known as the “Tartan Army,” which culminated in the mayor of Boston and the Glasgow City Council announcing a friendship between their cities; they are now formally recognized “twin cities.” Now, certainly, these are trivial examples and I can’t help but imagine that some of these experiences are motivated by things other than genuine care for other people (motivated by things like brand and profit). But I think the reason these stories touch our hearts and become known as “feel-good” stories is because, deep down, we sense the goodness of certain actions: acts of hospitality, acts of generosity, acts of curiosity and patience between cultures. These stories “feel good” because they are about people “doing good.”
And lest we draw the conclusion that all we need is to do our “good deed for the day” to be happy, that our faith is just a checkbox exercise, it’s helpful to remember that for James, at least, this doing is rooted first in hearing. It all begins with that simple message, “You are my beloved child, with whom I am well pleased.” This message inspires us to do the truth, to live as the beloved children of God that we are. Moreover, we do these good deeds not for some mercenary or ulterior motive of simply “feeling good.” Our motivation is much larger than just personal happiness or pleasure. Our motivation is that God’s Word won’t be limited to empty and “worthless” talk (cf. Ja 1:26), but rather might take on real flesh in our world. Our motivation is that God’s kingdom might take root. When we align ourselves with God’s word and act accordingly—when we do the truth of who we are—then yes, we will certainly feel good, knowing ourselves to be beloved and cared-for children of God, but more importantly we will begin to see that not just us but this whole world is good. We will see God’s kingdom, growing from a seed planted in our heart.
Prayer
You stopped at nothing
To share with us the good news
That you had heard,
The good news that we are beloved children of God.
…
May your good news inspire us
To do good and care for others,
As children who act in like manner to their heavenly father.
Amen.
[1] Ernest Kurtz and Katherine
Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for
Meaning (New York: Bantam, 1992), 142.
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