February 26, 2012 | 4:00 p.m.

Sermon

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

James 1:22–27

One of my fears as a preacher is always that I will talk about things that are interesting to me but that you, the congregation, don’t care about. It’s not a problem just because I’m a preacher; it’s a professional hazard for many of us. We all know what it’s like to get stuck at a party or happy hour or a family gathering or even next to someone on the bus who goes yammering on about some detail of their job, as if interest rates or the price of steel or hospital billing procedures were the most interesting thing in the world. To be sure, sometimes learning about another person’s job is interesting, but when you make your living talking about your job, you worry about where the line is between interesting-to-me and interesting-to-you.

As a preacher, one of the things I have found most difficult to discern is whether you all find it interesting when we talk about occasions in the church calendar, like Transfiguration Sunday, which we celebrated last Sunday; Ash Wednesday, which took place this past week; or today, which is the first Sunday in the season of Lent. Sometimes people intentionally ask me about these things; other times I assume many of you don’t care. But this past Wednesday, something happened that helped, at least for this week.

On Wednesday, I was in the locker room at the gym, unpacking my bag, and a guy I had never met came up to me and said, “Excuse me, why do so many people have black marks on their foreheads today?” (I should note that I had a black mark on my forehead, so his question wasn’t entirely out of left field!) And I answered him that the mark was of ashes in the sign of a cross, a sign of my mortality and my need for God. I told him that today was Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, a season that, forty days later (not counting Sundays) would bring about Easter. This man’s question resulted in a pleasant, even-handed exchange about one of my Christian beliefs, and that was really nice, particularly in a culture where most often talking about our faith is either feared and avoided entirely or is marked by aggressive attempts at conversion. For this stranger and me, it was just a pleasant exchange about religion.

This unexpected show of interest in Ash Wednesday brought me back to a conversation I had exactly a year ago with a Bible study group. I asked them if they planned to go to church on Wednesday for the imposition of ashes, and almost to a person they said no. These are members of the church, by the way. They were uncomfortable with such a public display of their faith, they said, mostly because they did not want to appear to be overly pious or holier-than-thou either to friends and coworkers or even just to strangers on the street (or in the locker room). This troubled me for a couple of reasons. First, it shows how rare it is to have a harmless exchange of knowledge about religion, but more importantly, I was troubled because what that Bible study group feared is exactly the opposite of what is intended by the ashes. They are not meant to show how pious or holy we are; they are meant to remind us and others of our humanity, our sinfulness. They are meant to remind us of our need for God’s help in a world where so often things are not the way they are supposed to be, where so often we fail to do the right thing.

Is this misunderstanding about the ashes a new problem? I wondered. And I got to thinking that perhaps we are tempted to think that if only we lived like Christians in earlier times, there would be no misunderstanding. If everyone in our community was Christian, if everyone who lived in the same neighborhood also went to the same church, we would all know the meaning of the ashes and no one would get the interpretation backwards. But it turns out that just isn’t true. In every place and time where people do religious things, there are people who do those things for the wrong reasons, and as a result, there are other people who misinterpret what they see.

This is why on Ash Wednesday the typical reading is a passage from the Gospel of Matthew that reads, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them” (Matthew 6:1). What follows in that passage are instructions on how to pray, how to give away money, and how to fast, all religious exercises, warning people of how easily and how often these acts of religion can be seen as ways of showing off.

The passage I read tonight from the book of James highlights a connected idea: “If any think they are religious and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world” (James 1:26–27). James is concerned about an idea similar to the one Matthew considers: the idea that many of us profess to be religious but do not speak and act according to God’s commands, and it is this kind of behavior that makes people suspicious of religion. This is not a new concern. The public display of religion and its interpretation by others have always been a problem in the church.

So that’s my laying out of the problem: What should Christians do about all the “religious” stuff? How should we live if we want to have the right intentions ourselves and if we want others to get the right idea about us too?

As I talk about this subject a little more this evening, I’m going to start with the advice of a famous preacher named Fred Craddock. Toward the end of his career, he was asked if he would change anything about his preaching, and he said, “I wish I had talked about God more.” And that’s how I am going to try to approach this problem of the public display of religion. As I said a few moments ago, we make lots of choices in preaching about what we hope is of real interest to you, and the hunch I am working from now is that you probably don’t care much about whether wearing ashes makes you more or less religious; you’d rather know if it actually has anything to do with God. I got to thinking that, to whatever extent that is true, my response to the man in the locker room about Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, and the coming of Easter might have been somewhat worthless. The real question is not what the ashes mean; the real question is, “Do wearing the ashes, or any of the other religious things we do, really bring us closer to God?”

This question is what the whole passage in James is talking about. Are we doing religious things just for the sake of looking good, or because our lives might really be changed by it? Is our religion authentic? Is it true? When James says, “Be doers of the word and not merely hearers,” this is what he is talking about. He thinks that if the things we believe in are true, then those things will really make a difference in our lives.

So James talks about two of the real manifestations of religion in our lives, two things he thinks really make a difference: what we do, and what we say. He calls attention to God’s command to care for people who need help; care for the orphan and the widow, he says. Orphans and widows may seem to us like a rather narrow definition, but in ancient Israel, where all of life’s resources had to do with marriage and household, orphans and widows were more at risk than anyone. A widow, having moved with her husband to a distant place with no family or income of her own, could find herself destitute if she was suddenly without a husband. As for orphans, even people who were servants or slaves were considered members of a household and would have a roof over their heads and food to eat, but to be an orphan, with no household ties at all, was a serious problem. Who are these people in your own city, nation, and world? asks James. Who is without a family, a home, someone to lean on? Who falls outside the “social safety net” the politicians like to talk about? James says that religious people look out for these folks. That’s the kind of religion that brings us closer to God.

What James says about words is equally relevant, perhaps an even greater challenge, and frighteningly simple. Christians think about the power of words, he says. We can be so incredibly creative and so profoundly destructive with the use of our words. Think about the number of times each day someone changes your mood, your thoughts, your outlook on life, because of the words they choose to use with you. Think about the number of times every day when you can change someone else by the way you choose to use words: “Yes, no, please, thank you, I love you, go to hell, will you marry me? I want a divorce, you’re hired, you’re fired, I’m sorry, I forgive you.” Christians, James says, are careful with their words. That’s the kind of religious practice that brings us closer to God.

James believes that if the things we believe in are true, if the religion we adopt is authentic, it has the power to change the way we act and the way we speak. But that’s not all. There is a very important idea James uses to frame the whole argument, and it is important that we pay attention to this framing, because this is the part that has to do with God and who God created us to be. Without this part, you could go anywhere and hear about how to do and say nicer things, but what does it have to do with God?

Our relationship with God, James says, is like a seed that grows. Notice that he talks about the word of God as being “implanted” in us, and he talks about the things we do and say as being “first-fruits” of that word. When we plant a garden, we don’t expect seeds to instantly become beautiful flowers or fully grown vegetables or giant redwoods. They are seeds, and they must have time to grow, and they must be cared for and nurtured if they are to achieve their potential. Becoming people of good deeds and helpful words is a journey. It takes some time to get there, and like seeds, we start small. One commentator on this passage writes that when James calls us to make a distinction between worthless and worthwhile religious morality, the discernment of the difference between these two kinds of religious morality is an ongoing process” (Smith, Feasting on the Word). It’s hard to figure out just exactly what God wants from us, and it can be even harder to execute on it when we know. So we plant seeds and we care for them and we pray and hope for God’s help.

People wear ashes on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday as a sign of their need for God’s help and as a sign that, like seeds, we ourselves are as fragile as the dust of the earth and we are only starting on our journey to where God wants us to be. If that reminder helps you to speak and act a little better, then, James would say, it is true religion.

People wear ashes on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday because it is the beginning of the season of Lent. Many Christians across the ages have given up something for Lent. It can be a good practice. But honestly, if something we give up does not cause us to think about who God is calling us to be, what God is trying to do with seed planted inside of us, then it really doesn’t matter much. Plenty of folks use Lent as an excuse to cut down on some guilty pleasure, to diet, or to do any number of things that never cause them to think about who God created them to be, and that’s just not what it’s about.

Presbyterians certainly don’t require that you wear ashes, nor do we ask everyone to give up something for Lent; you certainly can if you want to. But consider this: Consider a Lenten discipline, a practice over the next few weeks, of watching what you say, “bridling your tongue,” as James says it. Maybe you try to avoid being as nasty or profane as you normally tend to be, or maybe you consider making a conscious effort to use your words for good, finding a way to make someone else’s day better each day because of what you say to them. Alternatively, perhaps you’ll consider a Lenten discipline, a daily practice, that changes not your words but your actions—caring for orphans and widows in their distress, so to speak; finding someone who needs help and helping them.

Either way, know this: you are planting a seed. Don’t make it the equivalent of a New Year’s resolution that is doomed to fail and, when it does, will make you feel more guilty than when you started, for that is not the point. Accept that your life is a seed that has been planted and that in this season, God wishes to cultivate your life. And remember that there will be floods and droughts, places that seem too shady for rapid growth and places where the sun’s rays burn too hot. And there are always weeds that wish to swallow us up. It is hard for seeds to grow, and it takes a long time. But give thanks, for your seed has been planted.