Monday • 5/10/2021
Week of 6 Easter 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 80; Deuteronomy 8:1–10; James 1:1–15; Luke 9:18–27

Comments on James 1:1–15 from DDD 11/12/2020: https://tinyurl.com/p7ez9f76

This morning’s Canticles are: before the Psalm reading, Pascha Nostrum(“Christ Our Passover,” BCP, p. 83); following the OT reading, Canticle 9 (“The First Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 12:2–6, BCP, p. 86); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (“The Song of the Redeemed,” Revelation 15:3–4, BCP, p. 94)

James: tests versus temptations. To paraphrase a central point in today’s epistle reading: James says, “Embrace tests that come our way, but don’t think they are temptations from God.” Tests come from God, temptations don’t. Tests and temptations may look the same. In fact, clever wordsmith that he is, James uses the same Greek root (peiros-/peiraz-) for both. Tests and temptations can take an outward appearance that’s identical: mistreatment by a boss, an insult from a supposed friend, a slight by a spouse, overhearing gossip about a person we don’t like anyway, or overhearing a joke about people who are “other.” But tests and temptations are not the same thing, though they both show us what we’re made of. Tests come from a God who wants us to succeed, and are his loving way of helping us prove our mettle. Temptations come from a sinister source that wants to take us down and dance on our grave. Tests cheer us on, temptations jeer at us. Tests toughen, temptations entice.

Today’s passages offer helpful guardrails:

Deuteronomy: Accept the wilderness. When we find ourselves in a “wilderness” (as Israel did for forty years during the exodus), we can be tempted to ingratitude, or we can accept the test of gratitude (“For the daily bread you provide, dear Lord, I give you thanks”) and of obedience (“The path your Word lays before me, and not the one of my own devising, that is the path I will follow”). 

The past year has been a wilderness experience for everybody. There’s been no manual for coping with this pandemic, no univocal voice of human authority. We’ve had to sit outside nursing homes while grandmothers and grandfathers expire alone. We’ve resigned ourselves to being exiled from the Lord’s Table, from even simple handshakes  at the Peace, from seeing each other’s full and warm smiles. Rather than in person, we’ve had to process via screen experiences of, and responses to, tectonic shifts in politics and society. It’s been simultaneously lonely and suffocating. We’ve been pulled into a vortex of common fear and sickness and death; we’ve been pushed out into wildly different experiences. 

James: Look for the joy. Throughout it all, James challenges us to find the joy somehow (“whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy”), to embrace the discipline of endurance (“you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance”), to look to Him for wisdom (“If any of you is lacking in wisdom, ask God”), and to assess our own circumstances by the Lord’s valuation (and not by our culture’s or our own personal proclivities): “Let the believer who is lowly boast in being raised up, and the rich in being brought low” (James 1:2,3,5,9). 

Joy … endurance … wisdom … re-evaluation. The circumstances we go through always give us opportunity to name the things that give us reasons for thanks, that make us stronger, that make us smarter, and that give us new perspective. It might be worth it to take a few moments and make a list … 

Don’t blame the devil. In other places, Scripture points to the demonic source of temptation. I think of the Garden of Eden. I think of Satan’s accusations of Job. I also recall that later in his epistle, James himself speaks of a supposed “wisdom” that is at bottom demonic (James 3:14). But here in chapter 1, he speaks of that within us that makes us susceptible to the hiss of the serpent: our own desires: “But one is tempted by one’s own desire, being lured and enticed by it” (James 1:14). 

The shocker in James 1 is to discover that we are our own tempters. The devil’s whispers only work because they resonate with something inside us, something like a spiritual death wish. This same truth will be evident in James 3 as well, where James cautions against envy, selfish ambition, boastfulness, a world of iniquity within us, partiality, and hypocrisy—things that provide tinder for the sparks that hell sets aflame (James 3:6,14,16,17). In today’s passage, James says that to give in to these impulses is to surrender ourselves to a kind of death even before we die. He puts this out there for us so we might, say “No!”, and instead, respond to the new life which has, in Christ, taken hold in us: “[The Father of lights] gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures” (James 1:17,18).

Tough times call for an inventory of what God provides in our lives (gifts like joy, etc.), but also for an inventory of the vestiges of what the apostle Paul calls “the old man” or “the old self”—the self we are called to “put to death,” lest it kill us. “Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry) …  These are the ways you also once followed, when you were living that life. But now you must get rid of all such things—anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth” (Colossians 3:5,7–8). 

Perhaps one of the mercies of hard times, of finding ourselves in a wilderness like that of the past year, is that we are given abundant opportunity to name the evil that comes to the surface—to name it, confess it, rebuke it, and banish it.  (918 words)

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Reggie Kidd photo