13 No one who is tested should say, “God is tempting me!” This is because God is not tempted by any form of evil, nor does he tempt anyone. 14 Everyone is tempted by their own cravings; they are lured away and enticed by them. 15 Once those cravings conceive, they give birth to sin; and when sin grows up, it gives birth to death. 16 Don’t be misled, my dear brothers and sisters. 17 Every good gift, every perfect gift, comes from above. These gifts come down from the Father, the creator of the heavenly lights, in whose character there is no change at all. 18 He chose to give us birth by his true word, and here is the result: we are like the first crop from the harvest of everything he created. (Common English Bible)
“Gifts Given and Received: Cultivating an Advent of Generosity,” Week Three
I may have already shared with y’all in a past sermon my little sister’s proclivity for creating not just invisible friends but invisible pets when we were kids—her magnum opus being a family of multicolored crabs, including two that were born-again Christians: they were bad little crabs until they found Jesus and became good little crabs.
But before the crabs was a core pair of invisible friends my sister had concocted: Mistina, her good and virtuous friend, and Megan Carter, her troublemaking friend. And whenever my sister got in trouble—which she inevitably did—I would hear the refrain, “Megan Carter made me do it!” It was “the devil made me do it,” but for preschoolers.
And honestly, it was brilliant. I have to hand it to my sister. Not only was her mind a hive of creativity for building the (albeit invisible) community she wanted, but she was already unintentionally displaying an excellent command of the moral of this passage from the epistle of James, the brother of Jesus. It is not God who tempts us or tries us, because God does not wish for us to suffer, and especially to suffer gratuitously. When we harm others, and when others harm us, that is not the result of God.
But if not God, then who? And how does James so quickly tie this into gift-giving? Stay tuned.
This is a four-week sermon series for the season of Advent—not the Christmas season, that will come later—but for the four Sundays we spent preparing for Christ’s birth. As a preparatory season, Advent has its roots in penance, in us being penitential. It is why Advent shares liturgical colors (specifically purple) with Lent, just as Christmas and Easter share liturgical colors as seasons of celebration of new life.
In twinning this sermon series with our Advent devotional theme for this year, “Gifts Given and Received,” I considered whether any of us might need to do penance for any of our past gift-giving. That isn’t an invitation for public confession or self-flagellation, but rather, to ask ourselves, are we good gift-givers? Do we give thoughtfully and generously, in ways that put the receiver before us as the giver? Our devotionals allow us to consider such things in relation to Jesus, and I want to invite us over the next four weeks to reflect on those questions in relation to one another as well.
Because this is a pretty common thing, really! You probably know someone who is a subpar gift-giver! Maybe you are one yourself! (Again, I am *not* asking for public confession here.) So lets talk these next few weeks about the faithful spirit behind gift giving.
We are already at Advent 3, the Sunday of Joy, when in true Mean Girls movie style we light pink. We began Advent, and this series, two weeks ago in Genesis 4 with the first gifts given to God by humanity: the fruits of Cain’s crops, and the firstborn lamb of Abel’s flocks. Last week, we read a similarly well-known story that both Mark and Luke convey: the widow giving two copper coins at the temple. And today, as I said, we arrive at the letter of Jesus’s younger brother James, also known because of this letter as James the Just.
And to clear up a point of potential confusion at the start: this James was not one of the Twelve Apostles. There are two Jameses in the Twelve—James the son of Zebedee who is the brother of John the Apostle, and James the son of Alphaeus. Our James, being a son of Joseph and Mary, is clearly neither of these Jameses. Even after preaching recently on James, this is a helpful reminder.
But just because he was not a member of the Twelve did not mean our James did not have a substantial impact on the early church. Tradition holds that he served as the archbishop of Jerusalem in the early Jesus movement until his martyrdom around the same time as Peter and Paul, sometime in the early to mid 60s CE.
When I preached on James a few weeks ago, I shared with you that he and Paul were often at odds in their respective interpretations of very early Christianity, but they also concur on very important matters. One was on the nature of fruits of the spirit, or of wisdom from above, which I preached on then. Another point of agreement between the two is on the importance of resisting the cravings of temptation. For Paul, this was essential as a way of denying the earthly sins of the body, and truthfully I worry that we in the church may have taken Paul too far at times in not listening to our own bodies when they tell us what they need.
For James, this really isn’t about your body. James shares Paul’s distrust of the world, but that distrust does not extend to your body. Your body is good, and to James is worthy of protection and care. For him, this is more about the nature of God who transcends any one body, and of good and evil more broadly. To James, God is unwilling to tempt us because God is constitutionally unable to be tempted by evil.
And that has always struck me interesting, not the least of which is, I wonder what James would make of the introduction to the book of Job, when God ends up allowing the Adversary—which is how Satan is translated in the ancient Hebrew—power over Job’s family and life. Was it God being tempted by the Adversary, goaded into making that literal deal with the devil, or something else?
That question matters to me as we enter into year three of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, because we may increasingly feel like Job, only without his legendary patience. When will this be over? How will it be over? And we are tempted, over and over again, not to take a virus that has killed 800,000 Americans in less than two years seriously.
James is adamant: any such temptation is not of God. And my guess is if James has little to say about Job and the role of the Adversary in Job’s misery, James believes such tempting represents us tempting ourselves, and tempting each other. Which I think we have done a lot of—we have spent much of this past year tempting out not the better angels of our nature, but the worse angels of our nature.
So, how does James tie this into gift-giving? I told you to stay tuned for that. Think again about the pandemic, and specifically, the tools we have been given to protect ourselves from it. The vaccines have been good gifts, great gifts, that have almost certainly saved a huge number of lives. The masks we are wearing—we might not want to or enjoy wearing them, and are hardly our favorite gift. In that respect they are a lot like the awful sweater gifted to us by a distant relative with no taste and certainly no understanding of our taste. But, like the sweater, we wear them because it is right.
Every good gift, James says, comes from God. And it is precisely because God does not want to see us tried or tempted or suffering that we know the gifts from God will always be good. We need to know the former for the latter to also be true. We need to know it so that we can be led by it.
In your gift-giving this season, choose to be led by the spirit James describes of a God who does not, cannot, give into temptation. For us, I think, it means giving what is best for the recipient of our gifts, rather than what may be best for us. Choose to give not by any craving motivated by showing off or envy with your gift-giving, and choose to be motivated simply and solely by generosity of spirit. Put another way, is Megan Carter making you do it, or is God leading you to do it?
For God’s spirit is indeed generous with us—and continues to be generous to us in the face of our continued sins, our continued succumbing and caving to temptation. When we not only recognize that reality but lean into it, live into it, we can say when we give a gift, maybe not “God told me to give you this gift” (maybe God did), but surely we can say, “I was led by God, and God’s spirit of generosity, to give you this.” If the gift is indeed what the receiver most needs, and speaks to where their life is in that moment, then it may well be.
It isn’t always. I began going bald at a very early age, much too early, and my late grandfather, noticing this, very helpfully gave me a bonus gift one Christmas: Rogaine coupons. It was—and is—a hilarious story, but in the moment I was pretty stunned. Because the gift wasn’t really about me, it was about an ideal that my grandfather ascribed to, but I didn’t, and still don't. I now love being bald and don't feel the need to ascribe to someone else's ideal. A gift to remedy it is not a gift from above.
So this Advent and Christmas, I would simply ask: whose ideal does your gift-giving live up to? Yours, or the recipient of your gift? Your own temptations and cravings, whatever they may be, whether for bragging rights or status or one-upmanship, or God’s inability to be tempted by such things?
Who, then, is being reflected in your gifts? And are you reflecting the God who gave us the greatest gifts of all, of life and love beyond our wildest dreams?
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
December 12, 2021