The Joy of Winning

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 09.20.2015

Scripture Lesson:  James 3:13-4:3; 7-8a

Listen to Sermon Audio Here:

It’s a funny thing, and I’m not quite sure when it happened, but at some point in my life, I entirely stopped watching television.

Maybe it was the screen overload, the endless stream of data that pours from my various screeny objects.  As I’ve adjusted to watching whatever I want, whenever I want it, almost nothing contemporary ever appeals to me.  I watch shows, sure, but years after they’ve come out, and on my own time.

But nothing drove me away from the medium more completely and effectively than the rise of the reality show.  I watched those shows for a while, Project Runway and America’s next top model, and came to hate reality television.  The schtick is the same, no matter what the venue, no matter what the theme.  You get a bunch of people together, you force them to compete, and you manufacture one absurd drama after another to maintain tension.

It’s one episode after another of pointless struggle and one-ups-manship, at the end of which someone’s declared the winner.  They’ve won a spouse, or been declared a top model, or a fashion designer, or the next pop star.  They’ve made the best cake out of meringue, pickles, and possum ganache.  They’ve the sharpest sword, or been given a lifeline for their struggling startup from a circle of venture capitalists, whatever it is that the panel of celebrity judges has deemed to be the best.

What matters is that the people in power have judged that they’ve won, and everyone else has lost.

It’s the spirit of it, the endless ferocious ambition of it, the hungry, borderline desperate feeling you often get from these souls who are pitched into conflict with one another.  Oh, if I win, I’ll finally be validated.  If I get this prize, my victory will be complete!

The ethic it teaches is a strange one.  It’s the core teaching of the Sith.  The goal is to be the one with the power, to claw your way to the top, and to warily watch your apprentice, who’s waiting in the wings with their thumb on the switch of their lightsaber.  It’s the moral at the heart of that wildly silly 1980s movie Highlander -  there can be only one.

The winner gets everything.  Everyone else doesn’t really matter.  It is the rule of the lion’s share.

But this, this is not what life is like.  Sports, sure.  Games, sure.  There is something healthy and vibrant about our striving together, about our making each other stronger by testing ourselves against one another.  When it is play, when it is sport, it’s a good thing.

But when it isn’t sport, when it’s something that defines our reality, then it’s completely different.  We’d have a word for a family in which every family member tried to “win” over all the others.  It’d be “dysfunctional.”  A business where that was true would tear itself to pieces.  And a society, set in an endless adversarial struggle?  It’d be doomed.  “A house divided against itself will fall,” as an old friend of mine once said.

Life does not have to be this way.  In healthy communities, there is not just a single winner, the one strongest and mightiest, to whom go all the spoils.  That’s not the ethic in families, not the way we think of those that we love.  It’s certainly not the way churches are meant to think of those who share in the life of faith together

But while that basic human striving and aspiring can be deeply positive and life affirming, it can also become deeply negative.   That’s the warning James has to bring in this morning’s reading.

From this totally 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 little section, 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.   

Following that law produces in us what the Bible describes as a “gentleness born of 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 ways of getting in the world.   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 passion for one’s own power, one’s own success, in the worst possible way.  It’s just not about wanting to make things better, but wanting only your own success 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.

So the problem, James tells us, is that we are driven by a passionate desire to overcome others, from which we will reap material rewards and pleasures.

And that drive, that desire, goes well beyond the petty scripted machinations of reality television. Ambition for material gain folds itself, insidiously, carefully, into our lives together, into our economy, our oikonomia--which, in the Greek, just means “house-rules.”

It can impact how we view one another, how we act and think and speak together.  This is true in every field of endeavor, in every action, in every deed.  It whispers in our ears, yearning for the failure of others, subtly encouraging us to seek our own power.  We argue among ourselves about who is the greatest, like those embarrassed disciples, called out by Jesus.

That is true, for me, as a pastor.  It is true, for me, as a writer.  I feel that hum in my life, that whisper in my ear, because you cannot be in this world and not hear it.

I feel that bright, cold joy, that false, bitter joy, rising up in myself.  

And so I hear James, warning me.  I fall silent, embarrassed before Jesus at my zeal for my own pleasure, bought at the price of others.

As we should, when we feel that spirit rising up in us.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.