Fourteen years ago, I left a good paying job at a video production company to start my own. Around the same time, I had a friend who started her own company. She was going to design pages for some new thing called “the web.” Whenever we spoke, we would share stories of how our new businesses were going, making cold calls, showing our work to prospective clients.

Eventually, we shared stories of proposals we wrote, jobs we bid on and contracts we got. After a few months, our respective businesses were up and running. At around the same time, we each had the opportunity to bid on two really big projects. One day, to our amazement, we both got the big budget jobs we bid on.
That day, I ran into her at the supermarket. She said, “This is great. This is my favorite part about having my own company. I love this feeling when you get the job. It’s the best feeling in the world…… but what sucks is that now we actually have to do the work.”

Till this day, I feel the same way. I love getting the work. Actually doing it – not so much.

Following Jesus, being a disciple, becoming a Christian, is like that. It’s great to get the job. It just sucks that we actually have to do the work. Every week, we all sit here and experience a good feeling. We laugh. Maybe we cry. We feel entertained or maybe moved, or even motivated. Yet there is this disconnect between what we experience here and what we live each day. How do we incorporate this message into our everyday lives? How do all these great sounding ideas work out in real life?

In the first century, the members of the Jesus movement faced this same challenge. The generation before them had this incredible God experience of a charismatic rabbi named Jesus of Nazareth. Their parents and mentors had gone through the peaks and valleys of his ministry. After they thought it was all over and saw him killed, they even experienced him in a unique way after his death. Now all that experience was in the past and they struggled with the question, “How do we live out everything he taught us?”
We got the job, how do we do the work?

The Letter of James gives us a window into that struggle. We don’t know for sure who wrote it. Early church traditions attribute it to James, the brother of Jesus. Many scholars believe that at the very least, the Letter of James has some connection with Jesus’ brother and the Jerusalem church. If not originating with James himself, perhaps it is the work of a wisdom teacher building on the teachings of his master.

James is an often overlooked figure in the New Testament. In Roman Catholic theology, the very idea of Mary having other children is problematic. In Protestant theology, James’ emphasis on doing good works goes against Protestant hero Paul’s insistence that we are saved by our faith. So James is like having a heretical book in the New Testament, which I think is kind of cool.

Even though James can on the surface appear to be at odds with later Christian doctrines, I believe this book is a window into the earliest layers of Christian belief. There are several reasons for this. The first is the community associated with this book. The New Testament portrays the person of James as the leader of the Jesus movement in Jerusalem. This early church was a principally Jewish group, trying to understand Jesus in his original Jewish context. Here we see the Jesus movement before the influences of Hellenist philosophy and church hierarchy.

Second, unlike Paul’s writings, the Letter of James contains many parallel sayings to Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. There are also many allusion to some of Jesus’ other sayings. In fact the conventional wisdom in New Testament scholarship is that both the writers of Matthew and Luke shared a common source book of Jesus’ sayings. This document, which they enigmatically named “Q,” would be one of the earliest written records of Jesus’ teachings. James shares over thirty parallel sayings to Q.

So lastly, when I listen to the Letter of James it sounds familiar to me. The ideas and teachings I find there are recognizable. They sound like Jesus. So if we want some practical advice on how to apply Jesus’ teachings to our lives, the Letter of James may be a good place to start and we’re going to be doing that over the next few weeks.
Now maybe I’ve jumped in too deep here. I am assuming that following Jesus is a good idea. I am presupposing that there is something special about Jesus’ teachings. People ask me all the time, “Why follow Jesus? What’s so special about him? What do I need God or a church to live a good life? Don’t all religions teach more or less the same thing? In fact, what do we need religions for at all? Most people are basically good. I mean as long as we don’t murder someone or steal, aren’t we doing okay? As long as I don’t interfere with or hurt anyone, don’t we have a wide selection of ethical choices?”

James would say – quite emphatically – No! In fact, he goes so far as to scold his audience in 4:4, “Adulterers! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.”

That sounds so Jimmy Swaggert – doesn’t it? It is a strong statement but it is key to understanding this book. This is why James matters, because without this idea, my next few weeks of messages are going to sound like idealistic platitudes – merely nice ideas. Human beings have a choice to make, whether we want to or not. Even if we claim there’s no choice to make, we have already made one. Who are we friends with – the world or God? If we choose the world, then we are adulterers.

If you are in a relationship, you cannot be just a little bit faithful. You either cheat on your partner or you don’t. In fact in Jewish tradition, that metaphor of adultery, of cheating on God has a long history. The Hebrew Bible is full of that language. When the Israelites worshipped other gods, the prophets accused them using the metaphor of adultery. In an Old Testament piece of performance art, the prophet Hosea actually marries a prostitute to make this point.

When you think of God what comes to mind? An old man? Light? Energy? Our Judeo-Christian image does not speak that way. God is a lover. God is a faithful friend. God yearns to be in relationship with us. But, says James, we all got a little sumthin, sumthin, on the side. We all have other gods. Gods that do our bidding and obey us. Gods that “work for us.” I know a little something about being that little something on the side. For a lot of you, Vision is the church you see on the side. We’re the young little hot thing that’s exciting but maybe you don’t want to make a commitment. It makes me feel so cheap. Hey, at least by me dinner and mink coat. Some flower would be nice every once and a while.

James says we can’t play both sides like that when it comes to God and the world. We can’t be what he calls “double-minded.” We cannot be friends with both God and the world. How car-on-cement-blocks-in-the-front-yard-Bible-belt does that sound? This is an easy verse to misunderstand because it all hinges on how we define the words “friend” and “world.”

When we hear a church talk about the “world,” we picture all sorts of evil stuff – rock music, movies, dancing, sex. In other words, anything that’s fun. That is not what James is talking about here. The “world” for James is not rock bands, movies dancing and sex. It is not cities, people or houses. It is not even the creation, trees, rivers and animals. Its is not the idea that all this material reality is bad and what is good is the spiritual world of clergy people, angels, harps and bad music.

James’ community were not separatists. We learn in this letter that they owned land, had jobs, interacted with people and even took them to court. No, the “world” to James is a system of values and measures that gives no regard to God. It is a system that keeps God out of the picture.

It is so easy to live that way – without any regard to God. Sitting here, it is not difficult to think about God. But when we walk out that door, what then? Outside of choosing a church, planning a wedding or a funeral, when does God come into our decisions? We say we want to teach our children to make good choices, but how are we teaching them to factor God into those choices? It seems so innocent. It is so easy to leave God out of the equation, to disregard God. When we leave out God we are in fact being God-less.

A few years ago I met a woman at a one of my kid’s sport events. We got to talking and I mentioned I was the pastor here at Vision. She claimed she was not religious but spiritual. She had tried some alternatives to church but found them a little to nebulous. She told me she was facing a difficult decision and that she felt ill-equipped to make it. Her family needed to move to a new home and they had two choices. One was a huge luxury home. Or as we call them now in Warwick, “an exquisite estate.” The other was large, but more modest home. She said they could afford first one but it would be a stretch. It would, however, provide a good life for them and build equity more quickly. But she feared that her and her husband would have to work more hours, spend less time with the kids to make it work. Feeling that she was in the middle of a spiritual awakening, she wondered if God might have something to do with what house they chose.

That is what it means to bring God in to our values. It means seeing what the world regards as no-brainer financial choices as choices about God. God is not limited God stuff. It’s all God stuff. All the dimensions of our lives, all the decisions.

James tells us that friendship with the world, measuring ourselves by its values puts us at odds with God. So does that mean we have to unfriendly, condemn and reject people? Hardly. Friendship for James is a much deeper concept than mere congeniality or being nice. In the ancient world friendship was synonymous with intimacy. Greek philosophers discussed friendship as the highest of ideals, the paradigm around which to build cities, as being one soul with another. Friendship meant adopting the values of the other as your own. Our friendships today tend toward the casual and superficial. After all, we don’t adopt the values of our friends, do we?

When Pam and I were first married we wanted to make friends with other young couples. I’m a little more cautious about new people than Pam. There was a new couple that moved into a condo unit near ours. We met this couple at the pool one day. They seemed nice enough and invited us to come over one night for dinner. Pam said yes. I figured there’s got to be something wrong with them.

So we went over to their unit. That’s an odd expression but if you live in a condo you say things like that all the time – come see our unit, how big is your unit, what phase do you live in? And dinner went well. We had fun and laughed a lot. But after dinner and a few beers the conversation turned a bit bizarre. This couple suddenly felt comfortable telling us things like – how blacks started moving into their old neighborhood and ruined it. How they were disgusted by the two “queers” who lived next door. I’m not sure what was stranger, what they said or the fact that felt comfortable saying it.

Needless to say, Pam and I did not pursue that friendship any further. When we really think about it, we are careful about whom we choose to befriend. Real friendships change us. Our friends influence us and mold us. James provokes us to consider, who are we befriending? Whose values are we adopting?

Over the next few weeks, we’ll explore how God’s values aren’t just about the things you hear on the news or religious broadcasts. In James, God’s values aren’t so much about who you sleep with as who you are awake with, and how you treat them when you are awake. God’s values involve walking the talk, doing what we say we believe, our attitude in times of crisis. It means living in conscious rejection of the world’s values of envy, wealth and ambition, of judgment and partiality.

Like James’ community we wonder, how do we live out everything He taught us? It is not about big political issues, although it certainly affects how we approach those things. Instead it is about issues that you and I deal with every day, in our homes, our schools, our workplace, on the road, in the mall and even in church. We live out our discipleship in things so ordinary, that they are profound.

It just really sucks that we have to actually do the work.