Our guest preacher for today is the Rev. Dr. Dale Woods.
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“FINDING WISDOM FOR THE CHALLENGES OF LIFE”
The Rev. Dr. Dale Woods
James 1:1-8
August 8, 2021
Good morning, everyone. First, I’d like to thank Victor for inviting me to join with you in worship this morning and to bring the sermon this morning. As many of you know, this congregation holds a special place for myself and Sue. We were part of this congregation many years ago. And this congregation was actually my very first introduction to the Presbytery church in Canada. Never heard of Presbyterian church until I came to Richmond Presbyterian. But some of you will know and some don’t, this congregation supported by studies at the Vancouver School of Theology when I was here. I was a student alongside Tony Plomp. It was in this congregation that I was ordained 27 years ago almost to this date. So, a lot of water has got under the bridge since then. I noticed that we all went out and got our hair dyed grey. Not sure why we did that. But we have never forgotten the kindness and the support that we received from this congregation in those formative years. And I wish that I could say that after 27 years, I still remember everyone’s names, but I’m getting to that age now you know, where it’s difficult just remembering where you put your car keys. And yesterday I joined with a group of other Presbyterians who did a fundraising walk to Camp Douglas from the Lonsdale Ferry which is about 18 kilometres. So, if you see me starting to buckle during the sermon or my eyes bulge out, is just the pain flowing through my body reminding me that I’m not 18 anymore.
The choice of the text for today comes actually from a bit of a personal story. Our daughter, Sarah, is living in England so every day I read the London Times just to kind of keep up with what’s going on there. Now in that newspaper, they often have articles about people’s response to pandemic, how they’re dealing with it, how it’s affected them, and all of those kinds of things. It got me to thinking about how do we deal with the unexpected trials that come into our lives because for all of us this has been unexpected. And it got me to thinking about Scripture, what does scripture have to say about trials in life and when we come across and when we’re experiencing different trials, and that took me then to the letter of James.
And you could say that this letter in the New Testament, this letter of James, has had kind of its own trials really. It wasn’t accepted as part of the New Testament until the 5th century by all of the churches. In the 15th century the famed reformer Martin Luther, described it as the epistle of straw. Luther said while James doesn’t really have a lot to say about justification by faith and that was Luther’s big theme of the scripture, that was justification by faith, so Luther said there’s really not a lot you can get out of this letter from James. And scholars, they’ve had a hard time with this letter too. Trying to agree on who’s the writer of the letter, but I never really let that bother me because I’ve learned a long time ago that scholars hardly agree on anything.
But there’s a case to be made. I think that this letter is written by the brother of Jesus, James, the brother of Jesus in the New Testament. And if you know the story of Jesus’ family, you know that his family didn’t really think a lot of him. They thought that his claims to be the Messiah were outlandish. But according to Luke, it was the appearance of Jesus to the disciples after the resurrection that stirred faith in James and he became a devoted follower. He was an important voice in the early church when it ran into conflict in the book of Acts, you can read that.
Paul mentions meeting James, the brother of Jesus, along with the other apostles when he came to Jerusalem. And according to the historical records, he became the first Bishop of Jerusalem. So, he has experience and he has something to say. But regardless of what position people may take about the writer of the letter, James himself describes his authority as being a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s what centres his life. And he is inviting all the readers of the letter, and all the hearers of the letter to find the same centre for their lives. He’s writing as a Christian Jew to other Christian Jews who were forced to flee their homes, their country due to the early persecutions of the church, and as a result of that persecution, these people are experiencing all kinds of trials in their lives. All kinds of trials that they didn’t expect to have to deal with. And in response, James writes a pastoral letter.
Well, what do you say to people whose lives have been economically threatened? Or what do you say to a Christian community that is struggling to live out its faith in a new place and basically a new world? And what do you say to people who have found their lives turn upside down? But my guess is that most ministers would not begin the way James begins; “My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy”. Now that’s not a typical response to our hardships. We don’t usually connect joy and hardships in the same sentence. But there’s an important message about faith in that one sentence. There’s a temptation for all of us, I think, to think that the role of faith is to protect us from the hardships of life. If we only do the right things; if we worship faithfully; if we contribute our finances; if we pray regularly, well then God will reward us by keeping us safe. We live a life of kind of continuous blessing. After all, didn’t Jesus say, “I have come that they may have life and have it to the full.”?
In one service I attended, this is many years ago in the United States, the Minister invited us to close our eyes and to imagine, in our minds, our present salary. While back then my salary was $19,000 or somewhere around there and then he said, “I want you to add another zero on to your salary”. I thought, wow, I just went from 19,000 to 190,000. And then he said, “well if that wasn’t enough”, he said, “look, add another zero. Because if you have enough faith, God will give you that blessing”. Unfortunately for me, my faith was in short supply because when I got home, my salary was still 19,000 and somebody had forgot to inform my boss about the raise.
But James is upfront about what it means to follow Jesus. Faith doesn’t save us from the difficulties of this life. In fact, being a Christian may only add to the challenges. And he lays it out as bluntly as he can. “Whenever you face trials of any kind”. He doesn’t say if you face trials of any kind, he says, whenever you face trials of any kind. In life, it’s not if we’re going to have difficulties or trials, it’s when we have difficulties or trials.
I learned that many years ago when I was in Brandon Ministry, there was a lady in our congregation. She was elderly. I only knew her as a person in a care home and she had osteoporosis very badly to her bones, had disintegrated. The nurses had to put in a sling to move her into a chair. I remember visiting her one day and I said, Aina, I have to be honest with you, I’m embarrassed to be your minister. And she said, why would you say, that I said, well, because you have been through all of these hardships, all these difficulties in life, and you have such a joy in your faith. And I come here, and I think I’m supposed to kind of an encouragement to you, but every time I leave you encourage me. I don’t know if I would have the kind of faith that you have to deal with, what you deal with every day. I’ve not had any of those kinds of challenges in my life. She just looked at me and she says, Dale, don’t you worry about that, it will come. And they come to us, right? They come in all different ways in different sizes and different shapes. And just in this short letter of James he lists these; sickness, temptation, exclusion by others, poverty greed, bullying, someone else’s selfish ambitions, personal attacks, harassment and oppression. All that just in this one little letter. And you could add to that list things like loneliness, bereavement, disappointment. And you could even add pandemics. And they don’t come to us because of our lack of faith.
They come to us because it’s part of being human and in some cases it’s part of being Christian. As Job says, human beings are born for trouble, just as sparks fly upward. Well, the question is, if life comes with its difficulties as well as its joys, then how are we to deal with them when they come? How do we take those difficulties without being completely crushed by them? And let’s be honest, for some peoples’ trials, they’re absolutely crushing. And at first glance, James’s responds, it’s strange. Count it all joy. Or is another translation has it, considered a sheer gift? I think those are strange words because our initial response to most trials is to treat them as intruders into our lives, or to resent their presence in our lives. And our most common response is, and I’ve heard this so many times as a minister, “What did I ever do to deserve this?”
But before we go any further, we have to just pause for a moment. And we have to realise that we’re on Holy Ground in what James is saying here, because if we misunderstand what James is saying, rather than being helpful, it could be devastating. Here’s what I mean. I once read I read up a family where a young daughter had died of an illness and it was tragic for the family, but being Christian, they decided that they weren’t going to let grief get in their way of victory of Jesus and counted all joy, says James. So, they were just going to believe that this was Gods’ purpose for their lives. About a year and a half past. And no one spoke of this little girl. And then one day the youngest daughter crawled into bed with her mom and dad said, “I wish we could talk about Mary. I really miss her.” And then the floodgates opened and tears held behind this kind of false wall of Christian bravado came pouring out. It was the beginning of a real healing process for their family, and it was the mother who wrote that story to caution others in making the same mistake that they had made. There was nothing joyful about what happened to their daughter. They were wrong to think they had to pretend that there was. So, what does James mean then that we should respond to our difficulties in life with joy.
Well in one sentence James seems to be so in touch with our lives. You can have all the faith in the world and you still have trials. And then in the very next sentence he seemed so out of touch, count it all joy, like who is he kidding? Is he one of the people who kind of lived a charmed life, you know, so he can speak philosophically about these things? But if James is the brother of Jesus, that’s unlikely. We know how many trials came into that family. We know in the rest of the letter that James shows great empathy for the poor, for the sick, for those in need.
Here’s what I think he means. He’s not speaking about joy as happiness. Happiness is linked to our circumstances. You know, someone receives a new job offer and they say I’m the happiest person in the world. Its happiness linked to circumstances. Joy as James is using it is not linked to circumstances, but to faith. It’s not joy and what has happened, but it’s more like hope, that God can even take these difficulties we encounter and make something good out of them. And if that’s the case, then James is kind of echoing Paul’s words, “we know that all things work together for good for those who love God who are called according to his purpose”. And if there’s any joy to be found, it’s in the understanding that the difficulties of the trials that come into our lives are not the last word. We’re not left to despair. There remains the hope, always the hope that God can transform even the most hopeless of situations.
The reason I think James joins hope with joy, is because he goes on to talk about endurance. And it’s very difficult to endure if you don’t have hope. But if we can find our hope in God, we’re enabled to endure. That’s what faith does. An endurance produces maturity, says James, which is at the heart of his message. But what’s the alternative? Well, the alternative is that we might give up. We would give up on ourselves. We would give up on life. We give up on others. We give up on the world or we even give up on God. And so, James encourages us to stay the course to endure the persevere because God can transform even the most difficult of things.
I think it was Corrie ten Boom, who spent much of World War Two in one of the prison camps, who was asked, how did she do it as a Christian person? How did she manage to maintain any semblance of faith? And she said, I came to believe there was no depth so deep that Gods love was not deeper. There was no depth so deep the Gods’ love was not deeper. We mustn’t cheapen the challenge that James is setting out before us. As one writer puts it this way, he says, “Accept by way of tragedy, we do not become conscious of the titanic struggle and every recurring triumph of creativity over the destroyer of value human life. The past, the failure, and the destruction and upgrading, or dulling the glory that might have been and someday maybe, makes us realise the enormous issues at stake and the magnitude of the struggle involved in human life.”
James is not suggesting this is an easy road to travel. In fact, some trials we simply don’t know what to do. When we reached that point, we’re invited to lay our lives out before God in prayer. James again here is actually echoing Jesus’s words; ask and it will be given to you, search and you will find, knock and the door will be open to you. For everyone who asks receives and everyone who searches, fines, and for everyone who knocks the door will be open. Oh, what kind of faith is James talking about? Well, the faith is that’s required is not some you know heroic faith of some great saint. But it’s really the faith that is expressed in the letter to the Hebrews. Whoever would approach God must believe that God exists and that God rewards those who seek Him. And James point is that the trials did not put it at put us at loggerheads with God. It is not the trials that put us at loggerheads with God. It is thinking that God does not care about our trials that puts us at loggerheads with God. Because just the opposite is true, God will provide the wisdom we need ungrudgingly and generously says James, if we have the humility and the faith to ask for it.
My minister tells the story of a gifted secretary who is going through a difficult time. She had had a stroke. Her husband had gone blind and then he had to be taken to the hospital where everyone thought he would die. And the minister saw her one day in church went over to talk to her and he reassured her that he was praying for her. “Well, what are you asking God to do?” she said. And it somewhat startled the minister, and the minister said, “Well, I’m asking God to help you and strengthen you.” “I appreciate that,” said the lady, “but please pray about one more thing. Pray that I’ll have the wisdom not to waste all of this.” That was a wise woman, and I think James would agree. Life brings its own trials, including pandemics. Count it all joy whenever you face trials of any kind, not because we have the trial, says James, but because in the midst of the trial, we have God. Amen.
Preached by the Rev. Dr. Dale Woods on August 8, 2021
at Richmond Presbyterian Church.