Sermon for the Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity, 10:30 am service
“If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God”
In the somber grey of November, in the season of scattered leaves and the culture of scattered souls, God’s Word gathers us and challenges us about the nature of our Christian lives. Should we somehow think that it is enough simply to hear God’s word, then we are rightly and roundly reminded not “to be hearers only” but to be “doers of the word” as well. Likewise, if we should be so foolish and brain-dead as to think that worship and public prayer and all the things belonging to religion are peripheral and really nothing worth, then we are rightly reminded to “receive with meekness the implanted word which is able to save your souls”.
The point is ever so clear. It is almost a commonplace. We are called to be what we believe and that means both hearing and doing; in short, it means both faith and works. Such is the strength of the message of James. It is a kind of sermon, and, indeed, one which complements beautifully The Sermon on the Mount, the gospel which has been read for more than a thousand years on All Saints’ Day.
To suppose that we can absent ourselves from where the Word of God is proclaimed and celebrated is as absurd as to suppose that we can hear and receive that Word without acting upon it. That is the strong message from The Epistle of St. James. He is calling us to scriptural wisdom. “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God”. For “of his own will he brought us to birth by the word of truth”. We live from that word of truth.
If anything is lacking from our contemporary world, I fear, it is wisdom. We immerse ourselves in action. We busy ourselves endlessly in the doing of this and that. We are literally afraid to stop and think, to read, let alone to pray. We easily fall prey to the greatest of follies and superstitions. Ours, too, is a most gullible age.