Our Sunday Message

Whos is Wise and Understanding Among You?: James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a
Rev. Dr. Kenneth A. Corr
September 24, 2006
Sixteenth Sunday of Kingdomtide

  “Who is wise and understanding among you?”
  More than ever we need wise and understanding leaders.
   • Our world is changing and the pace of change is accelerating.
   • Perceived threats to our national and personal security are increasing.
   • The public school system and the public healthcare system are overburdened.
   • Multicultural diversity creates anxiety for the majority culture.
   • There are tensions in our churches, tensions in our denominations, tensions between faith groups.
   • The church is becoming more and more marginalized as the culture becomes more and more secular.
  More than ever we need wise and understanding leaders. “Who is wise and understanding among you?”
  James understood. He was writing to the church scattered. He addressed this letter, “To the twelve tribes of the Dispersion.” But he was also writing to the church divided. “Those conflicts and disputes among you,” James asked, “where do they come from?”
Now, just as then, the need for wise and understanding leaders is great because there is so much potential for conflict, disputes, division, and strife. And often, it is over non-essential things.
  I want to read the story of Clydes Corner. It is found in Thomas Troeger’s book, The Parable of Ten Preachers. This is a fictional story, but Troeger says, “Although the narrative and characters are imaginary, they are based on my work with preachers and seminarians of many different backgrounds and perspectives.”1 Many of you will be able to relate to this story. In this story, Jason is the pastor of a rural Methodist church at Clydes Corner.
  “It all started long before I came,” said Jason. And then he told how Cedric Clyde, the founder of Clydes Corner, had become a successful farmer at the turn of the century. To show his thanks to God, he had paid for the building of the local Methodist church, the edifice that was still standing there in 1990. Just before Cedric died, he had donated to the church a lot of furniture for the parlor and one item for the raised chancel behind the pulpit: a giant red, horsehair couch whose rich color Cedric fancied would brighten the front of the church. The hulking object featured massive curved arms and dark mahogany legs, each carved like the claw of a lion. If any strangers who knew nothing about the faith had entered that sanctuary, they would have concluded that the central religious symbol of Christianity was not the small brass cross on the table but the humongous couch in the chancel.
  The couch had occasioned a holy war between the Clyde clan and some newer families who had moved down to the country to get their children away from the drugs that were spreading into their suburban neighborhoods. The new families had bought up foreclosed farms and built beautiful homes back in the hills. They were accustomed to fine furnishings, and they detested what they had dubbed “the Victorian Leviathan” that dominated what otherwise was a plain but handsome church, a symbol of the simpler values they hoped to reclaim by moving into the country.
  But the Clydes, whose own farms had fallen on hard times during the Reagan years, looked at the couch each Sunday and fondly remembered that their great-grandfather Cedric had founded the church. Although their tractors were rusting in the front yard, at least in the house of prayer the preacher sat on Cedric’s couch.
“Let me tell you about proclaiming the gospel into the twenty-first century in Clydes Corner,” said Jason Kirk. “I stand in that pulpit, and over here, down to the right,” Jason gestured as if he were in the pulpit at that very moment, “sits the Clyde family. All of them. And over here in the middle sit the ones who don’t care, and over there, front left and back left, sit the new families. And every sentence I put in the air I see them all weighing whether it is ammunition for their side or the other side. Here I am preaching about the love of God, and everything I say is filtered through a single question: Is the pastor in favor of the red horsehair couch, or is the pastor against the red horsehair couch? I regret to say that is what preaching toward the twenty-first century in Clydes Corner has come to be.”2
More than ever we need wise and understanding leaders. “Who is wise and understanding among you?”
  “Those conflicts and disputes among you,” James says, come from bitter envy. The word “envy” is the Greek word “zalon” from which we get our English word, “zeal.” Zeal is a good thing until it turns “bitter.” In Dadeville, Alabama, during the summer of 1996, Gabel Taylor got into an argument with his neighbor over who knew the most Scripture. They argued over one particular passage and the neighbor got so angry that he went into this house, got his shotgun and shot Taylor and killed him.3
  Churches have divided over bitter envy for certain interpretations of Scripture. Friendships have ended over bitter envy for certain programs in the church. Pastors’ careers have been shortened because of bitter envy over theological positions that they have taken. Bitter envy.
  “Those conflicts and disputes among you,” James says, also “come from selfish ambition.” This is the same Greek word for “hireling.” It’s the attitude that is most concerned for my needs, my desires, my wants, and views others as competition.
  In his book Raising Abel, James Alison gives this example. “Now we have a brilliant professor and a brilliant pupil. The pupil imitates the teacher, and this flatters the professor and she likes it, and so she encourages the pupil. So far no rivalry, no conflict. However, as the pupil becomes ever more successful, the professor gets alarmed. She begins to fear for her own position and enters into rivalry with her own pupil, complicating things for her, making a ferocious critique of a brilliant seminar which the pupil gave. The pupil is disoriented: why is this happening? Why is my faithful imitation and love for my teacher rewarded in this way? She continues to try to imitate, but now finds that she’s a rival to her own model, who has entered into rivalry with her. They fall out, apparently over some vital point of truth to do with the interpretation of black holes, or the text of Aristotle. In fact, the quarrel has no real reason why. It is irrational; it has to do with the rivalry between the two.”4 Selfish ambition.
  More than ever we need wise and understanding leaders. “Who is wise and understanding among you?”
  The kind of wisdom needed for today is not learned in weekend seminars, is not gotten out of books, is not imitated from others. Instead, it comes down from above. It comes from the hidden depths of God. That is why James says, “Draw near to God and God will draw near to you.”
  “Who is wise and understanding among you?” The answer is clear. The wise and the understanding are the ones who have spent time alone with God and gained an intimacy that only God can give.
  I preached on this text in 2003 and Ray Hatton and I agreed that the person who came to our mind with this description was Rowena Carter. Rowena Carter is a name that some of you will remember. She was a diminutive saint with a squeaky voice. Rowena was not a prophet who challenged the powers that be; Rowena was not a CEO who understood organizational dynamics; Rowena was not a forward thinking change agent who could mobilize resources; Rowena was not a politician who knew how to build consensus. But Rowena was a wise and understanding person whose works were done with gentleness born out of wisdom.
  That’s the kind of leader that we need today. “Who is wise and understanding among you?” More than ever we need wise and understanding leaders.

1 Thomas Troeger, The Parable of the Ten Preachers, p. 9.
2 Ibid., p. 21.
3 Homiletics, April-June, 1997, p. 27.
4 James Alison, Raising Abel, p. 20f.