Pure, undefiled religion

James 1:22 – 27

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 02 Sep, 2007

TODAY IS Fathers Day, so a special greeting to the fathers among us. But maybe we should prepare for a surprise, because there is a sense in which we should all be fathers.

That might sound a bit strange, specially to the women here; but I mean it for everyone and not just for the men. Let’s all be fathers!

In our passage we read,

²⁷ Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

What our heavenly Father expects from us is fatherliness.

The Bible consistently teaches us to become like the God we worship. God says,

You shall be holy unto me
For I, the LORD, am holy.

We are created and redeemed to reflect the character of God.

Have you heard it said that we create a god in our own image and worship that god? That is partly true.

I used to work with a man who belonged to a semi–Christian cult. He could be a difficult fellow. He was always very pleasant until you crossed him, and then he would do everything he could to make it difficult for you. Several good engineers left because of his attitude.

I remarked to a friend in another department, “People become like the god they worship. His god is harsh and unconnected from the world, so he is harsh and can’t connect properly with other people.”

Isn’t that true? We grow like the god we worship.

The cult this man belonged to had recreated the God of the Bible to suit their own image; but they also became more like the god they had made as they worshipped him more.

Here’s my point: if God is our Father, then we should expect to become more fatherly as we worship him and seek to follow his plans and purposes.

I could as easily have said that we will become more motherly as we worship God and follow his plans and purposes. You remember that I said for Mothers’ Day that God is our mother, too. He has motherly characteristics.

But it is important in our day to re–affirm fatherhood.

Think of what has happened to men over the past thirty or so years. The changes havebeen incredibly dramatic!

Feminism has given us many good things. But it forgets that most men are as oppressed as women are.

Women can’t progress in many social settings even today because men hold most of the top positions.

But many men lead lives of quiet desperation, knowing that they will never progress either. Yet many women still see men in general as the enemy.

Shout this out: Ordinary, heterosexual men reflect some of the quality of God; fathers reflect something of the quality of God; there is good in masculinity!

Marxists see an antithesis between male and female, but where is the synthesis, the coming together into something new? Where is the way for men to value women and women to value men?

The gospel has answers, if we choose to listen!

 Right at the beginning, we read,

^{GEN 1:27} ...God created man in his own image,
  in the image of God he created him;
  male and female he created them.

Men, you reflect God. Women, you reflect God. Only with both sexes together can we see God’s full purpose in creating humanity.

In the ideal world, men reflect the fatherhood of God, but also reflect something of the motherhood of God; and women reflect the motherhood of God and something of the fatherhood.

Together, they reveal true fatherhood and true motherhood.

A woman I used to work with once said, “I hope you aren’t offended, but you remind me both of my grandfather and my grandmother. You are full of interesting ideas and information like my grandfather, but you can say, “Let’s have a cuppa and talk about it,” like my grandmother used to.”

I wasn’t offended. I was delighted. That is one model of how to be both a father and a mother, how to reflect God’s full quality.

I know that there are many ways in which I fail to reflect God, but isn’t it good if I can reflect even a fraction of his character?

WIDOWS AND ORPHANS

Today we are talking specially about how to reflect the fatherhood of God, and the first aspect that James speaks of is caring for widows and orphans.

Jesus also speaks of a good father when he says,

If you, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly father give good things to those who ask him?

For both Jesus and his brother, James, a good father is one who takes care of others.

Our western male role is often defined in terms of bringing in the income and fighting the battles.

You know how much Israel’s survival depended on the nation’s ability to fight off invaders and attackers, but the strongly–held idea in Israel was of families settled on their own patch of dirt, everyone with a significant role, mutually caring for one another, and with the father as the carer–in–chief. That still meant hard work and long hours, but it was not just work in the paddock, drop the paypacket on the kitchen table and retire in front of the TV.

The head of the family celebrations was the father. The leader of the family’s religious observations was the father. The one on whose plough handle the buck finally stopped was the father.

Think about the people who came to Jesus to get a child healed. We know about Jairus’ daughter, and nothing about Mrs Jairus, because it was the father who went to Jesus. When a boy took fits and kept falling into the fire or into water, it was his father who told Jesus’ disciples. When a centurion’s servant was sick, it was the centurion who went to see Jesus, and one implication of Jesus’ response is that the centurion is more Jewish than most Jews. He acted like the head of a family.

Yes, Jesus did heal the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter and raise the widow’s son, but one was a gentile woman and the other he did voluntarily, not because he was asked.

When Jesus was explaining the Judgment to his disciples, he said,

^{MT 25:41} “Then he will say to those on his left, `Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. ⁴² For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, ⁴³ I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

^{MT 25:44} “They also will answer, `Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

^{MT 25:45} “He will reply, `I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

Jesus’ ideal for us all is that we have a caring role in our society, and that proves that we are children of our heavenly Father.

In ancient Israel, there was no Social Security. Widows and orphans either needed a family network to support them, or depended on what the synagogue remembered to give them.

The pagan emperor, Julian the Apostate told Roman pagans to lift their game, because Christians were looking after the sick and the widowed and the orphaned Christians and looking after the sick and widowed and orphaned pagans as well, while the pagans did nothing very much except for their own families. He said that paganism would disappear if it didn’t start to take an interest in welfare and care.

See that: good evangelism begins in fatherly care!

I say “Fatherly care” for a special reason, and that is because, as I have said before, fathers are generally better at putting limits and boundaries on care. Mothers often care regardless. But fathers say,”I will look after you, but you have to look after yourself, too.”

The symbol of a mother’s care is the hug. Motherly care is often nurturing and comforting. The symbol of a father’s care is the steadying hand as a child tries something new. Fatherly care is supportive as the child learns to make its own way in the world.

The first thing, then, that we have to consider about reflecting God’s fatherhood is to care for those who lack care, to care for the vulnerable, to care for the outcasts.

UNPOLLUTED BY THE WORLD

However, James also adds something: that we need to avoid being polluted by the world.

That has a few ideas behind it.

The first is that the world, in Biblical terms, is always this present fallen age.

When Jesus talks about the people of this world, who are much more cunning than people of the Kingdom; when he says that the field is the world; when satan tempts him with the kingdoms of this world, it is all about this present fallen age.

It’s the same as when Paul says that, if anyone is in Christ, there is a whole new creation or a whole new world. He is contrasting the present fallen age with the perfect age to come under Jesus our king and our master.

The thing is, if we belong to the coming age, if we are true Kingdom people, we can’t afford to dabble in the fallen imperfect age and its ways.

Come out from them, and be separate,
says God.

One of our main failings as fathers is to follow the ways of our world, where fathers are discouraged from being carers and encouraged to isolate from their families, encouraged to be economic units but not to have a social role. That is a worldly notion: refuse it!

It is also easy for men to fall in with the culture around us. I have worked with some delightful people, and enjoyed their company.

But I couldn’t always go along with them when they spent a lot of out–of–work time drinking. You know I don’t mind an occasional wine or a can of Guinness with a meal, but I am not a drink til you drop person by any means. I have worked with people who were, and who would gladly have had me join them.

Some people fall in with a crowd who behave pretty unethically, and it is easy to fall into that trap if everyone does it.

There are many temptations.

I worked with a woman once whose parties seemed to overstep proper boundaries at times. It would be easy to join in so you are part of the work team, and you could end up somewhere you didn’t intend to go.

For many centuries these pressures and temptations fell more heavily on men, because women didn’t leave the house, except perhaps to go to the shop with another woman from the neighbourhood.

Today, both men and women are under these kinds of pressure.

Fatherly care can be very easily broken down by allowing ourselves to go too far away from those we are primarily called to care for.

But being polluted by the world can be far more subtle.

It has to do with attitudes, with doing things the world’s way. And even our care can be distorted.

Many Christian organisations were started by people with a profound sense of ministry. But how many were taken over by people with a profound sense of financial management, and they lost their soul and gained a good bank balance? You have seen it. Care for the sake of the income. That’s a worldly attitude that even the world recognises and is sickened by.

We have to keep our care focussed, and that means not letting the world and its ways divert us.

CONCLUSION

So this is Fathers’ Day. As I said, it is a good time to reflect on the Fatherhood of God and to consider how we can shine God’s fatherly love back onto our world.

It is something that both men and women can do.

It is something that doesn’t require us to have our own children.

It is something we can do for people who are not our own children.

It is not tied to a single gender, because it is basically about providing practical care for those with needs.

You might be comfortable with comforting care, or you might not be. But we can all be comfortable with helping someone to get ahead in life and survive the struggles of the day.

Some of you are the kind of people who will always be there when you are needed. I like the way that Neph talks about being “kuya.” It is a Filipino term, meaning “Big brother”, and it has a similar sense to the idea of fatherhood. The kuya is the one who steps in if the father isn’t available.

You don’t have to be a father to do any of these things. I have seen John Brown, for example, providing fatherly care to people from the drop in centre and other areas of our ministry, getting them to where they have to go, ensuring that they look after things they have to attend to. That’s fatherly care.

It can even be more a matter of providing nurturing care. I know a young woman whose father is emotionally remote, and she looks on an older man as being something of a father to her. It's not a matter of his having to provide support, it’s just that she looks for someone to talk to, to tell of victories and defeats, like she would if her father did that for her.

We have all had fathers. Some have been excellent, some have been pretty poor, most have been a mixture. What was good in them reflects God’s goodness to us, and provides us with a model to show God’s fatherly love to others. What was not so good in them provides us with an error to avoid. We all have something to give to those who don't have fathers of their own.

Let’s give thanks for fathers, and specially for God our heavenly Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name.

And let’s choose to reflect and reveal God’s fatherly love and constant care to a world which sees so little of it!

AMEN!

© Peter R. Green 2007. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)