The Fourth Sunday after Easter (May 15, 2022)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

In our society, we have lost any sense of beginning and end. If you know where something starts, you know where it ends. One of the problems with the modern person is that we’re told there is no coherent beginning and therefore no purpose for our lives. If our lives our inherently meaningless, then it’s up to us to make our own meaning. This is quite the wager the modern person is willing to make: if our life has no coherent beginning or end, then sure, we are free to make our own meaning. But what if there’s something outside of us, outside our world, that has placed an inherent trajectory in us? If that’s true, then making our own meaning really poses a problem, namely we risk losing what we were designed for. This is at the heart of our reading from James this morning.

It is fortuitous the way the Church calendar fell this year because two Sundays ago, we celebrated the Feast of St. Philip and St. James and our reading was James 1:1-16 which treated resisting temptation and exhorted us to follow the Gospel even to our deaths. Today’s reading picks up where that reading two weeks ago left off, covering James 1:17-21. Here, James continues to talk about the Christian life. I’m going to suggest, however, that to understand what he’s getting at most clearly, we need to read the reading backwards. But before we do, I want to ask a question: what is the purpose of being a Christian? If it’s true that God is our Creator and the point of our existence, what can we say is the primary objective or main purpose of being a Christian?

There are a lot of bad ways to answer that question. Some people will say they’re Christians because they see religion as an effective way to perpetuate their socio-political agenda, but this is a thinly veiled form of political idolatry. Others might say they’re Christians because the Church is a good social club to join. The problem with the is that you can go to better social clubs and that’s not what we’re about. Fellowship is an outworking of our mission as the Church but that means being something more than being a member of the Moose Lodge or American Legion. Still, others might say the purpose of being Christian is to get out of hell. It’s true that to be a Christian is to be saved. But is the purpose of being a Christian just fire insurance? I think it’s about something deeper than that.

The reason to believe, the purpose of being a Christian, was summarized by the fourth-century Christian St. Athanasius: “God became man that man might become God.” The point is not that we become some sort of demigods like you might find in Mormonism or that we get absorbed into the divine and cease to exist like in some Eastern religions. But rather, the point is that our human nature was united to God in Christ and we who are baptized are transferred into Christ and inherit eternal life as a result (which speaks not only to quantity of life but also quality — it’s not just about how long we live, but what kind of life we live). The Christian life, then, is about theosis, becoming like God. There’s a part of the liturgy that speaks to this. While the priest is setting up the Altar, he pours the wine into the chalice and then blesses the cruet of water and pours it into the chalice. The water is reminiscent of baptism, humanity seeking God, and the wine of course is the Blood of Christ, the price God pays to redeem us. So as he pours the water and wine together, the priest prays quietly, “By the mingling of this water and this wine, may we come to share in the divinity of he who humbled himself to share our humanity.” We are brought into Christ, and, in being in him, we become like him through the work of the Holy Spirit. Think about metal being put into a fire. When the metal is put into the furnace what happens to it? It heats up, it begins to glow. It doesn’t become the fire but it burns hot and is transformed by the fire. Similarly, God’s holiness is a fire and when we are put in that furnace, we begin to glow, to be transfigured by his holiness. The point is this: Christianity is about following and becoming like God.

This process of theosis is like tending a garden. What’s the first step when you want to plant a new garden? Remove the weeds, bramble, and other junk so that you can clear the land. Once the land is cleared, then you sow seed and nurture plants. The soul is like a Garden: we’re clearing it of the weeds and brambles of sin and we’re planting and tending to virtue. So the first step is setting aside anger, filthiness, and, as the King James says, “the superfluity of naughtiness” (The NRSV uses the gardening imagery by calling this “rank growth of wickedness.” The exhortation against anger is important for us in outrage culture; while there are some biblical precedents for a kind of righteous anger, it more often than not frustrates our pursuit of holiness. Anger is a sign of a diseased mind that lacks control. Further, we’re told to put away filthiness, the lusts of our flesh that weight our souls down and make it disordered. So we are to cut back the rank growth of wickedness and turn away from evil. Turning away from evil means turning towards something else; what should we turn towards? “The meekness of the engrafted word, which is able to save our souls.”

But what does that look like practically? For James, it’s threefold: being quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger. Being quick to listen means more than just hearing. It means actually acknowledging that the other person has something to say. it’s an exercise in humility because you are acknowledging that the other person isn’t someone to be dominated but to be heard. And of course, to listen requires us to be quiet. We don’t always have to speak. And, of course, James tells us to be slow to anger because the vision is self-mastery which frees us to do what God wants. So James wants us to become good by ridding ourselves of anger, filthiness, and malice so that we can embrace a posture that is quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to be angry. And James gives us these instructions because of who we are.

We are those who he “begot with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.” The Church is the vanguard and agent whereby God brings about his new creation and brings life to a dying world. And we are effective agents and ambassadors precisely because of what God has done in us - we were dead in our trespasses but are now raised to walk in newness of life. And what does this tell us about God? James said, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” God is goodness itself and he can’t change who he is. He doesn’t change based on what we do, which is why we can say that his “property is always to have mercy.” There’s a great comfort in that: God doesn’t change, even when we do all the horrible things that we do. This isn’t license, of course, but it serves as an impetus for us; it’s why human anger is so ungodly for James: it makes us unstable and determined by our circumstances, whereas God isn’t controlled by circumstances and so when we are hidden in him who doesn’t change, shifting and evolving circumstances don’t dictate our responses. James urges us to be anchored in what is more stable: the unchanging nature of God. Circumstances always change but God and his life-giving Word don’t. Underneath it all, I think James is calling us to an active faith that fully trusts God and cares for others despite evolving circumstances. God is faithful and our lives should reflect the fact not only that we understand this but also that we are becoming more like him.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.