4/26/26 Sermon

Before we come to the reading this morning, I want to tell you where we're going — and where we've been.

Last  week, we been spent time in 1 Peter. We were thinking about hope — what hope actually is, where it comes from, what it can and can't carry. That's a conversation we’re not done with. Hope isn't a thing we finish in a  Sunday.

But this morning I want to set 1 Peter down for a while and pick up another letter. Today we're moving to James. I'm out next week, and when I get back the week after, I want to start really walking through this book with you — slowly, a piece at a time. So today is a kind of front porch. A way of stepping onto the property and looking around before we go inside in a couple of weeks.

I'll tell you why I want us here and why I decided to change course after the bulletin was done this week. 1 Peter and James are closer than they look. They're both letters written to scattered people. 1 Peter calls them exiles. James calls them the twelve tribes scattered outside the land of Israel. Same situation. Same kind of audience. People who aren't where they thought they'd be, trying to figure out how to live faithfully there.

If 1 Peter spends a lot of time on the why of faith — why hope, why endure, why trust — James is going to spend most of his time on the how. How do you actually live this. How do you talk to each other. How do you handle money. How do you treat the poor. How do you pray when you don't know what to ask for. James is the practical letter.

Now, a word about James himself, because it helps to know who's writing.

The James who wrote this is, in all likelihood, not the apostle James — not the son of Zebedee, the one who walked around Galilee with Jesus during the ministry years. This James is somebody else.

This James is Jesus's actual brother. They grew up in the same house. Had the same mother. James watched Jesus grow up — and for a long time, according to the gospels, he didn't believe a word of it. There's a moment in John where Jesus's own brothers tell him he's basically lost his mind. James was probably one of them.

Then something happened. We don't know exactly what. Paul mentions in 1 Corinthians that the risen Jesus appeared to James specifically — that James was on the list of people Jesus came to find after Easter. Whatever happened in that encounter, James ended up as the leader of the church in Jerusalem. The brother who didn't believe became the brother who held it all together for the first generation of Christians. He was killed for his faith around 62 AD.

That's who's writing this letter.

And here's the part I love. When you read James, you're reading somebody who really listened to his older brother. The whole letter is full of echoes of the Sermon on the Mount — about the poor, about judgment, about asking God for what you need, about letting your yes be yes. James internalized what Jesus said. Then he spent the rest of his life passing it on.

What he writes isn't an argument the way Paul writes arguments. It's closer to wisdom literature — closer to Proverbs than to Romans. Short, sharp observations. Pastoral nudges. The kind of thing you imagine an older brother saying to younger siblings he loves and worries about.

Martin Luther famously didn't like this book. He called it an epistle of straw. He thought it didn't talk about grace enough. And the church has had a complicated relationship with James for a long time, partly because James is willing to make us uncomfortable in ways we'd rather not be uncomfortable.

I think that's exactly why we need it.

So let's listen to James. From chapter 1, verses 1 through 18:

From James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.

To the twelve tribes who are scattered outside the land of Israel.

My brothers and sisters, think of the various tests you encounter as occasions for joy. After all, you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance. Let this endurance complete its work so that you may be fully mature, complete, and lacking in nothing. But anyone who needs wisdom should ask God, whose very nature is to give to everyone without a second thought, without keeping score. Wisdom will certainly be given to those who ask. Whoever asks shouldn’t hesitate. They should ask in faith, without doubting. Whoever doubts is like the surf of the sea, tossed and turned by the wind. People like that should never imagine that they will receive anything from the Lord. They are double-minded, unstable in all their ways.

Brothers and sisters who are poor should find satisfaction in their high status. Those who are wealthy should find satisfaction in their low status, because they will die off like wildflowers. The sun rises with its scorching heat and dries up the grass so that its flowers fall and its beauty is lost. Just like that, in the midst of their daily lives, the wealthy will waste away. Those who stand firm during testing are blessed. They are tried and true. They will receive the life God has promised to those who love him as their reward.

No one who is tested should say, “God is tempting me!” This is because God is not tempted by any form of evil, nor does he tempt anyone. Everyone is tempted by their own cravings; they are lured away and enticed by them. Once those cravings conceive, they give birth to sin; and when sin grows up, it gives birth to death.

Don’t be misled, my dear brothers and sisters. Every good gift, every perfect gift, comes from above. These gifts come down from the Father, the creator of the heavenly lights, in whose character there is no change at all. He chose to give us birth by his true word, and here is the result: we are like the first crop from the harvest of everything he created.

Know this, my dear brothers and sisters: everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to grow angry. This is because an angry person doesn’t produce God’s righteousness. Therefore, with humility, set aside all moral filth and the growth of wickedness, and welcome the word planted deep inside you—the very word that is able to save you.

You must be doers of the word and not only hearers who mislead themselves. Those who hear but don’t do the word are like those who look at their faces in a mirror. They look at themselves, walk away, and immediately forget what they were like. But there are those who study the perfect law, the law of freedom, and continue to do it. They don’t listen and then forget, but they put it into practice in their lives. They will be blessed in whatever they do.

If those who claim devotion to God don’t control what they say, they mislead themselves. Their devotion is worthless. True devotion, the kind that is pure and faultless before God the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their difficulties and to keep the world from contaminating us.The letter opens with an address that's easy to skip past. From James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ. To the twelve tribes who are scattered outside the land of Israel. Greetings.

Scattered outside the land. People who aren't where they thought they'd be. People living at some distance from the life they imagined for themselves — geographically, vocationally, relationally, spiritually. People who've had to make a home in circumstances they didn't choose.

And then the very next thing James says — the very next thing — is "think of the various tests you encounter as occasions for joy."

I want you to feel how strange that is. He doesn't say hello and ask about the family. He doesn't ease into it. He writes to people who are already scattered, already worn down, already wondering how they ended up here, and he says: think of this as joy.

If somebody said that to me on a hard day, I might want to throw something at them.

I've been a Christian long enough to know that this is one of those verses we tend to handle quickly. We translate it into something more manageable. We turn it into "look on the bright side" or "everything happens for a reason" or "God won't give you more than you can handle" — which, by the way, isn't in the Bible, and is one of the worst things one human being can say to another. We make James easier than he is. We pat the verse on the head and move on.

But James won't be made easy. He's writing to scattered people, and he's telling them that the very thing wearing them down is the thing in which their faith is being formed. He's telling them that the test is the place. Not the obstacle to the place. The place itself.

That's a hard word.

Now, I'll tell you the truth about myself. When my faith's been tested in my life — and it has more than once — my first move has almost never been to count it joy. My first move's been to look for an exit.

When I was younger, the exits were obvious. Drugs. Alcohol. The kind of habits that turn the volume down on whatever you can't bear to hear. I wasn't running toward sin in some grand theological sense. I was running away from feelings I didn't know what to do with. Self-doubt. The sense of not belonging. The strange emptiness of having gotten what I thought I wanted and finding that it didn't fix anything.

And the substances worked. That's the thing nobody tells you when you're young. They work for about forty-five minutes. And then you wake up the next morning a little further from yourself than you were the day before.

I'm older now, and the exits have gotten more sophisticated. They're more socially acceptable. They look like overwork, or overeating, or the phone, or shopping. The exits change shape, but the impulse stays the same: when something inside me feels unbearable, find something outside of me to make it stop.

James has a word for the person who lives that way. He calls them dipsychos. Two-souled. Double-minded. The person who's always partly somewhere else. The person who asks God for wisdom in one breath and reaches for the exit in the next. James says that person is like the surf of the sea, tossed and turned by the wind. I read that and I think: yeah. That's exactly what it feels like inside.

And I want to be careful here, because there's a version of this sermon that turns into a list of everything wrong with us, and that's not what James is doing. James isn't scolding. He's describing. He's naming, with uncomfortable accuracy, what it's like to try to have faith in a world that offers a thousand cheaper alternatives every hour. He's saying: I see you. The surf is real. The wind is real. You aren't imagining the difficulty of this.

What he's also saying, though, is that the surf isn't the last word. There's a way of being that isn't tossed. And the way you get there isn't by trying harder to feel certain. It's by letting the test itself do its slow work.

This is where, in earlier drafts of this sermon, I would've pulled out my favorite theologian and let him explain everything to you. Paul Tillich, who I've loved since I was twenty years old and barely holding it together, says that faith is ultimate concern — that whatever you're most ultimately concerned with is functionally your god, and if it isn't actually ultimate, you're committing idolatry.

That's a useful idea, and I'll let it stand. But I notice in myself a tendency to reach for a theologian the way I used to reach for other things when scripture gets uncomfortable. Something to take the edge off. Something to make the strangeness manageable. And James isn't asking to be managed. James is asking to be heard.

So let’s try to hear him.

What James seems to be saying — and I want to be careful here, because it's easy to get this wrong — isn't that suffering is good. It's not that God sends us tests to teach us lessons. He'll say later in this same chapter that no one should say "I'm being tested by God," because God doesn't work that way. God is the giver of every good and perfect gift. God is the creator of the heavenly lights, in whose character there's no change at all. James is saying that God isn't the author of what's hard in your life.

But rather, God’s present in what's hard in your life. And the test — the place you didn't choose, the scattering you didn't ask for — is where something's being born in you that couldn't be born any other way. James calls it endurance. He calls it being "fully mature, complete, and lacking in nothing." He's describing a kind of person who's stopped running for the exits. A person who doesn't get tossed when the surf comes.

I'm not that person yet. I want to say that clearly. On most days, I'm still two-souled. But I've lived long enough to know that the times I've grown — the times I've actually become more like the person I want to be — haven't been the easy seasons. They've been the seasons where there was no exit, and I had to stay, and God was somehow there in the staying.

There's one image in this passage I haven't been able to get out of my head all week. It's at the very end of what we read. James says God chose to give us birth by his true word, and here's the result: we are like the first crop from the harvest of everything he created.

The first crop. It's an agricultural image, and an old one. In ancient Israel, the first crop of the harvest was brought to the temple before the rest was even gathered. It was an offering, but it was also a promise. It was a sign that more was coming. The first crop said: the harvest is real. The whole field's going to come in. This is just the beginning.

James is telling these scattered, exhausted people that they're the first crop. That their lives — including the tests, including the doubts, including the long slow work of becoming someone who doesn't grab for the exit — are a sign of a harvest that's still coming in. That God's doing something larger than they can see, and they're the early evidence of it.

I find that almost unbearably hopeful. Not because it solves anything. The tests are still tests. The scattering is still the scattering. But it locates us. It tells us we're not random. We're not lost. We're early.

So here's what I want to leave you with this morning.

If you're in a season of testing — and some of you are; I know some of your stories, and some of you I'm just guessing, but the odds are good — James isn't asking you to feel something you don't feel. He's not asking you to perform joy. He's giving you a different way to locate yourself inside what's happening.

You're not being punished. You aren't being abandoned. The test isn’t evidence God has pulled away from you and being in a hard season doesn’t mean God is further from you than usual.  You're scattered people, and the letter's addressed to you, and the One who wrote it isn't running out of patience.

And the small, daily work of not reaching for the exit — of staying with what's hard, of asking God for wisdom and waiting for it, of letting endurance do its slow work in you — that's not nothing. That's first crop. That's the early evidence of a harvest you can't yet see.

So May you be people who stay.

May you be people whose faith isn't the absence of doubt but the refusal to be ruled by it.

And may you trust that the God who began this work in you is, even now, bringing in the harvest.

Amen.