Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri

Morning Worship · September 27, 2009

  Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

Litany of Praise and Invocation

From Psalm 124

Had it not been for the Lord

       We would have been utterly destroyed,

       swallowed alive by forces and powers beyond our control.

Had it not been for the Lord

       The current would have taken us under,

       the raging waters swept us away.

Had it not been for the Lord

       We would not have escaped,

       not flown away like birds fleeing the net.

Let us pray:

       We place our lives into your care, O Mighty One,

       Creator of heaven and earth. Amen.

New Testament Lesson

James 5:13-20

Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise. Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. Elijah was a human being like us, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain and the earth yielded its harvest.

My brothers and sisters, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and is brought back by another, you should know that whoever brings back a sinner from wandering will save the sinner’s soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.

Message

What Can We Do?

Tim Carson

On 9/11, as the events of that fateful day unfolded, I was leaving the church and ran into a church member who was just arriving. We stopped to talk and he said to me, “I didn’t know what else to do but come here. What can we do? What can we do?”

That same question was to be asked millions of times that day and the many days that would follow. It is the same question that has been asked across the seas of time at every intersection of crisis, struggle, doubt, and confusion.

Pearl Harbor is attacked, and we ask, “What can we do?”

President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. are assassinated, and we ask, “What can we do?”

The space shuttle explodes during takeoff, and we ask, “What can we do?”

A tsunami of colossal proportions wipes out entire sections of the Pacific Rim, and we ask, “What can we do?”

It is an earthquake, a train wreck, the ravages of war, a famine, a drought, or economic collapse, and the question is always the same, “What can we do?”

And then there are the very personal disasters of the marriage that breaks up on the rocks, the job that was lost, the house that was foreclosed, the finances that were bankrupted, the parents whose health failed, the kids who went down the wrong path, the abuse that was dished out or received.

“What can we do?” That’s what we ask.

The answer to that question may include practical fixes, technical solutions, coordinated actions, or plans that address things on one level or another. As necessary or important as any or all of those are, they don’t get to the root of our question, which includes other, deeper questions:

How can we endure suffering? Where do we turn for strength? Who or what can I trust? 

Much of our calamity seems random, senseless and surely beyond our control. But there is plenty that is clearly the result of our own agency, our own decisions and actions, our unwillingness to love our neighbor as ourselves. But regardless of the cause or origin, suffering comes to all. As Jesus said, “The rain falls on the just and on the unjust.” And so it does. But what can we do?

The entire book of James is an answer to that question.

As opposed to Martin Luther, I do not feel that this is an epistle of straw, but rather a practical guide for the Christian faith. Whoever James was – and the authorship is somewhat in question – the book reflects the struggle of a Christian community as they strive to figure out how to live as Christians in the world.

If you sit down to read the five chapters of this slender letter, you can easily finish it in half an hour – if you don’t pause or ponder too much. (In fact, that might be a spiritual practice you could adopt for this week. James would be an easy read during a morning devotional or even a lunch break. But fasten your seatbelt – it’s a radical little book!)

You will find descriptions of Christian character, the guiding principles of Christian morals, dealing with testing and temptation, understanding how faith and works complement one another, right speech as an act of faith, understanding, and handling conflict, the Christian view of and use of wealth, and how Christians should live together in community.

And then, as you listen to the voice of the author speaking in the last chapter, you begin to hear the answer to today’s question, “What can we do?”

***

“Are there any among you suffering? They should pray …call for the elders of the church …pray for one another …the prayer of faith will save the sick…the prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective.”

For James, the answer to every predicament – whether unearned suffering or the consequences of our own behavior – is to reset our spiritual receivers with prayer, and to do that in the midst of caring community. There is power in tuning in, turning toward, and attending to the Spirit that is breathing through our spirits. When we begin to tune in, turn toward and attend to the Spirit, that changes things. It physically, spiritually, emotionally, relationally, socially changes things. Resetting our spiritual frequency enlivens our imaginations and emboldens our decisions and actions. It changes everything, and James knows that.

This summer I tried something new – I took sailing lessons. This is something I had wanted to do for the longest time, but had just never gotten around to it. There were times, as we fried on the deck of the sailboat in the Texas summer heat, that I thought I had lost my mind. But in the end, the whole process was exhilarating.

What I discovered out there with wind and sail and water is something I might call a theology of sailing. If I wrote a book, I might title it, Sailing through James. And with all apologies to James this morning, who may have never stepped foot on a boat, I’m going to take a risky leap. I believe that the theology of James is similar to my new theology of sailing, because it addresses the same question – “What can we do?” – and also provides some of the same answers. I’ll let you be the judge of whether the leap was worth the effort!

Sailing is all about wind and what you are going to do with it. One of the starting places is to know the difference between true wind and apparent wind.

True wind is the actual direction and speed of the wind, something you sense if you are standing perfectly still. A tree knows true wind because it is rooted in one place. If you want to see the signs of true wind, you look at something planted in one place, like a flag or a campfire.

Apparent wind is a combination of the force of true wind and the wind you make from your own motion. Apparent wind is what you experience when you are moving – a product of the true wind and your relative wind created by your own motion. Let me give you an example.

If you are in a car, or on a bike, or on a horse, standing still in one place, and the wind is striking you on your right side that is true wind. But if you start moving forward much faster than the wind is blowing, soon it will seem that the wind is coming from in front of you. As a child, haven’t you played with the force of wind as you stuck your hand out the open car window, pretending that your hand is the wing of an airplane? You are playing with apparent wind – the wind created by your own motion. Even if the true wind is coming from the side, it seems to come from in front of you.

Imagine that you are on a bike standing still and the wind is striking you in the face at 20 mph. If you accelerate to 20 mph, what will the wind seem to be doing then? Right, the apparent wind is 40 mph – 20 true and 20 of yours added together. If, on the other hand, the true wind is striking you in the back of the head at 20 mph standing still and you accelerate to 20, what will it seem? Right, zero. You’ll be travelling forward at exactly the same speed as the true wind behind you. It will appear that there is no wind at all.

Well, before any of you asks the question, “So, Tim, what does this have to do with the question, ‘What can we do?’ and the book of James?” I’ll tell you:

There is the power that is God, and there is the power that is we, and the interaction of those two is the place where we experience faith. There is the true Spirit of life and our spirits co-creating with it, and that is what we experience as the apparent movement of the Spirit in the world.

The question of life is: What can we do in the face of wind and water in this little boat we call our lives? And the answer from James is this: You have to learn how to sail, and Christians sail in a certain way.

Sailing with the Spirit requires the same seamanship that other sailing does.

The first thing is reading the signs where God is at work. In sailing, this is reading the wind to know how and where it is moving. Since, like God, you can’t see the wind, you have to learn how to see the signs of its moving, and that is by the effect it is having on other objects – like flags, trees, smoke, clouds, ripples in the water, your own body.

So many of our sayings have come from the nautical world. Have you ever heard the phrase, “a telltale sign?” What’s a telltale? A telltale is a little strip of fabric attached to the edge of a sail so that you can tell what the wind is up to and what the true wind is doing in relation to your own motion. It acts like a windsock at an airport so pilots can know which way the true wind is blowing.

When James says the response to everything should be a prayerful attentiveness, he means it. We have to discern, to read, and to observe the telltale signs of the Spirit. Sailing is all about reading the wind, and spirituality is all about reading the Spirit in our lives and in the world.

But it is not enough to just observe the movement of the Spirit. According to James, faith without works is dead. That is, there must be integrity between the faith we hold and how we respond, what we do with it. And that leads us to the second thing, that it’s not enough to read the wind, you actually have to navigate.

Of course, the helmsman has to set the course by turning the rudder. We have to set a course in the spiritual life – based on everything we know about the wind and our response to it. But to sail, you have to work with the wind, not work against it. That doesn’t work very well!

Have you ever heard the phrase, “trimming the sails?” Well, of course you have. But this is more than hoisting the sails. This has to do with drawing the right tension on the sheets at the right angle to the wind so that they will not “luff” – spill their wind. The sure sign of a poor sailor is if her sails are fluttering and luffing – evidence that they are not harnessing the power of wind.

Prayer is trimming the spiritual sails, putting your life, like a sail, at the disposal of the Spirit’s wind – in the right tension, the right receptive angle, so that God’s true wind and your movement become harmonious.

So often people try to fix the problems of their lives without attending to the way the wind fills their sails. No matter how many Band-Aids they place over this or that, they often find themselves back at the same place where they started. And James insists that the right prayer, the right trimming of the sails, is going to lead you to the right action as a result. Unless you develop that prayer discipline, trimming the sails of the spirit, not much of the rest is going to work for you. Oh, it might for a while, but not in the long haul.

You know how people say that your Christian faith shouldn’t be a one day a week thing on Sunday thing but lived every day? I have a friend who says, “Heck, forget the rest of the week, I’d like to carry it as far as the church parking lot. Have you ever seen people trying to get out of the church parking lot after services?”

At the end of James’ letter, he gives council to spiritual leaders to help the people who have wandered away from being in harmony with the Spirit, to bring them back to the truth of faith. Do you know that there are two terms in sailing that describe that wandering?

If the wind suddenly stops entirely, a sailing boat is trapped in the “doldrums,” that region where the wind is at a premium. If you and I lose the wind, it is often times not due to our action or inactivity – it just is. And in the spiritual life, we often find ourselves adrift, waiting for the Spirit to move so that we might move with it. Whether this is John of the Cross’s “dark night of the soul” or the stillness that precedes or follows great conflict, we also find ourselves in the doldrums of the Spirit, windless, our sails empty.

But there is another sailing reality that is directly related to our decisions and choices as a navigator. If you head directly into the wind, it will absolutely block your forward motion. When a ship does this, the wind does not fill the sails but rather pushes against the ship. Sailors call this position, “in irons.”

If we position our lives over and against the currents of God, we will experience the same kind of thing. We will be clapped in irons because we are not working with the wind but fighting against it. And that is James’ allusion to those who have wandered away – they are “in irons,” because they are not living in harmony with the Spirit, but fighting against it.

***

Spiritual sailing sends us to the right place in the right way, even when life shakes us and we end up asking the hard questions like, “What can we do?” Spiritual sailing takes us into every day because we’re always reading the wind and its telltale signs and then trimming our sails in response. Every day we rise to catch the wind that transforms and sends us to the right place in the right way. Even when life shakes us hard, we know there is an answer to the question, “What can we do?” And because of that, we can aspire to lives of compassion, justice, peace, harmony, community, forgiveness, and service.

Hoist your sails, Mateys. Faith is but catching the wind of God and discerning, as we pursue the spiritual path, where we go and what we do next. And in that is perfect freedom and joy.

Benediction

And now may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship and communion of the Holy Spirit guide and direct us all. Amen.