Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to comm.church for more information.

For those I haven't met formally, there are a few of you here in the room for sure. My name is Scott. I'm part of our team here in the community and I'm excited to be jumping into this conversation we're having in the book of James. The truth is that I'm always honored to have the chance to think and reflect with so many of you and this happens a lot in all kinds of different places here in the community. It happens in the courses that we run.

It happens in the groups that I happen to be part of from time to time. It also happens in so many lovely chats over coffee. And this is true because it's your questions and your integrity in your weekly work and your embodiment of our tradition's most wonderful virtues. These are the things that sort of provoke and inspire and invite me to continue in my own journey of faith and into our shared pursuit of lives and a world that looks more like Jesus said it could be. And I hope that as maybe you've been tracking with us in this series, if you have been, I hope that you have caught a glimpse of this big assumption that's sort of operating behind the scenes in James' writing.

This assumption that Christian faith is often best understood as something that we embody. This assertion that to trust Jesus's humble way is to take action in the world not just swim in the shallow end of Christian ideas which isn't to say that ideas aren't important or that theology doesn't help guide or excite us as a community here at Commons because it certainly does but rather I think James invites us over and over again as we read this book to sometimes come to the realization that it's helpful to take stock of what we're doing as an effective way of revealing what we actually believe. And of course, the ancient author does this for us by speaking to their ancient world. And last week, it might have felt for some of us like we were listening in on a Zoom call of first century Christian leaders and the truth is is that the audience for those words in this passage last week were the audience is a bit broader because James' instructions find us where we are. They remind us to be careful with our words and to be cautious with the responsibilities that we carry, encourage us to remember that we all stumble from time to time and invites these words invite anybody who influences others to pursue this practice with holy gentleness.

Now last week, Jeremy closed that sort of teaching time by sharing that as a leadership team, we have spent some time these last few months reflecting on how we can ensure that we continue to be a community that prioritizes wholeness for all, where we choose to celebrate our strengths as a community and leveraging choosing to leverage those for good, but we also choose to be honest about our weaknesses when they become apparent and we try to work on them for integrity's sake, which is so important because the truth is is that when each of us bring our whole lives to bear on our lives or our whole selves to bear on our lives, as pastors we have a chance to do that but so do you as leaders and as volunteers and as influencers and as curious observers and every place in between. When we do this, we're invited to shape each other. And in turn, we shape our homes and we shape our neighborhoods and so much more, which is no small thing. This discovery of what it means for our faith to be at work, drawing us into the peaceable restorative way that Jesus taught us.

And we are gonna lean into that a little bit more here today. But first, I wanna invite us to just take a moment to still our hearts and minds and pray together. So would you join me now? Creator, God, we choose to pause even in just this moment because our hearts are known to you and our desires that are there underneath the surface. And in the shared words that we have offered and in the prayers that have been given, we have together confessed you as our source and our hope for all our need.

And we pray that you would guide us now as we take up ancient faithful words that we would find ourselves imagine or, yeah, our imagination stirred for the simple steps that we can take toward you, toward our neighbor, toward the fullness of life that we are probably all seeking here today. We ask these things in the name of Christ, our hope. Amen. Alright. So, let's jump right in today.

We're going to be looking at James chapter four thinking a little bit about internal deconstruction using grace and how to hear imperatives. And as is so often the case in scripture, in order to move forward, we need to look back to chapter three for just a second because remember, these ancient writers didn't use chapter and verse numbers. Those were added much later to the text and so much of the New Testament comes to us in the form of personal correspondence and just like your texts with your partner or with your friends, they don't have these numerical and thematic divisions that we see now. Though, I am sure that there are some of us who from time to time think it would be so handy to be able to respond to somebody in the middle of an argument. Actually, I kindly refer you to what you actually said in chapter 14 verse 27.

Right? No. Actually, this would be a terrible idea. Most of our relationships wouldn't survive that kind of precise critique. But the point here is just to say that while relationships don't use these markers, sometimes it's so helpful to not read our bibles with them.

Okay? So this is why we're moving back and just hopping back to James chapter three for a second to read this. Where James says, who is wise and understanding among you? Let them show it by their good life, by deeds done in humility that come from wisdom. But if you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, don't boast about it or deny the truth.

For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you're gonna find disorder and every evil practice. Now, I read that passage to you because there's something happening here that James returns to in the verses that we're going to look at in chapter four and it's pretty straightforward. James is holding up a measuring stick to some of the people who are leading in these early Christian communities and he's saying in effect, look, you wanna know who the wise people are? They are the ones living a balanced life and they're humbly doing good things. And for those of you who are walking around dry driven by your envy and your ambition, you need to realize that your lives are going to bring chaos and harm if you aren't more careful, which kinda makes sense.

Right? So when in chapter four, James begins this way, what causes fights and quarrels among you? Don't they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire what you don't have so you kill and you covet but you cannot get what you want so you quarrel and you fight. When James says these things, it's very clear that he's talking to the same people he was just talking to in chapter three and addressing the same kinds of actions.

And here's the deal. We scholars still debate the social situation that's behind these words because it's never really made explicit who's being talked to and why. We we can assume that there's some tension maybe between the people who are more wealthy or more well situated and the poor in the community, but there are actually scholars who think that some of what James is doing is he's addressing the anti Roman violent sentiments that got really intense in the first century right after Jesus' life. And that these things may have infiltrated the early Christian communities to the degree that some Christians may have been committing murder for the sake of a political cause, which is just to say, we're not gonna get into that too much because we can't be too sure that this killing language is hyperbole or for real, which is why I'm gonna try to direct us a little bit more to the recurring theme in this passage. Because up to this point, James has been arguing so strongly for an evidence based approach to finding and evaluating faith.

Reminding the earliest communities that the best of Christian belief is often found in the people who are living those beliefs peacefully. But then also James is reminding us to consider some of the same instructions and how we drive in bumper to bumper traffic and how we talk to our stressed out partners and children or how we stand in a clearly ignored line at the pharmacy, which are all areas that I found myself finding it difficult to be Jesus y this week. Hashtag pastor fail. But then James makes these statements like he does at the beginning chapter four where the inference is, hey. You wanna know what's happening when there's all this conflict and rage and unresolved tension in your surroundings?

Why don't you turn your gaze inward? And he asserts that these things happen because of warring or competing desires inside us. Maybe our longing for things to be a certain way, for instance, Or when we compare ourselves to someone else, when we envy possessions or position, or when we wanna try to control every possible outcome in our lives. And you know what? That's not necessarily the reminder that I want on a Sunday.

Thanks a lot, James. Because so often when I'm not my best self, I lash out or I withdraw and I isolate from others while I methodically dissect their position and their actions to the most minute detail. I'm not talking about anybody else. Okay? And maybe that's similar to where you feel like you are in some part, some conflict in your life or some issue that's flaring up or some professional situation that you're facing.

It feels like your energy is being drawn out of you, how you're trying so hard to do the right things out here and it's not helping. And you actually find that other people are shutting down and you're pulling all of this apart out here in your life as an effort to find some peace. And in a world full of so much turmoil, I imagine James coming to me, and he kind of places his open hands on my shoulders and kind of stops me. And he offers a suggestion. He says, instead of focusing on the external patterns and behaviors that are unfolding out there, why don't you look inside and work your way out?

When conversations are getting hot or decisions have to be made or when disagreement seems to be ruling, James suggests, hey, before you go tearing apart all their ideas, before you spend another restless night trying to figure it all out, do some internal investigation. Ask yourself, what do I so desperately want right now that I can't have? What peace am I searching for so frantically? What is the result that I am trying so hard to make sure happens? Which is so practical for us in this historical moment we're living through together in our relationships that are strained by important desires for rest and for peace and for security.

In so many conversations that are dominated by the justifiable longings for truth and for clarity and for agreement. And in moments where we are all doing our best to find answers and to find a way and to find ourselves in these and so many other places, James invites us to pause. Actually, I think he even gives us permission to. And remember that sometimes the simplest step of faith you should take is to start with a little internal deconstruction. Now full disclosure, things get a little tricky here in the text right after this, and I hope you came to church ready for tricky scriptures.

Okay? It's clear that the author is upset with the people in this community that are disputing and clamoring with each other for power. And it's clear because James comes right at them. He says, you have been so unfaithful. Don't you know that friendship with the world means enmity with God?

Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you think that scripture says without reason that God jealously longs for the spirit God caused to dwell in us? But God gives us more grace. And this is why scripture says, God opposes the proud, but shows favor to the humble. And I can see in some of your faces that that's a lot, which is why we're gonna just pull it apart for a few moments.

Okay? And the first step is just this, to imagine James hoping that these early believers will see the relational collateral of their fights with each other, the ways that their selfish desire and ambition are impacting the people around them. And in using this friend enemy language, he's trying to make it clear that no one can work with and use the patterns of dominant culture or economics or power positioning. You can't use those things and stay faithful to a divine imagination. And he seems to be hinting for all of us here today that there's a cost that we pay for choosing power over people, choosing success over compassion, choosing an economy of gains at all costs over an economy of grace.

And he does not mince words. He says, look, you wanna live like that, you show that you don't have faith and god opposes you. It's hard to hear. But then he throws in this cryptic line. He says, oh, you think that scripture says without reason that god jealously longs for the spirit that god has caused to dwell in us?

Which again, this is super obscure. Just like many ways we come to the scripture, we find things that we have to read at our own risk. And it's obscure for a couple reasons I wanna point out to you. First, James sounds like he's quoting scripture. In fact, he claims to be.

What's so mystifying is that his words don't actually directly correspond to any Hebrew Bible passage or Christian scripture that we have. And scholars so, like, is he is he quoting scripture or not? That should be the question that comes to mind. And scholars like to speculate what's happening here, but I just wanna suggest to you that it might be helpful to consider that James is drawing from a wise and a revelatory tradition whose source isn't clear, and it's not entirely scriptural. And we're gonna come back to that before we're done.

So hold on to it. Okay? Because we need to consider what exactly James seems to be saying, and it's not easy because the grammar is super tricky here. I don't know why he's trying to sound smart, but that seems to be what's happening. The words don't always fit together.

And this is why when you look in your Bible or you look on your app, you'll see that your bible has multiple notes and even alternative translations here, which feels so right for me in some ways because part of reading the bible faithfully is to come to something that is hard work and to struggle towards good and beautiful interpretations. So that's what we're doing together. Okay? And to be honest, the NIV here that I've read for you does a pretty decent job of constructing a statement that James seems to be giving to his friends. He's saying, don't you get it?

When you act selfishly and when you abuse the people around you, God has an emotional response because God created you for something other than that. God placed a divine spirit mark in you for a different kind of life. A life that there is so much room for, James says. And in saying this, James hammers home something that's easy to miss, especially in a series when we're talking about how our faith works itself out in the world. And the point is just this, that the defining measure of my weak and feeble attempts to do the right thing and your recurring struggle to come to grips with the teaching of Jesus, that the defining features of authentic faith are not our mustering and our maintaining of it, but rather our learning to trust a wide and expansive story of how persistent the divine is.

See the difference? Which might not seem like a big deal for you, but let me assure you something profound happens when you start to see your practice of faith in the world not being connected to a contract of obligation. When you start to see your faith not as part of an endlessly fatiguing program of self improvement that you have to keep doing, but rather when it starts to change into what you feel is a simple trust that God has been faithful to you and will be faithful to you. Giving us more grace, James says. Grace that you use whether you know it or not to do so many things.

Some of you have done it this week as you have worked to forgive that person in your story again slowly and courageously. Some of you have done this as you've intentionally investigated some long held belief. And as you've done that, you found not that it closes down and gets hard, but it opens up and becomes more beautiful. Some of you are using grace to serve and to care and to grow in the smallest of places and increments that nobody else can see. And when you do that, you start to think of faith less as something that you do and more as what happens when you live without the fear of doing it wrong.

And that's so beautiful, which brings us to the heart of chapter four. We've seen James confronting these friends of his and trying to offer some gentle assurance too and after all that, he jumps into a list of commands and here they are. He says, submit yourselves then to God. Resist the devil, he will flee from you. Come near to God and God will come near to you.

Wash your hands, you sinners. Purify your hearts, you double minded. Grieve, mourn, and wail. Humble yourselves before God and God will lift you up. Now that's a solid compilation of advice that we need to look at just for a second and maybe try to remix it a little bit.

Because here's what I think James is suggesting. I think he's saying, if God gives grace to the humble person, why wouldn't you just choose to be honest about who you are? Why wouldn't you be honest about your strengths and your limits and find that life doesn't work against you if you can be honest about what's happening? And then he goes on, he says, why don't you resist the antagonizing and accusing tendencies that this world invites you to practice Because you might just find that when you choose a vocabulary and a tone of kindness that other harsh voices in your life fall silent. Why don't you confess your mistakes?

Why don't you work for wholeness? Stop being duplicitous. That's that double minded phrase that James is using. And all he means with that is, why don't you stop being one way in private and another when people can see because that's so exhausting. But he's not done there.

He keeps going. He says, why don't you take peace meek making seriously? Engage the hard costly long term work that reconciliation requires because if you do humbly and gently, you might just find new sources of encouragement and flourishing that are divine. And see, what James is doing here, whether we can see it or not, is giving some clear examples of what faith looks like when it goes to work, which allows us to conceptualize what faith looks like as it moves and it breathes. And it does so not just in biblical knowledge or articulate prayers or in relationships that all look the same.

No. It comes alive in wise and gritty responses to the dynamics of your actual life. And we see this in this section because the truth is as scholar Luke Timothy Johnson argues, in the broadest sense, all of James is a form of moral exhortation or here's this Latin word, paranesis, which just means communication that's suggesting that you take certain actions. Johnson argues that the dominant mood of the whole book of James, the whole letter is the whole letter is imperative. It's sort of commanding your attention.

And also Johnson points out that what this means is that so many of James' statements aren't to be tested against their internal consistency with each other, but how do they correspond to reality? And you know what? I love that. I love that we can trace this approach to reality that James takes from a statement that he makes right at the beginning of the letter because he says this, if you lack wisdom, if any of you do, you're having a hard time, ask God who gives generously to all without finding fault, and wisdom will be given to you. And then chapter by chapter, James starts giving us advice.

He starts hinting at where he thinks the wisdom is. And here in chapter four, I've already pointed out for you. We've seen him pull from a tradition of wisdom that is beyond the scriptures. We don't even know where it comes from even as he offers clear instructions for the complex terrain of our lives. And why does James do this?

Well, I suggest to you that it's because he seems to have believed that there was wisdom out there in the world, out in the cracks and the adventures and the oh so normal moments of your life and mine, which is such a helpful observation about how we can read and hear the scriptures and the imperatives they use. Because maybe we can start to hear them not as binding rules, but as wise suggestions. And not as contractual terms, but more like getting directions from someone when you're lost in a neighborhood that you don't know. It's also an observation on how to be open to all the forms that wisdom takes. Learning to hear the imperatives that come to help and find you wherever you are because they do.

We come across paranesis all the time, wisdom from all kinds of sources bumping and jostling and keeping us on course like it does. Wisdom that as we learn to hear it becomes a chorus of voices that grow in their intensity and shape our perspective. And guess what? It also starts to shape our faith. And when I think about how Pernicious has found me in the past, there are plenty of examples that come to mind.

Like when Kathleen Norris in her writing reminded me that it is daily tasks, daily acts of worship and love that serve to remind us that the religion that we practice is not strictly an intellectual pursuit, but that Christian faith is a way of life, it's not an impregnable fortress of ideas. Or how activist and journalist Desmond Cole, especially during 2020 and some of the things that were happening around us in the world, Desmond spoke moral imperatives to me in almost every interview I watched of him and every experience of Canada's marginalized people of color that I heard him recount and explore because I found him inviting me to the table, a table around which we need to cultivate understanding or listening partnership and solidarity as we carve out a better and more healthy and more vibrant collective future. Or how the audio book voice of Irish priest and poet John O'Donoghue stopped me in the dog park. I literally stopped. Just a couple weeks ago when I heard him say, as if to me and only me, Scott, you were born for life, and you were born for eternal life, and you really should give yourself the gift of risking enjoying it.

Which is to say that I can't tell you where you're gonna hear imperatives that invite you toward daily acts of love and toward partnership and solidarity. I can't tell you where wisdom is gonna find you and send you off shining light for other people or dancing for joy at the wonder of your beautiful life, but I know that that wisdom is out there. And you might find it in an ancient prayer with as we pray with Dorothy Day today or you might find it in your favorite psalm perhaps, but maybe it will come to you in the memory of something a teacher or a parent said to you. Maybe it's found in a life lesson that you need to remember how it that thing, that experience made you who you are. Maybe it'll come in the voice of a child who invites you to stop and to play.

Or in your partner or your friend's offering of the embrace that you need to accept. In these and in so many other ways, the world resounds in wisdom. In the imperatives that are guiding you, I promise you, safely and peacefully through your story. And you know what? James knew this, and he trusted it.

And I hope maybe you can start to as well. Trusting the value of a little internal deconstruction. Trusting the practice of using grace without fear. Trusting that your faith really is growing with every piece of wisdom that you collect and you cherish. Let's pray.

Loving God, again, in, yeah, some of these words that are not always the easiest to work with, I think we sense an invitation towards the kind of life that you imagine for us. And in all the ways we come to this moment, some of us facing significant obstacles, some of us carrying so much weight, some of us unsure of what steps to take forward, each of us we come and we ask that you'd help us to be present to the ways that you are already helping us and working with us, Trusting the ways that our heart is actually inclined to step forward with the kind of faith we imagine might work for us. This step inward perhaps as we try to make sense of the world around us. Also, this maybe inclination to lean towards grace and all the ways that it invites us to live more courageously. And so too, the ways that our ears and our hearts could be open to the wisdom that we've known in the past and the wisdom that waits for us this week.

In all these things, we ask, be our guide, be our friend, and give us strength to trust you. We pray in the name of Christ. Amen.