“A Non-Taxing Harmonization”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Text: James 4:1-10
It was the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations' Charter of Human Rights. It was 1998, and a school in Ottawa invited me to speak to the student body about human rights, particularly as it related to Africa. The event was a splendid. The children were prepared ahead of time, some of whom had written pieces of music and performed for me and the other guests. One particularly articulate young woman had written a most moving poem that she presented to all who were in attendance. Some students had created art and posters. They were well prepared.
I looked forward to it, knowing that I would have an audience already steeped in the subject matter and believing that it would be a great event. And it was… until the end! Just as I was leaving the auditorium, a young boy came running up to me, and he said, “Why do people like you cause so many wars?”
I said, “Moi?”
He repeated, “Why do people like you cause so many wars?”
Well, I had to think for a moment. Did he mean the English? Was that what he was getting at? Did he mean the spectacle of the slightly follicle challenged? Did he think that at one point in my life I had been a soccer hooligan? I had no idea what was on his mind! So, I employed the Socratic method and I asked him what he meant. He said, “My father tells me that religious people cause wars.”
I realized at that moment that there was no point in getting into a debate with the young man. I simply thanked him for his observation and went home. I recognized that in my mind the moment he said that there is a nexus between religion and armed conflict. One would have to be very naïve and certainly no observer of history could think otherwise. I just let it go, but it still troubled me.
Very recently I encountered a similar challenge. A business person (who is not associated with this congregation but decided to phone me) asked for a meeting. The purpose of the meeting was to outline the financial difficulties that he had been encountering over the last 18 months. He was very firm with me, very firm that his expectations had not been met, that he was not as affluent as he was, that he was concerned about providing a lifestyle that he had been used to and planned for his children and his family, and as a religious person he wanted to ask me one question: “Why doesn't God answer my prayers and solve my financial problems?”
I could have been anybody from almost any religion! I think these two questions or statements, the one from the young boy and the other from this business person, are the very questions the clergy hate to receive. They know that they are provocative. They often go right to the heart and the initial sentiment is to become defensive when you give it. But provocative they are! As I read the Book of James and particularly today's passage, I realize that there is something in here for both the young boy and the businessman.
James did not have in mind these questions when he wrote this particular passage, but because he wrote these words they are relevant to the situations I encountered. James, like the Book of Proverbs in the Old Testament, is writing words of wisdom that are practical for one of the earliest Jewish-Christian communities, probably in Jerusalem. James is writing words of guidance. He doesn't have the rhetoric of Paul or the theology of John, but he has some down-to-earth solid advice as to how Christians should live.
He knows that they are being persecuted (probably under Nero, it depends when you date the book). He knows that the earliest Christian community is often divided. He knows that there is a problem with some of them wanting to elevate themselves above others by virtue of their wealth and their prestige. He knows there are conflicts between them and even society at large and he knows that there is this war going on in their own souls between the desires of sin and the grace and the will of God. And so he tells them that war and conflict is the product of the human will and its desire for pleasure and power.
Then he asks one of the most provocative things in the whole of the New Testament when it comes to prayer. It is both a question and a statement: “You do not get what you pray for because you pray with the wrong motive.” I like the King James Version: “Because you ask amiss.” In both of these there is a profound statement about the relationship between the Christian and God, between the person of genuine faith and their Maker, and in this encounter there are some very profound lessons for us.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer said in his great, Letters and Papers from Prison that the Christian faith can't always be reduced to this but there is a sense in which this is important, there is a need for “prayer and righteous action.” This Lent I want to look at this and address these two statements that were brought to me head-on because in some ways they help us all come to terms with the true meaning of prayer.
The way I want to deal with them is by asking two very simple questions. The first is do our prayers harmonize with the will of God? Let me start out by saying first of all that God answers our prayers. In a conversation I had with Dr. Hunnisett this past week when we were dealing with the whole issue of tragedy, Jean made the declaration that God always answers prayers, and I agreed with her. It was a clear, simple statement: “God always answers prayers.”
One of the problems of human beings is that in our mortality we often do not see God's point of view! We rarely, if ever, see God's point of view. We ask but have no idea if, in God's great counsel, the prayers have been answered but they are. Annie Dillard likened this to the great Ring Nebula, which is part of the Constellation of Lyra, and she made the suggestion that our prayers are very much like the relationship we have with the Ring Nebula. The Ring Nebula has been something that has always fascinated me and my publisher put it on the cover of the last book I wrote.
The Ring Nebula was first seen by human beings with the eye in 1054. It was a supernova. It could be seen even during the daylight. But over time we see less and less of the ringed nebula. Yet over all that time, this particular event has been taking place where the nebula has expanded by 70 million miles a day. That has gone on ever since 1054. If you were to take a photograph of it 15 years ago and if you were to take a photograph of it today, it would appear that the nebula had never changed.
Such is the nature of the universe. Such is the power of cosmic forces from what we see with our eyes and our ability to observe. We see nothing happening, yet the activity is enormous and the force of nature so powerful. Dillard said our relationship with prayer is like that. We ask for something and then we do not see the answer taking place. We observe something from our own senses and sinfulness and position and then we do not see it unfold.
That is all very well but how do we know the will of God? We have an Epistemological challenge, how do we know? Well, let's take a test case. Let's deal up front with this issue of religion and war. Let's deal with it!
There was a book written not long ago by Christopher Hitchens, a very articulate, very clever English writer, who is on television a great deal, entitled God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. It is a fascinating book that every Christian should take out of the library and read. It is a fascinating because what he does is place at the foot of religion the great conflicts of humanity. Whether it is Baghdad or Belgrade or Belfast, it matters not for this particular writer. He says that religion attaches itself with racism, exacerbates racial tensions, and when it does so, produces war and conflict. He makes an absolute statement: “God is not great and religion poisons everything.”
In response to this, the former Oxford and now Kings' College, London scholar Alistair McGrath wrote the following fascinating statement: “The twentieth century gave rise to one of the greatest and most distressing paradoxes of human history. That the greatest intolerance and violence of that century were practiced by those who believed that religions caused intolerance and violence.”
Then, he went on to explain that in fact radical atheism and a radical non-believing were actually the cause of many of the great conflicts and the greatest violence. The French Revolution for example, wanted in some ways to push God to the periphery of things and was in fact one of the most violent antecedents to movements that would arise in the latter part of the 19th and early part of the 20th century.
Marxism, which I referred to last week, considered religion the opiate of the people and became one of the most oppressive and violent forms of government when it was institutionalized and led to a totalitarian slaughter of the innocents and the gulags. The national socialists who wanted to replace the authentic God with a person and the deification of a nation carried out the most awful atrocities of genocide in the 20th century. There have been other governments equally non-attached to God and religion, from the Khmer Rouge to the others, who have slaughtered people mercilessly.
The conclusion Alistair McGrath made was this: Very often religion and violence go hand-in-hand, but violence like a virus, can attach itself to many forms of human behaviour whether it is ideology or nationalism or identity or greed or power or religion. As a sin, it attaches itself in such a way that you often cannot distinguish between it and the purpose that lies behind it. This then raises the question.
As Tim Keller rightly says in The Reason For God, when this happens, fanatical people often lose sight of their own faith. They get caught up in the violence and the networks into which they are so easily drawn. What then is the answer? The answer is to go to the very will of God. And where do we find this? We find this in the Son, in Jesus Christ. Listen to the words of Jesus:
Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called the sons of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
If you want to know the will of God, you go to God's Son. If you want the method whereby you seek the will of God, you go to God's Son, who in Gethsemane, when facing death and persecution, who when he had found that he had been betrayed or was to be betrayed and his disciples were sleeping in the background, said those immortal words: “Father, not my will, but they will be done.” This is total submission to the will of God, total harmonization of his prayers with the will of God.
I would suggest to you that the counter to any of the comments made about religion and its excesses and its abuses are to point. Had I known this 10 years ago or thought about it more clearly, to that young boy's question I would point to the words of Jesus of Nazareth himself. That is how we make sure that our prayers are in harmony with the will of God.
The second question that we need to ask is how do our lives harmonize with our prayers? Cicero, the great Stoic philosopher, who lived probably at about the same time as Jesus, once said that we were not created just for ourselves. In a great Latin phrase he outlines the importance of this. For the Stoics at the time would repeat it over and over again: Non nobis solum nati sumus. We were not created ourselves alone.
The Christians went beyond the Stoics and this is important. They not only recognized that we are not made for ourselves and ourselves alone, but to serve God and one another. We are made to live in humility to the one who made us and to one another. That is what James is getting at so clearly. Here he says, “Look, don't be violent, don't be greedy, don't take home the will of the devil! Don't succumb to sin and to the powers and the pleasures of this world, but rather submit yourself to the power of God. Make sure that your lives are in harmony with your prayers.”
There is a wonderful moment in the great movie Fiddler on the Roof, where the father, who is the central figure in the story, is dealing with his five daughters. One of the daughters has decided to marry a man, Perchik, who is a revolutionary. This lovely daughter, Hodel, comes to her father and lets it be known that she wants to be married, but Perchik goes to him first and says, “I want to give you some good news. I am going away. I want to give you some more good news: I am engaged to your daughter.”
The father, you must understand, believed in planned marriages and that he had to give his permission for one of his daughters to be married for in the great traditions of Judaism that is what you did in that time. That was what was expected. For this fly-by-night to come along and say that he is taking his daughter away was not acceptable. Finally, the daughter appeals to the father and says, “We want your blessing, not your permission.”
And the father says, “Why should I give it? You haven't consulted me. You haven't cared what I think. You haven't asked for my opinion. You haven't dealt with the things I have said and the things that I want. Why should I give you my blessing when you haven't asked for my permission and guidance?”
In regard to that movie, I couldn't help but think that we are like that with God and that we want God's blessing and our prayers are mainly about blessing. We want God to bless what we have already ordained. We have asked for certain things, we want certain things, and we want God to deliver them. Is that not what that business person was doing with me? At what point did the business person ask “What can I do for someone else?” Did he say “How should I acknowledge and recognize God?” Did he ever say “Is there anything that I might have done that caused the financial problems that beset me?” Did he say “Should I adjust my expectations to meet the realities of this before me?” No! He came and he wanted God's blessing for the things that he had already determined. And when God didn't give them, the crisis then was with God. How many of us, if we are honest, do the same thing? We don't bring our lives into conformity with our prayers but we want God to conform to our prayers. We want blessing and not guidance and there is disconnect and not harmonization.
There is a story that is told that one of Britain's most famous preachers, Dr. Norwood of the City Temple, decided that he was going to run for political office and become a member of parliament. He said to his congregation that this is what he was going to do: he was going to run for elected office and that was perfectly fine. But, a couple of the ladies from the congregation came up to him and said, “Dr. Norwood, we know that you are running in the election and that you are going to be a Liberal candidate and we want you to know that we are praying for you to be successful, that you will win, but we also want you to know that we won't be voting for you because we've always voted Conservative.” True story!
Isn't that a problem? Isn't there a problem when your prayers want one thing, but your lives do something entirely different? Is it not the call of those who are sincere to bring their lives into harmony with their prayers? That is the clear message in James, “You do not get what you ask for because you ask amiss.”
I understand how hard it is to pray for things. James understood it. Jesus certainly understood it. He knew the cost, he knew how difficult it is to seek the will of God. There is nothing easy or shallow or glib about this. This is hard. But in that struggle there is the need for us to take a moment and analyze what we are asking for, to analyze our own motives, to be humble before the presence of God.
I love the last words of the passage that was read this morning. It was the following, “Humble thyself in the sight of the Lord, and he will lift you up.” That is the great harmonization of our will with God's. Amen.