How to live a good life

James 3:13 - 4:3, 7-8a

What is a good life?  We have ideas of what a good life is or should be. Right now especially it seems to have something to do with being on the correct side of the issue, whatever the issue may be. And just as important as being correct is being seen as being correct.  It can be about vaccines, or policing in our cities, or climate change, or racism, or it can be about how your lawn looks, and what you’re putting into your body, and how well-behaved your kids are, and what kind of effort you put into maintaining friendships.  What it looks like to others is at least as important as what it actually is.  
Modern life is primarily a performative exercise.
 
But, James asks, what’s going on in your heart?  Is this so-called good life being lived with envy, resentment, self-centeredness, bragging, or bending the truth?  If so, then there will be disorder and wickedness of every kind.  If so, it’s not a very good life.
 
What is a good life, then, and how do we know how to live it?
 
For example: Is it ok to shop at the super convenient and cheap store that pays minimum wage and doesn’t provide their employees with health insurance?
 
 What about that place that pays great, delivers health insurance, treats employees well and donates to great causes, but the owner of the company invests his personal money in a fund that, among a number of other good things, also supports a cause that dehumanizes some people?  
 
Is it actually better for the environment to buy the toilet paper that is made from sugar cane and bamboo, if it comes encased in several layers of cardboard stuffed with (recycled) paper and is delivered to your door by a large gas guzzling vehicle? 
 
Is it ok to want to have nice things or go on nice vacations when there is so much poverty and inequity?  Do you volunteer enough? Speak out enough?  Keep your house tidy enough?  Spend enough time with your kids, or grandkids, or parents? Do you stay informed enough?  Exercise enough?  Pray enough?
 
Living toward a standard of a good life that isn’t even fixed or clear is exhausting.  Measuring that against how well other people seem to be doing it in order to figure out whether I am doing it right is downrightt mind-scrambling.  
 
In fact, disorder and wickedness of every kind result from this kind of selfish ambition and envy motivation.
 
I feel disordered frequently. I feel the desire to be seen as good that, if I am honest, is sometimes greater than the desire to actually be good.  
 
I feel jealousy or resentment rise in me on a regular basis.  I feel misunderstood and I lob misunderstanding right back at the opposing party.   I am often quick to judge and quick to anger.
 
If a good life has to include with what’s in my heart along with mastering some performative actions then I can’t even delude myself that it’s possible to live a good life.  There is no way I can live a good life.  I can try all I want, but it is never enough, and I do it for all the wrong reasons, and from all the wrong motivations.  And the striving and comparing and accusing voice of judgment against myself and others will never stop howling inside my head and often out my mouth.
 
What is a good life and how do we live it?  
If this scripture is prescriptive it hasn’t yet told us what to do.  Because trying not to be selfish or jealous, or striving to have perfect motives when we perform all of our lofty and moving-target good life actions, is not only stupid and impractical, it actually is impossible.
 
This is good news actually. We can’t actually live a good life. We can’t even figure out what a good life is half the time.  
But that’s not our job. 
 
Here’s where it this passage tells us what is our job, three things:
Submit yourself to God.
Resist the devil. 
And draw near to God.
Submit. Resist. Draw near.
 
Submit yourself to God, James says because all the conflicts and disputes come from the cravings at war within ourselves.  They come from the way we try to save ourselves, advance ourselves, preserve ourselves, present ourselves. 
 
But life is not actually not about belonging to ourselves, it’s about belonging to God, and through God to each other.  And in fact, God does a much better job of unconditional love and boundless acceptance than we could ever do for ourselves. So much so that when our lives are rooted in our belonging to God, we can be brave and open and connected to others.  So we are called to submit ourselves to God, to confess our selfish desires and admit our messy motives, and lay down our flimsy defenses and repent. We ask for the connection and hope that we desire, that we are made for.  
 
Then, instead of us trying to live a good life by whatever current standards and definitions we have embraced at the moment, the wisdom from above that is God’s wisdom, not ours, will live through us.  And our lives, the words we say and the actions we take, how we treat others, how we treat ourselves, what we do with our money and our time -  these things will become a good life. They will be done with gentleness, born of God’s wisdom.  
When God moves through us God draws us into lives that are peaceable and pure James says, and “willing to yield, full of mercy, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.”  But we don’t make that happen. We can’t.  We submit ourselves to God and the Holy Spirit does that work in us.  And the Holy Spirit draws us into God’s goodness already at work in the whole world, and we join in out of joy and calling, not out of urgency, pressure or guilt.
 
Second, we resist the devil – the Greek word is the accuser, the voice of condemnation and blame directed at our selves or others, the voice that that tears down our own humanity, or someone else’s.  That voice that says if we try harder and learn all the things, and avoid all the things, and do all the things, we can live a good life like those people obviously do. Or, look how awful they are, if we aren’t like them then we must be good.  That voice that tells us we are in it on our own, and we are supposed to be stronger than we are and not ask for help or admit weakness.  The voice that says we have nothing to offer someone else, nothing to give.  The voice that says that other people’s suffering or the problems in the world are not my business. The voice that says we have to carry it all and if we don’t it proves we don’t care.  We speak back to the voice of the accuser and stand up to it. We refuse to relinquish our minds and hearts to the delicious but poisonous, divisive anger of it.  When we confront the accusing voice, it will flee from us. 
 
And finally, third, we draw near to God.  We steep ourselves in what helps us seek God – meditation, walks in nature, stillness, stopping and stepping out of it all through gratitude, practicing noticing, and wonder, and cultivating silence.  We choose to spend time with those in need, and to care for each other, and we let ourselves be cared for and seen in our own need by others because right there is where we see God most.  We are human and present in our lives, because the God who became human in Christ is present to us here.  
Stop performing your life and live it, right here where God is.  Draw near to God and God will draw near to you.
 
This is a good life. 
Submit, resist, draw near.
 
I am more and more convinced that the way through this pandemic is to go deeper and simpler. Do less.  Listen more.  Turn things off and turn things down.  The noise and the conflict is a liar that tricks us into feeling alive but drains us of life. 
No matter what is happening around us or to us, we can live a good life.  God’s goodness is here for us, at any and every moment.
So submit to God and let God bring you into peace.  
Resist the accuser and it will flee. 
And draw near to God and God will draw near to you.
Amen.

What ended up happening instead

Daily Devotion - May 23

I will send a brief message each day (except Mondays)

while we are pausing gathering in person.
- Kara

Acts 16:6-15, 40

When a story unfolds, it’s impossible to say it could have happened any other way. Think of your own stories of childhood, or college, or career, the places you’ve lived and the friends you made and the choices that have shaped your path.  Taken together, they are your story.  Would you be the same person if things had happened differently? 

If you had said yes to the other job offer, or come a few minutes earlier and met different people in the school registration line? If you’d gone to the camp the week before or after and missed the speaker whose words lit up your soul?  

I can play this game with my life very easily.  What if I hadn’t stopped spontaneously for that DQ blizzard which I ate in hours-long, standstill traffic with the rest of session, and instead had been ten miles further up the freeway where the terrible accident occurred?  What if my seminary roommate hadn’t gotten sick, and the person she was proofreading for hadn’t had me pinch-hit in her place? (spoiler- I married the guy.)  What if I had ended up randomly assigned to a different group at that conference in New Jersey twelve years ago, where I met someone who would become one of my closest friends and colleagues? (shout out, Jodi!).  

If any one thing in any of our lives were different, the whole story would be different. 

 

That happens to Paul in our scripture today, and to Lydia too.  First of all, the story begins with a pretty bossy Holy Spirit, who keeps shutting down Paul’s plans and pointing his group in directions they hadn’t planned to go.  But by this point, Paul is used to the Spirit’s wily ways, and has learned to pay attention to curious things, like dreams.  And then he gamely goes wherever it seems like he’s being led.  And so they end up in Philippi.

 

When they get there, who knows why Paul didn’t start with synagogue there like he did other places?  Why were he and his companions wandering along a river outside the city on this fine Sabbath day, instead of checking in with the powers that be in their local religious gathering?  What had they heard about this “place of prayer” that they set off to discover it?  And when they first saw it, it was nothing to them.  They had no way of knowing then that it would become a sacred place for them, a quiet and holy place they returned to often. 

 

And surely, as they walked along that day, they had no idea their lives would be changed by a person they were about to meet “by accident.”  And she didn’t know her life was about to change either.  This “seller of purple cloth,” an established businesswoman who happened to be in this place of prayer that Sabbath day, was a worshiper of God- meaning, a Gentile who followed the God of Israel.  She had joined with other women on this day of rest in a place they liked to go pray and talk about God together.  In other words, without yet knowing what it was, they were being Church.  And on that one innocuous day, God brought together these two leaders.  God had plans they could not possibly have imagined.  

 

All over this story we see the fingerprints of God, the breath of the Spirit, blowing the story along, leading and prompting people into situations they could never have imagined, and yet, looking back, could never imagine their life without. 

 

So Paul meets Lydia.  And when he tells her about Jesus Christ, God opens her heart, and she knows what Paul is telling her before she hears it. The message he shares resonates deep in her being; it is meant for her, she is meant for it.  

 

She knows right then this is her story, and she’s ready to live it.  Immediately she is baptized – her whole household is, in fact.  And she urges Paul’s posse to stay with her, and then once again, their plans shift.  I love this wording, “she prevailed upon us.”  She prevailed and they relented.  So they stay at her house and are embraced by the lavish hospitality of the first Christian convert in Europe.  

 

This Jesus-follower’s house becomes for the road-weary little band a kind of home base, a place to eat home-cooked food and sleep in clean sheets and wash their clothes, a place they return to for comfort and care, where they go to find themselves again. 

 

Lydia quickly becomes for them the friend you keep in touch with over years and distance, the one you can send friends to when they’re passing through town and she will throw open her door and hug a stranger over the threshold.  “Any friend of Paul’s is a friend of mine!” she’ll laugh as she takes your coat and boots.  That will be Lydia’s house.

 

And later on, when Paul and Silas are locked up and then released from prison, Lydia’s house is where they’ll go to rest up and get sent out again.

 

God invites Lydia into ministry, quite apart from Paul’s initial plans or intentions. Then, from different paths in different parts of the world, God weaves together these two souls, so that one day, if they were to look back they would not be able to imagine who they would have been, or where their lives would have gone, if they hadn’t met one another in a seeming coincidence on that one day back then.  

 

And it wasn’t just the two individual lives that were changed, but the Church that was coming to life.  Here and there, spreading and growing in homes and communities, in lives changed and hope shared, the Church was shaped by Pastor Lydia, Leader Lydia.  Lydia’s house, Lydia’s table and her message, her influence and her energy, her hospitality shaped the Church in Europe.  She embodied the gospel message that Paul wandered around telling people about.  

 

And how did the message Paul preached get jolted and altered when, instead of the Jewish man from Macedonia he’d dreamt about, expected and intended to meet – the person God introduces him to is a Gentile woman who already knew, but was waiting for an introduction to, Jesus the Christ?

When Paul wrote to the Church in Philipi, his letters most likely got delivered right to Lydia’s house, and can you imagine our bible without the book of Philippians?

 

We have plans, and God overrides them.  We have expectations, and God thwarts them. We have assumptions, and God rearranges them.  We have our ideas of what makes a good life, and God gives us a good life, sometimes quite in spite of and apart from those ideas.  This God of love and redemption is never not up to something.  Even here, even now. 

Here and now especially. 

God is always bringing the world to wholeness, bringing people back to God and each other, and this cannot be stopped.  

 

One of the joys of this life is that we get to look back and see how what unfolded is how we got where we are – especially those things we hadn’t planned on or prepared for.  We get to notice how the things that happened along the way were part of God’s work in us. And we can see how some deeply meaningful people and impactful moments were often not things we set out pursuing or expecting, but were what ended up happening instead.

 

This time we are living in right now was on none of our calendars. We had other plans.  We had ideas about what makes our lives good, and for most of us, it wasn’t this.  But here we are.  What will God do with us in this place? How will these weeks and months get woven into our stories? How will they alter the meaning or direction of our lives?   And what will God do not just in us, but through us, because of this unexpected turn?  Each of us, but us together as well - how will the ministry of our congregation be shaped through what unfolds in this unusual and unforeseen chapter?

 

The breath of the Spirit is blowing our story.  All over our lives are the fingerprints of God. These days hold moments that, one day, we will never be able to picture our lives, or our church, without. God has plans we could not possibly imagine.  I look forward to looking back and seeing what they were.

CONNECTING RITUAL:

Perhaps tonight before bed, whatever time that is in each of our homes, we and so join our souls with each other and the people of the whole earth:

God, I had not planned for this time,

but here I am.

Thank you for the ways you've prepared me, like...

Help me through the parts that I'm finding difficult right now, like...

Thank you for the gifts I couldn't have anticipated, like...

For what you are doing that I can see, thank you.

For what you are doing that I cannot see, thank you.

For the future you have in store for me, and for all of us,

thank you.

Amen.

Your Glorious Life

2 Corinthians 3:17-18, 4:6

The big story about Moses was that after whatever happened up there on the mountain between him and God, he never looked the same again. The skin of his face glowed like a nightlight.  God is so holy, and the glory of God is so powerful, so overwhelming, that God told Moses that nobody could see the face of God and live. So God showed Moses the almighty backside and still Moses' face was permaglow.  And it freaked people out.  

Being thoughtful like that, Moses decided it was good to just cover the offensive thing when he was out in public and only to let them see the proof of his encounters with God when he was actually delivering messages right from God.  So Moses wore a veil.

This both lent a little gravitas to the messages delivered with special effect veil removal, and also made potlucks a little easier, without his big mug beaming across the table at you while you were trying to eat your hot dish in peace. 

Imagine if he just let his light shine! Mercy! There would be no forgetting, ever, that the universe-creating, law-giving, covenant-making, ancestor-leading, Red Sea-parting, Egyptian-army sinking, manna-giving God was meddling in your affairs.  

This was back when things could holy, a conduit of the divine: the Ark of the Covenant; the Holy of Holies.  This mentality went on for quite a while – holy places, the bones of dead saints, relics. In the Middle Ages the reason the priest would put the Eucharist host right on your tongue, and then check to make sure you swallowed it, was so that you didn’t smuggle it home and feed it to your sick cow to cure its illness.

  

We modern people don’t see it that way anymore; we’re too rational to believe in holy things. We have a hard time believing in transcendence at all. We no longer take for granted the active, meddling presence of God in all of life.  We have to get into the right mindset when we share the bread and the cup to trust that God is with us in this act, and this moment is holy, because it is.  And then we take the bread into the Gathering Room after the service and eat it with peanut butter because, after all, it’s bread.  

But with that shining light face of his there was no getting around that Moses had been made holy.  He was set apart, a bridge between humanity and God. Even when he was sleeping, or using the toilet, or doing his taxes, he was different, holy.  Holy people are so extra! To navigate being near regular humans it’s just easier and kinder for everyone if he wears a veil.  

 A veil you can get used to – that’s a human thing.  You might even, from time to time, forget why he had it on and just act almost normal around him (just don’t swear in front of Moses!).

Perhaps when we think of what it means to live a good life,* we think it means a holy life, in this way. It's to be somehow different, better, other than human, set apart, not normal. And probably we'd answer, in this veiled version of holy, that it's a life that doesn't do bad things but does good things instead, a life that strives to be good and admirable, and please God, and so also maybe hides the things in us that feel bad, or weak, or less than stellar.

Perhaps we think this is what God wants from us. To project faith as belief without doubt, instead of   receive faith as the dependable presence that of the One who will never let us go.  And to treat prayer as a skill we can master and excel at, rather than it being really present ourselves in the real presence of God.  And to see being a disciple as something to strive for, rather than a state of being, characterized by attention and expectation that God will act.  In a veiled version of holiness, both prayer and faith are then also things we can use to measure and compare ourselves, ranking and dividing ourselves from each other. "He's a good pray-er; I could never pray like that."  "She's such a faithful person; I could never be so selfless and devout."

And so we’re not so different than the people of God have ever been, thinking, let’s just keep it how it was when God gave a list of helpful guidelines and the only one who had to bear the shock of meeting the transcendent was one dude, and he would veil up.  

In fact, let’s all veil up! – just to be safe. For the Corinthians, it was asking the Gentiles to become Jews, for us, we’ll set out purity tests for wokeness, or right theology, or agreeable politics, and silo everyone off into like-minded groups of good or bad, right or wrong, and guard our true selves from others, and stick with our own, who are obviously the right ones, and we’ll call that living a good life.

And with all of us veiled up then nobody has to deal with the unexpected shock of glory coming through some face we don’t recognize or approve of, or God, forbid, through our own faces at one another.  An uncontrollable kind of life that would be – just maybe coming across glory at any turn!  Geesh!  It might make us have to talk about it and share in it, and change what we believe about each other or God, or be changed by each other and God! Frankly, we’d rather just point helpfully to the list of rules and the guy in charge and keep ourselves safely to ourselves.

It is easier, maybe, to live with a barrier between us, than to have to be confronted all the time with the honest truth of being chosen by God, in a relationship with the Divine and smudged with inescapable glory.  In any case, it made things easier for the people, but it made it easier for Moses too, maybe, if they didn’t have to be reminded all the time that God is near.

But God is near. All the time. Joy is right here, just under the surface of life, for each of us to taste or touch at any moment.  (Perhaps remembering that is what it is to live a good life).

My friend Peter who has spent many years in Africa, shared a story about a wedding he attended in Morongo, Tanzania.  The bride was wearing a veil- one of the many western imports creeping into life there and into the marriage ceremony.  

Now, in that culture, Peter explained, the bride is not to look happy on her wedding day. She is leaving her family, and should be appropriately melancholy.  She is meant to have despondent demeanor, downcast eyes, look generally bummed out enough to show respect to her family who raised her and whom she is now leaving; and all the formal wedding photos reveal a properly sad bride.

But Peter took a picture of the veiled bride on her way down the aisle, and, being that this was some years ago, did what we all did back then and waited some time before having the film developed.  When he saw the photo, he discovered that the flash captured through the veil an enormous, joyous grin on the bride’s face as she made her way to her wedding alter.

He said he loves that photo, and that in some beautiful way, the veil over her face allowed her to have a foot in both worlds- to respect and give to her family and people what they needed to see (and needed to not see), but to also be glowing with joy in privacy behind that veil.

Veils, by design, don’t so much keep us from seeing out, they most often keep others from seeing us.  When the veil is removed, people have to see you.  There’s no hiding to keep yourself, or others, more comfortable. You have to be seen. For who you are.  For the glory of God that shines out of your ordinary life.  

And what the heck is glory anyway? Isn’t it the halo around the saint’s head in the paintings? The glory of the Lord shown around those angels when they sang to the shepherds in the fields keeping watch over their flock by night, and they were sore afraid!

Like a residue of mystery, power, transcendence, glory is something connected to God, something other than ordinary, something worthy of awe, something clinging on or shining forth or drawing us near its holiness.

By its very nature glory is NOT inconspicuous or unnoticeable, it’s not a blend-in kind of thing, and it doesn’t spend much time worrying about boat-rocking or institution-building or rule-respecting or people-pleasing, because it comes from quite beyond all of that, some kind of intense nearness to or reflection of the Divine, come what may.

Paul says that all of us, with unveiled faces, see the glory of God as though reflected in a mirror.  Remember last time he talked about a mirror? He was talking about faith, hope and love, those things that come to us from the complete into the partial.  “Now we see in a mirror dimly, then we will see face to face,” he said (1 Cor. 13:12-13).  In those days mirrors were just polished metal; they were vague, a rough estimate, a glimpse of the truth. 

Imagine seeing the glory of God, however vaguely, in your own face, when you gaze into a mirror? Imagine seeing the glory of God, when you are face to face with one another? 

Who is this God and what is God up to?*  God is making us holy – conduits of the Divine. The Spirit of God is transforming us. We are being transformed.  From one glory to the next.  From the glory of an immortal, invisible God only wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes, to the glory of God-with-us right there in the very opposite of glory – muck, filth, ordinariness, shame, boredom and the mundane.

   

Is there glory in a dozen dirty diapers in a day that never gets out of the pajama pants with a shower nowhere on the horizon?  

Is there glory in a daily drudge commute and a cubicle with little satisfaction and no chance for advancement? 

What about our recycling and gardening, voting and volunteering, listening, trying to forgive, letting out our tears and anger, injuries and healing, celebrating the birthdays and going to the funerals, do these things have anything to do with glory?

Is there glory when our bodies begin to fail us? Or when our minds start to go, and we can’t always tell what’s real, or remember the things and people that we used to know so well?

Does glory say anything to the questions, Does my life even matter? Am I even important?

Or to the crises and losses that knock us on our backs and makes us think we’ve got nothing to get up for?

Yes. The God of glory came right into those places, the real places, the veil-less, see-it-for-what-it-is-places.  Right there, in the least likely of places, and shining off the least likely of faces, is the glory of God.  The Spirit of the Living God transforms us and makes our lives holy, like it transformed a state torture and death instrument on a dump outside the city walls into the symbol of our salvation and freedom. And whether we’re caught up in pursuing purity, pleasure or protection, this story upends our definition of living a good life.

In Christ, Paul says, the veil is removed.  The curtain in the Holy of holies tore in two from top to bottom when Jesus breathed his last. God has broken through, and the transcendent has invaded the ordinary; our lives are part of that glory.  The Spirit of the Lord sets us free! Paul says this a million ways and not always nicely, You are free! Stop acting like you’re not! Go live the free that you are!

In Christ, your self-protection is stripped away.  Your comfort in answers and control over who’s in and who’s out, who’s right and who’s wrong, and how much you personally have to invest or reveal – it’s all been removed – you have been set free for the terrifying task of living as free people, free for loving God and one another, come what may. 

  

We are being transformed to live a holy life.  It’s a real and awake life, a life drawn into the helplessness of God, as Rowan Williams says, who cannot not forgive.  A vulnerable, honest, attentive, expectant kind of life, a life claimed by love, for love. Look in the mirror and see it. Look at each other and see it. In all our unglorious mess, the glory of God shines forth. 

But not if we hide.  Not if we cover our true selves and our inspiring, vulnerable places where God has met us, because we’re sure it would make others uncomfortable to be around such things.  Not if we drape over our own struggling humanity, our failures and doubts, and weaknesses.  And not if we hang a curtain between ourselves and others whom we don’t understand, because we’ve decided God’s glory can’t possibly be present there.  

I’m not perfect, and I’m not always an easy person to love. And neither are most of you.  If this were our own glory we were working at revealing, we’d be in trouble.  If the job in front of us was to make ourselves holy, we’d be doomed.  But it’s not about what we’ve earned or done, or how shiny we try to make our lives.  This is God’s glory, shining off our faces, right into the faces of others.  Shining from the weakness and honesty of our lives right into the lives of others.  And it’s inconvenient and makes us uncomfortable sometimes.  And we’d like to hide so as not to offend.

But instead, since we have such hope, let’s act with great boldness, Paul says, a few verses earlier. Let’s live bravely.  Let’s not cover up that we are people being transformed by the Spirit of God.  The light who shines in the darkness shines in the darkness of this world and the darkness of your life. 

Let it shine.

Amen.

We are in a year of questions at LNPC - lots of question. But the two (or four, depending on how you count) main questions guiding our whole year are: Who is God and what is God up to? And, What is a good life, and how do we live it?

This is sermon 4 in a series that is following along Rowan Williams' book, Being Disciples. Here are its precursors:  Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3.