Be doers of the word

Proper 17 Year B
September 2, 2017

    I remember the first biography I read in elementary school; it was the biography of Arthur Ashe, the tennis player.  I was fascinated by this amazing man who is still the only African American man to win the US open and Wimbledon. He used his fame to help African American youth by teaching tennis clinics in the inner city. I continued to try and follow Ashe’s life throughout the years; even when his own health became an issue, he was a spokesman for the American Heart Association.  Later when he learned he had contracted HIV/AIDS from a blood transfusion, he was incredibly active until his death, educating people about this disease, creating the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the defeat of AIDS. He was also politically active, protesting about the treatment of Haitian refugees. I admired him greatly. He was one of those amazing people that managed to overcome obstacles and use even a deadly illness for the good of others.

    I loved reading biographies when I was in school.  I loved finding out about people and the things they accomplished.  I still enjoy a really good historical novel for the same reason; I find it fascinating to think about what might have motivated people to act in certain ways.  It’s obviously not entirely easy to understand motives and reasons… but that’s what makes it interesting. But scripture is a different story, isn't it? It's not like reading a novel or biography simply because we are interested in the person or subject… Scripture certainly helps us to learn about God and about the life of Jesus;. But for us scripture is a living story, where we find our own connections to what we hear and read.  And hopefully, no matter how often we hear or read parts of scripture, we still find something new and different to inspire us.

    We hear a great deal this morning about the law, and how important it is for those who want to live a Godly life, to follow God’s law.  The letter of James even calls it the law of liberty. Kind of funny to think about following the law as a path to liberty, isn’t it? And yet, when we have a path before us that helps us to live our lives according to God’s desires, rather than ours, there is a sense of freedom that I think can be experiences by not having to think about some of the choices in front of us; it’s kind of like the person who has been sober for a while, who might think the occasional drink sounds good; yet he knows, that if he continues to remain sober, he will not fall victim to his addiction that keeps him imprisoned in so many ways…

    “...be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like. But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act-they will be blessed in their doing.”  

    Doers of the word… As I thought about this part of the letter of James this week, I had  few thoughts… My first, rather silly thought, was that whoever coined the term “actions speak louder than words” must have paid close attention to this part of scripture; I discovered later in the week, that the term was first used in the U.S. by Abraham Lincoln, whose biography was the second one I read in elementary school.  I knew I liked him! My second thought had to do with being doers of the word, and the word being the perfect law, and I began to wonder… So often, in the New Testament when we talk about the word, we are speaking of the Word as the second member of the Trinity, Jesus the Son. I think that James is speaking of the law, the Torah given by God to God’s people.  For us, though, Jesus is the embodiment and the new translation of the law. In Jesus, the law becomes a living being that responds to God’s people and God’s world, as the law reinterpretted. In Jesus, the disciples and you and I are given not just someone to admire and copy, but we are given the one whose adherence to the law is perfect… We can certainly read all day long about what we are supposed to do, right?  But written words by themselves, while important don’t tend to make the kind of impression that knowing a person or knowing a person’s actions tend to make. It comes down to relationship, I think. If you and I have a relationship with Jesus, if we participate in the sacraments of the church where we receive God’s grace, if we read scripture and truly engage the stories we find there, I think we begin to see and act differently.  If we believe that the Holy Spirit lives in us through our baptism, and if we believe, as we have heard for many weeks now that Jesus is the living bread that came down from heaven, then, we cannot help but be changed. We no longer sit by as observers in God’s world, but because the Spirit moves and prays within us, we long to be like Jesus, we long to be those who reflect his law in the world… the law of liberty lives in us and we are not imprisoned by the death dealing desires of the world… but rather are moved to be in relationship with all of those whom God loves… our hearts become filled with the desire to do the things that Jesus does, things that look like the perfect law that walked on the earth.

    May we be always be doers of the law, no matter how difficult that may be.  May we never deceive ourselves into thinking that God isn’t calling us to move beyond ourselves into the world that God has created… may we always know that God’s law is the law of love that moves us to live God’s law in all that we do.