Letting Go (James 4:1-10)

Tragic Choices

I’ve heard that among some communities in Central America, where monkeys run wild and will occasionally pinch food or other possessions, people have developed a clever device to trap them. They build a small container and put a banana or some other tasty treat inside. Then they carve an opening in the container that is just large enough for the monkey’s paw to reach through. When the monkey reaches in and grabs the food, however, he is met with a rude awakening. The opening, which was just large enough for his paw to reach through, is too small for his closed fist. And here’s the kicker: the monkey won’t let go of his plunder. He could free himself, but he won’t. The monkey’s selfish desire tragically keeps him trapped.

I’ve heard of a similar situation that strikes a bit closer to home, pertaining not to monkeys but to humanity. It is a piece of ancient Buddhist folklore. The legend holds that people who are very greedy in this life may be reincarnated—may be reborn in the next life—as a sort of mythical creature known as a “hungry ghost.” A hungry ghost is essentially what it sounds like: a person with an insatiable appetite, cursed with a hunger that they will never be able to satisfy. In one of the stories of this tradition, the hungry ghosts are gathered around a long rectangular table, with a feast in front of them. All that remains is to eat. But when the dinner commences, they run into an immediate problem. The utensils at the table are too long. No matter how they contort their bodies, they cannot get the utensils to their mouths. The tragedy in this case—and perhaps you’ve already figured this out—is that if they stopped thinking about their own hunger for just one moment, they might realize that they could feed each other; their utensils, which are too long to feed themselves, are just the right length to feed the person sitting across from them. But as with the monkey, their selfish desire prevents them from the good that is right in front of them.

A Different “War”:

Redrawing the Battle Lines

In today’s scripture, James begins by asking where conflict and violence come from? His answer is a rhetorical masterpiece. “Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you?” (Ja 4:1). In other words, James is redrawing the battle lines from out there somewhere, to in here—in the heart. For anyone who follows Christ, the real “war” is not against “flesh and blood” (as Paul would say), but against “cravings” in the heart. James proceeds to specify that the battle in the heart has to do with selfish desire. With wanting something we do not have.

In one sense, it is the same tragedy we see with those pesky monkeys and those hungry ghosts. Selfish desire prevents us from enjoying the goodness that is right in front of us. And what makes it tragic is that we don’t see this. When we find ourselves in a situation of willful conflict, the default viewpoint is not, “Oh, there I go again—wanting something I don’t have.” We don’t typically stop and chide ourselves when we’re in a fight, “Remember, the war is really within!” No, we draw battle lines, we identify enemies outside of us. In the heat of the moment, it’s all about getting our way.

But when James uses the word “enemy,” he is not referring to anything “flesh and blood”—he’s not referring to those oppressive Romans over there, or his audience’s Jewish brothers and sisters who deny Christ, or anyone else. Just as he first relocates “war” from without to within, from the battlefield to the heart, so he also redefines the terminology of “friend” and “enemy.” For James, the enemy is not a group of people but a way of living. When James talks about the “world” and whether we see the world as “friend” or “enemy,” he’s not referring to our planet and the people on it (which are undoubtedly “very good,” as God Godself saw at the conclusion of creation). By “world,” James is referring to a way of living, a mindset, an orientation. For James, the “world” is shorthand for our tragic habits of selfish desire. The “world” is code for the willfulness that keeps us tragically trapped like those monkeys who won’t let go, the willfulness that keeps us heartbreakingly hungry like those ghosts who can’t see others as their companions. To be a friend of the world is to live by these woeful habits that keep us locked in struggle with ourselves and one another, not realizing that the real enemy is not other people but the very attitude or mindset within that says we don’t have enough and everything would be better if we could just have that one more thing that we very well may have to fight for.

Fighting Back…

If we are in the same tragic predicament as the monkey and the hungry ghost, then we are faced with the same challenge: namely, to let go of getting our way and instead gratefully receive that which is already within our reach. James says as much. A “friend of God,” James suggests, is a person who lives humbly, trusting in God’s grace to supply their need (cf. Ja 4:6). The irony of letting go is that while it feels like losing (the monkey must let go of the food in his hand, the hungry ghost must give up on eating the food on his own plate), the result is actually winning (the monkey is liberated from the trap, the hungry ghost gets not only food but a friend across the table who cares for them).

Intriguingly, as James invites his audience to let go, he continues to use military language. Just to recap, so far he’s talked about “war,” saying it’s within, not without, and the “enemy,” indicating it’s not “flesh and blood” but a way of living. Now he talks about fighting. “Resist the devil” (Ja 4:7), he says. The Greek word for “resist,” anthistemi, is a military term that means “to stand against” the attacks of the enemy. Practically speaking, resist means to “fight back against.” Jesus uses the same word in the Sermon on the Mount when he says, “Do not resist [do not ‘fight back against’] an evildoer,” but instead turn the other cheek (Matt 5:39). If we take Jesus’ instructions together with James, then a clear picture emerges. Our fight is not against other people. Our fight is against what is within, which is to say, a way of living that gains ground inside of us, that gains ground not by bombs and battles, but by thoughts and cravings for what we do not have. Call it evil, call it the devil, call it whatever you want—it’s what separates us from others, from our own selves, and ultimately from God.

…With Tears?

If we do not fight against the devil with fists and firearms, if the real evil is not other people but in our thinking, then how do we fight back against it? James has some surprising advice: “Lament and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy into dejection” (Ja 4:9). It is clear James is not here to win a popularity contest….

In our culture, tears are often seen as a sign of weakness, something to be embarrassed about. If we cry in front of another person, we might hide our face and apologize, “I’m so sorry….” If someone wants to offer some hard counsel to a friend drowning in self-pity, they might say, “Well, don’t cry about it…do something!”

But according to James, tears are how we fight back against the devil, against the evil that is not out there but in here.

What do tears communicate? In one sense, it is impossible to say. Tears are beyond language; they express something beyond words. Sometimes they overtake us and we don’t even know why. Which sounds sort of like Paul’s description of the Holy Spirit interceding for us with groans too deep for words (cf. Rom 8:26-27). But if I had to say, I would suggest that tears most often accompany a profound feeling of loss. It could be a real loss, like the death of a loved one. Or it could be a more superficial loss, like the evaporation of a potential business opportunity. I imagine that if that trapped monkey were to by some strength other than his own let go of the food and walk free, there would still be something akin to tears wetting the cheeks of his soul.

Perhaps the tears that James commends, accompany a sense of loss, as we relinquish the need to be right, to be in control, to win. Such tears are not selfish or immature; they are honest, and they help us to see more clearly the reality that we will never live well as long as we seek only our own gain. (As one folk singer puts it, “It’s a hard hand to hold that is looking for control.”[1]) These tears of loss are the prelude to victory, to letting go and walking away. For letting go and walking away is how the war within us is won. How the devil is defeated. It’s one of those gospel paradoxes: die to live; lose to win; weakness is strength. We see it most clearly on the cross, where Jesus lets go of any need to be right, to be in control, to look good, to win. If Jesus had called down some angels and put up a fight…he would have lost to the devil. No matter how victorious he may have appeared, the devil’s spirit of division and contention would have thrived.

One church leader in the tenth century, Simeon of Byzantine, insisted that tears are the “second baptism,” the real baptism; they signify our spiritual surrender and our readiness for the reality of God. Letting go of the need to be right, to be in control, to win, may indeed be a tearful experience and feel like losing in the heat of the moment…but the good news of Christ (which James proclaims in a rather minor key, at times!) is that this loss is in fact a great gain. Or to put it more precisely, a great grace. For when we let go, we discover a much greater reality: God loves us and graciously provides for our need.

Prayer

Today I’d like to close by sharing a prayer written Mary Mrozowski, a native New Yorker and housewife who became a world-renowned spiritual leader. She came to understand her life’s quest as one of letting go and consenting to be in God’s presence.

One of her prayers, which became particularly well-known, is called “The Welcoming Prayer.” It is a little unorthodox, in that it makes no demands or requests of God, but rather makes commitments on behalf of the self. It is written in the first person, and I will read it this way, inviting you to pray it inwardly for yourself:

Welcome, welcome, welcome.

I welcome everything that comes to me in this moment
because I know it is for my healing.

I welcome all thoughts, feelings, emotions,
persons, situations, and conditions.

I let go of my desire for security.
I let go of my desire for approval.
I let go of my desire for control.
I let go of my desire to change
any situation, condition,
person, or myself.

I open to the love and presence of God
and the healing action and grace within.

In Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior: Amen.

---

[1] Willy Mason, “Hard Hand to Hold,” Where the Humans Eat, Virgin Records, 2004.

"Wisdom from Above" (James 3:13-18)

Isn’t Ambition Good?

Several weeks ago, over the Fourth of July weekend, my sister-in-law suggested that my family watch Hamilton as a way of celebrating our national history. If you haven’t seen Hamilton yourself, you have probably heard about it. When it originally burst onto Broadway, garnering widespread acclaim, it reignited interest in the story of our nation’s founding. Through its focus on a lesser-known historical figure, Alexander Hamilton, it gave a surprisingly engaging account of our country’s ambitious beginning. It gained particular renown for its appeal to youth of color, as its author Lin-Manuel Miranda casted many of the founding figures as people of color (thus foregrounding the immigrant character of our forebears) and wrote most of the numbers in a sort of plainspoken rap.

I won’t embarrass myself trying to rap, but I would like to share with you in spoken word a portion of the show’s opener, which introduces Alexander Hamilton as an ambitious upstart, a go-getter, a young man who won’t take no for an answer. Here’s how the show begins:

How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a
Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten
Spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished, in squalor
Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?

The ten-dollar Founding Father without a father
Got a lot farther by working a lot harder
By being a lot smarter, by being a self-starter
By fourteen, they placed him in charge of a trading charter

And every day while slaves were being slaughtered and carted
Away across the waves, he struggled and kept his guard up
Inside, he was longing for something to be a part of
The brother was ready to beg, steal, borrow, or barter….[1]

Hearing these words rhythmically and enthusiastically delivered, it’s hard not to feel a sense of pride and optimism for the young Alexander Hamilton, and indeed for our young nation. The hungry and scrappy character that would propel Alexander Hamilton to great heights is the same character that much of our world aspires to today. In a word, we could call it ambition. (In fact, that may be the perfect word for it. Ambition comes from the Latin word ambitio, which just means “going around.” The word originated from when politicians would “go around” to seek votes, to build their following, to proclaim their superiority over against other candidates.

In our world, ambition is widely considered a good thing. Ambition is the drive to achieve, to get ahead, to win, to inch your way forward to the top. We think of ambition as what has propelled so many advances in medicine, technology, engineering, and science. Ambition has given us the telephone, the airplane, insulin, the heart transplant, the internet, tiny phones with the processing power of computers, and so much more.

“Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse”

It may, therefore, be a surprise to hear how James takes ambition to task, twice. First as a trait that is opposite to God’s wisdom (Ja 3:14). Then as a trait that breeds chaos and destruction (Ja 3:16). James clearly does not think highly of ambition.

Miroslav Volf, a professor of theology at Yale University, has a pithy diagnosis for the disease of ambition. “Striving to be better than others,” he warns, “makes us worse.” It’s a tale as old as time itself. Consider Adam and Eve in the garden. The serpent tempts them to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil by telling them, “You will be like gods” (Gen 3:5). But in fact the pursuit of superior knowledge leads to the humans’ downfall. Striving for superiority in fact entails shame and division, hiding the truth and blaming others. The harmony of God’s good creation is broken by the dissonance of ambition.

Miroslav Volf shares how each school year, several thousand new students arrive on Yale’s campus. All of them are excellent students. They have gained admission by being top of their class. You might think their arrival would be cause for celebration and camaraderie. “We made it! All those years of hard work have paid off. Finally, we’re here!” But instead, he says, many of the students become anxious and depressed. Now they are just a small fish in a big pond. He concludes that their ambition contains in its heart a deep insecurity. A doubt or distrust that they are good enough, that they will be loved and cared for just as they are. They are always comparing themselves with others, always implicitly in competition with their surroundings. The striving of ambition is ultimately an insatiable desire to be better. There’s no rest in comparison and competition. Only endless striving.

It is for this reason that I find the story of Alexander Hamilton so fascinating. The musical celebrates him as a hero (albeit a tragic hero). He rose from obscurity to fame, from the rubble to political power. He is held aloft as an example of the American dream, as an example of the greatness that can be achieved by (as the song puts it) “working a lot harder” and “being a lot smarter.” And yet the tragedy of his story—and of his ambition—cannot be denied. First there is the humiliating affair that he engages in when he chooses to stay behind in Philadelphia to pursue his work during the summer instead of traveling with the rest of his family to the countryside. Then there is the brutal fact that both he and his son Philip died as the result of choosing to engage in duels to uphold their honor (despite the fact that duels were illegal). The rewards of Alexander Hamilton’s ambition were indeed high—but were they worth the cost? I wonder what Eliza, his wife, would say.

British philosopher John Gray suggests that whenever ambition results in what we might consider progress, it nearly always follows this same tragic arc. All of the progress that we might celebrate—in technology, in medicine, in engineering, and so on—all of that, he argues, “is an illusion.”[2] “The core of the idea of progress,” he claims, “is the illusion that knowledge enhances human freedom. The reality is that it merely increases human power.”[3] The unfortunate tendency that we tend to gloss over is that much of human progress is accompanied by tragic misuse of the new knowledge and new power. Consider how at the turn of the twentieth century, western civilization was optimistic about the prospects of our scientific advances, predicting that they would usher in a golden age of peace and prosperity. Instead, we got two world wars and several genocides, all of which implemented our new knowledge and power in the worst of ways.

Knowledge Is Not Wisdom

In Genesis, when the serpent promises Eve that eating the forbidden fruit will make the humans like gods, giving them a superior knowledge to what they have, the storyteller reports a curious, minute difference in what Eve perceives. He says that Eve sees that “the tree was to be desired to make one wise” (Gen 3:6). The serpent promises knowledge, but she anticipates wisdom. In other words, she confuses knowledge with wisdom. It is the same mistake made by the optimists at the turn of the twentieth century, and indeed by anyone who lives by selfish ambition.

Wisdom is not knowledge. If you think about it, this is pretty obvious. A teenager might know what it takes to drive a car—first you turn the key to start the ignition, then you take the car out of park and into reverse, and so on. But knowing what it takes to drive a car is very different from knowing how to drive a car. Anyone getting in the passenger seat with a teenager who’s never actually driven better be prepared for an adventure!

Knowledge is about a what; wisdom is about a how. Knowledge is about information; wisdom is about an orientation. When humans learned what nuclear energy was, that was knowledge. When humans decided to use it to make a bomb, well…a Christ-follower might argue that was a tragic, devastating lack of wisdom.

Worldly Wisdom and God’s Wisdom

According to James, “earthly” wisdom is about an orientation that is selfish and ambitious. “Earthly” wisdom is the orientation that we see in Hamilton: a mindset of competition and comparison, a ceaseless striving to be “better.” James is clear that the results of this wisdom are conflict and chaos and destruction.

But God’s wisdom, James says, has a very different orientation. The “wisdom from above” is, paradoxically, about living serenely below; this wisdom is “peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy” (Ja 3:17). We need only think of how Jesus repeatedly teaches his disciples that greatness is not lording it over others, but being last of all and servant of all. Jesus is not teaching the disciples some new knowledge; he’s reorienting their hearts, away from ambition and toward gentle acceptance and cooperation. It’s telling that not long after he teaches this lesson for the first time, James and John come to him in private and demand positions of power in his kingdom (Mark 9:33-37; 10:35-45). This new orientation, this new “how,” is not easy to learn for us who have long been schooled in ambition.

“Imagine…”

Alexander Hamilton’s widow, Eliza, lived over fifty more years after her husband was gunned down. Remarkably, just a few years after losing him, she founded the first orphanage in New York. What gave her the strength—I wonder—not only to keep living, but to live so abundantly? By all accounts, she was a woman of deep and abiding faith. I would like to imagine—although I must stress, I’m not a historian, and I don’t know this for a fact—I would like to imagine that her faith grounded her in a way her husband’s ambition could never do. I would like to imagine that she stood secure in God’s love, knowing herself to be cherished and cared for, just as she was. For this reason, all the scandal that befell her—from her husband’s infidelity to her son’s death in a duel and her husband’s as well—all this scandal could not move the needle on the orientation of her heart. With God’s wisdom, she continually employed her gifts and efforts toward mercy and peace.

Priest and spiritual leader Henri Nouwen writes, “So much of our energy, time, and money goes into maintaining distance from one another. Many if not most of the resources of the world are used to defend ourselves against each other, to maintain or increase our power, and to safeguard our own privileged position.” Here, I think, it’s pretty clear he’s writing about the spirit of ambition and competition that prevails in our world. But he proceeds to imagine more people living like Eliza. “Imagine all that effort being put in the service of peace and reconciliation! Would there be any poverty? Would there be crimes and wars? Just imagine that there was no longer fear among people, no longer any rivalry, hostility, bitterness, or revenge. Just imagine all the people on this planet holding hands and forming one large circle of love. We say, ‘I can't imagine.’ But God says,  ‘That's what I imagine, a whole world not only created…in my image [but also living in it].’”[4]

Prayer

Dear Christ 

Of gentle and humble heart,
You lived secure in God’s love,
Not striving but trusting
…
Inspire us by your faith
And your example
To live not by ambition—
Not by the need to be more, or have more, or do more—
But by a desire for your kingdom of mercy and peace,
Where all might live secure in God’s love.
Amen.

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[1] “Alexander Hamilton,” Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda, https://genius.com/Leslie-odom-jr-anthony-ramos-daveed-diggs-okieriete-onaodowan-lin-manuel-miranda-phillipa-soo-christopher-jackson-and-original-broadway-cast-of-hamilton-alexander-hamilton-lyrics, , accessed July 27, 2026.

[2] John Gray, “An Illusion with a Future,” Daedalus (Summer 2004): 11.

[3] John Gray, “An Illusion with a Future,” Daedalus (Summer 2004): 15.

[4] Following the Call: Living the Sermon on the Mount Together (ed. Charles E. Moore; Walden: Plough, 2021), 104.