"On Friendship With The World" Kurt Nelson
October 29, 2009
On Friendship with the World
James 4:4-6 Rollins Chapel 10/29/09
“Adulterers! Do you not know that Friendship with the world is enmity with God?”
It’s always nice, I think, to begin a chapel reading
with the word, “Adulterers!”
In case you were worried, perhaps,
that James wasn’t referring to people like us,
Or on the off chance that your eyes simply glaze over when such language is bandied about,
Take heart.
For he was quite likely speaking to folks,
a lot like us.
And I think we can safely assert that James wasn’t referring to unfaithful spouses, here,
so much as he was drawing from the great Biblical tradition,
of likening humanity’s relationship to God.
To an unhealthy marriage covenant
rife with perpetual one-way unfaithfulness.
James suggests, in fact,
that friendship of the world,
philos,
that kind of non-erotic,
non-divine,
friendly love
is in itself a kind of divine adultery.
Friends of the world,
are enemies of God.
This seems the basic message that James was trying to convey.
And it’s been a difficult one for Christians indeed.
But certainly not a lone voice.
The Gospel of John points to the world’s inevitable hatred of Christ,
and those who follow him.
Luke and Matthew to the inability to serve two Masters.
But James, perhaps,
puts it most boldly.
“Friendship of the world is enmity with God.”
While we’ve generally done a pretty good job of ignoring this message,
at least in places where Christianity has long dominated the world’s religious landscape,
Occasionally, this has proved,
a powerful message for a select few.
A message that Christians,
at least those truly faithful ones,
must, in some sense, opt out of the broader world.
John Wesley, the founder of Methodism,
lamenting the lack of thoughtful exploration of this passage,
tells his followers to, “be wary of a close attachment to any that know not God.”
More specifically suggesting that they avoid “needless” conversations with the ungodly.
Powerful narratives of inevitable conflict with the religious other,
seem to pervade our consciousness to this very day.
Notions of global conflict and cosmic battles between great faiths,
spill into our elections, and news-cycles,
largely fueled, I believe,
by this sense of necessary separation,
between those who love God,
and those who do not.
But this messages has much more specific applications too.
Countless Monks and ascetics have fled to the hills,
or monasteries throughout the ages.
Heeding James’ warning in the most literal of ways.
Indeed an entire cottage industry,
based largely I think on James’ warning,
has arisen in our contemporary era.
Dominos Pizza founder Tom Monaghan,
has founded a utopian Catholic Community in the South of Florida,
save from the world-friendly lures of pornography and contraception.
Countless Christians,
heeding the word of James,
have moved “off the grid” throughout the rural and mountain US,
seeking to escape worldly friendship of any kind.
Bible camps, and retreat centers,
and temporary monastic communities exist throughout the world,
for those who aren’t quite ready to take the full monastic plunge,
or move to an intentional Christian community,
but still want,
to borrow a phrase from the facebook age,
to “unfriend” the world from time to time.
And of course, my personal favorite,
are the numerous relatively-new counter-cultural Christian Colleges,
which offer a holy alternative,
to our world-friendly, Dartmouth style, liberal education.
I remember receiving daily letters from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University
my senior year in high school.
And continued to receive their mail well into my college career.
Kevin Roose’s recent book “The Unlikely Disciple”
reveals an intimate (and surprisingly enticing) look at this alternative to the godless college culture,
through the lens of a more-or-less non-religious Brown University student -
This grand educational attempt to opt out of friendship with the world,
through the creation of something new.
While clearly none of these are my personal style,
I will admit a certain amount of admiration,
for these attempts to opt out of our sinful and troubled world.
Leaving aside, for the moment,
the violence, and insobriety, and degrading nature
or our often fiercely unloving world -
Which are strong and understandable fodder for a desire to escape -
the world offers us,
even more in line with James thinking,
things like material comfort,
and seeming security,
built often on the backs of unjust practices.
Comfort and security,
personal satisfaction and,
the “illusion of fun”
as our puritanical chaplain often points out,
these are things that are easy to befriend.
For we tacitly seek them,
even amidst our careful Christian rhetoric of separation.
James’ epistle is no doubt a difficult book.
And I suspect James and I would not have been close friends.
There are times it’s much easier,
when leafing through its pages,
to remember that Martin Luther called this an “epistle of straw”
-devoid of any the true Gospel message of salvation through faith and grace alone-
than it is to take James seriously.
I’m not, after all, an adulterer in a strictly literal sense.
But James does care about those things that we ought care about.
Equality and community.
Treatment of the poor.
A sense of justice in the world,
and the connection of faith to meaningful action.
And in this difficult passage,
he is, I believe,
speaking about material comfort surpassing a kind of divine dissatisfaction
with the state of the world.
About an easy and cheap friendship with the “goods” the world has to offer,
replacing a robust relationship with the much more challenging message of Christ.
And he is,
I believe,
right in saying such a friendship with the world,
would indeed be enmity with God –
Something which we must all struggle with.
But something about the impulse to opt out
has always troubled me greatly.
And James’ passage is one I can only partly take seriously.
While there is no doubt a strong impulse to befriend, if not the apparent evils of the world,
at the very least its false comforts, securities, and ‘funs.’
I wonder often how we are meant to seriously and deeply love our neighbors,
and love even our enemies,
if we see the world as something to be avoided.
Is Christian love something that can only happen on Christian terms,
and in Christian communities?
While wrestling with this passage,
and difficulty this week,
I turned to a perhaps-unlikely source in Thomas Merton.
Merton was a writer and activist.
A theologian and philosopher.
But most of all, he was a Monk,
living much of his adult life in a monastery in the hills of Kentucky.
He died in 1968,
having gained the public’s ear,
through his writings about the Vietnam War,
and the increasingly violent American Civil Rights movement.
What’s perhaps most interesting to me about Merton, though,
He sought, for most of his days,
a sense of what it would mean to have “God Alone.”
He lived in solitude and silence
No friends or distractions.
No worldly pleasures or troubles.
Just seeking “God Alone,”
And through months and years of prayer and solitude,
he discovered at the depths of his existence,
his fellow humans.
All of whom are similarly flawed,
and, as he often said, “ridiculous.”
“To choose the world,”
he said,
“is an acceptance of a task and vocation,
in history and in time.
To reject the world is not a choice,
but the evasion of that choice.”
To opt out,
or “unfriend” the world,
is a way of not choosing how to engage it.
How to deal with it.
While we certainly cannot, as James reminds us,
befriend the world for what it is.
I think he was only half-right.
Because I believe we must love the world for what it might be.
For God so loved the world that he gave his only son.
Let us love one another, for love is from God and love is God.
Love your neighbor as yourself.
These are not optional, peripheral calls,
but are rather the very heart of our lives as Christians.
Merton wrote:
“Do we really choose between the world and Christ as between two conflicting realities absolutely opposed? Or do we choose Christ by choosing the world as it really is in him. that is to say created and redeemed by Him and encountered in the ground of our own personal freedom and of our love?”
If we seek God as an alternative reality,
meant only to be found in the Rocky Mountains,
or Christian enclaves
or after days or weeks of solitude,
then we, I believe, set up just another idol
on the edges of our existence.
Rather, I suggest, we ought to seek the true God where we are.
Loving and working and serving,
and even befriending that which surrounds us,
that we might discover something better.
Not loving it simply for what it is,
but for what it might become,
when viewed through the lens of a still greater love and grace and forgiveness.
We ought not befriend not the world in order to seek comfort, or security.
For the world is a poor object of our faith and friendship,
which will surely disappoint.
But we can, I think, love the world,
as a means of seeking and learning to love God.
creator, sustainer and forgiver of all.
Jesus entered the world in love,
called his disciples friends,
and sent them to love and serve the world,
not escape it.
So too we must, I think,
Go into the world,
with James’ warning ringing in our ears.
But not so loudly that we cease
loving and serving and seeking God,
wherever we might be,
and whoever surrounds us,
even in this often unfriendly world.
