Proper 20: September 19, 2021
The Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost
Year B: Proverbs 31:10-31; Psalm 1; James 3:13-4:3; Mark 9:30-37
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Let’s consider again the collect for today from The Book of Common Prayer.
“Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.[1]
Let us not be anxious about earthly things. Not exactly easy sometimes, especially when we have so much happening in the world around us and in our own lives.
On the positive side of, On the positive side, the side of “things heavenly,” there is what James calls the “wisdom from above [which] is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.”[2] And you know if there’s a positive, there’s a negative – on the negative side, the side of “things that are passing away,” there is “wisdom [which] does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, [and] devilish.”[3]
And there is, of course, the age-old question – how do we learn wisdom and how do we learn to choose one sort over the other?
One way, of course, is from our elders. We learn by watching them, by listening to them, by doing what they do. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes not so good, but as the old saying goes, apples don’t fall far from the tree. For most of us, the ways we do things, the ways we make choices and decisions, the ways we react the world around us are pretty much the same ways our parents or grandparents did. I know I’m not alone in having those moments when I hear myself saying something and then think, “O heavens! When did I turn into my mother (or sometimes into my father)?”
But the world changes rapidly and we don’t always find ourselves in situations where the “wisdom of the elders” can be used. We face new contexts and different challenges; we deal with a reality that they never encountered.
My parents and grandparents were all born in a span of 24 years in the first third of the 20th century. Victrolas ruled before the 1920s. Radio was king in the 30s. Electric typewriters and digital adding machines were yet to come to be.
My grandmother was the last of them to leave us and that was in 2002, less than twenty years ago. The iPhone had not yet come on the market. Look what has happened in the years since in the world of business and personal communications in that same time, cell phones, smartphones, the internet, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and all the rest. We ostensibly live in an age of information.
If you carry an iPhone or some other “smartphone”, that device has computational power 1500 times greater than any one of the four navigational computers onboard the Apollo spacecraft. Have you ever seen those spacecraft at Kennedy Space Center? When I saw it, I said it looked like we sent up our astronauts in aluminum foil.
But the world has changed and continues to change dramatically in just the span of our lives, and the wisdom of the early 20th Century is often woefully inadequate in dealing with the 21st Century.
Sometimes we humans can’t deal with change, particularly when it comes at us rapidly as it has in these past several decades. Our reaction is often to try to lock things down, to try to stop the change. But we can’t really do that; the world changes anyway.
But the wisdom of God – that is ever present.
Wisdom, the right kind of wisdom, the “wisdom from above”[4] as James calls it, recognizes that. It is, he says, “willing to yield.”[5] Earlier in his letter, in fact in its very first words, James writes, “My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance.”[6] For James, it is a simple thing: “Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.”[7]
James understands, and he wants his readers, you and me, to understand that nothing is ever locked down, that change can never be stopped, it can only be embraced; for James, this is as true for changes in ourselves as it is for changes in the world. In this letter, James is writing to the whole church. Unlike Paul’s letters which were written to particular congregations to solve particular problems, James’s letter is written to all Christians in every place at every time. Therefore, it is addressed to people who are in different and widely differing circumstances, to Christians who are at different stages of spiritual maturity. But the author is able to address each of us, no matter where along the journey we may be.
Conversion to Christ is not a one-time thing; it is an ongoing, life-long process. Unlike Paul, we usually aren’t brought suddenly in a blinding instance from darkness fully into the light so that everything before some point of conversion is left behind and all ambiguity removed. It just doesn’t work that way. Conversion is an ongoing process. Every day we have to leave behind our anxieties about earthly things, and learn again to love things heavenly; every day we have to turn away from the wisdom from below, from envy and selfish ambition, from disorder and wickedness, toward the wisdom from above, toward peaceableness and gentleness, toward simplicity and mercy.
In today’s Gospel lesson from Mark, when the disciples are arguing amongst themselves about envy and ambition, Jesus took a little child and put her in their midst; Jesus took the child in his arms and said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”[8]
As children, we look to our elders to learn wisdom; as children of God, we look to God to learn the wisdom from above. In that way, we receive the kingdom of God; we enter the kingdom of heaven.
It’s often abundantly clear that knowledge or information does not produce wisdom. The definition of wisdom in our world can be plain wrong. Literally. When we consider how repeatedly we hear ruthlessness, manipulation, and cheating being extolled as being “smart” or “clever,” we have to remember that wisdom, especially the wisdom of God that we have been urged to seek in our readings for the past several weeks, means something else entirely.
Just like our readings from Psalm 1 and James, Jesus points out that the wisdom of God, and the way it orders our lives, turns worldly wisdom upside down.
The way of wisdom, the way of welcome into God’s household, is also the way of mercy, grace, and above all, love.
In our world today, the search for spiritual answers, the search for religious certainty, the attempt to lock things down often does more to divide than it does to unite. It is a quest governed more by the wisdom from below than by the wisdom from above. The wisdom from above does not try to lock down an unchangeable certainty, but rather turns daily to God with childlike simplicity to ask, “What is your gift for me today?”
[1] Book of Common Prayer, p. 234
[2] James 3:17, New Revised Standard Version (“NRSV”)
[3] James 3:15, NRSV
[4] James 3:17, NRSV
[5] Ibid.
[6] James 1:2-3, NRSV
[7] James 4:10, NRSV
[8] Mark 9:37
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