Episcopal Church of the Incarnation
The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 20B]
Jeremiah 11.18-20 Psalm 54 James 3.13-4.3, 7-8a Mark 9.30-37
May the Lord be
in my mind, on my lips, and in my heart,
that I may
rightly and truly proclaim His Holy Word.
Amen.
“Draw near
to God and he will draw near to you” (James 4.8a). I am reminded of this teaching from James
when I think about the visit I had with a prisoner, over here in the Clay
County Jail. Let’s call the prisoner
“Ken”. Ken was not a member of this
parish. I got to know him because he
would stop by the parish office occasionally.
He’d pick up pecans from the rectory yard in season, or he’d stop by and
ask for help with food. Once or twice he
just dropped in to talk.
One night
Ken knocked on my front door, at about 1 in the morning. I woke up a little alarmed, and went to the
door ready for trouble. I saw that it
was Ken, and asked him what was going on.
He was drunk. He said he’d had a
fight with his girlfriend; she’d kicked him out, and he was on the street. I told him that he was over-the-line in
coming to the house, particularly at 1 a.m., and said that if he had a problem
with a fight he had better go to the police.
He left. A couple of days later I
heard he was in jail. I decided to go
see him, knowing that he had no church.
You see, I figured that when Jesus tells us to visit prisoners, He’s not
telling us to just visit the members of our own flocks. So, I walked over to the jail.
The first
thing Ken said when I came in the visiting room was that he wanted to apologize
for pounding on my door in the middle of the night. He had gone to the police, and the police had
arrested him for public drunkenness, and then his girlfriend had pressed charges
for him hitting her (although it was pretty obvious that she hit him too). We talked about his situation, and I made the
point that life would continue to be a series of problems unless and until Ken
decided to change how he was living. I
suggested that he needed to get active in a church, both for spiritual reasons
and to get to know a group of people who could be part of a network of mutual
support. Ken said that he was “alright
with God,” that “he’d given his life to Jesus” when he was fourteen. And so I had to ask, “Then what are you doing
sitting here in jail?”
Now, before
you think I was being abrasive, or that I’m saying that people who get in
trouble with the law are necessarily bad people, let me go back to what James
had to say, “Draw near to God and he will draw near to you”. There is no place in which we cannot find
God. There is no place that is truly
God-forsaken, even in the “belly of the beast,” as prison was famously
described by the writer Jack Abbott, in his 1981 best-seller of that
title. We can find God in all places,
but we have to look for Him.
James
offers practical observations about what is wrong, observations about passions
and desire, covetousness and fighting, asking wrongly (that is, for reasons of
self-interest only). And the wisdom he
offers as a way out of these troubles is that we submit to God (James 4.7);
that we draw near to Him to accept His rule rather than our rule.
All of
James’ letter is essentially a sermon, a sermon about living right. He’s sometimes accused of focusing too much
on works of righteousness, as opposed to justification by faith, but James is
very clear that right living can proceed only from a lively faith, from a heart
in the right place.
So, let’s
get practical, just as I tried to get practical in my subsequent conversation
with Ken. If we are to draw near to God,
how do we do this? I’ll get to the
practicalities in a little bit; practicalities like a life of prayer and of
living God’s word, together in the grace of His sacraments. But first I want to consider that in order to
draw near to anything at all, we need to know what it is, and so we need to
focus on it, as we are reminded in the Collect when we pray, “Grant us, Lord,
not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly ...”
Remember
what Jesus said to Peter in our lesson from the gospel last week? After Jesus had predicted His passion, Peter
took Him aside, essentially saying that Jesus needed to have a message more in
line with peoples’ expectations of what the Messiah would do. And what did Jesus say? “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not on the side of God, but of
men” (Mark 8.33). Not on the side of
God; in other words, focused on the worldly.
Focus. It’s about focus. If we aim for the world, we’ll get the world
only. If we aim for the kingdom of
heaven, we’ll get the world thrown in for free, and find too that the world we
live in is a far better place–regardless of our circumstance–because it will be
a world in which we can experience the nearness of God. So, when James says that we have to draw near
to God, the first thing that we must realize is that God is already near to us,
intimately near. We don’t have to seek
for God; we just have to recognize that He is present by getting out of the way
all of the things that cloud our focus.
And what are these things? They
are the worldly passions and desires that James writes of, the covetousness for
stuff, the self-interest in which we ask for ourselves only. It is, above all, a will which is so
conformed to self that it tries to fit God into its own little tool box, as a
convenient power tool to be brought out when needed.
God is not
a tool for us to use. We are His
creatures, created to do His will.
Jesus, not a creature, but the only Son, begotten of the Father, was
sent to do His Father’s will. When He is
arrested to face death, Jesus tells Peter to put up his sword, pointing out
that at His word “more than twelve legions of angels” can be sent to rescue Him
(Matt. 26.53). But even the Son, despite
His almighty power, does not seek to treat God as a tool to use for His own
will. He submits His will to that of the
Father. He serves His Father’s purpose.
He serves,
and in rebuking the disciples for their dispute over who is the greatest, Jesus
teaches what service means. “If any one
would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all” (Mark 9.35). And then He takes a child, places the child
in their midst, and teaches that whoever receives a child in God’s Name
receives God (Mark 9.37). A child, as in
one who in Jesus’ society has no rights whatsoever, no power, no independence
of will. Jesus may be teaching His
Jewish disciples, but He is teaching them in Gentile territory, at Capernaum in
Galilee. He is teaching them in a Roman
world in which a child is treated as the property of his or her father, and can
be sold into slavery (or even killed) for displeasing his or her worldly
father. And so to receive a child in anyone’s
name is unheard of.
Unheard of
in the world, but not in God’s will.
Just as the Messiah could have come in power and might, with at least
twelve legions of angels, to smite the wicked and cleanse the land, but came
instead as a baby born in a small town in simple circumstances, so too is God’s
will effected by those who rely not on their own might, but on God’s; who act
not for their own interest, but for those whom God has given them to love; who
seek not their own glory, but God’s.
God is not
far. He is near, and to draw near to Him
we need not search, but only focus; only focus by getting out of the way all of
our own self-interest that so clouds our vision. Ken said that he was “alright with God,” and
that he’d “given his life to Jesus”. But
he kept his life from the Lord. He
treated his life as just an extension of his will, not as a
manifestation of God’s will. God was
never far from Ken, but Ken did not look for God; he looked for what Ken
wanted.
Ken’s out
of jail. The last I heard he was on the
Coast and had found work. I hope he’s
OK, and pray that he will feel once again the nearness of God that once
surrounded him in baptism. He won’t have
to look far. He’ll just have to say the
same words that any one of us can say to God:
“Not my will, Lord, but yours.”
Glory be to the
Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost; as it was
in the
beginning is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.