Doers of the Word (James 1:22-27)

My part of this message was mostly an extended introduction to our guest speaker, who talked about some of the programs our church has to help young people who don't have a lot of help move into a better place in life economically as well as spiritually. Hence the brevity and curious ending.

James gives us a very interesting metaphor to describe people who are only hearers of the word and not “doers of the word.” They’re like people who forget what they look like as soon as they walk away from the mirror.

Now I know – there are some things about what the mirror shows us that we would rather forget. The amount of gray in the hair – or the amount of hair that’s not there. The exercise that should still be done. Or the unhappy results of what genetics has stuck you with. And that metaphorical mirror, the one that we talk about looking at when we talk about whether or not we can live with what we’ve done, that one shows us things we would rather forget as well. How we treated this person, or what we said in that situation. I would much rather those things had been done by someone else, but the mirror shows me that the one who did them was me.

Still, the way James talks about it the idea of forgetting what we look like is not recommended. He seems to think it’s pretty foolish and the sign of a shallow kind of person. If he were 12 he might be saying, “You’re so dumb that when you walk away from the mirror, you forget what you look like.”

There aren’t a lot of things that are more “us” than the way we look. When we’re born people scrutinize our new faces, hunting for signs of this parent, that grandparent or some other relative, when the truth is all babies look like Winston Churchill. One of the signs we’re starting to grow up is when we choose our own clothes to wear instead of being dressed in what our parents lay out for us. Cowboy outfits, princess dresses, superhero T-shirts – all of these become important parts of our lives as we get into our elementary years and we begin to have some interest in what we look like to other people. Middle school is invested with having the same clothes as everyone else does in order to establish that we are our own person. It makes no sense to me either, but it probably did then.

And then there’s high school, where we probably use some of our own money to buy things that we want to make us “look older.” We tell everyone how cool our music is by our T-shirts (and also how cool we are for listening to them). It’s not just girls – boys too will want to copy a certain look in haircuts or appearance. Our clothes help show other people we like this video game, that movie or TV show or that we support a particular cause.

Don’t get me started on what happens in college.

The upshot is that even healthy, well-adjusted people pay attention to what they look like because it’s a part of their identity. So James is suggesting more than just people who aren’t bright enough to remember their own faces after they walk away from the mirror. He’s suggesting that people who only hear the word but don’t do it have forgotten something even more important: They have forgotten who they are.

We can hear the gospel message of God’s love all we want to and even believe it truly describes us and our relationship with God. But until we live it out, it does not define us. It does not tell us who we are. Something else does.

Maybe it’s the words of someone else in our lives, some authority figure who we’re always trying to please. Maybe it’s the crowd of people to which we want to belong, dictating to us how we will act and look and speak if we want to be accepted. Maybe it’s our culture at large, imposing values about what’s important and what’s not, what needs to be pursued and how it needs to be pursued in order to arrive at our true selves. Maybe it’s the circumstances in which we live – you’re in a trailer, you’re a nobody with no future but if you’re in a mansion you’ve got the world on a string.

For many people, one of those things or something else entirely defines them, and you can tell what it is, what word they have heard, by what word they spend time doing. Show me your checkbook and I’ll tell you what matters to you. Show me your calendar and I’ll tell you what you think is important. The word you hear is not what defines you, it is the word you do.

James saw the same things, expressed of course in terms of his own culture instead of ours. He knew that the fundamental problem with all of those other words was that they were inadequate and they were inaccurate. It’s why doing them rarely if ever leads to real, full satisfaction and a life with meaning. There is only one truly defining word and it it’s the gospel message, the word that speaks to the image of God in every one of us. It tells us that we do not need to perform the tricks that all of these other words demand, because before we ever drew breath we were loved by the God who made the universe and everyone in it. That is the truth of our worth and value, and nothing else. That is our identity. And it’s a very good word indeed.

If we do not do it, though, if we do not love the Lord with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength and if we do not love our neighbors as ourselves as the Holy Spirit leads and helps us to do, well, then we will never know who we really are.

But if we do it? If we do the Word as well as hear it? Not only will we learn who we really are, others will learn who they are because of those words and actions. Let’s listen to someone who can tell us about that.

Is Your Servant Listening? (1 Samuel 3:1-10)

Ordinarily when I preach from this text I include the second part of the chapter, where God tells Samuel the bad news about what's in store for Eli and how Samuel only tells the old man reluctantly. I think it's important for us to remember that when God sends a message to the people it's not always a sunshine rainbow-gram; sometimes it's a warning of consequences for actions taken.

But this time I felt drawn to one of the themes of the story that's set up in its first few verses, and that's the idea of vision, sight and understanding. "Visions were not widespread," we're told, and when we see God describe the leadership of Eli we can understand why. Remember when Hannah was first praying for a son Eli saw her and thought she was drunk. He's watched his sons use their priestly positions to enrich themselves and done nothing. Whatever you may think his role as chief priest was supposed to be, he wasn't doing it, and "the word of the Lord was rare in those days."

We can see this play out even more clearly when we see why Samuel didn't know who was calling him. In verse 7, we learn "Now Samuel did not yet know the LORD, and the word of the LORD had not yet been revealed to him." We might gloss past this by thinking that Samuel was still a young boy, but let's step back and look more closely. The Hebrew people didn't have their Temple yet, but the shrine at Shiloh was the religious headquarters of the nation. The Ark of the Covenant was kept there. And that's where Samuel was working. He doesn't know the Lord, even though he's working in the midst of what's basically Yahweh Central!

Yes, he is just a boy, but how many children do you know in church who have some understanding of what's going on there, even if it's only on a childish level? I would wager it's more than a few, and remember, he's hanging around the major religious center of his people and watching its activity every day.

Lest you think I am blaming Samuel, I am not. I do recognize that he is a child, and I will point out something that you've probably already guessed about the kind of kids I've mentioned. Yes, there are children today who have some understanding of God and of their relationship with him, because they have adults who have taught them. If Samuel doesn't know God and the word has not yet been revealed to him, then the culprits if they exist are the adults who have failed to teach him while he is in the midst of a swirl of religious activity.

Now I admit you have to read between the lines, so to speak, to come up with this idea. It's also possible that he didn't yet know the word of God because God had not yet revealed himself to Samuel. That's a plain reading of the scripture and could very well be true. But when we look at those context-setting verses that we get in the beginning of the chapter and the stories about the corrupt sons of Eli in earlier chapters, we have to wonder if it's something more than that. Because the truth is that we adults are the ones who will help children know the voice of the Lord when it comes to them. And to his credit, Eli does eventually recognize what's going on with Samuel and gives him good instructions.

If we don't help young people know that God calls them to himself, they will still hear a call but they won't know who it's from. They'll think it's from the culture around them or from some other source and they will run to it as Samuel ran to Eli. They'll look to answer it but find no satisifaction or peace in doing so. It will be an empty call in the end, and they'll find out what they've pursued is empty of meaning or purpose.

Sure, letting them know about the call of God in their lives doesn't guarantee they will answer him. But not knowing about it is a great indicator that they won't know to answer him.

It works the same for those of us more advanced in years as well. The older I've gotten the more I'm convinced that almost every desire I have in life somehow represents something that God wants me to do or wants me to listen for. But when I see those desires in the context of the world and of the culture around me I get that call messed up and I pursue it in a direction God didn't want me to take. I too need to keep myself invested in the word of God so that when God calls me, I can recognize it and say "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening."