If the heart is God’s ground…

 

St Francis of Assisi is well known as a kind, compassionate and caring man, but there was also a slightly sterner side to him as well. One day, a woman went to see him and asked what she had to do to be forgiven for her gossiping. St. Francis told her to take feathers and place one at the doorstep of everyone she had spoken ill of in the town.

She did so and returned to Francis who then told her to go and retrieve all the feathers. When she attempted to do so, of course they were all gone. By that time the feathers were scattered all around the town. Once again, she returned to St. Francis and told him about the feathers. He said to her, "You wish to repent and be forgiven of your sin. Good. But the damage of your words is done and cannot be taken back."

It’s a harsh lesson – forgiveness is certainly possible but some of the damage done by our actions can have lasting effects. And in the reading from the letter of James today (1:17-27) this is the message that he is trying to get across.

Be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger – be doers of the word and not merely hearers… the letter of James, unlike most of the other New Testament letters doesn’t seem to have been written to a specific community but to a much wider group. It is a letter that has been strongly criticised by some great Church figures – even Martin Luther didn’t like it, but of all the books in the Bible I think this letter is one of the easiest to understand – it doesn’t spend much time with complicated language, it doesn’t ask us to interpret it’s meaning – it is blunt and it is clear.

However, something that is easy to understand doesn’t necessarily offer us something that is easy to do ! 

Some of you will have heard this story about a man called Bill. Standing with his family in church, Bill recites the Lord’s Prayer. This is followed by some singing and praising God and then some announcements before the sermon, one of which is by an elder who is seeking to enlist some workers for an outreach project in a very poor area of the city. 

Bill whispers to his wife, “Why do they interrupt the nice flow of our worship with appeals like this?”

Offered as a point to think about we can see how stupid a comment it is – worship without action is meaningless – hearing without doing is pointless. And yet, it is very easy to fall into a similar trap – some people criticise Christians for getting involved in politics, some will keep away from pubs and clubs, seeing them as some sort of evil that is damaging society, some will spend time only with other Christians because they’re the people they understand and relate to, some Churches will spend so much time on complicated liturgy that people may not understand it, other Churches may be so bound up with praise and worship that they too lose touch with reality.

The letter of James speaks bluntly to us. If we call ourselves Christians, then every little thing that we do in our lives is a reflection on Jesus, or at least that is how many people will see it. Reputations can be made or broken in seconds, and when we do something as a Christian, it can be the reputation of Jesus himself, and of the Church, that is affected.

Every day our lives are held up to scrutiny – by God certainly, but even more alarmingly by other people. God sees the things we do wrong, accepts our thoughts, and is ready to forgive at any time, but other people may not be so kind and not so ready to forgive.

Being doers of the word of Jesus, not just hearers, means trying to follow his example in absolutely every aspect of our lives. That is what the book of James tells us and that is what I meant when I said the book is easy to understand but really hard to do!

The qualities of Jesus are well known to us, incredible abundant love, forgiveness, compassion, courage, humility and so on… It is easy to be religious, to practice the sort of religion that Jesus talks about in the gospel reading (Mark 7:1-8, 14-15,21-23), to be tied up in Church life so that it fills up huge amounts of time, but by itself that doesn’t make us a follower of Jesus…

The Jewish tradition involved a huge concern for how people ate. There were important rituals to be followed. One of them involved washing hands, not just to make sure they were clean on the sort of level we may do, but to make a point that the hands were undefiled, in other words that the hands were spiritually clean. 

As some of Jesus’ disciples did not wash their hands in this way, Jesus was questioned by the Pharisees and the Scribes, and he took this opportunity to criticise the traditions, not because there was anything particularly wrong with the traditions but because the people had forgotten what they were being done for. 

Tradition for some at that time had become more important than doing God’s work… And I wonder if that is sometimes true for us today as well. Tradition has its place in the Church, but it absolutely does not if it gets in the way of compassion, love, fellowship or evangelism.

James writes that religion that is pure and undefiled before God is to care for orphans and widows and to keep ourselves unstained from the world. In other words he was echoing the message of Jesus to get out and do things, and do things for the right reasons – in other words as a grateful response to the love of Jesus for each one of us. 

Jesus is surely concerned with our motives for doing things, not just what we do. What is inside us is important, and what is inside will often be what we reflect to people outside the Church. We can look as good as anyone on the outside, but God looks at our insides… 

Someone once wrote, ‘If the heart is God’s ground, nothing else is required; but if the heart is not God’s ground then nothing else will suffice.’… 

Some years ago now, I did a talk for some young rugby players, and one of the things on the syllabus for their talk was the importance of representing the badge of their club in every aspect of their lives, and remembering that everything they do on and off the pitch is a reflection of the club… As Christians we wear a far more important badge – the badge of Jesus… It may be a privilege to wear that rugby badge, but there is no greater privilege than to wear the badge of Jesus…

The call to do his work is a tough one, and it is one that we will fail at sometimes, but he invites us back, again and again, opening wide his arms of love and compassion, and offering us through the Holy Spirit, the strength to grow in trust and faith, and ultimately to become more like Jesus himself.

There is no greater gift than his love that we have, and there is no greater response than to show it to others. AMEN