“Can’t We all Just Get Along?”

James 4:1-17

A Sermon preached by the Rev. Douglas M. Donley

September 21, 2003

University Baptist Church

Minneapolis, MN

 

            Can’t we all just get along?  That’s such a plaintive cry.  And yet it almost seems trite these days.  It almost is not part of our consciousness as a nation.  It is not so much about how we get along with others as much as it is about how others get along with us.  Which is kinda like asking how well people follow our orders.  That don’t make friends and influence people.  Well, maybe it influences them, but it doesn’t make them friends and it certainly doesn’t curtail things like terrorism. 

            Maybe James is not talking about international matters.  He’s certainly not talking in 21^st century terms, but maybe he can give us some insight into how we might get along with one another. 

            James, as we may remember from our previous three weeks of sermons, was written to a small, persecuted, exhausted and fragile congregation in Jerusalem.  James, the founder of the church, wrote this letter in order to help the people to keep the faith in a world that told them their faith was foolishness and that their Way was folly.

            We remember that James, in the first chapter of his book called the people to be doers of the word, not hearers only.  He told them to practice what they preached.  We need to hear those words today, too.

            In the second chapter, James told the people that faith without works is dead.  It takes work to be a Christian.  It takes work to not be conformed to this world but transformed by the renewing of our minds.  It takes work to live and love in Christian community.

            In the third chapter, we learned that it is true wisdom, often antithetical to the ways of the world that will save us.  Not envy and selfish ambition, but purity, peace, gentleness, willingness to yield, being full of mercy and good fruits and without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.  That’s the way of God. 

            Now we have James making it plain about how we are to get along with one another and with God.

            After he speaks about judgement of one another, boasting and injustice which abounds, he concludes with this simple phrase: “Anyone who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin.”

            We can get into a heavy theological diatribe about the source, nature and meaning of sin, and I’m not sure that would be very helpful.  For James, sin is simply seeing something that needs to be done and then failing to do it.

            As long as people see what is right and fail to do what is right, this world will continue on its downward spiral.  As James said in chapter 3, even as a small rudder can change the course of a huge ship, so can our work of justice and righteousness change the world.  Margaret Mead once said, “Don’t think that a small group of people cannot change the world, indeed it is the only thing that has changed the world.”

            If the people of God truly acted on their faith, then this world might be different indeed.  But more importantly, to James and to us, we would be different indeed, too.

            For James and the early church, their value and their identity was all wrapped up in how they did the word.  Everything said that they shouldn’t, but they did it anyway.  The last verse of the fourth chapter was written to encourage the people to keep on doing the works of justice, mercy and hope that the Way, the early church was all about.  “Anyone who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it commits sin.”

James starts out the fourth chapter by asking, “these conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from?”  He then answers his own question by asking another question: “Do they not come from your cravings?…”  “You want something and you don’t have it, so you kill….You covet something and can’t attain it, so you engage in disputes and conflicts…”

            It sounds like James is talking with a bunch of selfish brats who only want their own way.  Another way of saying this is the phrase Paul Wellstone often used.  Quoting Jim Hightower, Wellstone said, “We all do better when we all do better.”  Brian Rusche from the Joint Religious Legislative Coalition said at an adult forum here last Spring, that Hightower’s phrase has fallen out of favor and has been replaced with “I do better when I do better.”   James is calling us to resist the temptation to selfishness and focus upon doing good works.  As he says in verse 6 “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”

            James says that all of the conflicts and disputes come from our cravings, our covetousness and our greed.  In eloquent prose, James opens the fourth chapter of his letter by telling us that we need to look at ourselves and our selfish desires if we want to solve the problems of the world.  We need to be honest with ourselves, and we need to watch ourselves when we lapse into covetousness and greed.  Knowing this tendency to slip into selfishness and self-interest, James tells us what we must do.  If we do not do this, we commit sin.  Hear his ten commandments from James 4:7-10.

1.                  Submit yourself to God

2.                  Resist the Devil and the Devil will flee from you.

3.                  Draw near to God and God will draw near to you.

4.                  Cleanse your hands

5.                  Purify your hearts

6.                  Lament

7.                  Mourn

8.                  Weep

9.                  Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to dejection

10.              Humble yourselves before God and God will exalt you.

 

We need to be honest with others and we must be honest with ourselves. 

We need to remember who is in charge. 

We need to examine our motives and check our biases. 

We know what to do, but if we fail to do it, we commit sin.

Having said all of that, let me share this with you:

This past week, 100 pastors met at the American Baptist Assembly Grounds in Green Lake, Wisconsin to begin a three-year Lilly Endowment funded program to promote excellence in congregational leadership.  The pastors represented American Baptist, Southern Baptist, Baptist General Conference, Evangelical Free and United Methodist congregations in the upper Midwest.  For three years, pastors and congregations commit to praying together, working together to have high personal and professional standards.  By the time the program is finished about $10,000 will be spen ton each pastor and congregation.  Up until about a month ago I was to attend this conference.  The leadership, however, felt that our church’s presence as a Welcoming and Affirming congregation would be detrimental to the cohesiveness of the conference.  The leadership of Green Lake withdrew its invitation to me and UBC.  That decision has set off a firestorm of controversy and activism born out of a decision designed to keep only one side of the debate away and not the other.

We have received letters.  We have sent letters.  Jeff Long-Middleton from Massachusetts and the coordinator the Coalition for Baptist Principals is thinking about sending out petitions decrying this action on the grounds that it violates the purposes of Green Lake and certainly our Baptist belief in soul freedom.  I receive three to five phone calls or e-mails a day from people disturbed by this action.  Not only have people written lots of letters (a compilation of the letters is in the church office and update daily).  People have been motivated to boycott Green Lake, have their churches de-fund Green Lake, take Green Lake out of their wills.

It is real tempting to get on my ethical high horse about this.  James helps me to clarify my thinking and my action: “Whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it commits sin.”  And here’s where it gets hard.  We can write the letters.  We can muster all of our righteous indignation.  We can call people on the carpet for executing injustice.  But how we do it is important.  We don’t want to become as judgmental as those whom we oppose.  We need to remember that they are children of God who are victims of untruth, just as we have been.

We need to remember that it is not about Green Lake and whether they are coveting that place that we also covet.  It is about remembering that God is in charge.  It is remembering that James echoes Jesus’ ethic when he says in verse 11, “Do not speak evil against one another…do not judge your neighbor.”  Martin Luther King said that our attitude needs to be checked when we are doing the work of change.  We need to find ways not to demonize our adversaries.  And we are to refrain from violence of the hand the tongue and the heart.    The hand is the easy part.  The tongue is a bit harder.  The heart is harder still, but it is at the center of the possibility of change.

People have asked me, “why do you think Green Lake did this?”  I don’t know why they did it.  I will continue to refrain from the temptation to demonize them or the people in leadership for doing so.  I will call them to account for doing it, but I will do so in Christian love, not in quasi-Christian judgementalism.  Judgmentalism is the way of the world.  It is one of the ways we are stained by the world.   Our faith and our witness needs to be stronger than that.

Think of the times and places where you are tempted toward judgmentalism.

Think of the times when you are tempted to covet something you don’t have and therefore use trickery to get it. 

Think of the source of our disagreements. 

Then think of how Jesus would want you to respond.  You know the right thing to do.  Knowing then right thing and failing to do it is the same thing as committing sin. 

If we can do the right thing interpersonally then we can avoid sin and find new ways of getting along.  And if enough do it on an individual scale, who is to say it can’t be done on a denominational scale, on a national scale, on an international scale?

Can’t we all just get along?  Is a plaintive cry from a victim of violence.  It is a cry for help.  I think we know the answer.