Poolesville Presbyterian Church
09.23.12; Rev. David Williams
I’m a terrible, terrible Apple fanboy. I’m really just not good at it at all.
This last week, for instance, I think I was supposed to be excited about replacing my iPhone 4 with the long anticipated iPhone 5. The Williams household runs on iOS. We have an iMac, and a Macbook Air, and an iPad, and iPhones for the adults and iPod Touches for the kids. If you’re one of those lucky souls who bought Apple stock ten years ago, well, you’re welcome. In a closet in my study is a bag filled with a tangle of old outdated iPod and Apple connectors and dongles and widgets and doodads, all of which were once essential and now serve no purpose at all. We’re consistent consumer of Apple products, and as such I suppose we should be joining the scores of other Apple fanboys and girls in long lines outside of Apple stores.
But as much as I use my phone, I just don’t feel any compulsion to replace it so long as it’s still working. It already does a million things that are cool, but that I don’t really need it for in the first place. Do I really need to read scripture from it? No. Do I even remember how to use a map? I’m not sure.
I want to be able to talk to people with it, not necessarily talk to it. I don’t need it to do anything more than it does now. So I’ll keep mine as long as it works.
I tend to be that way with things. Like, say, shoes. I’ve recently come to the decision that I might need a new pair of schlumping shoes. Schlumping shoes are those shoes you keep around for mowing and gardening and painting and walking the dog and puttering about. I tend to wear mine until they have fallen apart, or, to be entirely honest, until well after they’ve fallen apart. This last pair I wore pretty much every day around the house for two years, and as the sole gradually detached from the upper, I just reached for the epoxy. And then, a few months later, I did it again. And then again.
Eventually, though, that stopped working, and as it’s hard to walk the dog with the soles of your shoes slapping against the fronts of your feet like backwards flipflops, I decided it was finally time to buy a new pair. Or I had, until I looked at the previous pair of schlumping shoes, and realized they still might have six months of life in them.
That’s just no way to run an economy.
Our entire consumer culture rests on the premise that we should never ever be satisfied with what we have. We are supposed to be relentlessly ambitious, always seeking to have more and to be more and to do more. On some levels, that serves us well. Being deeply committed to deepening both the skills that inform our work tends to strengthen us personally and make us better at caring for others. Recognizing that we can always grow as human beings is a vital part of our existence, and a central purpose of faith.
But while that basic human striving and aspiring can be deeply positive and life affirming, it can also become misdirected and deeply negative. That is the essence of the wisdom James has to teach in this morning’s reading.
From this eminently practical book over the past several weeks, we’ve heard about how we need to let our faith govern our actions, and how we need to let grace govern our speech. But from this portion, we hear from James that even those who received and engaged with his teachings have managed to muck things up. They were still human, after all, so I suppose that’s not much of a surprise.
What James recognizes and asks his hearers to recognize is that there are some strivings and yearnings that do not build us up and do not strengthen the bonds of love and grace that define community. James has told us what works over the last several weeks. An ambition that is founded in what James calls alternately the “Royal Law” or the “Law of Liberty” will produce the good. That law is nothing less than loving neighbor as yourself, and what it produces in us can be found in verse 13 of chapter 3.
Letting that law govern our every action produces in us what the New Revised Standard Version translates as a “gentleness born of wisdom,” and the New International Version presents as “the humility that comes from wisdom.” What is being described there is not knowing something. It’s not data, but a state of being we should strive for. It’s a “wise kindness.”
In opposition to that stand other forms of wisdom, other approaches to existence that drive human beings to living in ways that will make us stressed, hateful, and unhappy. James identifies two particular ways of thinking that create “wickedness of every kind.”
The first is what is translated for us as “bitter envy and selfish ambition.” The English spin on this seems to warn us of being ruled by jealousy, where we let our lives be defined by our resentment towards the guy with the nicer smartphone and larger car. James gets to that, but not here.
The key word here is the world that we hear as envy, which is zelon, the word that gives us “zeal.” Understood in context, it’s social. It’s political. It’s sociopolitical. It’s passion for partisanship, in the worst possible way. It’s just not about wanting to make things better, but hating what the other guy believes and orienting ourselves to defeating them.
If our ambition is driven by that desire to defeat the other, James says, it will invariably mess things up. We lose sight of truth. We lose sight of grace. Things fall apart. Just one look at our political system is all the evidence you need for the truth of that.
The second comes from a word that is repeated several times in the Greek, but is hidden from us in the process of translation. In chapter four verse one, the source of conflict is described as coming from our “cravings.” In chapter four verse three, we hear that we misdirect our ambitions by using them to feed our “pleasures.” Both the word craving and the word pleasure are the same word in Greek, hedonyn, a word which gives us the term hedonism.
If the thing we strive for is our own pleasure, and that governs how we direct our lives, then James tells us that this approach to life will invariably drive us into conflict and mess.
Honestly, this leaves us a little bit stuck. To be wise and have wise ambition, James has just told us, you need to set aside the wisdom that tends to govern the life politic. Defeating your opponent and proving yourself superior just can’t be why you strive. If it is, then the thing that is governing your life may be wise, but it leaves you in perpetual struggle, always looking for a reason to oppose
Even more challenging is his warning that our striving can’t be ruled by desire for our own pleasure. That flies completely in the face of everything that streams at us from the marketplace. It is the message of every ad, every banner, every clickable teaser on the side of our Facebook page. We are told, consistently and relentlessly, that our happiness and our pleasure is just one product or purchase away. So much of our lives can be turned towards that, as we let ourselves imagine that we will find happiness and our purpose in life fulfilled at the next firmware upgrade or in the next model year, in a larger home or in a faster processor.
That approach to life can create in us a dark pragmatism, as we turn our dreams and our aspirations and our energies towards feeding those hungers in us. Our thoughts and our creativity and our efforts to grow into that dark, consuming self focus completely on what comes next, and we find ourselves continually unhappy, always discontent, as our hunger for personal pleasure displaces from one pleasure to the next, always seeking and striving to be fed.
And no, the iPhone 8’s direct neural interface will be cool, but it won’t solve that problem.
Not allowing ourselves to be guided by power and product is not easy. But James reminds us that as we walk the Way Christ taught, it is essential. Turning our ambitions and our hopes away from those false guides, and back towards the radically countercultural teachings of Christ, that’s what gets us to that place where we are purely peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and true to our best self.
Let that be our best hope and ambition, for you and for me, AMEN.
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