Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
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SERMON
For the past three weeks, we have worked our way through the Letter of James, learning along the way that “pure religion” must not be self-centered or inner-directed; but must be concerned with the community, especially with the “orphans and widows in their distress.” We also were reminded that our “good works” should make a real difference in the lives of others and in our own lives. And last Sunday, Julie concluded her sermon by challenging us about our “words” and the impact that our “good words” (and our “not-so-good words”) have on others and on ourselves.
Now, we finish the Letter of James by combining his concerns with good works and good words into a question about the “good life.” The question is, “Who is wise and understanding among you?” And James’s immediate answer is: “Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom.” James will not settle for just any kind of “wisdom,” but insists that we seek for the wisdom that comes “from above,” a wisdom that is “first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy, and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.”
This is quite a list of attributes. But James does not stop by defining the positive features of “wisdom from above.” He also points out the negative features of “wisdom that is earthly, unspiritual, and devilish.” These negative features involve “envy, selfish ambition, disorder, and wickedness of every kind.”
Where does this leave us in understanding the connection between “the good life” and “works done with gentleness born of wisdom”?
Perhaps the results of a recent opinion poll can help here. A national survey (by Roper ASW) of more than 2,000 American adults over the age of 18 asked people to name the key elements of the good life.
Number 1 (for 89% of participants) is “owning a home;”
Number 2 (at 87%) is “good health;”
Number 3 is “a happy marriage;”
Number 4 is owning a car (78%).
Other important qualities of the good life include: having more time to spend away from work (66%), obtaining a college education for your children (59%), spiritual enrichment (low 50s%), having a vacation home (48%), having a home computer (45%), having a home entertainment center (39%), having a four-day workweek (34%). About 70% of the respondents to the survey say that their chances of achieving the good life are very good or fairly good.
National opinion polls certainly are one way to find out what people think. Another way is to ask the people around you. So, earlier this week, I mentioned to my wife, Sandra, that I was going to preach this Sunday, taking my text from the Letter of James for a sermon to be entitled “The Good Life.” Her first response was to remember a song entitled The Good Life, which she correctly recalled as having been one of the signature songs of Tony Bennett (Indeed, his autobiography is entitled The Good Life).
What neither Sandra nor I remembered was that the song was featured on the soundtrack of a 1962 Italian-French film called “The Seven Deadly Sins.” I imagine that some of you have heard of the so-called seven deadly sins—identified since the Middle Ages as pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust. So, the lyrics of Tony Bennett’s song proved not to be the best place to discover the connection between the “good life” and “works done with gentleness born of wisdom.”
Well, if Tony Bennett can’t help us, perhaps we can find another guide. A quick search of Google on the Internet generated 879,000 hits for the the phrase “good life.” Just for fun, I looked through the 100 most popular sites associated with the good life.
The number one website for the phrase “good life” is www.goodliferecordings.com, a Belgium-based music firm that emphasizes “hardcore” and alternative music for youth around the globe. In their FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) section, we learn that the name “goodlife” came about in a curious way. One of the youthful organizers of the record company was hanging around at home, and his dad remarked that he seemed to be enjoying the “good life” there at home – and the name for the record label and company was born. So, “hanging around at home” got equated with the good life. As a parent of a teenager, I can understand the concept and I am sure that many of you can too.
The number two website associated with the phrase “good life” is called www.goodlife.org, and is listed in the category “Home> Homemaking > Frugality.” It is the Internet presence for “The Good Life Center” located on Penobscot Bay, in Harborside, Maine. There, on Forest Farm, among the organic gardens and a hand-built homestead, visitors can learn more about the movement for “social justice and simple living” advocated by its deceased founders, Helen and Scott Nearing.
Building on the Nearing’s legacy, The Good Life Center encourages and supports individual and collective efforts to live sustainably into the future. Guided by the principles of kindness, respect, and compassion in relationships with natural and human communities, The Good Life Center promotes active participation in the advancement of social justice, creative integration of the life of the mind, body and spirit, and deliberate choice in living responsibly and harmoniously in an increasingly complicated world.
The Good Life Center has no permanent endowment, relying instead on donations and book sales to support its good works. The current resident directors of the Good Life Center “gently suggest $5 per person” as an appropriate donation for visitors.
Unlike GoodLife Recordings and its “hardcore” musical offerings, The Good Life Center sounds much more like the sort of place that James would have celebrated as “works done with gentleness born of wisdom.”
The third most popular web site belongs to a magazine based in Austin TX. Called The Good Life, the magazine offers “a sense of community and brings readers together to explore the local culture.” Politics, profiles, entertainment, fitness, alternative healthcare, gardens, work, people, relationships, events, travel, spirit – it’s all in The Good Life. Well, this sounds like Austin, Texas, doesn’t it?
Along the same line, in Wichita, Kansas, KNSS NewsRadio 1240 AM carries a Saturday morning show entitled “The Good Life,” hosted by Mr. Guy Bower, who can be reached at www.goodlifeguy.com. His program focuses on Food, Wine, and Fun – with cookbook authors, winemakers, chefs and other guests on the leading edge of today’s hottest food and wine trends. I wasn’t surprised to find such a program on the radio, but I was surprised to find it in Wichita, Kansas!
Another interesting website refers to a television program called The Good Life found on The HGTV network (Home and Garden Television Network). According to its self-promotion, this program celebrates people who have done more than dream about dropping out of the rat race. Each episode tells the story of real folks who have set goals, made sacrifices, and ultimately turned their dreams of the good life into reality. The program allows viewers to visit them in their homes and at the places they work to find inspiration in their personal experiences. I suspect that James would not have been impressed with people who “drop out of the rat race” just for their own pursuit of the good life. He would have wanted to see some evidence that their goals, sacrifices, and dreams involved the broader community.
This broader perspective can be heard on a radio program called “A Good Life,” broadcast around the world every Tuesday with a repeat on Friday on Radio Netherlands. The theme of the program is development, and that includes all the ways people strive to improve their lives. Given the world in which we live, the topics are often focused on the hardships people face and the obstacles they must overcome to make life better.
For many of us, we take for granted that material success is essential to have the good life. But, as the Radio Netherlands program reminds us, a lack of material success is the daily fare for most of the world. The World Bank has a webpage called PovertyNet, where we can hear some of the voices of the world’s poor people. What do the poor say about the Good Life?
The World Bank’s global study reveals considerable commonality of experiences across countries, cultures, rural and urban areas, and age and gender divisions. Five major features of the good life (and its absence) emerged in the World Bank survey: material well-being, physical well-being, security, freedom of choice and action, and social well-being.
Material well-being is tied to food , shelter, clothing, or their absence all around the globe. In Argentina, it was said, “You have work, and you are fine. If not, you starve.” Especially in urban areas, starvation is more and more widespread. In Russia, the researchers wrote about a woman who said that sometimes she did not have food for several days, and only drinking hot water and lying in bed not to spend energy.”
Physical well-being reflects health, strength, and appearance, which in turn often determine a person’s ability to work and earn the money needed to feed her family. Poor people are sick more often and for longer periods than are the wealthy. Illness can drop a household into destitution, for governmental and private sector insurance touches so few of the poor around the globe.
Security represents a peace of mind or confidence in survival from day to day. War, crime, violence, ethnic cleansing, frequent natural disasters – all these play havoc with the poor in every nation. In Bulgara, a respondent said, “Security is knowing what tomorrow will bring and how we will get food tomorrow.”
Freedom of choice and action means that people have some control over their lives. Being poor is to suffer exploitation, rudeness, and humiliating treatment at the hands of the rich – remember James’ comments about how we in the church receive the rich and the poor when they come into the sanctuary! A poor woman in Brazil told the survey team, “The rich is the one who says, ‘I am going to do it’ and does it. The poor, in contrast, do not fulfill their wishes or develop their capacities.” Security also includes the ability to acquire skills, education, loans, information, services, and resources; to live in good places rather than in dangerous places; and to withstand sudden stresses without slipping into poverty. Surviving among the poor requires taking risks that the rich never face.
Social well-being means having good social relations within the family and in the broader community. For the poor around the globe, being able to raise, marry, and settle children is a constant struggle. As an old woman in Bulgaria remarked, “To be well means to see your grandchildren happy, well dressed and to know that your children have settled down; to be able to give them food and money whenever they come to see you, and not ask them for help and money.”
The words of a poor older women from Ethiopa can serve to sum up the global survey: “A better life for me is to be healthy, peaceful and to live in love without hunger,. Love is more than anything. Money has no value in the absence of love.”
The data from this World Bank survey of poor people’s perceptions of the good life are quite striking, don’t you agree? In fact, I suspect that some of us feel that we have more in common with the poor in Bulgaria than we do with the affluent folks subscribing to The Good Life Magazine in Austin or listening to the Good Life Guy and his guests discussing the latest wines making their way from France to Wichita, Kansas.
Perhaps nowhere in the world is the pursuit of material success as celebrated as at the pinnacle of the American educational establishment – Harvard University in Cambridge, MA. This past year, the Rev. Professor Peter J. Gomes (Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church) published a book entitled The Good Life: Truths That Last in Times of Need (Harper-San Francisco, 2002). In his book, Rev. Gomes observes that – in recent years – Harvard students have gone beyond the material things that got them to Harvard, and have discovered that there is more to life than success alone.
He writes, “The value questions which were once tied to material net worth, increasingly have to do with matters of moral value, public and private virtue, and a sense of a fit vocation for making a good life and not just a good living.” For instructions on how to live a good life, Rev. Gomes says, “The shortest answer is Jesus’ answer: It is love of God, love of your brothers and sisters, It’s as simple as that.”
And this brings us full-circle back to the Letter of James. Remember the question with which we began: “Who is wise and understanding among you?” The answer for James, like the answer for Jesus, emphasizes the importance of doing good works, sharing good words, and being peacemakers with the gentleness born of wisdom from above.
And how do we learn to be kindly, gentle, and peaceable? James offers a simple solution: “Submit yourselves therefore to God. . . Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.” In the end, James makes clear that doing good works, sharing good words, and pursuing peace with gentleness come together as we come closer to God. It is not our wisdom but God’s wisdom that ultimately transforms us, our community, and the whole world.
The Letter of James challenges us about the difference between pursuing a life filled with goods and a life dedicated to the Good. The goods – the material stuff we lust after as a measure of personal success – will fade away and become obsolete in time. But the Good – especially the love and the peace that we share with our neighbors – will endure and transform the world.
So what will it be: a life filled with goods, or the Good Life?
Amen.