Reflection
James 1"17-27
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This morning the lectionary begins a brief detour into the Epistle of James, and pastors in Protestants churches everywhere are giving the obligatory disclaimer about Martin Luther’s dislike of James and the Protestant anxiety about its apparent emphasis on the importance of good works, playing up an exaggerated divide with Paul’s emphasis on faith and grace.
The Epistle of James, which tradition long associated with James, the brother of Jesus, and the leader of the church of Jerusalem, does in fact read like a series of moral instructions.
But to only read this letter as a burdensome series of moral instructions is to miss what James has to tell us about the nature of faith and what it looks like when it puts on shoes and walks around in our world. Faith and action are two sides of the same coin. The Hebrew word for worshipper is the same word for servant, and in this Epistle, we catch a glimpse of that.
James 1:17-27
17 Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. 18 In fulfillment of his own purpose he gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures.
Hearing and Doing the Word
19 You must understand this, my beloved let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; 20 for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness. 21 Therefore rid yourselves of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness, and welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.
22 But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. 23 For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; 24 for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like. 25 But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act—they will be blessed in their doing.
26 If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless. 27 Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.
Perhaps you saw the viral video a couple years ago featuring a four year old girl named Jessica standing on her bathroom counter looking intently at herself in the mirror and giving herself a pep talk for the ages:
“My house is great!” She begins with much excitement, “I can do anything good! I like my hair, I like my haircut, I like my cousins, I like my mom, I like my dad, I like elephants!” She says emphatically while flexing and dancing in the mirror, before jumping down and jumping into her day.
Raise your hand if this is how you start your day…
I tried to look up the average number of times that we look into a mirror each day and found everything from 8 times to 71. I’ll let you decide what sounds most like you. But no matter what the number is, my guess is that very little of that time in front of a mirror is spent with as much admiration as little Jessica.
We look into mirrors to evaluate, to fix, to make sure nothing from lunch is on our face or still in our teeth. We look in mirrors to manage the image we want to project to the world and to make sure we match up to the expectations that the world has for us and how we should look.
In 2011, a graduate student at UCLA, feeling this enormous pressure to look a certain way, embarked on a year long experiment to live without looking in a mirror. For an entire year. She began by covering up all the mirrors in her house, and then did the hard work of retraining herself from looking in the mirrors in public restrooms or shopping malls, in her car, and even into reflective surfaces and windows as she walked around the city. (It seems to me, it would be far easier and probably healthier for us to learn to see ourselves differently than to avoid looking altogether!).
But my main point here, is that even after a year without looking at herself in a mirror, of course she did not forget what she looked like. And this brings us back to James’ analogy this morning where he compares those who hear the word and do not do it, to those who see themselves in a mirror and then walk away and immediately forget what they look like. It’s a strange analogy because forgetting what we look like is simply not something we do.
It seems to me, the problem here is not forgetfulness, rather, the problem has to do with how we are looking in the first place and whether or not we see our true selves.
So fixated on blemishes and insecurities, so attuned to who the world says we are and who we should be, burdened under the weight of all the ways we think we are not enough, don’t add up, are undeserving- our vision obscured by the soup of expectations we swim through daily - we miss seeing who we truly are.
Children of God.
Shaped from the dust of creation,
filled with the Spirit breath of God,
claimed in the water of baptism,
marked as Christ’s own forever.
Loved. Named. Enough.
James suggests another mirror for us to look in – the perfect law – the law of liberty, God’s word as a mirror.
The 19th century philosopher and theologian Soren Kierkegaard was greatly influenced by this analogy of a Scripture as mirror, and in his essay on Self Examination, he wrote:
The first requirement is that you must not look at the mirror, observe the mirror, but must see yourself in the mirror.... The second requirement is that in order to see yourself in the mirror when you read God's Word you must (so that you actually do come to see yourself in the mirror) remember to say to yourself incessantly: It is I to whom it is speaking; it is I to whom it is speaking.... Finally, if you want to look at yourself in the mirror with true blessing, you must not promptly forget how you looked, you must not be the forgetful hearer of whom the apostle says: He looked at his bodily face in a mirror but promptly forgot how he looked
Kierkegaard observes that we forget what we look like because instead of looking in the mirror, we look AT it. We take Scripture, and instead of looking in it, where we might discover our true selves, we look at it as a tool only to be studied. It can be so easy to keep Scripture at a safe distance by engaging it in discussion, debating different interpretations, dissecting it in a classroom – and while all of these things can be good and important, if that’s all we do then we are the hearers of the word who are not doers. James is not telling us to not study and listen, he’s telling us that true hearing of the word, true paying attention, requires our full involvement, our hands and hearts as well as our brains.
The Greek word that James uses when he invites us to look into the mirror of Scripture includes the word ‘to stoop’ – he invites us to literally “stoop down and look”
When you stoop down to look at something, it has your full attention. You only go out of your way to stoop down to look at things that capture your imagination. It’s a posture of reverence, a posture of curiosity. And maybe even a little wonder-filled and childlike.
And so, we are invited to stoop down and look carefully and curiously into the perfect law, the law of liberty, where we discover that we belong to God. And when we truly see our identity in the mirror of God’s word, when that truth cuts through the noise the world yells at us about who we are - when we see ourselves in that mirror and know that we are loved by the one who created us and named us, there is incredible freedom. When we are set free from the need to earn love, to impress, or to fear the other, then we are free to love them instead. When we know who we are, our actions naturally follow.
Renowned priest and spiritual leader, Henri Nouwen, wrote often about the importance of understanding our belovedness at the very center of our being, as the truth from which the rest of our life flows. He writes:
“Becoming the Beloved means letting the truth of our belovedness become enfleshed in everything we think, say, or do. As long as ‘being the Beloved’ is little more than a beautiful thought or a lofty idea that hangs above my life to keep me from becoming depressed, nothing really changes. What is required is to become the beloved in the commonplaces of my daily existence and, bit by bit, to close the gap that exists between what I know myself to be and the countless specific realities of everyday life. Becoming the Beloved is pulling the truth revealed to me from above down into the ordinariness of what I am, in fact, thinking of, talking about and doing from hour to hour.” (Henri Nouwen Life of the Beloved)
And Nouwen goes on to say that when we start to understand our belovedness, a funny thing starts to happen – we start to also see the belovedness of others. When we understand deep in our bones that we have been chosen by God, then we start to see how everyone we come across has also been chosen by God. And that, my friends, goes a long way in connecting our hearing and our doing of God’s word. All of a sudden, caring for orphans and widows, speaking up for the most vulnerable in our society, watching our language, being quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry – all these imperatives in James – become less about a list and more about love, a reflection of what life looks like when we see clearly in the mirror how loved we are by God, and how loved is all creation.
As the sociologist and author Brene Brown likes to say: people are hard to hate close-up, so move in! And maybe that’s exactly the invitation to us this morning – move in closer, pay attention to the image of God in others, and especially in those you would rather avoid. Stoop down and look closely into the mirror of Scripture that you might see who you are – because in order to love others, we often need to learn to love ourselves. So, move in. Look. Listen. Be slow to speak. And may the love you discover in that mirror be the force that drives both your hearing and your doing.
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.