In that moment, it doesn’t mater whether a national newspaper runs a page-long obituary for us or if nobody notices we’ve passed on. What matters is whether our hearts have received the good news word and let it grow up within us. What matters is whether our hearts have learned to hope like Jesus hopes, to trust as Jesus trusts, to love like Jesus loves. At death, the whole of our lives are summed up. Our every action, feeling, and thought will have completed its work in shaping our hearts. Either we will have let God’s powerful gospel word blossom into trust and love for Jesus or we will have stunted it, choked it out with selfish or angry habits, poisoned it with envy and bitterness.
(Check out the whole sermon after the jump. . .) =================================================================
I don’t often read the obituaries in the newspaper. But after my Grandpa passed away a few weeks ago, I read his obituary. I was surprised at how it summed up his life, which bits of who he was were deemed important or characteristic enough of his life to include. It mentioned things like his military service, how he worked delivering coal, then milk, and then the mail. It noted when he married my Grandma and how many children they had. But it also left out a lot. His obituary didn’t mention once his love of the outdoors or how he’d loved to make other people laugh at family gatherings.
Talking about obituaries or my late grandfather’s personality probably isn’t an uplifting way to begin a sermon titled “Beautiful Lives.” It’s important, though, that we bring that horizon into focus. We today share a very important thing with the Jewish Christian believers to whom James addressed his letter: we will die. From where we stand, death is the horizon that encompasses us. We trust that God has made a good place, a Promised Land for us beyond that horizon. Jesus himself gave us the proof when he stepped out of the grave on Easter morning. But that doesn’t make that horizon look any less final. Like ancient sailors, we see the skyline and assume that’s where the world must stop.
There is a Catholic theologian whom I love and greatly respect. I usually try to keep academic theologians from cluttering up my sermons with their high-sounding, usually-complicated ideas. But I’m going to stretch my own rule this morning, so I hope you will indulge me this time. My theologian-friend’s name is Karl Rahner. He wrote a beautiful, short book called On Prayer. At the very end he reflects on what our prayers mean when it comes time for us to die. Listen to what he says,
“The whole life of a man is gathered into [the hour of his death], and his past appears clear, solid and final at that moment when for him time is to be swallowed up in eternity. In the hour of death, both God and the dying person speak their last word--a word which is final and decisive for all eternity. The important question for us is whether we shall obtain the grace to make our last conscious moment a moment filled with the prayer of decision, by which we mean such a prayer as will lift up all that we were and are, all we have done and suffered, in [an offering] to the mercy of God; whether, as the shades of death darken in our minds, we shall turn a last glance on Him Who has crossed the bar of death and yet behold He lives” (107).These are deep words, and I’m not sure that even as I read and re-read them that I perceive all that Rahner has to say. But here is my summary of his reflections: When we finally walk up to that dread horizon line, perhaps like reaching the top of one of the high mountain ridges I knew so well growing up in Montana, we’ll be able to look back on the entirety of the path that’s led us there. Our souls remember all the joys and sufferings, the acts of compassion and the deeds of selfishness that have shaped them. And the important question is whether, in those moments before we cross to the other side of the mountain peaks, we have become the kind of people who put all our hope in Jesus or whether we still love our own selves more than all others, more than the God who can save us.
In that moment, it doesn’t mater whether a national newspaper runs a page-long obituary for us or if nobody notices we’ve passed on. What matters is whether our hearts have received the good news word and let it grow up within us. What matters is whether our hearts have learned to hope like Jesus hopes, to trust as Jesus trusts, to love like Jesus loves. At death, the whole of our lives are summed up. Our every action, feeling, and thought will have completed its work in shaping our hearts. Either we will have let God’s powerful gospel word blossom into trust and love for Jesus or we will have stunted it, choked it out with selfish or angry habits, poisoned it with envy and bitterness.
Let’s leave behind scholars’ theology books, and let’s listen for what the Spirit has to say to each of us this morning through James’ letter. Let’s begin with v 13 of ch 3. James says, Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good way of life that your works are done in meekness born of wisdom.
James asks, “Who is wise and understanding?” He’s not asking who’s good at doing math problems in their head. He’s not asking who’s good at financial planning. We have to remember that, according to James, wisdom is something that comes as a gift from God. In ch 1, James says if anyone needs wisdom or understanding, they should ask God, who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly (1.5). After all, James says in 1.18, Each good gift and every perfect thing that’s given is from above, coming down from the Father of lights. James isn’t asking, “Who has studied up, who’s done the hard work to become wise?” No, James is saying, “Who has received God’s good gift? Who’s received the Word that gives both salvation and wisdom?” Just listen to v 19 of ch 1: That same God who gives every good gift is the one who chose to give birth to us by the true Word. James addresses the Jewish Christian home church, asking for a show of hands: “Who’s received God’s soul-saving, wisdom-giving Word?”
I imagine a lot of hands would go up. If I asked you this morning, “Who has received Jesus’ good news message?” I hope many of you would raise your hands. Jesus’ message is reason number one that we gather together on Sunday morning and live together as a church during the rest of the week. We thank God for it in our prayers, we praise God for it in our songs, I try to name what that good news message means in our lives today in every sermon I preach.
But as we’ve heard James say again and again, merely being able to say we’ve heard Jesus’ good news word isn’t enough. That message of hope must be allowed to sprout and send out its shoots, buds, and branches into every area of our lives. Over the last few weeks we’ve heard James say that if this word has germinated and is growing in us, then we’ll give up our prejudices, we’ll change the way we talk.
We all know people who’ve heard Jesus’ message dozens of times, but in whose hearts and lives that message has not made a difference. When I was a missionary in Eastern Europe, I had a Muslim friend who worked as a translator for the missionaries. He spent a lot of time hanging out with the missionaries. He had gone along with them to dozens of conferences and camps, translating as they preached and presented the gospel. I’m sure he could have presented the gospel more accurately in Shqip or Macedonian than I ever could. But it made no difference in his life. For whatever reason, family pressure or a jaded heart or something else, he followed the way of Muhammad rather than the way of Jesus.
Many people know the good news message well without it every taking root or bearing fruit in their lives. In fact, in ch 2, v 19, James says that even demons know the the truth about God--but it sends them scrambling in fear rather than rejoicing over God’s salvation. Some of us, I’m confident, gather here each Sunday, say the Lord’s Prayer along with everybody else, sing the songs and hear the sermon, but the gospel word never exerts its soul-saving power to change their lives.
You see, it’s not the choice between Islam and Christianity that matters so much for us. No, the way I see it, and the way James tells it in his letter, the critical choice is between Jesus and self. We can pray all the prayers we want, sing every song in the hymnal. If our allegiance is still to our desires, our plans, our interests, then the gospel has not yet remade us.
Listen to what James says in vv 14 through 16 of ch 3:
If you have bitter envy and selfish ambition, do not boast [as if you were wise] and lie about the true [word]. Such wisdom does not come down from above, but is earth-bound, unspiritual, demonic. For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and every kind of worthless deed.According to James, our lives show whether we’ve received the Word and let it grow within us.
Now, before we all start pulling out our score cards to size up one another, I must insist that this is something that each of us can only know personally, for ourselves. We do not know the path that our sister or brother has walked. We may look over from where we sit and think, “Wow, she stirs up trouble wherever she goes.” But we don’t know the healing that God is working in her life, the grace that is already beginning to blossom, the times she holds her tongue or, be it everso gruffly, shows compassion. Yes, in her life, the Word is bearing fruit even though the soil was once hard and overgrown. On the other hand, we may see our brother at the other end of the pew, and think, “Wow, what a man of God! He has his life all together.” Little do we know that his godliness is the face he makes up just to impress others; little do we know the selfish ambition growing wildly in his heart. As James says a few times in his letter, “Don’t presume to judge your brother or sister. We all have only one Judge.”
But look into your own hearts. What’s growing in your heart? Is it God’s gentle Word of compassion? Or is it selfishness or bitterness or envy? What we allow to grow in our hearts, the habits we cultivate shape our hearts. When we stand before our one Judge, I want my heart to cry out with hope and joy to see the God who’s saved me. I don’t want my heart to be full of regret about the projects I never accomplished, the thrills I never had. I don’t want my heart to be wrapped up so completely in my want for this or that thing, my hopes for this or that relationship, that I turn my back on God to mourn for things I wanted but never got. I don’t want to be bitter that death cuts me off from everything I love when God stands with arms wide open offering every good thing.
There is a type of wisdom, a cunning, that helps us get what we want in this world. There are tricks we learn to work the broken systems of this world, to make sure that we get all we can, to make sure that we aren’t the ones who get hurt. This is not the wisdom that God give us. This is not the wisdom of the salvation world. No. Instead, this “if you can’t beat them, join them” wisdom is bound completely to the broken way things are, it knows nothing of God’s Spirit of Resurrection Life, it is, in truth, the sort of wisdom the prince of lies and the ruler of this age employs, it is demonic.
Until God spoke his soul-saving, wisdom-giving Word, this was the only kind of wisdom available to us. It forced our hearts into its mold. It was the wisdom of the addict, the player, the dealer, the devil. It was showing us the way to grow up to be just like them, one more addict, one more dealer. One more person whom death finds bitter and full of regret, someone angry, lonely, disappointed and afraid.
Oh, thank God for sending us the soul-saving Word! Thank God for sending Jesus with a new kind of wisdom, a wisdom from above! Thank God that our hearts can become something different, something beautiful.
Back in v 13, James says that true wisdom, the wisdom God gives, shows itself in a “good way of life.” The Greek word for good, kalos, is also a word that means beautiful, precious, or even pleasant. Just like the wisdom of the broken world leaves us broken, so the wisdom that comes from God’s good news word trains us to lead good, beautiful lives.
When I read my Grandpa’s obituary, I knew what I want my own obituary to say: “Josh Wallace. He led a beautiful life.” Instead of regret, I want to be known for joy. Instead of selfishness, I want to be known for generosity. When people tell stories about me, I want them to say that I lived with a spirit of gratitude rather than of bitterness.
I don’t know if the Dorothy Day is a familiar name to many people this morning. Dorothy Day lived a life that demonstrated, in many ways, the wisdom that God gives. Dorothy Day was born in New York City just before the turn of the last century. She grew up far from God, far from faith. She was a journalist and a political activist. But something about the worship of the Catholic church caught her heart. Slowly, and at great personal price--at the price of some of her closest relationships, in fact--she came to confess her own faith in Jesus.
But this is not where her faith ended. No, it grew out into a lifestyle and a movement. At the beginning of the Dirty Thirties, Dorothy Day and some other believers started, first, a newspaper called the Catholic Worker to tell how the gospel spoke to the situation and needs of the working poor and unemployed during the Great Depression. But writing about the gospel wasn’t enough. Soon Dorothy Day and her friends began welcoming the hungry and homeless into a communal house of hospitality. Soon similar houses and farms were sprouting up in other cities, providing welcome, a warm meal, and room to stay in for anyone in need.
To me, this is a beautiful life. Dorothy Day could have had an ordinary life, she could have simply tried to look out for herself during the hard years of the Thirties. She could have made her only priority her personal relationships. In this broken world, we would have looked at her and said she led as decent a life as anyone else. But Dorothy Day did not choose that route. No, she opened all of her life and her heart to God’s soul-saving Word, and her life became something beautiful. She became a servant to the poor and an advocate for peace in troubled times. This is the kind of life I hope to lead.
James uses two words to describe the beautiful, good way of life that testifies to God’s wisdom. We’ve heard the first already in v 13. James says, Show by your good way of life that your works are done in meekness born of wisdom. “Meekness,” or “humility” as some translations have it, is one way God’s wisdom makes our lives beautiful.
A verse we’ve returned to a few times as we’ve worked our way through James’ letter has been ch 1, v 21. There James says, With meekness accept the word planted in you, which can save your souls. We might think of being meek as being a doormat. I found one dictionary definition that said being meek meant being easily imposed on. Meekness, we might think, is playing powerless, downplaying our abilities, our desires, our worth. According to James, however, meekness is the attitude we need to access the power of the saving Word. Remember Jesus’ words from Mt 5: The meek are blessed because they will inherit the earth.
If we live with the wisdom God gives, we are meek because God is powerful. We realize that we don’t need to look out for number one, we don’t need to fight back to defend ourselves, we don’t need to maintain our reputations. No, Jesus preached a good news message that we have a King--we have a God--who looks after us. God provides what we need; God vindicates us. Knowing we have this kind of God enables us to look first to what God cares for, to the people whom God cares for. Like Dorothy Day, we can live beautiful lives of hospitality.
In vv 17 and 18, we hear the second way James describes the beautiful, good life lived in God’s wisdom. He writes,
The wisdom from above is first of all innocent. Then it is peaceable, fair-minded, open to persuasion. It is filled with mercy and good fruit. It not prejudiced. It is not insincere. But the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.Beautiful lives are lives of peace, of shalom, to use the Hebrew word for everything being as it should be. Beautiful lives, too, are lives that make peace, that usher and witness to God’s reign of shalom.
Dorothy Day made peace for struggling men and women when she offered them a room with a warm bed and table set for them. She also spoke and acted for peace in the following decades as a nuclear arms race escalated and the United Staes began an unending war in Vietnam. God’s wisdom clarifies for us what truly matters in a world where God--not death, not sin, not presidents, generals, or war machines--is our ultimate ruler.
I know another man, personally, who leads a beautiful, if often difficult and frustrating life. He’s a bit of a role model to me. When I met him he was an elder in his church, a church often at war with itself, over theology and budgets and priorities. My friend had his own opinions, convictions he felt were God-given. But rather than trying to out shout those he disagreed with or choosing to draw lines in the sand, he invited those he disagreed out for a coffee or over for a bowl of soup.
My friend had received God’s Word, God’s wisdom. He trusted that the fruit of righteousness is planted by those who work for peace in meekness, not those who fight, not even those who fight for what they believe is right. Peace is made through conversation, perhaps at times through reparation, but not by ultimatums, raised voices, or fists pounding on meeting room tables.
In the end, my friend’s commitment to peace cost him his position in his church. But while he is no longer an elder in his congregation, he is still a friend to many. When contention has rocked the church, he’s provided a stable, quiet, welcoming shelter for many. When others have thrown up their hands in exasperation and stormed out of the fellowship, he has remained in thankfulness and hope. That is beautiful.
In the moment when I reach death’s horizon, my hope is that I can look back on a life that has shaped my heart to embrace my God and King. I hope that habits of welcome, compassion, patience, and meekness will have made the soil of my heart good for the gospel word to grow. I dream of the same for all in this church. I dream that we can become people in whom God’s wisdom shines through in hospitality, kindness, good shared conversations and good shared meals.
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