Now and then, I like to look up high school required reading lists and choose a book or two to read that I’ve never read before. I first discovered To Kill a Mockingbird that way, and I wondered if that book would’ve been as powerful to me had I read it in high school as it was when I read it in my 30s. Another book from a high school required reading list I discovered in adulthood was Oscar Wilde’s strange and challenging book The Picture of Dorian Gray. I looked the book up when we were struggling to get one of our kids to sleep through the night. I had searched for a classic book to read for free on Kindle (so I could read in my child’s darkened room), and that was the first title to pop up for me.

I don’t know how many of you have read The Picture of Dorian Gray, but it is a weird story. In the book, Dorian is a young and beautiful man, who is largely unaware of his own charm and beauty at first. Through the devious influence of Lord Henry, Dorian becomes terrified that he will lose his outer beauty, and so he curses a painting of himself. As a result of the curse, Dorian will not age or lose his beauty, and all of the effects of time and immoral living will show up on the painting of Dorian instead of on his physical face.

Over the course of the pages of the story, Dorian becomes more and more preoccupied with his beauty. He stops thinking about other people, their feelings, their needs, or the consequences of his actions. Why worry about it? He will stay beautiful and admired for his appearance no matter what he does. The story is a tragic tale of what can happen when we live only for ourselves and care exclusively about appearances. 

Perhaps that seems a strange lead in to our passage from James 3 and 4, but I hope you’ll see the connection as we go along. 

Last week in our series Faith on Display, Pastor Jeff talked about the difficulty of taming the tongue. We see evidence of how difficult a job that is every single day. We cut one another down. We speak and share things on social media to be divisive and contentious rather than lift each other up. James says no one can tame the tongue, and when we look at the world around us, it is easy to believe that this is true. 

This week, we are continuing in the same chapter of James, only now James has turned his focus to a discussion of wisdom. James compares earthly wisdom with heavenly wisdom, and he has some tough words for his readers. He says earthly wisdom yields “bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts,” but “wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.” Earthly wisdom is all about the self, all about what is doing good for us personally, but wisdom from above cares about others. Wisdom from above yields good fruit, gentleness, and peace. Earthly wisdom wants what other people have, and it leads to contention, anger, and separation. Wisdom from above wants what God wants, and that creates a better world.

James is drawing off of concepts familiar to Greek philosophy. Plato believed that there were three parts to the human soul: reason, desire, and emotion. He believed reason was the best of all of the three parts, and the goal of human life was to get reason and emotion to work together to keep desire in check. Samuel M. Powell, professor of  philosophy and religion at Point Loma Nazarene University explained Plato’s views this way: 

“Reason is the driver, who has to contend with an unruly horse, desire. Reason’s natural function is to govern the soul but its task becomes difficult when desire intrudes. The second horse is emotion; its moral status is ambivalent, for it can be as much an

obstacle to reason as is desire but can also help reason govern and control desire. Emotion should stand with reason and against desire by filling us with a sense of repugnance whenever we are overcome by desire.”

Plato viewed desire as a kind of insatiable appetite, a craving that threatened to overcome logic. The goal was to elevate logic and emotion so that desire wouldn’t win.

In Oscar Wilde’s book The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian solved this problem of logic and desire by allowing his desires to dictate everything he did. He followed his cravings, his selfish desires, and allowed his lusts to win out, which left a trail of destruction behind him. Dorian believed, because of Lord Henry’s winsome arguments, that it was fine for desire to be in control as long as no one could see the truth by looking at him. Lord Henry’s vision was all about what people saw on the outside, and not what was happening on the inside. As long as things looked beautiful on the outside, the inside didn’t matter.

Pablo Picasso, famous cubist and surrealist painter, spent a lot of time exploring how things looked on the outside. But, as a cubist and a surrealist, he also took a lot of liberties and created interpretations of his subjects that both delighted and puzzled those who viewed his work. I recently came across a series of self-portraits done by Picasso, and I was amazed by his earlier true-to-life paintings. The first self-portrait was of Picasso at age 15. Isn’t that incredible? The realistic art continued in his self-portrait at age 18, but age 20 he begins taking more of an interpretive approach. By age 25, his hallmark style is beginning to emerge as he focuses on shapes and sizes rather than proportion and realism. The journey continues, and by the time Picasso was 90, his true appearance is left completely to the imagination of the viewer of his artwork. 

Two quotes by Picasso sum up the way he viewed his work. He said, “I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.” He also said this about art in general: “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.” Picasso, unlike Dorian Gray, was less concerned with how things appeared and more about what was behind those appearances. Even though his paintings were far from physically realistic, he was telling a story through each of them.

Plato’s philosophical vision was that under the surface, each of us had an internal battle going on, the goal of which was for logic to prevail. Dorian’s self-centered vision was that the only thing that counted was how things looked on the outside and what his beautiful outside could gain him. Picasso’s artistic vision knew there was more to each of us than what meets the eye, but his insight was so unique that we are often left wondering exactly what it was he could see that we could not.

So, what is God’s vision? And what did God’s vision look like to James? James uses words similar to what Plato would have used – words like desire and cravings – but while he agreed with Plato that our desires and cravings are not always what are best for us, he disagreed with Plato about the best way to overcome those desires. Plato thought we could use logic to keep our cravings and desires under control. James shows us a different way. He writes this in 4:7-8a: “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.”  The answer is not submitting our desires to our logical minds, but instead submitting our whole selves to God. 

The word “submit” in this passage means “to arrange under” or “to put in rank order.” Basically, it means to recognize that God is Lord over everything in our lives. When our cravings and desires are lord in our lives, it looks like the first few verses of James 4: “Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.” In a very real way, Dorian Gray’s self-centeredness led him to wound many. Not only did he suffer, he caused immense amounts of suffering to the people around him. 

I am reminded of this quote from Harper Lee’s book To Kill a Mockingbird: “There are just some kind of men who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.” When all we care about is what gets us ahead, gets us to the next place, or satisfies whatever craving it is we have, you can look around and see the trail of destruction that is left behind. All we have to do is turn on the news for a few minutes, or take a look at social media to see how common it is for people to be governed by their desires rather than by the will of God.

So, what do we do? We live in this world, in this time when the loudest group of people is urging us to focus on what we want right now. We are shaped by this world, raised by it, and inundated with these messages, and we can also see that it’s not working out very well. What can we do?

First, we need to remember that what’s loudest isn’t always what’s right or best. The prophet Elijah went in search of the voice of God. The earthquake, a mighty wind, and a fire all passed him by, but the words of God came in a still small voice. In order to be shaped by God’s vision for our lives, we need to make the space to listen for it. This week, let’s take some time to explore our daily routines. How much space are we making to listen for the voice and leading of God? Are we making any space at all, not just to talk to God, but also to listen? Being here today is a start to listening for God’s voice, but we are only in this place for one or two hours a week. The rest of the world has all of the other hours if we allow it to. Let’s make space to listen for the quiet leading of God.

Next, we need practice using the holiest words we have: yes and no. I love the way Pastor Katy Stenta said this:

“God help me,

to discern when to say no

So that I can also say yes.

Help me do the junk,

the stuff that has to get done anyway.

But also…..

Help me to know when to draw

the boundaries that need to be drawn.

To be healthy

To hold firm

to say

No.

Simply

as a complete sentence.

So that when I want to

Say Yes, to something that I am called to

To something that is fulfilling and right

that I can say Yes.”

Sometimes it helps me to practice my “no” and my “yes” in a tangible way. Let’s try it together a moment. Take your hands and press your palms out in front of you. Take some full, cleansing breaths with your eyes closed and your hands outstretched. We are saying “no” to the pull of earthly wisdom, the pressure to live only for ourselves, the strife and the contention that is around us. Now, take those same hands and hold them with the palms facing up. While you are breathing, imagine those hands receiving wisdom from above, wisdom that leads us to love our neighbors as ourselves, that calls us to gentle and peaceful. We say “no” to what tears down so that we can say “yes” to what leads to life.

And finally, as James says in 4:8, “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.” A strange and wonderful thing happens when we submit to God and seek after God’s ways, we will find that God will no longer seem like some far off, towering deity in the sky. As we draw near to God, we will find that God was already drawing near to us, already transforming us, already admiring us as beautiful and beloved children of God. Let’s make space to listen for the quiet wisdom of God’s artistic vision for our lives and the world. Let’s practice saying holy “no’s” and “yeses.” And then, let us rest in the comfort that as we draw near to God, God will also be drawing near to us. Amen.