The Burning Word

Not All Who Wander Are Lost

This whole series on James I’ve been wrestling with this question. “But what about the person who is disillusioned with this whole thing?” I know, I know, such a response feels a little burned out. I know there are some who get all revved up and excited by James’ hard hitting truths and calls for faith. But what if it’s not connecting? What if the challenges of James fall flat? It’s kind of like a coach who has an athlete that just doesn’t seem to love the game any more. They keep encouraging, correcting, trying to point out small tweaks and subtle shifts to get them back on track. But what if they’ve lost their love for the game? I think I was surprised to hear in James 5 that James ultimately has the same concern. For as challenging and hard hitting as James can be as a coach of the faithful, James closes his work with this wonderfully gentle call, 19 My brothers and sisters, if one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring that person back, 20 remember this: Whoever turns a sinner from the error of their way will save them from death and cover over a multitude of sins. (James 5:19-20) That’s it. James’ closing vision is the need to restore those who have wandered. And with that same fire-y intensity, James concludes, “If you do this, they will be saved from death.” But notice how ambiguously that last phrase is worded, “and cover over a multitude of sins.” A scholar I was reading on this pointed out the Greek is unclear - is it the sinner whose sins are covered over or the one who is rescuing the sinner? It reminds me of the story where a paralyzed man is lowered through a ceiling to Jesus. It’s a desperate act. One of utter dependency. Yet for those of us who have been tracking the stories about Jesus, we know what Jesus will do. Jesus is kind. He will pause and take pity on this man, and likely will heal him. And this of course is what Jesus does. But there is a twist that is easy to miss if you’re not paying attention. As the man is lowered down and Jesus sees him, Jesus pauses his teaching. And presumably Jesus looks up, and as he looks up he sees the heads of the friends poking through the thatch. Incredibly, to the shock of the reader, Luke tells us that when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the man, “Friend, your sins are forgiven.” (Luke 5:20) James of course knew this Jesus. He also knew Jesus taught that loving shepherd will leave a flock of 99 to seek out the 1. He knew that Jesus told the story of a woman who dropped everything and upended her house in order to find the one coin that had been lost. And James surely also knew the story about a certain prodigal son, who after wandering far away, is restored home to the Father’s love. The Christian story has always been about those who are wandering and has always contained a summons not just to beckon them home but to seek them out and if possible restore them to the Father’s love. There is this line by J.R.R. Tolkien that he gives to Strider, that shrouded figure in exile who is long in waiting on evil to be defeated and the throne to be restored. It reads: “Not all who wander are lost [https://youtu.be/H7JvHxgVvbw].” My prayer for you if you have been following this series, is that you would find a faith that actually works. Not one engulfed in hypocrisy. Not one mired in self-doubt. Not one cloaked as righteousness but in reality is self-righteous rage. But rather that you would find a faith that works. James and Jesus want to remind us, there is always a way back for those who have wandered. There is always a feast waiting upon your return [https://youtu.be/H7JvHxgVvbw]. May we learn to seek out those who have wandered. And may we ourselves meet Jesus on the road any time we stray from the faith. With hope, John This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theburningword.substack.com [https://theburningword.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Finding Eternity in Time

So my friends will tell you I am obsessed with time. I don’t know when this fascination began… though I know at even an early age, each birthday I would experience felt weighty and full of significance. “I am 16 today. I will only ever be 16 for one year of my life. This is the only 16th year I will ever get to experience.” It all seemed quite normal to me. Until I of course began to realize most of us, most of the time, never slow down to ponder our time. The time that we are in. The time we’ve been given. Even what in the world we’re supposed to be doing in and with our time. James 4 has this interesting turn in the arc of James’ teaching, where he pivots from a profound and resounding call to repentance (James 4:4-10), to an urgent reflection on the brevity of our time. “What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and vanishes.” (James 4:14) As I read those words, I wonder if it was in fact James’ words that haunted a younger version of me, who felt the full confrontation of his challenge. “What is your life?” Yet to read James closely is to realize the confrontation is attempting to tease out a new kind of response. Is it possible that if you were to live in light of the shortness of your time, you could begin to orient yourself to a different kind of eternity? This I think is a far more helpful question, than a despairing view of birthdays, or a defeatism we sometimes embrace about the shortness of the time we’ve been given. What if instead, this year of my life was about responding to the eternity that even now continues to break into my time [https://youtu.be/etPkddhaEL8]? Such a response might just change the way we live here and now. With hope, John This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theburningword.substack.com [https://theburningword.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Words Create Worlds

One of my favorite quotes on the power of language comes from the Jewish thinker and philosopher Abraham Heschel. Heschel is one of those “blow your hair back” kind of writers. Though he lived in the 20th century, in the wake of the horrors of the Halocaust and through the radical cultural revolutions taking place in the 1960’s, Heschel still somehow held on to this belief that the God of the Jewish people could be known through the Word that had been passed down to them. One of his more influential books is on the Prophets themselves (which of course would have resonated with the era of revolution in the 1960’s when he wrote) - yet Heschel always comes back to this vision of God the prophets captured. It wasn’t so much the social change Heschel wanted. It was the vision of the God who demanded social change from his people in order to realize the created order God had originally made. So how then does God move and act through the world? What is God’s instrument to bring about the social change God intended? Well the answer is not quite what you expect. My first instinct would be to focus on the prophets themselves. Those incredible revolutionaries who poured forth their lives for the change they wanted to see. Yet Heschel, soaked in the Hebrew Scripture, offered an alternative explanation in a later work entitled, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, he simply pens, “ [https://youtu.be/wDp4CLmFOR4]Words create worlds. [https://youtu.be/wDp4CLmFOR4]” [https://youtu.be/wDp4CLmFOR4] Now get this - his daughter Susannah, writing the introduction to the work offered even more context. She notes, Words, he often wrote, are themselves sacred, God’s tool for creating the universe, and our tools for bringing holiness — or evil — into the world. He used to remind us that the Holocaust did not begin with the building of crematoria, and Hitler did not come to power with tanks and guns; it all began with uttering evil words, with defamation, with language and propaganda. Words create worlds he used to tell me when I was a child. They must be used very carefully. Some words, once having been uttered, gain eternity and can never be withdrawn. The Book of Proverbs reminds us, he wrote, that death and life are in the power of the tongue. I need this kind of radical picture to help me enter into the wisdom of James. If we can grasp the monumental, revolutionary, world creating power of our words, we can begin to see the stakes. Yet far too often, James and the Bible descend into belittling invectives against gossip or careless social media posts. We need a bigger vision of the stakes of our worlds if we are to begin to turn the overwhelming tides of violence, hate speech, condescension, and malice that pour forth around us. Perhaps James 3 [https://youtu.be/wDp4CLmFOR4] is where to begin. With hope, John This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theburningword.substack.com [https://theburningword.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Why James Says Faith Should Make You Tremble

When I was about 20 years old, I happened to pick up Søren Kierkegaard’s justly famous work Fear and Trembling [https://youtu.be/gS-j2eFcJDM]. In it, he pairs the verse from the Apostle Paul in Philippians, “continue to work out your faith with fear and trembling.” (Philippians 2:12) with the story of Abraham’s call to sacrifice Isaac (Genesis 22). What a bold imaginative pairing. Kierkegaard essentially asks, “Is what Paul was getting at in his call to work out faith in fear and trembling the kind of faith that Abraham modeled in that moment?” A totally bewildering, seemingly outrageous call asking you to give up everything for a God who seems to be asking with no apparent rhyme, reason, or reward waiting for you on the other side. Is that the kind of faith Paul had in mind? To truly slow down and linger on the paradox required, of a faith that is worked out in fear and trembling, begins to move to the heart of the mystery. None of us have this mastered. None of us are exempt from grace. Yet none of us are invited into complacency when it comes to the rigors of what grace will require of us. For as gentle and kind as Jesus was, he also repeatedly told his followers that to follow him, they would need to pick up their own cross and die. This is the tension the arises when working through the book of James, to inevitably struggle with what James says about faith and works in James 2 (check out our latest episode here [https://youtu.be/gS-j2eFcJDM]). This great and challenging section has consistently pricked and prodded those who would try to move away from a costly grace. James refuses easy vindication of the faithful by grace alone. He insists upon the testimony of fruit. How do we hold such a heavy word? How do we ponder the tensions this seems to create with the teachings of Paul? I think Paul himself gives us the answer: We wrestle through these questions with fear and trembling. Yet like Abraham, we do not wrestle without faith that there is one who could make a way even for the lowliest of sinners. But instead we follow a God who will offer the sacrifice up for us, even when our very own faith falters. with hope, John This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theburningword.substack.com [https://theburningword.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

How Do I Find a Faith That Actually Works?

The initial idea of the Burning Word was always to return to the actual Bible itself, in order to explore how this complex, ancient Word from God continues to breathe and speak to the equally complex and strange culture we find ourselves in. I’m therefore delighted to get back to things with this Study of James [https://youtu.be/ZljYCswixmg]. I first read James when I was 13 years old. I was at a Christian camp of some kind, cordoned off with a fellow group of boys and a 23 year old camp counselor who I inevitably thought knew “everything” there was to know about God and Christianity. This leader proposed we needed to take our faith “seriously” and that the only way to do that was “to actually study the Bible” - he proposed the book of James. These types of exchanges were precisely the confusing cocktail of straight talking, hard shooting, over-zealous presentations about how God was going to “sort out our lives” with a simple read through of the Bible. As much as I smile at that counselor’s sincerity, I feel a deep sadness at the many fellow travelers who would later find their faith dismantled in college lectures halls, or crumbling under the complex crush of a life that wasn’t so easily “sorted out” as just picking up and reading the book of James. All this being said… I still remember the first time I read through the book of James. * I remember being struck by how straightforward James was. Where other books of the bible could lose me in complex themes and ancient references, James had the straight talking transparency that resonated with a life in need of direction and challenge. * I remember James’ commitment to the poor. It deeply struck me, even in that early stage of life, that to love Jesus meant that you had to move towards the marginalized. And the church that failed to do so was not really honoring God. * I finally remember James pushing me towards practice. Christianity can at times be a wonderfully gentle religion. It cushions its honesty and judgement in forgiveness and grace. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the same God of Jesus Christ who extends mercy. James of course knows and worships that God. But James contains a certain fatigue with empty words that speak much and do little. For all these reasons, I think James is a wonderful place to start if you are wrestling with the question, “How do I find a faith that actually works?” Not a cheap faith. Not an abusive faith. Or a hypocritical faith. But a real faith. A faith of solid stuff. A faith that makes true of ourselves that to which we are called. I want to find that kind of faith. I’m sure you do too. So join me as we dive into James over the coming weeks to find a “Faith That Works. [https://youtu.be/ZljYCswixmg]” With hope, John This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theburningword.substack.com [https://theburningword.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]