The Everchanging World and the Unchanging God

James 1:17-27 •

Psalm 15 •

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Oftentimes in life, it can feel like we stand on shaky ground. When we don’t know what is going to happen, when we are feeling lonely, when we have to make a decision, when we don’t have control, it feels like at any moment the ground might fall away from under our feet. It can even feel like we are falling. This shouldn’t be surprising because we live in an ever-changing world. We aren’t what we were, neither is this community or our city or this country - let alone nature itself. If we are standing on something, depending on something or someone it might literally not be there tomorrow. If this is what we try to rest in it will make us like the things we lean on: undependable, reactionary, afraid, worried, fickle, and more. We need to find something else to rest in, to depend on, so that we too might become dependable. The God we meet in Jesus Christ and that is present in the Holy Spirit is the only one we can depend on. When we do, that changes everything. It leads us to live lives like our dependable God.

Today, I want to look at 1) What it means for God to be invariable,

2) How we depend on him,

3) Finally, how this calls us to act out his love in courageous ways.

Our reading from James’ letter starts with the fact that God is the giver of all perfect gifts and the source of all generousness. This is an important starting place, because it tells us the character of God and an essential part of God’s work. It tells us that if we rest in God, we are resting in someone that is generous and perfect in His giving. We can trust in His gifts and His care. It also gives us a starting place of where to meet him; if we can’t perceive him, or understand him, we can also watch for him at work using the people around us - some people will live out God’s generous giving, even if it is only for a moment. God is already consistently giving, but we can encounter him easily by seeing where He is inspiring others to live out the same.

Next, James tells us that there is no variableness or shadow of change when it comes to God. God is consistent in his generousness and what’s more his gifts are never less than perfect. That is a huge claim. I have been at fault for not always believing this. When I encounter something I think is bad, I have limited God and say things like God is doing the best with what we have given him. Or in my mind, I have turned something into less than perfect, even less than good, because I didn’t trust God enough - to believe that something hard or sad could actually be good. I don’t know for sure if we can say that everything in this world, every situation or encounter is a gift from God, but what I can say is that in every situation or encounter God will give you a perfect and generous gift, if we are willing to perceive, receive and incorporate it. Let me repeat that. I don’t know if every situation is a gift from God, but I do know that in every situation God is offering a good and perfect gift. I know there are numerous things you are going through right now. There is death, grief, aging, sickness, loss of jobs, housing, and more. All of these are not good unto themselves, but can we trust God in his invariableness to give us his perfect and generous gifts in these things we don’t like? Can we watch for how God is working in the worst situations, follow, and act on his generousness?

This is how we show our faith and how we rest in the consistent God. We trust, we watch, we follow and we act. Depending on anything means that it becomes the primary thing we trust in and one of the primary things that decides our actions. In this definition, you can understand why depending on this world can lead us to both inaction and poor action. If we trust something in the world, even something as good as family or our sense of right and wrong and yet that thing is fickle and changing we will often try to protect it and do the wrong action or it will lead us to stay where we are to hold onto what we have for as long as we can. So we should depend on God to find something trustworthy that guides us to courageous right acts.

Now, I recognize that trusting in God is not usually a simple one-and-done thing, it is a commitment and that trust is a spectrum that we are always trying to grow in. It’s not impossible, but it can be hard to trust in God completely from the beginning. That means that most of us do it in stages. We act in trust and as we do we see that God is trustworthy, so we know we can trust him more. The hard part of this is that growing in trust continually challenges us to trust him beyond what we know, see, or understand. If we want to grow in this trust, at any moment we will come up against something, and we won’t know how God will respond, but if we act in trust we will see that God is trustworthy and so grow in faith. In this, our lives are changed as we experience and relate to the world and God in a new way. At any moment, we might decide God isn’t trustworthy and not lean on him (though this is always unwise). When we lean on something else we will see other things fall short, or only measure up for a time. When that happens we should say I shouldn’t have depended on that. God proves himself the only faithful one, yet we too often put that aside because something is right beside us, or gives us more control for a moment - even though our experience and knowledge tells us otherwise.

Okay, so now this brings us to how this makes us encounter and live in the world. We already looked at how we are continually meant to grow in trust and faith by acting out of a trust that will be uncomfortable. If we were really to continually trust God more and more in this way, our relationships with wealth, control, and even safety would drastically change, because we would depend on them less and less. We wouldn’t throw these things away willy-nilly, but in trust we would freely give our wealth, control and safety over to God, knowing that he might literally take them away from us. Knowing the whole time that we have something more trustworthy in God.

This trust that leads to open hands is what leads James to write about how listening, action, service, giving, etc. are all a natural outpouring of our faith. When we put our faith in God and are baptized, we are made new. That trust and dependence on God makes us his children - Jesus and the Holy Spirit entered into humanity to make this more than just a spiritual renewal. We are remade to be like Jesus and so we become like our father - a giver of generous and perfect gifts.

When we are with others, we won’t need to speak as much because we won’t depend on control, we will trust in God. We will understand that it is a more generous gift to listen, understand and only then speak out of that. So, we would listen way more than we speak. We also wouldn’t respond in anger because we trust not in our ability to force some situation to be right, but we trust more in God’s work and presence. So, we are called to listen more in every situation, but ultimately we are meant to be listening for what God is saying in that situation. Again, this is about where our primary dependence lies. This is an area I am still working on. I try to be a good listener, but I still do speak a lot. I am also very empathetic. It has been very easy for me to go with what others are feeling, their thinking, and their decisions. This means I am listening well to them, but I might not be listening well to God. So, the challenge for me is how do I hear everything someone is saying with understanding and then speak God into that situation - and at the same time making sure that it isn’t just my will or my feelings guiding the words. Sometimes, I’m not courageous enough to speak God’s guidance either, and for all of that I need to grow in trusting God.

Listening before generosity makes sense, otherwise, you probably wouldn’t know what someone needs. This generosity needs to start with listening because ultimately the only way we can be truly generous in good ways like God is to listen to where he is going to act or wants us to act. It might not actually be generous or good for us to make room for every little thing. It might not be generous or good for us to fill someone’s desire or need. It might not be generous or good for us to do what we think is right, so we need to take in God’s word and listen for him. With humility to God’s word we can take it in and then live it out.

James has a lot more to say about how we are called to live out this faith in tangible physical ways. We could talk about how we use our money, our homes, our bodies, our time, energy, faith, voices, relationships, and everything in light of this trust and purpose to be like our generous and perfect Father. Every encounter is an opportunity and a test to see how we will live out that faith and trust in God.

We can’t look at all of that but to close I want to look at the last verse. James ends our passage today by saying that we are called to care for orphans and widows in their distress and to be unstained by the world. These are two important ways that we live out our faith. 1) The orphans and widows of Israel’s days are those people who we can see are alone, who don’t have support or people who will lift them. There are a lot of versions of this in our world today and we should be asking ourselves, how do I care for these people who are alone or unsupported? How do we live out the generosity we have seen in God? Giving the Good, perfect and generous gifts are rarely comfortable, but they are beautiful acts of faith that God will show himself faithful in. Pray to see how God is leading you.

2) We are meant to keep ourselves unstained by the world. This means that we enter in, we serve the world and we try to lift it up, but we don’t wear the world or anything that comes from it, we don’t let it mark us, we don’t ingest it in a way that makes our faith or love sick from these things that aren’t perfect like God. We are rooted in and inspired by the consistent, generous and perfect love of God and that is how we live. AMEN

Children’s story - String and stick bridge (unsturdy) vs. the ground