Bringing Wanderers Back Home

So, we have spent all summer walking through this little book in the back of your Bible called the Book of James, the New Testament Book of James, and we have seen that James has the bedside manner of a surgeon, pretty much, sorry surgeons, but you're kind of known for that, but he's direct, he's blunt, he's honest, but he's like my job is to get the disease out, so I am not going to be nice to you, so we have heard him say things like your religion is worthless, or faith without works is a corpse, or our tongue is a restless evil and full of poison, or what causes quarrels and fights among you, and James says well basically it's probably you, it's probably your fault, why don't you look at yourself,

etc. etc. Most New Testament letters end with something kind of warm and fuzzy, like 1st Corinthians, my love be with you all in Christ Jesus, or Colossians, grace be with you. Here James ends with verses 19 and 20 with a call to action, he says my brothers and sisters, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins. Nothing warm and fuzzy, but there's a lot at stake here, James says, like I don't want you to think everything I said is to be ignored here, and what he's doing, let's back up and just get a little context of what he's doing, he's giving a vision for the church in this last section, starting with verse 13, and Father Brett covered a lot of this last week, but let me just

remind you, verse 13, is anyone among you suffering, let him pray, if anyone's cheerful, let him sing praise, is anyone among you sick, let him call for the elders of the church and let them pray over him. So what is the church do? What is the church? Well the church is this beautiful place founded by Jesus where we suffer together, where we sing together, we weep together, where we pray together, we anoint each other with oil together, but James says there's one last thing we do together, and I don't want you to forget this, and I want this to be the last thing on your mind as I close this letter, the church is the place where we bring sinners back home. We don't just cancel people, we don't just let them go without a fight, we don't just give up on them, as much as we are able, we go after them. If they've wandered away, we will seek them and find them, and if they have sinned, we may need to

find them. But by ending this way, James is saying, look church, if you're not a church that goes after those among you who wander away, then as he said in chapter 1, your religion is basically worthless. None of what I've said here is going to do you any good. You have to go after wandering sinners. So, in these last two verses, little verses, there's three characters in these verses. First, there are those who wander. Then, there are those who go after wanderers. And then third, there is the Lord Jesus, and I'll get to that. So first, let's look at those who wander.

James says this, my brothers, if any among you wanders from the truth, there was an issue, an article in Current Biology, I'm sure a lot of you read that for fun, right? Well, I read an article for fun this week from 2009 issue of Current Biology, a team of German researchers did a study in which they looked at, can people walk in a straight line? You know, maybe you've never researched that. Maybe you think that's true, but nobody's actually researched it until 2009. So what they did is they plopped people into various settings, into say, for instance, a forest or into a desert, without any fixed reference point. And then they walked in a straight line. So they had no fixed reference point. That's the study's phraseology, a fixed reference point. And they said, can you walk in a straight line? And then they videotaped him and they watched him. And here's what the article concluded.

We can't walk in a straight line. Did you know that? So they said, quote, people walked in surprisingly small circles, rarely in a systematic direction. Is that not true of our spiritual life? We have trouble walking in a straight line, spiritually speaking, prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love. And notice James says, anyone, I love that word, anyone. We are all prone to wander and we're prone to wander from what we believe to be the truth. And that's a very bold statement in our day and age. Like, you know what the truth is? Well, Christians would say, yes, the Bible reveals the truth. Your word is truth, O Lord. Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. And it flows from a person, the Lord Jesus, who said, I am the way and the truth and the life. And the church is called to guard the

word and proclaim this truth. We don't make it up, but we're called to proclaim it and declare it. Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it. So James is this very Jewish man, James. He's tapping into something that he knows his Bible very well. One of the first stories in the Bible, Genesis chapter four, Cain murders his brother Abel. And what does the Lord tell him? The Lord says, you will be a fugitive and a wanderer all the days of your life on earth. Are we not all Cain-like wanderers and fugitives? The children of Israel, God's people delivered from slavery, wander in the wilderness for 40 years. The great prophet Isaiah, all we like sheep have gone astray. Each of us turned to his own way. Jesus tells this story about a prodigal son who wanders into the far country and the father who goes after him. Again, notice verse 19, if anyone, not just him or her or them

or those people, if anyone, James chapter three, verse two. And that's why it's so important that we've immersed ourself in this book. You start to see themes, you start to see patterns, you start to see repetition. James chapter three, verse two, he says, he says that he says we all stumble in many ways.

Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers and sisters, he says in chapter one. Do not be deceived by the thought that maybe if I'm nice enough, if I'm spiritual enough, if I'm righteous enough, I won't be one of those. Anyone's who wander or if I do, I will commit only respectable sins. Nice sins. What I like to call dainty sins. Okay. There is no such thing as a dainty sin, but we think, well, that's not a really bad sin. Like other people commit really bad sins. I commit dainty sins, not big ones. If anyone wanders away, that's why our liturgy is such a gift. And I want us to see this people of God. I want us to see what a gift our liturgy is because what it does Sunday after Sunday is it's assumes that we've all wandered and we're being brought back. So did you notice how Bishop Stewart began the service? Blessed be God, the father, the son, and the Holy spirit.

What he's doing is he's what the liturgy is doing is it's bringing us back to that fixed reference point, the living God. And then what does the liturgy do next? We read the two great commandments. You shall love the Lord, your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself on these depend all the law and the prophets. And then what do we say next? Lord have mercy upon us. Why? Because we didn't do that this last week. We didn't do it. Well, we need help. We need mercy. And then our colleague this week was so perfect.

Keep your church, your Lord, by your perpetual mercy. And because without you, the frailty of our nature causes us to fall or wander. Oh, we like sheep have gone astray. So the anyone who wanders is you. It's me. That's the wanderer. And then James says, there are those who bring the wanderer back. They have a ministry of going after wanderers. And I love what he says. If anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, someone who's the someone. Well, the someone is anyone. Because earlier he talked about the elders call upon the elders and they will come and anoint people with oil. So that would be the leaders of the church. That could be the priests. That could be the deacons. That could be other leaders of the church. But here is just someone like if you're a Christian, you're following Jesus. You're a someone. You're one of these people that can

bring wanderers back. Notice the Apostle Paul says something. He uses almost the says it almost exactly the same thing in the book of Galatians. There's where we see, again, patterns as we immerse ourself in scripture. So in Galatians chapter six, the Apostle Paul says this. Brothers and sisters, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spiritual spirit of

gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you, too, be tempted. Put those side by side. They're basically saying almost exactly the same thing, exactly the same truth, that the church is the place where it's normal to speak into each other's lives the truth of God's word, the truth of holiness. When we're caught in sin, I just want us to see the expectations of what is the church like? What does the church look like? We speak the truth and love to one another and we listen to each other and we learn from each other and we humble ourselves to it before each other. Now, this raises all kinds of issues for us. We get a little uptight with this and we start thinking, who am I? Look at my life. I got a lot of faults of my own. Doesn't that sound bossy, judgmental, like I'm going to bring you back? I'm going to bring you back.

Doesn't that sound self-righteous? Doesn't that sound risky? Like what if I say something and I'm wrong? Or I didn't know the whole story. Or I blow up the friendship. Or it just seems kind of weird. Like in America, right? I mean, one of our creeds is you do you and I'll do me. So what's this? You're being bossy in my life. So let me build a case for this. First, with just sort of natural observations, kind of a natural law kind of thing. There are all kinds of areas of our life where we allow people to speak into our lives. So I go to my doctor and he says, your blood pressure is really high. Or a little low. We got to get this right. Or I go to my mechanic. He says, your timing belt is on its last lap. That's going to cost about two grand. And while we're at it, we need to do the water pump too.

I do writing projects. I have editors all the time tell me, that sentence is really weak. That sentence needs to be changed. I preach sermons. People give me feedback. You folks give me less feedback than my Long Island parishioners. So a couple of weeks ago, I preached a sermon. I asked Deacon Megan, how'd you like that sermon? She said, Deacon Megan is a really nice person. And she said, your third point was really long. Like you belabored that third point. So I looked at it during the opening hymn. I cut half of it out and I didn't miss anything. She was right. So there are all these areas where we allow people to speak the truth into our life. That's how we grow. That's how we learn things about ourselves. But the church is especially the place where we practice this in love, under the Lordship and the grace of Jesus. Look at this beautiful little two first words in verse 19.

My brothers. Or literally, better translated, my brothers and sisters. It's affectionate. It's warm. It's tender. Over 20 times, James talks, says, brothers, my brothers, my brothers and sisters. Twice he says, my beloved brothers and sisters. It's so warm. It's so affectionate. I think we think it's weird because in our culture, we've largely loved a vision for friendship, what friendship means, what it means to be a friend, what it means to be a brother and sister in Christ. See, ancient people, including classical Greek thinkers and also biblical thinkers. Friendship was something really robust. It meant a lot to be a friend. It was risky and there was no way you could become a good person without really good friends. Your friends would determine whether you would live a life of virtue or whether you would drift into vice. Your friends would determine that. Your friends are like a mirror. They like hold up a mirror so you can see yourself.

That's what friendship was. Think of a simple example. You're at a restaurant. You're eating raw vegetables. You have broccoli in your teeth. Can you see it? No. But your friend says, hey, you got broccoli in your teeth. Why don't you wipe that off? In the same way, friends can see sin in your life. They can see things in your life that you cannot see. Real friendship, brotherly, sisterly friendship takes the risk of speaking the truth. You can't just wipe it off. There's some great advice from a young guy. Well, he was young because he died at the age of 48. That's really young. And he was in the 1200s, a guy named St. Thomas Aquinas, who wrote a whole section in his master book. You can go read it. Go look it up on fraternal correction. Like, how do you correct somebody? It's really practical and it's really good. And some of the things Thomas said was, well,

you're humble because you know you're a sinner. You're gentle. You don't do it out of anger because, as James says, anger does not work the righteousness of God. You're prudent. You find the right time. You're realistic. Sometimes you just don't do it because the person's not ready to hear it. And I would also add, be prayerful because that's what James is talking about here. You're praying for the person. God will have more impact than you can have on this person. But Thomas said, at some point you have to say something because fraternal correction is an act of charity. It's an act of love.

It's like an act of mercy. Like, it's like feeding the hungry, Thomas said. It's on that level of urgency and importance because by not saying something, you're hurting the most important thing, the most important relationship in a person's life, their relationship with God, Almighty God, and possibly their eternal destiny. And we're missing the point for which we exist, which is to love God and to reflect Jesus in all our behavior. So no wonder James dropped that at the end. Why don't we do it? Sometimes it's just lack of courage or we have a lack of vision for holiness. We don't want to hurt the person's

feelings. I remember during Lent, I was doing a confession with another clergy person, and I talked about a problem in my life, and I was looking for sympathy. I was looking for camaraderie. I was looking for compassion. I was looking for love. I was looking for love. I was looking for love. I was looking for love. And he said, you're going to have to shoulder that. That's it? Just got to shoulder it? And then he prayed for me. It was true. I've never forgotten that. It was something I needed to shoulder in my life. Another story, I want you to know, I was in a community in the church, three young guys in our church, been friends for a while, young men. They did a lot of socializing around alcohol. It became a very important part of their camaraderie. And at some point, they all realized at the same time, we're drinking too much. This is not good.

It's not good for our spiritual lives. And so they made a pact together. They made a covenant that they would not touch alcohol, not just when they were together, but at any time, any place, anywhere, they would not touch alcohol for a full year. That was a liberating experience for them. They were speaking truth into each other's life. That was fraternal group

correction. So there is the wanderer. There's those who bring them back. And then there's the Lord Jesus, James, calls the Lord of glory. Now he doesn't mention the name of Jesus. But when you think of someone who brings back a sinner from his wandering, I don't know about you, but I can't help but thinking about Jesus. Parable of the prodigal son, for instance, the guy who wanders into the far country and the father waits, brings him back to him. And Jesus, the one who's right there telling that story. And when I see the phrase covers a multitude of sins, as Bible Christians, you've got the whole Bible in front of you. What are we supposed to think of when James is very Jewish pastor, very Jewish follower of Jesus pastor, when he talks about covering a multitude of

sins, not only a multitude of sins, but the sins of the whole world, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. So here's in the background. James has us. Here's the Lord Jesus inviting, calling, calling a sinner. Come home, calling a wanderer. Come back and calling the church to call the wanderers back. So the question for us is, I think the biblical text often just addresses us with a question, a powerful, provocative, heart-cracking open question. And that is, what kind of church do you want? What do you want the church to be? Do you want the church to be a place where people come with their nice little sins, their nice dainty little sins, their respectable sins, but we know Jesus can't deal with the really big ones. Or do you want the church to be the kind of church where we deal with sin together, we deal with sickness together, we take care of the sick and the wounded,

where we confess our sins together, where we pray for each other? Do you want the church to be that kind of church? Because it can. And sometimes I'm the person that wanders and needs to be brought back. Sometimes you're the person that wanders. Sometimes you're the person that goes after the wanderer. Because our Lord Jesus saw into the depths of our sin and paid the penalty for the price of our sins. So come, Lord Jesus, renew your church. Renew us in the truth.

Thank you that you went after each and every one of us, a wandering sinner, and you still do. Renew us in the truth of Christ, renew us in the truth of love, the justly, honest love, the love that has covered a multitude of sins. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen!

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