Calverton Baptist Church, Silver Spring, MD, August 15, 1982; Takoma Park Baptist Church, Washington, DC, Sept. 30, 1984)
Preachers find sermons in all sorts of strange places, and I found this one in a bottle!
Now you can just stop thinking what you are thinking and listen to what I mean!
You see, as nearly as I can remember, the first money I ever earned outside of being generously rewarded by my grandmother for little jobs I performed for her, the first money I ever earned outside the family, I earned underneath the bleachers at the baseball stadium not far from our home.
Now once again you can just stop thinking what you are thinking about what may go on underneath baseball bleachers. Hear me out on this!
The job was to pick up all the soft drink bottles dropped by thirsty fans and to return them to the concession stand. All night long, while others watched the doubleheader and cheered their favorite teams, I snatched bottles from under those stands, stacked them in cases, and triumphantly marched them back to the stand where I collected something like 25¢ for each case of 24 bottles. The point was that each bottle in those days cost 3¢, and so the owner would rather give up one cent and have them picked up than to give up three cents or have to pick them up himself. Thus a night’s work for a twelve-year-old boy.
But eventually the job disappeared. It disappeared with a new kind of bottle, one marked with ominous words, words that sound like a warning, words that marked my demise as a bottle boy. No deposit, no return. No deposit, no return: meaning, of course, that the bottle was free. One paid nothing for it, one need not return it. No deposit, no return. I was rif’ed by a bottle imprint.
But, I say you can find a sermon in that, and so perhaps the old bottle boy job will serve me one more time before I let it go completely. You can find a sermon in the label, No deposit, No return, if you twist the meaning of the words just a bit. I'll read them like this: No deposit, no return; if you do not deposit, you will receive no return. If you do not invest, you will not gain; if you will not perform, if you will not give, then there will be no profit to you or to anyone else. No deposit? Then no return.
And in our text for today the apostle James says much the same thing, in his own way. He is trying to make the point that if we do not do something we ought, if we fail to do something which obviously ought to happen, then we have lost, we have struck out morally. And he puts it this way: “Whoever knows what is right to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.” “Whoever knows what is right to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.” In other words, no deposit; therefore no return.
I
At heart, I suspect that James would want us to understand that essentially he is identifying the sin of self-satisfaction. The sin of self-satisfaction, the sin of supposing that we are getting by, we are keeping ourselves guiltless by refraining from this and than. We may define ourselves, you see, by all the things we do not do; there are folks out there who, when you tell them you are a Baptist, begin to grin and shake their heads and pity you just a little. After all, as one person said to me, “If you don’t drink and you don’t smoke and you don’t play the horses, what DO Baptists do?” We may define ourselves by all the things we do not do; but how easily this leads us to the sin of self-satisfaction. How readily we can wrap our cloaks of righteousness around ourselves and imagine that we are better than the great unwashed out there.
Let me ask you to allow your imagination to roam with me for a moment. Let me ask you to imagine a situation in which the parents of a new-born infant, in order to protect their child, decide that they would place him in some kind of isolation chamber from his earliest childhood. They would try to keep him from being exposed to anything which would harm him or infect him. They would send food in by way of sterile openings, they would wear sterile gloves when handling him. Everything would be done to protect this child from the normal but dangerous environment. And, by the way, this is not really so fanciful, because occasionally a child is born whose natural immunity systems fail and thus it is necessary to protect the child from any possibility of infection.
But let's suppose this is a normal child and that his parents decide they will keep him absolutely isolated from all the viral systems out there in the cruel world. What will this mean for the child as he grows up? Will it mean that he will never get sick, never contract a disease, never get a good case of the sniffles? Not at all; it will instead mean that he will not develop his natural immunities, it will mean that no antibodies will be generated. It will mean, as I understand it, that he may well be more subject to disease than if he had never been so protected.
And you see, I understand our spiritual lives to be much the same. You can protect, you can keep people from exposure to the world if you want, you can police what they see and what they hear, you can place them in a place like my friend Grady Nutt says Baylor University was when he attended it, eight miles from the nearest known sin! But does that mean they will be forever morally pure? Does that mean they will never learn the harsh reality of sin? Not at all, not at all. It may in fact mean they will relish all the more the chance to kick over the traces once it comes. And, more to the point for today's theme, it will mean that although they have been kept from all sorts of negative behavior, maybe they will also have been protected from the risks of positive behavior. They will have avoided a thousand chances to do something, to accomplish something. And thus there will have been sin in that life.
Well, now, so much for the hypothetical. So much for the imaginative. It’s a bit late for most of us to think about protecting ourselves entirely from the world. But the trouble is that we do tend to suppose that if we just keep away from certain things, if we just stay sober and pay our bills and keep out of trouble with the law, if we just stay away from the negative stuff, then we’re all right. And we fall into the trap of the sin of self-satisfaction. We think we have avoided all the mistakes, we suppose we have stayed away from all the vices. But hear out the apostle James: “whoever knows what is right to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.” No deposit, no return; no giving of one's self, no going beyond the bare minimum, no moving out to do what love calls for, then no return, no obedience, no full discipleship, no blessing.
What else might this mean? How else would you apply James' teaching? Can we flesh this out some more?
II
James' principle might apply to the way we use our knowledge resources. It might speak to what we do with all that we know. Whoever knows what is right to do, he says … whoever has the knowledge resources at his command, and fails to do, fails to use these, for him it is sin. Knowledge resources.
When the judge swears you in as a material witness, he makes you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I'm interested in the idea of the whole truth, that there are times when we tell partial truths, times when we do not explicitly lie, but we just hold back a part of the truth, and it makes all the difference. And that, if James is to be believed, is sin.
My family and I are great fans of Inspector Closeau. We can watch Peter Sellers as Inspector Closeau in the Pink Panther movies over and over and never tire of them. In one film there is the scene where Closeau, in one of his many inept disguises, is trying to register at a hotel desk. Nearby is a mean-looking little mongrel. And so Closeau, casting a wary glance in the direction of this critter, asks the hotelkeeper, “Does your 'dig' -- remember the fake French accent? -- does your dig bite? No, says the hotelkeeper, my dig does not bite. A moment later there are canine teeth sinking into the inspector's leg, and he cries out, “I thought you said your dig did not bite.” Comes back the answer, “That is not my dig."
And so while a lie was not told, the whole truth was not told either. While there was knowledge to be had, that knowledge was not fully shared. And when I have been to Sunday School and have studied the scripture every Sunday of my life and have memorized the books of the Bible forwards and backwards and can quote all kinds of trivia from the Scriptures, but I do not share the word of life with my neighbor … what does it accomplish? What have I done, really? I have not stolen from him, at least not his possessions. I have not taken what was his, but I have withheld from him something
which was precious, something which I knew how to give, but I did not. And James has a word for it. Sin. Sin. Whoever knows what is right to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.
And so while drugs and aimlessness and alcohol and on-the-highway drag racing destroy young people around us, it becomes terribly attractive to protect ourselves. It becomes terribly important to us to keep our kids out of that, to keep ourselves and our own insulated. And I understand that, of course I do. But if we have the knowledge of how to minister, how to reach others, how to affect the community in which we live, and we don't use our knowledge, what we have done? What have we accomplished? And what label does James plaster across our dismal failure? Sin; you know that by now. It will not do simply to store up knowledge and never to put it to use. I am indicted personally by a library of hundreds of books, all too few of which I share with others or use to do something which will enhance the quality of life for someone else .. I am indicted too by this potent principle: No deposit, no return. Knowledge resources: whoever knows. Whoever knows what is right to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.
III
And if this word of the apostle applies to the way we use knowledge resources, it surely also applies to the way we use material resources. It surely also speaks to the way we use the mind-boggling material and financial resources we have.
You see, if I had wanted to shock and trouble you thoroughly this morning, instead of selecting only one verse of this letter and stopping there, I might have continued. I might have read on into the next chapter. Because although James does a good bit of skipp1kng around from topic to topic, and thus it may well be that what he says next has no necessary connection with the verse we're looking at today, yet it is also possible that there is a connection. Just try this with me. Try putting our verse for today with the very first verse of the next chapter.
It would go like this: “Whoever knows what is right to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin. Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you.” Wow, isn’t that a powerful and troubling connection? To fail to do right is sin: you rich, weep and howl; and in very strong language James spends several verses condemning the luxuries and the selfishness of the rich. And I am led to conclude that he would have us see that if we do not use our material resources to accomplish positive good, then we sin, we sin just as much as if we had used our money for the usual vices.
I think of the rich young ruler who came one day to the Lord and asked him what he ought to do to inherit eternal life. And as Jesus reminded him of the Ten Commandments, this fine young man, cream of the crop, was able to say that he had avoided all of the evils outlined in the commandments. He had a perfect record when it came to avoiding all the things you should not do. But then there is the matter of what you should do, and here Jesus had him. Jesus said, “Go, sell what you possess and give to the poor”. The connection again: what you do do, the way you do what you know you ought to do, is to use your material possessions. And the verdict? When the young man heard this he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.
And so, you see, the issue for us as middle-class folks, who by the world's standards also have great possessions, is not, “Did you avoid stealing anything?” The question is not, “Did you shoot straight on your taxes? Did you keep all the bills paid up promptly? Did you stay away from the racetrack and the lottery machine?” Those are not the crucial questions for us.
I hear James asking us instead, “Did your money do anything for anybody? Did your money accomplish something? You knew that you ought to support your church and its needs; did you? You knew that around the world there were the starving and the hurting and the lost; did you channel something in that direction? You understood that this world contains ignorance and disease, that it harbors poverty and pain. Did you act to correct it? Did you use what you called yours where you knew you could make a difference?” Because if you did not, James tells us, “Whoever knows what is right to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.” No deposit? Then no return.
The poet sums it up in this way: I never cut my neighbor's throat; My neighbor's gold I never stole; I never spoiled his house and land; But God have mercy on my soul, For I am haunted night and day By alI the deeds I have not done; O unattempted loveliness; O costly valor never won.
No deposit? You can count on it: no return.
