{"id":22573,"date":"2024-10-30T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-30T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailchi.mp\/urc\/urc-daily-devotion-30-october-2024"},"modified":"2024-10-30T06:00:00","modified_gmt":"2024-10-30T06:00:00","slug":"urc-daily-devotion-30-october-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.trinitywimbledon.org\/index.php\/urc-daily-devotion-30-october-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"URC Daily Devotion 30 October 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

James 2: 14 – 17<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you?  If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food,  and one of you says to them, \u2018Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill\u2019, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?  So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.<\/span><\/p>\n

Reflection<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cMany have mightily laboured to reconcile James with Paul\u2026\u201d grumbled Martin Luther, \u201cbut with no real success. <\/span>
These are at odds: faith justifies, faith does not justify\u2026\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Rather than promise to eat his hat, Luther instead offered to hand over his doctoral cap to whomever could reconcile these competing biblical perspectives, and let them \u2018scold me as a fool.\u2019 So far as I know, nobody ever claimed the prize.<\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps the real problem here is the determination to reconcile these two contrasting views on what Sallie McFague described as \u2018the unprecedented task\u2019 of having to \u2018think about \u201ceverything that is.\u201d\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

Christianity has been, from the very outset, a community of people with different perspectives. A place of plurality. Here we find James\u2019 perspective coming to the fore \u2013 elsewhere we find Paul\u2019s, we shouldn\u2019t be surprised to find them different.  <\/span><\/p>\n

The Samoan theologian Upolu Vaai laments the effects of what he calls a colonial \u2018one truth ideology\u2019 \u2013 a way of seeing the world which insists that there can only be one correct perspective, one \u2018right\u2019 or \u2018true\u2019 way of understanding things. This ideology, Vaai insists, doesn\u2019t mesh well with an indigenous Pacific way of understanding the world and instead \u201cpromotes top-down hierarchical frameworks\u2026\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps we want the Bible to do all the work for us, to tell us exactly how to think and act \u2013 maybe we turn to it as if it were an inexhaustive book of rules, complete in and to itself. Instead James urges us to look beyond the page to the world around us: Look! Here are people with no clothes, no food, we must reckon with this reality. Barth seemed to agree, urging that we preach \u2018with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

We live in a busy, messy, complex world where our answers generate ever more questions, and where people lead, as Thoreau put it, \u2018lives of quiet desperation,\u2019 faced with that reality we must learn to take responsibility for how we live \u2013 that we may come to different conclusions is no great surprise.  <\/span><\/p>\n

Prayer<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

God save us from the false hope of easy answers.<\/span>
Forgive our tendency to demand simple solutions to complex problems.<\/span>
Free us from prisons of perfection<\/span>
Help us to see the frail beauty of difference.<\/span>
Light our path as we try to respond to the challenges we encounter,<\/span>
And teach us to listen when others speak.<\/span>
Amen.<\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James 2: 14 – 17 What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you?  If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food,  and one of you says to them, \u2018Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill\u2019, … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “URC Daily Devotion 30 October 2024”<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitywimbledon.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitywimbledon.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitywimbledon.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitywimbledon.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitywimbledon.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitywimbledon.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22573\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitywimbledon.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitywimbledon.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitywimbledon.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}