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Close to God                        James 7: 7- 8                   September 20, 2009

Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and God will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.

Join me, please, in a moment of quiet reflection on the text we just read.

Did that silence make you uncomfortable? My guess is that, for some of you, it did. I'm also guessing that for many of you it was hard to focus just on the text. And that was just one minute. Sixty seconds of silence, and most of us fidget noticeably. Our minds wander. Our thoughts kick into high gear.

Normally, after the reading of our text for the day, I offer a brief prayer and launch into my sermon. Our Sunday worship service begins at 11:00 and ends at noon, or thereabouts, and we fill that hour with music and talk. There is probably no more than a few seconds of silence.

And that's the hour we set aside each week whose purpose is to bring us close to God! Think of the other 110 or so waking hours we spend each week. How many of those do we spend in silence, without any agenda, with nothing on our mind?

Well, this morning I'd like to explore with you a different approach to communicating with God. One that is oriented toward listening rather than talking - or singing - or praying with words, whether silent or aloud.

Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, poet and author of more than seventy books, was one of the more influential Christian authors of the 20th Century. His name is almost synonymous with the spiritual practice known as contemplation.

"Contemplation is the highest expression of humankind's intellectual and spiritual life," writes Merton in his classic book, New Seeds of Contemplation. "It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being."

Contemplation is fundamentally about the discovery of God. About being conscious of the presence of God.

Merton writes, "our discovery of God is. . . God's discovery of us. We cannot go to heaven to find God, because we have no way to know where heaven is or what it is. God comes down from heaven and finds us. We become contemplatives when God discovers God's self in us."

Heady stuff.

James, the author of our text for this morning, may or may not have been a contemplative. There's no way to know. He writes, though, in verse eight of chapter four of his letter/sermon, the text we read a few moments ago: "Draw near to God, and God will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded." And when James writes those words he certainly sounds like a contemplative.

Because practicing the spiritual discipline of contemplation is all about drawing near to God.

In the first half of our lesson, in Chapter 3, James talks about wisdom. First, he lists some things that are the opposite of wisdom: bitter envy, selfish ambition, boastfulness, falsity, disorder, and wickedness of every kind. Things that separate us from God.

Then, by contrast, he spells out the positive characteristics of wisdom: it is pure, peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. Things that repair our relationship with our Creator.

In Chapter 4, James shifts gears. He scolds his readers harshly. The desire for pleasure, he says, results in conflict, war and murder. "You do not have," he tells his readers, "because you do not ask, and you ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures."

James describes a world in which people are bitterly envious, selfishly ambitious, unspiritual, and devilish. The communities he addresses are in constant conflict and people are continually disputing one another. In other words, he describes a world where sin is the driving force that rules the day. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

To say that sin is as much a part of our experience as it was in the time of James is to simply state the obvious. The church has been around for over 2,000 years and throughout that span of history it has consistently taught and preached about sin, and sometimes ranted and raved at it.

In the late 6th century, Pope Gregory the Great first defined the "seven deadly sins." He also ranked them from most serious to least: pride, envy, anger, sadness, avarice, gluttony, and lust.

Later theologians, including St. Thomas Aquinas, argued that the sins should not be ranked in order of their seriousness. It makes sense when you think about it. If all these sins are "deadly," then one is as evil as the other. Interestingly, it wasn't until the seventeenth century that the church replaced the vague sin of "sadness" with the more specific sin of sloth.

Today, these seven sins: pride, envy, anger, laziness, greed, gluttony and lust, hardly seem deadly at all; more likely to be a punch line for a joke or the plot line for a movie than the subject of a "fire and brimstone" sermon.

In Europe, I gather, there is an ice cream company that markets a "seven deadly sins" line of ice cream bars. And right here in the good old U S of A, if you like you can call your broker and invest in shares of the "Vice Fund" - a mutual fund that buys stock in the alcoholic beverage, tobacco and gambling industries.

Clearly, standing up with righteous indignation against the sins of the world does little to stop the sins from flourishing. In fact, it may have just the opposite effect.

And even worse, reducing the definition of what it means to be a person of faith to a long list of things that must be avoided trivializes the Gospel and makes the Body of Christ look naïve and foolish.

James, in our lesson for today, is like a good physician. He provides us with both a diagnosis and a prescription.

His diagnosis is simple: James writes that the evil things we experience in the world - violence, war, murder, social upheaval and the like - are the result of our predisposition toward one particular deadly sin: envy.

Why, James asks, are there wars and battles among you? It is because of envy. Why do young children prey on weaker kids over a leather jacket or a pair of high-end athletic shoes? Envy.

Why does the quest for oil drive the endless conflict in the Middle East? Envy.

Why, indeed, do we find it so difficult to follow the God who loves us without condition? It is because of the craving that demands the taking of that which belongs to another so that one of us might become greater than the other. It is because of envy.

Fortunately, James' prescription is as simple as his diagnosis.

Because his analysis shows that our sinfulness - our separation from God - is because of a disease of the human heart, the repair of that separation - the healing of our sinful nature - is made possible by a turning to God.

You'll notice that James doesn't talk about conversion. He doesn't talk about a once-and-forever repentance experience. No, James recognizes that drawing close to God is an ongoing process. A rigorous process. A process that, because of our weak human nature is often a two steps forward, one step back series of events, but a process none the less.

"Draw near to God," says James, "and God will draw near to you."

This imperative brings me back to the spiritual practice of contemplation, and to Thomas Merton.

Contemplation, Merton writes, is the very process of drawing near to God. Like James, Merton recognizes that it is a journey. With steps along the way. Three are particularly important.

The first step, he says, is to pray for your own discovery.

"Let my eyes see nothing in the world but Your glory," he prays, "and let my hands touch nothing that is not for your service. Let me use all things for one sole reason: to find my joy in giving You glory."

"This, then is what it means to seek God perfectly," Merton writes: "to withdraw from illusion and pleasure, from worldly anxieties and desires, from the works that God does not want. . . to entertain silence in my heart and listen for the voice of God."

The second step is to love fully.

"To say that I am made in the image of God," Merton goes on to say, "is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Love is my name."

And the third is to recognize that the more I become identified with God, the more will I be identified with all the others who are identified with God.

This third step is really important. Though contemplation must take us apart from others - to our own room or corner where no one will find us or disturb us - to a place where we can leave the world behind - the contemplative does not seek to escape people but "to learn how to find them; we do not leave them in order to have nothing more to do with them, but to find out the way to do them the most good."

Here's my recommendation: find some time in each day to sit, quietly and comfortably, and silently experience the presence of God. Start with a simple prayer like the one Thomas Merton suggested: "God, help me to neither see nor hear anything but Your Glory," read a text from Scripture - the Moravian Daily Text watchword is a good choice - and then embrace the silence and listen for the voice of God.

At first, you may only be able to maintain silence, without any extraneous thoughts, for a minute or two. Stick with it. And gradually increase the time, until you are practicing this contemplative prayer for 20 minutes each day - longer if you can. And on those days when the pressures of life are about to drive you to your wit's end - make it 40 minutes.

Thankfully, we worship a God who wants to be close to us. But also a God who gives us the freedom to choose - to be close - or not. May we choose wisely. May we draw close to God, with the absolute certainty that God will draw close to us.

                                                                             AMEN

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