Sermon Archive
Planning for the future
Sermon preached by John Armes at Matins on 26 November 2006, Feast of Christ the King
Martin Luther disdainfully described the letter of James as an 'epistle of straw'. By which he meant, I think, that it was theologically lightweight; and, as our fairy tales tells us, you don’t build a house out of straw if you want to avoid the huffing and puffing of some big bad wolf - and Luther certainly feared predatory wolves of the ecclesiastical kind.
The epistle only mentions Jesus twice and it reads like a pre-Christian sermon into which someone has added a few Christian references. Some scholars, indeed, suggest that this was exactly what happened. Luther's particular grouse was that the letter seems to emphasize practical good deeds, whereas his preoccupation was to get the vital point across that we are justified by the grace of God, not by our good works.
But Luther's preoccupations are not ours and James' earthy injunctions are in many ways well-suited to the 21st century. So, he tells us that people who hear the word and then do nothing about it are like those who look at themselves in the mirror and immediately forget what they look like. He's scathing of people who find the best seats for the rich in church, whilst expecting the scruffy and ill-kempt to sit on the floor; or of those who speak kind words to the poor whilst doing nothing to help them.
And in today's reading he again digs at the wealthy: What's the point of making great plans to get rich in the future when you cannot know what tomorrow will bring? What is your life other than mist that vanishes away? All our future plans, should be made with the proviso 'If the Lord wishes...'
I used to drive a bus for an old people's lunch club. I would do the round of the parish, join them for lunch and then take them home again. It was a highlight of the week. Whenever I dropped off one particular old lady we always went through the same litany of farewell. 'See you next week,' I would say, cheerily. 'See you next week,' she would reply, and invariably add, 'God willing.' To which the other old folk in the bus would chorus, 'If all's well!'
Those old folk got it right, according to James. Indeed, there's an echo here of Jesus - remember his parable of the rich man who gathered all his harvest into his barns and then sat back to eat, drink and be merry, only to discover that 'this day your soul is required of you.' Whatever Luther says, therefore, James' offering is hardly out of step with mainstream Christian thought, and neither is it irrelevant to the business of trying to live a Christian life in this day and age. We’re to place our lives in the context not of our own profit but of the will of God.
Today is the feast of Christ the King, traditionally kept on the Sunday before Advent, when we reflect on what the rule of Christ means for us. And the truth is we discover that we inhabit two kingdoms, two realms. On the one hand, the Kingdom of God, the realm in which the power of God is persuasive and the values and priorities of God prevail; on the other, a realm where other values and priorities prevail and the power of possessions and self-interest is persuasive. Not surprisingly, we find it a struggle to live in both at the same time. For we're committed to the world we live in, to the well-being of others; we want to affirm all the joys and delights of human experience. Yet James reminds us that we must still live with God in mind.
Seen in this way, the Christian message, however life-affirming, is also countercultural – even counter-intuitive. Our instincts tell us that we should gather into barns and store up riches for the future, Jesus tell us that God feeds the sparrows and clothes the grass, so why worry – each day has sufficient troubles of its own without creating others. Our work ethic demands that we set targets and quantify results; the Christian ethic requires us to ask first what God wishes – and offers results that are hard to quantify, certainly in economic terms.
James is clearly addressing a community facing a similar struggle - a community in conflict with itself. With great psychological perception he recognizes that these outer conflicts are rooted in the conflict within the human soul, the war that is waged when greed or covetousness makes us want more than we have. All these pretensions and ambitions must be stripped away, cleansed, and our wills submitted instead to God.
There’s something very 'Old-Testament-prophet' about James’ fierce language. He exhorts his listeners to
'lament and mourn and weep. Let your laugher be turned into mourning and your joy into dejection. Humble yourselves before the lord, and he will exalt you.'
Ironically, our reading from Haggai (who really is an Old Testament prophet) has quite a different feel. He promises his dejected people that their suffering is over, that God will restore their nation, that they will rebuild their temple and that their last state will be better than their first.
The two readings, in other words, are addressed to people at very different points in the cycle of sin, penitence and restoration. James' audience seem complacent, they've sold out to a set of values that exclude God; they know what is right but they do not do it. Their sins of omission are every bit as deadly and deadening as their sins of commission. Haggai, on the other hand, is speaking to a broken people who have lost their hope. Perhaps our world needs to hear the message of both prophets, the message both that God is with us, and also that we are to do what we know to be right.
However, I would hazard the suggestion that it is to James that we Western Christians should be most attentive. In effect, he’s calling us to prayer; to listen to God and to allow our wills to be inspired and enlivened by God so that we learn to desire and to ask for the right things. For we should note that James is not condemning forward planning per se, but forward planning untouched by an awareness that our whole life is to be seen as meaningful to God and relevant to God’s purposes.
And if that's true for us as individuals, it's true also for us as a Christian community. We’re called through our prayer, our listening to God, to still the warring instincts within us and to be conformed to the mind of Christ. And we’re called, as a church, to plan for the future having put aside self-interest and wrong ambitions and having set our hearts on pleasing God.
This is a timely thought when inevitably much of our planning for our buildings and our churchyard is related to the future. Whatever our hopes for our heirs, those who will follow us here fifty, 100 years from now, our task is still to live faithfully in our present. It is our own faithfulness to the gospel now that will make the ultimate difference to how we prepare for the future; it is our passion for God, our delight in the person of Jesus, our attentiveness to God’s still small voice, that will teach us what to ask for and empower us to be the answer to our own prayers.
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