When is the best time to start being a Christian? I am prone to think that it was much easier to follow Jesus in the first century. James was the brother of Jesus. He knew him. He knew Peter. He argued with Paul. That was a good time to become a Christian.

The letter of James begins with the encouraging command, “My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy.” We don’t know to what specific trials James referred. He seems to suggest that his listeners are poor. In the rest of the letter he gives hope to his readers who are being dragged into court by the rich and defaming the name of Jesus. The implication is that his readers are not wealthy people.

However, we can extrapolate even further. When a group is facing pressure from the outside, often its members direct their defenses not against those who are attacking them, but against one another. The bulk of James’ letter instructs its hearers on how to behave toward one another. So it just may be that this group of early Jewish-Christians, stressed from the attack from the surrounding culture, had begun to turn on one another.

Today, one has to look no further than our urban areas to see examples of this. In the wake of centuries of racism, we unfortunately see the plague of black on black crime. How many of us know married couples who, having experienced a trial in their life, financial difficulties, serious illness in the family or the death of a child, grow, not closer together but farther apart? Perhaps even getting divorced.

When we face the struggles and difficulties of life, we have a tendency to attack, not the source of our trials, but those closest to us. James tells his audience, when you face those trials, don’t attack the people you love. Don’t even attack your persecutors. Instead consider it nothing but a joy. Make you wonder if James owned a leather hood and a pair of handcuffs? What kind of masochist was he? Consider your trials a joy?

James was not advocating some self-punishing guilt-ridden religion. He didn’t mean for us to consider our troubles as punishments from God out which we are to derive some perverse pleasure. When you and I face a trial, that doesn’t mean it’s time to beat ourselves down, it’s time to let God lift us up.

Bob Scott is one of the founding members of this church and the director of Trinity Institute at Trinity Church in Manhattan. This week, Pam and I had the privilege of attending a Conference to which Bob invited us. One of the speakers was Sister Helen Prejean. Most of you know her as the person Susan Sarandon portrayed in the movie “Dead Man Walking.” In her presentation, she recounted her journey into working with death row inmates. It was not a calling she sought. It was outside her comfort zone and extremely scary for her. But every challenging step along the way, from walking in to visit with a guilty murderer to meeting with his victims’ families she described how God gave her what she needed to meet the challenge. She said it was like “grace bubbling up from underneath.”

How many of us yearn for that feeling? That feeling of God’s grace bubbling up beneath us, supporting, sustaining us, and carrying us through the tidal waves of existence. James tells us that the way we face those undulations of fortune makes all the difference in the world. Our attitude and approach determines whether or not we’ll make it through the wave.

James says that those who doubt are like a wave of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind. He isn’t referring to some kind of Sunday School doubt. It isn’t questioning the Virgin Birth or wondering how Noah fit dinosaurs on the ark. Those kinds of questions have more to do with our maturity than our doubt. The doubt that James condemns is the doubt with a capital “D.” That existential Doubt. The kind of Doubt a college freshman, a teenage artist or a middle aged businessman, mother or even preacher experiences.

It is that nagging question of whether or not there is any purpose to our lives. It sneaks up on us and forces us to wonder whether there is any meaning to our stories, any redemptive dimension to the struggles of life. It is the kind of question we wondered about one day when we took Intro to Philosophy and repressed and stuffed away when we took Intro to Business Management.

What if the bumper sticker is true, “life sucks and then you die?” Wow, that’s three weeks in a row I been able to work the word “sucks” into a sermon. I sound contemporary and yet the invites to speak at mega-churches are not forthcoming.

But that’s the kind of doubt James is condemning. The doubt that drags us down not with theological questions of “how could God allow this?” But the doubt that plagues us in times of trouble, that pops into your head in the shower, or driving to work or watching the news. It is the hope-gnawing possibility of “What if everything is going wrong in my life and there’s no point to it, there’s no silver lining, there’s not even book deal of my sad story or an Oprah appearance. It’s just awful and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

I remember one night about twenty years ago, I spent talking with a family friend. He had a problem with alcohol and had had a little too much to drink. He was in his sixties, facing forced retirement. After thirty years, the company he worked for took away his secretary and his company car. They gave him a new office. It used to be the custodian’s closet. If he needed something typed, there was a secretary and copying machine down the hall. It sounds awful, but trust me, as I tell this story every man in this room, including me is worried that they will end up that way.

His only daughter was about to get married and he was worried his wife would miss the wedding. His wife was in the hospital with panic attacks and depression. I had known him since I was a little kid and I never saw him cry, but he was crying this night. All he could say was three words, “It’s just lousy.”
Into this man’s life, into your life and mine comes James who has the audacity to declare, “Don’t consider it lousy. Consider it a joy.” What a jerk!

But, James isn’t saying not to be sad. God gave us feelings and emotions so we can experience them not repress them. James knew that for whatever reason, that’s the way the universe is, bad stuff happens. The key is to endure it. But James doesn’t stop there. Endurance is not a goal in and of itself. Endurance he says, completes us and even perfects us.

Jesus said, “Be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect.” John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement said, “God is moving us on to perfection.” That sounds demanding but at least it sounds positive. It’s a call to moral and ethical and good. That’s challenging enough. But what if it also means enduring tough times without succumbing to an attitude of “it all stinks and I just give up.” That seems like the dark side of perfection.

Now you may think, “I don’t that. I never just throw up my hands and give up.” Oh, but the sad truth is we do it all the time. We face difficulties in a relationship and we withdraw in silence to our little corner of TV, self-pity or prescription pills. Someone hurts us and we carry our anger and resentment around like a badge of honor. We compromise and sell out. We set the ethical bar a little lower. We adjust our dreams downwards. We go to church, hear something that challenges us, calls us to greater commitment, expands our thinking about an issue and we don’t come back.

This week, someone shared with my wife the story of their mother. This person’s mother was blind and in a wheelchair for years and was the Director of Religious Education in her church. “I am amazed by her,” this woman said, “I don’t know how she did it.” I’ll let you in on a little secret that I think this woman knows too. You know how her mother did it? She did it.

James’ time seems like a great time to be a Christian. But James’ church was one of trials, doubt, external persecution and internal conflict. It was not a good time to be a Christian. We know what that’s like. Following Jesus sounds like a great idea but now? Well, it’s just not a good time. I’m going through too much right now. When things settle down, I’ll have some time to think about God and a faith community.

It’s never a good time. We’re always busy. We’re always in a rush. I was late once in 1982 and I still haven’t caught up. It’s always a bad time to follow Jesus.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor in Nazi Germany. Many of his fellow pastors kept their mouths shut and rationalized their silence about the Third Reich with shallow theological justifications. But Dietrich was different. He got involved with a movement to overthrow the government and assassinate Hitler. Eventually, the Nazis got suspicious of him and began watching him closely. Dietrich knew it.

In the midst of all this turmoil and suffering, he was planning on getting married. Friends advised him against it. After all, they reasoned, his arrest was just a matter of time. Times were tough. People just don’t do things like that in the midst of crisis. But here is what Dietrich wrote in 1942 to his fiancé about faith in hard times.

“I don’t mean the faith that flees the world, but the faith that endures in the world and loves and remains true to that world in spite of all the hardships it brings us. Our marriage must be a “yes” to God’s earth. It must strengthen our resolve to do and accomplish something on earth. I fear that Christians who venture to stand on earth on only one leg will stand in heaven on only one leg too.”

Three months later, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested and three years after that, was hanged in a concentration camp.

In the midst of our difficult and busy lives, are you and I taking actions that say “yes” to God’s earth? In the middle of broken relationships, are we saying “yes” to God in our homes, our jobs, our friendships? How are we enduring the trials of our lives? When things are at their lowest are you still participating in creating a church that says “yes” to God?

No one will remember us for how we at when everything was at its best, but they will remember us for how we act when things were at their worst.