This defensive possessiveness--this instinct to mark and guard our territory from intruders--starts at a young age. I’ve heard that toddlers’ favorite words are “no” and “mine.” I wish it could say that this fear for our possessions is something we grow out of. I wish I could say that by the time I was thirteen or nineteen or twenty-nine I never again felt threatened by the specter of someone barging in and taking away my stuff. But selfishness is something we never completely grow out of, even if we do outgrow saying “mine” every other moment like two-year-olds.
James talks about this in his letter. In a letter he wrote to some of the first churches, James asks the gathered believers, What causes fight and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires your desires that are at war within your body? (4.1).
So often its our love for our precious things--whether they be tree forts or action figures or dollar bills or the minutes in our day--that causes us to feel angry and resentful towards other people. Like a dog with a bone, we’re happy to sit there gnawing on the things we love; but when someone comes along who might take our bone away from us, our hackles go up, we snarl and bite. Maybe it’s the government asking for a bigger chunk of our paycheck in taxes. Maybe it’s a committee or project expecting us to give up one more weeknight. Maybe it’s our sister or brother trying to grab our Halloween candy from trick-or-treating. Whoever’s approaching us, we crouch down and bare our teeth and let out a low growl.
When I was ten years old, my best friend and I built a tree fort on her family’s acreage. The fort was beside an overgrown stream in the bottom of a ravine. The fort wasn’t too impressive--just some old fence posts and a few planks and old fencing wire spools nailed together. But it seemed awesome to us. We stashed our treasures there. It felt like a secret hideout.
But one day, my friend and I tramped down to our fort, and we noticed that things didn’t look quite right. Things seemed a bit out of place. Nothing was quite where we’d left it. It looked like someone else had been in our fort.
Who could it be? We decided it must be the kids from down the road. They were the intruders, the trespassers, the fort-stealers. We wouldn’t let them take over our secrete hideout. We had to defend our fort!
We set booby traps around the fort--logs to trip over, mudholes to fall in, ridiculously complicated knots of ropes and nets. Looking back, I doubt any of our traps would have worked. We also decided to camouflage our fort. So we caked on mud and dead leaves. We piled brush high up around it.
As it turned out, we never saw another trace of anyone invading our fort. No one set off any of our traps. We never again found the fort disturbed or things out of place (though it might have been hard to tell with all the caked-on mud and leaves!). In reality, kids from down the road probably never, ever set foot in our precious fort; they probably didn’t even know about it. Probably it was some deer or raccoon or magpie that wandered by the fort and disturbed our stuff in the first place.
But I don’t think my friend and I ever considered that possibility. You see, for us, that fort, that ravine was ours, our precious property. There wasn’t another ravine or fort around as good as ours. And if it was precious to us, then of course other kids would want to take it away, to steal and make it theirs instead of ours. A deer or a raccoon wouldn’t want a fort; no, other kids wanted forts. And we had to be ready for them, to fight them off.
Maybe you can think back to your own childhood turf wars, your own fights to protect your tree fort or hideout. Or maybe you have memories of arguing with a brother or sister or friend over which toys belong to whom and who gets play with them.
When I was even younger, I shared a bedroom with my little brother Andrew. He’s three years younger than me. Just the right age to want to play with all the things his big brother was playing with. I remember working very hard to clearly mark out which actions figures and Lego sets were mine. More than once my mom had to discipline me because I’d hit my brother for touching my stuff.
This defensive possessiveness--this instinct to mark and guard our territory from intruders--starts at a young age. I’ve heard that toddlers’ favorite words are “no” and “mine.” I wish it could say that this fear for our possessions is something we grow out of. I wish I could say that by the time I was thirteen or nineteen or twenty-nine I never again felt threatened by the specter of someone barging in and taking away my stuff. But selfishness is something we never completely grow out of, even if we do outgrow saying “mine” every other moment like two-year-olds.
James talks about this in his letter. In a letter he wrote to some of the first churches, James asks the gathered believers, What causes fight and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires your desires that are at war within your body? (4.1).
So often its our love for our precious things--whether they be tree forts or action figures or dollar bills or the minutes in our day--that causes us to feel angry and resentful towards other people. Like a dog with a bone, we’re happy to sit there gnawing on the things we love; but when someone comes along who might take our bone away from us, our hackles go up, we snarl and bite. Maybe it’s the government asking for a bigger chunk of our paycheck in taxes. Maybe it’s a committee or project expecting us to give up one more weeknight. Maybe it’s our sister or brother trying to grab our Halloween candy from trick-or-treating. Whoever’s approaching us, we crouch down and bare our teeth and let out a low growl.
It sounds like James was right. Our fights and quarrels, our disputes and strife, our wars and battles are over the stuff we love. He asks, Don’t they come from your desires that are at war among your members? And if we’re honest, we have to say, “Yes, we fight because we’re selfish.”
From one perspective, defending our stuff makes sense. After all, if I didn’t find a separate place in the closet to hide my action figures, my little brother definitely would have taken them, played with them, lost them and broken them. From one way of looking at it, fighting for what’s mine makes sense. After all, if the government taxes away all my money, I can’t spend it on the things I want. If I give in and send a check to the letters from charities or missionaries that make me feel so guilty, then I can’t save that money so I can have a good retirement. There’s only so much money, so much Halloween candy, so many toys and tree forts to go around, right?
Do you remember the story of Cain and his brother Abel? They were Adam’s and Eve’s first children, the first brothers in biblical history. Abel raised goats and sheep, and Cain grew crops from the ground. The story goes that they both went to worship God one day, to thank God for newborn lambs and kids in the flock and wheat and corn growing in the fields. They each took some of what God had given them and gave it back to God as a sacrifice. But while they were worshiping God, Cain noticed that God seemed to like Abel’s thank-you sacrifice better than his. Cain was angry! I tend to think that Cain thought there was only so much love from God to go around. His brother was getting more than his fair share. Cain had to do something about it, to get back his fair share of God’s love. So Cain said to Abel, “Let’s go for a walk out in my fields.” As they were out on their walk, far away from Mom and Dad, Cain grabbed his brother, he hit him, and killed him. I think he imagined that without his brother’s competition, he would get all of God’s love.
But that’s not how the story ends. You see, God’s love and goodness are endless, it keeps going and going, there’s always more. There was plenty, more than enough, an endless amount for both Cain and Abel. Cain was wrong. We don’t compete for God’s love and goodness. And we certainly don’t get more by getting rid of, killing off, or shutting out other people whom God loves. When we do that, we don’t get more love from God. No, instead we get punishment. And that’s what Cain got. God sent Cain far away from his family and everyone else he might hurt and kill in his selfishness.
I think James may have had the story of Cain and his brother in mind when he wrote the next two verses, vv 3 and 4, where he says,
You desire [something] but do not have it, so you kill. You envy [others] but cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You don’t have because you don’t ask God. You ask for [something] and you don’t receive it, because you ask with wicked motives, that you may spend what you get on your desires.I hope that none of us would kill someone to get what they have. James says, though, that murder and robbery (and we could add war and colonialism) are the direction in which jealousy is always pointed. Just like selfishness makes us suspicious that everyone is trying take away what’s really ours, jealousy makes us hate other people because they have something we want, and, we assume, that if they have it, that means we can’t.
I wasn’t a popular kid in middle school. I didn’t wear the cool clothes and I could never get my hair to look the way the popular kids’ hair looked. There was a time in grade 7 when I despised kids with good haircuts. They had cool hair and I didn’t. That meant they got to be popular and I didn’t. Just like Cain, I hated them because I was jealous they had something I didn’t. I never killed or even picked a fight with any of my peers--but I did say a lot of mean words under my breath.
James tells the believer that the reason they don’t have things is because they don’t ask God for them. That sounds a bit funny to me. I’ve asked God for all sorts of things that I’ve never got--good hair, better basketball skills, a big elk or deer during hunting season. James explains in v 3 that often when we ask God for something but still don’t get it, it’s because we ask with bad motives. When I asked God to give me a cool hairdo, God said no because my reason for asking was bad. I wanted to depend on my looks and the admiration of others for my sense of value and purpose rather than on God.
I wonder if God hears our prayers the same way a parent hears kids whining about Halloween candy: “Her bag is more full than mine. I should get the fuller bag and she should get the one with less!” We ask God to divvy up the limited resources of the world so that we get to enjoy the largest slice of the pie and everyone else gets the crumbs. No wonder God says “No” to our requests.
James, at the beginning of the letter he wrote, in ch 1, vv 16-17, says that God doesn’t work like that. God isn’t a cosmic umpire supervising how the limited amount of time and money and health and joy and love and blessing get divided up. This may be what the world we live in thinks. But James says, Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers and sisters! Each good gift and every perfect thing that’s given is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.
God is a God of unending love and goodness. Cain had it wrong, the world gets wrong, we get it wrong. That why James says in ch 4, v 4,
You adulterous people! Don’t you know that friendship with the world means being enemies with God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes God’s enemy.I think this is the heart of all the advice James gives in his letter.
Jesus came to invite us to be God’s friends, such close friends that we become part of God’s family. That invitation is Jesus’ great gospel word to us. Being friends with someone means knowing who they are, knowing the truth about them. When we hear rumors and lies about someone who is our friend, we know they’re false and we don’t believe them.
God calls us friends, but we often believe lies about God! Rather than believe that God is good--that God loves us and will make sure we have every good thing we need--we listen to the lies and rumors and get angry at God. We believe that God has cheated us out of something we want. We’re unfaithful to our most loving friend! We’re backstabbers! God loves us, but now we’re complaining that God’s not giving us enough of his love.
We don’t act or think like real friends of God. Instead we act like selfish friends. If we’re friends with anybody, we’re friends with people like Cain. We think Cain had it right about God! We have to look out for ourselves, have to make sure we get the most of God’s blessing and love. We don’t trust our friend God to look out for us.
Let me tell you a story, one about Jesus. One of Jesus’ followers asked him to teach them how to pray to God. Jesus responded this way,
“Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. . . . Is there anyone among you who, if you child asks for a fish, will give snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good fits to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” (Lk 11.9, 11-13 // Mt 7.9-11).Here’s the truth: God is good, and God enjoys giving us good things. If we’re God’s friends, we know that about him. We’d know that God has a great sense of humor, but God’s not the kind of person who plays practical jokes on us. God said he’ll give us good things, everything we need. All we need to do is trust him, just like we trust any of our other friends.
There’s no reason for us to fight over who gets what, because God’s good blessings go on and on, they never run out. If we fight for what’s ours, or get jealous because someone has something we don’t, or pray that God will give us more than someone else, we’re believing lies about God. We’re believing the lie that God, our friend, can’t give something to someone else and still have plenty to give to us. The only reason we’d believe that is if we’re only concerned about ourselves, if we're selfish friends.
I want to be God’s real friend. I choose to always trust that God is good, even when I hear rumors or feel that maybe God isn’t being fair. I don’t want to be the kind of friend who’s really only out to get stuff for myself--better tree forts or Halloween candy or a bigger savings account. I wouldn’t really be acting like God’s friend at all then. Now, I’m going to choose to trust that God is good, and God will give me everything I need, even when times are hard. Because that’s the kind of friend God is. Amen.
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