Why
are you here?
Why did you come to church this morning?
What made you voluntarily choose to spend the last summer Sunday -- before the
too busy, too crowded Labor Day weekend -- inside a church?
Why aren’t you lolling on some beach? (Okay, okay--maybe you will be later this
afternoon!)
Maybe you are here out of habit.
Maybe going to church is “what you do” on Sunday morning.
Maybe you are here because your parents dragged you into the car, kicking and
screaming, and you would rather be anywhere else.
Maybe you are here because you are lonely.
Maybe you are here because you feel something is wrong or missing in your life.
Maybe you are here hoping that something in here will make you different in here
(point to heart).
None of these are bad reasons to be at church on a sunny August Sunday (nope,
not even being brought by your parents). But here’s the reason we Christians
gather for worship week after week: We worship to wake up. We worship to come
alive and take notice of the presence and power of God in the world, in our
lives, in everything we see and do and touch and feel.
The Latin “re-ligare” from which we get our word “religion” has the root “lig” —
which scholars have traced back partly to meaning “pay attention.” Any religious
service, any religious act, should make us sit up, shake our heads, and focus in
on the divine. When our lives adhere to a set schedule of work, when everyday
routines can be acted out without even thinking about them, we loose
consciousness to the wonders that surround us.
The wonder of God’s creation.
The wonder of love.
The wonder of family.
The wonder of breathing in and out. The wonder of life.
G. K. Chesterton, one of the most important writers of the last century, put it
like this: “The world shall perish not for lack of wonders but for lack of
wonder.”
This week’s epistle text is from the Letter of James, the letter Martin Luther
famously pooh-poohed as “an epistle of straw.” Luther’s words gave a lot of us a
“free pass” on James. James was seen as “weak sauce” — not worthy of much
attention. But skipping James lets us slip by to our peril of slipping up and
missing some of the most real life, faith-in-action admonishments in the New
Testament. Could that be the real reason it is so tempting to keep James on the
back burner? James won’t let us get away.....
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