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The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, 3 September 2006
A Sermon on James 1:17-27 (RCL) by Samuel D. Zumwalt
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James 1:17-27 [English Standard Version from BibleGateway.com]

17Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. 18Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first fruits of his creatures. 19Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; 20for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness that God requires. 21Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls. 22But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. 23For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. 24For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. 25But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing. 26If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person's religion is worthless. 27Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.

[I am grateful for insights derived from R.A. Martin’s commentary on James in the Augsburg Commentary on the New Testament series.]

A TIME FOR GRATITUDE: GRATEFUL DOING

In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

How grateful are you? That’s what the apostle James is asking us today. Are you grateful enough to do more than listen to God? Are you actually grateful enough to do something about what you have heard?

Today the apostle James takes issue with a kind of misreading of Scripture, and particularly of the apostle Paul, that results in a Christianity that is more talk than walk. Anyone can say all the right things about loving God, trusting God, and obeying God. But the key is in how a person – indeed in how a church – responds to God’s grace and mercy in Jesus Christ. James says you can tell a grateful Christian by what she or he does. Don’t be hearers of God’s Word only. Be doers. That’s how we show our gratitude for all that God has done, is doing, and will do for us in Jesus Christ our Lord!

From our second reading we get a clear picture of what the old life – the unredeemed life – looks like: unbridled anger, moral impurity, devotion to wickedness. These things ought to be drowned in the waters of Holy Baptism and drowned again daily as we call upon the Spirit of God to help us. The child of God humbles her or himself before the Lord God each day saying not only “have mercy upon me, a sinner” but “teach me to give myself to you in love even as your beloved Son has given Himself for me.”

For the past two years our congregation has been drawing the contrast between church membership and discipleship. Church membership ought not to be a bad thing if we understand it as St. Paul does in 1 Corinthians 12 where each baptized child of God is like one of the living members of Christ’s body – meaning one of Christ’s living body parts directed by the mind of Christ. But unfortunately church membership has come to mean something far removed from Paul’s intent.

In our day, church membership has come to mean having one’s name on the rolls of an institution that owns property and holds meetings that one occasionally attends. Church membership has come to mean little more than being a nominal member of a club. And indeed some church members are more active in their country club or their boating club or their university alumni organization than they are in the church of which they are a nominal member.

Our European Lutheran churches have been decimated by tax-paying membership in state churches where most members don’t worship and some clergy are little more than paid bureaucrats. But our American Lutheran churches, like most American churches, have membership rolls that are four and five times the size of the actual number of worshipers. And our churches are shrinking as too many of us listen more to the world around us than to the Lord of the Church. It’s not just that many of us aren’t doers of the Word. Many of us aren’t even there to be hearers of the Word!

St. James is telling us today that disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, children of the Heavenly Father, Christians filled and animated by the Holy Spirit look different and are different than the people around them. You can tell who someone belongs to by how she or he behaves.

There’s nothing as wonderful as that feeling the first time one falls in love. I remember thinking that I was in love a number of times as an early teenager. But there was something palpably different when I fell in love when I was 17. There was a freshness, a tenderness, and a giddiness that I had never felt before. I didn’t want that relationship or that feeling to end, but, of course, it did. Two years later I dated that same person again, and the old feelings came rushing back. I thought for sure this was going to result in marriage and children. I had an entire life mapped out. But, mercifully, it was not to be. It was not a match.

Imagine falling in love, marrying, having children together, and then slowly beginning not to spend any time together – not to share anything more than mutual bills and mutual offspring. Imagine becoming caught in a lifestyle in which every day is a dull carbon copy of the previous day and every weekend a dull carbon copy of the previous weekend and never really connecting emotionally, spiritually, or even physically. In time, you would come to believe that that’s just what marriage was and that love was just a biological trap to get you to procreate and to continue the species.

Indeed some have begun to have affairs to try to recapture that feeling of being in love only to have their family life come crashing down and then only to find that the affair was nothing more than an illusion of love – a fantasy fueled by passion without commitment or responsibility – just hooking up for a time but then being left emptier and more cynical about the possibility of true love.

And yet it doesn’t have to be that way. When a man and a woman find each other and fall in love, seeing each other as one of the heavenly Father’s precious gifts, their love grows deeper through the years. It is tempered by the changes and chances of life. It is nurtured by forgiveness, humor, compassion, and respect. True love between a man and a woman reflects the self-giving love of God that is shown us in the face of Christ.

If we will think about human love and its true origin in God’s great love for the world in Jesus Christ, then we begin to understand what the apostle James is telling us today about gratitude. When we are grateful to God, it does something to us and in us.

Disciples of the Lord Jesus have not only fallen in love with the One who loves us more than He loves His own life. Disciples of the Lord Jesus cannot fathom not being with Him and His church in worship – the place where we listen to Him and receive Him in bread and wine. Disciples of the Lord Jesus cannot fathom mere listening to Him without learning from Him. Disciples of the Lord Jesus cannot fathom not following His humble example of giving themselves to His heavenly Father in love. Disciples of the Lord Jesus give themselves in love to their families and in love to a broken and hurting world.

Church membership, as we understand it today, has come to mean having a series of affairs with the world around us instead of falling in love with the One who has died for our sins and who yearns for us not to run away from Him to the arms of strangers.

James is saying to us: those who love God spend time with Him, listen to Him, learn from Him, and indeed are changed by Him. God’s love frees us from the same old dull routine that can even include passionless membership in a church. If you are bored with Jesus Christ, you have the problem. You’re not listening and learning. You’re not getting in on the love that God has for you. And maybe, the real problem is that you still want to hold on to your affair with the world around you!

A friend of mine says that a person has to be entirely ready to give up her or his old life. She or he has to become absolutely convinced that the old life is never going to get any better and, in fact, it’s going to keep getting worse. You have to stop hitting your head against a brick wall before you realize that it feels better when you stop hurting yourself. Are you ready to drown your old life in the waters of Holy Baptism today?

Paul says in Romans 5 that while we were yet sinners Christ Jesus died for the ungodly (5:7-8). Our heavenly Father didn’t wait until we were ready enough or sorry enough or good enough to send His Son Jesus to die on the cross for our sins. He loved us so much that He became human like us in order to suffer with us and for us. By His dying on the cross, the Lord Jesus destroyed the ultimate power of sin, death, and evil. They can never again have the last word. God’s good and gracious last Word is eternal life in Jesus Christ for all who trust Him with their living and dying and who are baptized into His death and resurrection.

Being a Christian doesn’t mean that we never suffer or die. Being a Christian means that we know that suffering and death, as bad as they are, have been transformed by the death and resurrection of God’s Son Jesus into an open door into Paradise – into a life of perfect love, joy, and peace with God that goes on forever. Being baptized means that we can trust that we have a spiritual passport that says our citizenship is in heaven. There we will receive a new body that can never wear out, feel pain, suffer, hurt, or die again. We know where we are going ultimately. We know who and whose we are today!

We are grateful for God’s love and grateful for the beauty and joy that we will not only enjoy someday but for the love, beauty, and joy we experience however partially and incompletely here and now. Are you grateful? If you are married, do you see in the face of your wife or husband, a cherished gift from God? If you have children, do you see your children as gifts from God’s gracious hand?

The love of God in Jesus Christ does something to the children of God. The Holy Spirit works on us and in us each Sabbath day as we gather to listen to God’s Holy Word and gladly hear and learn it. As we listen daily to God’s Word when we read the Scriptures, the Holy Spirit wants to continue what was begun in Sabbath worship. He wants to convert us from the old dead end life, from the old ungrateful life, from the old life of untrue loves and, yes, from our half-hearted love for the God of grace and mercy.

Today James lays out for us some examples of the grateful life, some examples of grateful doing. These examples are not exhaustive. They are illustrative. They remind us what grateful Christians do in response to God’s love and mercy in Jesus Christ.

Grateful children of God are learning to control our speech especially the words we use with those we love and with those that are most difficult. Grateful children of God are learning to open their hearts, their calendars, and their wallets to the weak, to the helpless, and to the have-nots. Grateful children of God are learning to resist evil before it finds a weak place in us to take up residence again.

A spouse that never gave him or herself palpably to the other would make a sham of marriage. A parent that never gave her or himself palpably to childcare would make a sham of parenting. A church member that never gave her or himself palpably to the Lord of the Church and to His good and gracious will would make a sham of Christianity.

St. James invites us today to return to the waters of Holy Baptism where the old life is drowned and where we are reborn to the life God has intended for us all along!

In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

©Samuel D. Zumwalt
szumwalt@bellsouth.net
St. Matthew’s Evangelical Lutheran Church
Wilmington , North Carolina USA

[An mp3 version may be accessed after 8 p.m. Saturday by clicking on the icon at the top right “This Week’s Message” page at www.stmatthewsch.org]


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