Empowering people to be Christ’s followers in the world….
Sunday 02 November 2014
Lessons from the Letter of James
Theme
The Way of Submission
PREACHER
Josh Jones
READINGS
Genesis 1:26-31 ● James 4:1-8a ● Matthew 19:14
VERSE
“Come near to God and He will come near to you.”
James 4:8
09 520 5652 • www.stgeorgesepsom.org.nz
So it’s week 7 in our sermon series on James and in many ways the theme of today’s passage goes to the heart of one
of the biggest debates of our post-modern, post-Christendom society.
Because James calls for us to “submit to God and resist the devil”
“Come near to God” says James “and God will come near to you.”
Now firstly, many would hear this and say that there is no God to submit too.
And even those who believe in God, or at least have a notion that there must be some sort of higher power, still live
lives that echo Frank Sinatra’s anthem for life... ‘I did it my way’ (apparently the most popular song for funerals)
The Christian belief that we must submit and live in obedient reverence to the full and abundant way of our Creator
God (as revealed in Jesus Christ) isn’t exactly bringing people along to church in their droves.
So today I want to explore this question raised by James.
What do we mean by submitting to God -and why do we need to?
Last week I began with a Michael Leunig cartoon and because there’s such a rich vein of insight in his work I wanted
to do the same again this week. And the reason I pick this particular one is because I think it touches upon this whole
question of ‘why we need to submit to God’?
It’s a good question from Michael Leuning!
Could it be that what threatens our way of life… IS our way of life?
Our obsession with doing it ’our way’
Well James definitely thinks it does. Because the very first words of today’s passage, ask a similar question.
“What do you think causes all these fights and quarrels among you? Do you think they just happen?
No they come from the desires that battle within you. You lust for what you don’t have and are willing to kill to get it.
You covet and want what isn’t yours and will risk violence to get it.”
This is a spiritual truth we all know only too well. It’s the inner demons that battle within us all, that can take us to unhealthy places and in some way (big or small) threaten our way of life.
In a world dominated by the 3 gods … of power, possessions and prestige, all of us get seduced and tempted to lust
and covet what we want but don’t have … and at times we will risk hurting others to get what we want. None of us
hopefully will get to the point of wanting to kill, but all of us can be willing to risk hurting others (even unintentionally) if
it means getting our own way.
James’ answer, is to ‘resist the devil and he will flee’.
Well everyone here will have a different understanding of the ‘devil’, but whether you call the devil Satan or the father of lies or the forces of darkness or evil - in the end, it’s still the voice of the one who tempts and seduces us to submit to a different will other than the will God..
So I want to explore this question of what we mean by ‘submitting to God’ and why we need too - in 2 ways and the
first is this.
Living in fruitful harmony with the created order of things.
I want to unpack this by connecting the spiritual truth of last week to this week’s truth.
Because the one speaks directly into the other.
Last week we looked at living wisely … 2 kinds of wisdom, heavenly wisdom of God and our earthly wisdom. My core
point, was that when we talk about living our lives in heavenly, Godly wisdom, we’re not just talking about being a bit
more insightful or perceptive than other people. This Godly wisdom is about the deepest truth of all existence.
To grow in this kind of wisdom (and that’s why we come every week)… is actually to come to understand the meaning - the significance - and the purpose of ALL things. It’s about connecting the dots of what it means to be a human
being living in sync with all that is true and noble and excellent and praiseworthy and what makes everything tick.
My one sentence definition of living God’s heavenly wisdom was this … To grow in our understanding of what it means
to live in fruitful harmony with the created order of things, instead of against them.
How does this speak into the need to submit to God?
Well I would suggest for this reason …’the only way to live in fruitful harmony with the created order of things… is to live
lives that submit to the way of the creator’ If we believe in a creator God, then the only way we can know true human
flourishing, is to live by the way the creator wants us to live and actually created us to live.
As Genesis 1 tells us, … In the beginning, God spoke: “Let us make human beings in our image, make them reflecting
our nature.
All through Genesis 1, we have the beautiful poetic image of the Garden of Eden. Everything running as it should be.
All we have to do, is be wise stewards of this good design, reflecting God’s nature -by living in obedient reverence to
God’s created order and then we can know human flourishing.
If we want to know what it looks like to live in unfruitful dis-harmony, then all we have to do is watch the news and
read the papers. Every single day we are reminded of what it looks like when we DON”T live in submission and obedient reverence to the created way.
James, typically pulling no punches calls the people who live like this…’adulterers to God’
Again its strong language from James but he makes a very good point about ‘unfruitful –disharmony’
When we get married, we make vows to be loyal and faithful. We make a vow and a promise to invest in this sacred
covenant/relationship we are agreeing to commit to. The basis of Genesis 1 and the whole story of Holy Scripture, is of
the Creator God wanting a sacred covenant relationship with humanity. But as we know, time and time again humanity is unfaithful to this relationship. We’re seduced and tempted by the other desires within us that take us away
from an intimate and loving relationship with the one who made us.
But as we also know, the story of Holy Scripture is of a God that loves unconditionally and in His mercy and grace
keeps the relationship alive. Keeps waiting with open arms for the prodigal son and daughter in every one of us to return.
I made the point last week and I make it again … that ALL of this deep wisdom and truth is embodied and revealed in
the life of Jesus Christ.
Jesus basically went around saying … “If you want to know what it looks like to live in fruitful harmony with God’s created way … then listen and look at Me”
If you want to know what a faithful covenant relationship with the Father looks like… then look at ME.
“If you want to know what living in submission and obedient reverence to God looks like… then listen and look at Me.”
It’s about justice for all human beings. It’s about all the diving walls of hostility being broken down. It’s about all the
captives (physical and spiritual) being set free.
It’s about mercy and grace with no boundaries, because mercy and grace with boundaries… is a contradiction in
terms.
In a word … all you need is love. Servant-hearted love.
Put very simply, what Jesus Christ showed us how to do humanity ‘properly’.
This is what it looks like to be truly human and this is why we (along with millions of others down the centuries) have
chosen to try and follow this way and truth of Jesus Christ in our lives.
The 2nd point I want to explore is this.
To engage or not to engage, that is the question?
If we want to live lives in faithful submission to God … does this mean withdrawing from the world or engaging more
fully in it? The reason I ask this question is because James says this:
4 You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.”
Now these are strong and sometimes uncomfortable words for our modern day ears. So what does James mean by
“anyone who is a friend of the ‘world’ is an enemy of God?
Well I really want to explore this because I think that there have been times when this has been interpreted in a particular way and this has led to a misguided ‘life denying’ Christian faith, instead of a ‘life affirming’ faith.
The problems centre around our understanding of the word ‘world’ and it’s the same we hear the word ‘flesh’ in scripture. ‘word’ and ‘flesh’ have taken on particular connotations.
In scripture the essential meaning of these 2 words is this … ‘patterns of human life contrary to God's will’ ‘Anything’
we do as humanity that doesn’t live in submission or reverence, to the created order of God. And St Paul and St John
would use the words in a very similar sense.
The problems of a simplistic interpretation of these 2 words have led to some aspects of Christianity feeling that they
need to live in some sort of ‘holy bubble’ so that they don’t get contaminated by ‘the world’ or ‘the flesh’. It’s led to
puritanical dualistic approach to life that as I said, is a fundamentally ‘life denying’ rather than ‘life affirming’.
An extreme example of this, is that I still meet Christians who tell me that they are still struggling to recover from their
‘indoctrination’ (their word not mine) … that ‘dancing’ was of the devil because it was worldly or of the flesh. Even
though we’re told in scripture that people danced while singing the Psalms.
And my own personal bug bear is Christians who tell me that unless a piece of music has the word Jesus in it… it’s not
completely ‘sacred’. Even though the gift of creating music was actually given by God in the first palce.
What all this kind of ‘contamination theology’ seems to overlook is the fact that God made the ‘world’ and the ‘flesh’
and called it very, very good. In fact God so loved the world he came to walk among us as flesh, as human, in Jesus
Christ.
Now none of this, is to underestimate in any way, that this beautiful thing we call life and all creation is very fallen and
very broken and in need of redemption (it’s why we have the cross) … but that doesn’t take away the intrinsic sacredness of all that God created.
And there’s a fantastic piece of wisdom by a Christian farmer/writer in America called Wendell Berry who captures
the truth of all this with these words.
“There is no such thing as sacred or un-sacred … there is only that which is desecrated”
If ‘the World’ and ‘the flesh’… are all those ‘patterns of human life contrary to God's will’ … then it’s our human arrogance and rebellion and our determination to do things our way that has left the sacred being desecrated. In a
word - it’s our ‘SIN’
So for instance…the dignity of every human being made in the image of God, is very sacred. But every time we diminish this dignity through oppression and poverty and greed, or any other abuse of power. Then we desecrate its very
sacredness
Again because we are ALL made in the image of our creator - there is a sacred oneness and connectedness to all
humanity that we should cherish and treasure. But how often do we desecrate this beautiful thread, with attitudes of
racism, religious bigotry and selfish nationalism. All of course which makes it easier to kill and maim and generally do
violence to other human beings simply because ‘they are not like us’
Childhood is incredibly sacred but its desecrated daily with sexual exploitation and wars and fighting perpetrated by
adults.
And of course we desecrate God’s beautiful design of creation through bad stewardship. We rape and pillage the
sacred beauty that God has entrusted to us without thought of consequence for future generations, all in the name
of greed, selfish ambition and simple apathy.
“There is no such thing as sacred or un-sacred, only that which is desecrated”
‘The world’ and ‘the flesh’ are the desires and motives within that do the desecrating.
My final thought on this point would be to ask this question.
Do we too often construct an unnecessary and unhelpful divide, with labels like sacred and secular?
Because my own eyes and common sense shows me that secular un-sacred attitudes of the heart (things of the
‘world’ and the ‘flesh’) often exist inside Christianity (inside me) and equally, attitudes and actions that live in submission and reverence to the created order of things (things of justice, beauty, peaceful ways and servant-hearted love)
- exist in people outside of Christianity.
So it’s worth remembering in humility, that these harsh words from James in today’s passage, about selfish desires that
lead to coveting and killing are actually directed to fellow Christians. And James himself, reminds us of this wisdom by
quoting Proverbs… “God opposes the proud but shows favour to the humble.”7 Submit your selves, then, to God.
The first step to wisdom and living in obedient reverence to God is always ‘humility’ As Tom Wright so rightly said…”the
queen of all the virtues”
So let’s finish with a time of reflection in humility, to find encouragement for your life and mine from these words from
James
The line of the whole passage that jumped out at me was these words from verse 6 “come near to God so God can
come near to you” So les take a moment for some time of silence.
In a time of silence let’s bring ourselves near to God so that he can be near to us.
Reflect on where in your life at this moment perhaps you feel a little too far away from God.
A part of your life where you know that you’re not living in obedient reverence to how God would want you to live
and you recognise a sense of not living in ‘fruitful harmony’ with God’s will and way.
Somewhere in your heart you sense a reluctance to submit fully to God’s will.
Our encouragement is that because of the new life given to us in Christ, through grace - even in our most broken and
most wounded, we can all be agents of healing and restoration in our lives and the lives of others.
SILENCE
Prayer
Loving and healing God,
Through the power of your Holy Spirit, enlighten and empower us with the virtue of humility. Open our hearts and imaginations to the heavenly wisdom that reveals to us how to live lives in fruitful submission to your created order. To live
always in obedient reverence to your sacred ways.
Empower and equip us with the grace to be agents and instruments of healing and restoration to all that may be desecrated. May we be instruments of healing, who seek reconcile broken relations, restore injustices and redeem your
tarnished beauty.
And may we always look first to the way and truth of the one who always lived his life in submission and obedient reverence to Your will and Your way.
We pray this in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord and saviour, Amen
REFLECTIONS FOR GROUP DISCUSSION
In scripture the essential meaning of the words ‘world’ and ‘flesh’ is this … ‘patterns of human life contrary to God's
will’ ‘Anything’ we do as humanity that doesn’t live in submission or reverence, to the created order of God. Theologian and scholar Walter wink used the word ’systems’ to define these 2 words. Worldly systems that perpetrate of any
kind of human ‘domination’ over another.
1. What has been your understanding of these words and have you experienced a ‘life denying’ rather than ‘life affirming’ expression of these in your Christian journey?
I gave the quote of Wendell Berry (page 5) which for me captured the truth of what is often an unhelpful divide created with labels like ‘sacred and secular’ because attitudes of ‘the world’ and ‘the flesh’ exist inside Christianity too.
Wendell Berry said, “there is no such thing as sacred or un-sacred – only that which is desecrated”
2. Discuss your thoughts around this quote. Do you find it a helpful quote and if so why?
3. What does ‘living in fruitful harmony with the created order’ look like for you and where in your life do you find it
most difficult to live in obedient reverence to God’s created order and way?