Scripture: James 1:22-25; Genesis 2:7; Acts 7:58-8:1 Series: 2021
Part of the ‘Reset’ series, this sermon on James 1:22-25 calls hearers to become ‘doers of the word.’ Using nasal breathing as an extended metaphor for prayer (tied to God breathing nephesh/soul into humanity at Genesis 2:7), Wilson defines the soul as the aspects that make you you, warns against assuming people are fixed and unchangeable (Saul of Tarsus), and centers the Methodist question ‘How is it with your soul?’ He frames resetting the soul as practicing the Wesleyan means of grace—worship, scripture, prayer, fasting, Christian conferencing, and acts of mercy—not to earn salvation but to seek God and stay alive in Christ.
Illustrations: mouth-breathing-nasal-breathing, texas-cedar-allergies, zoom-interview-manners, covid-nasal-breathing-study, psychology-etymology, mirror-forgetting, saul-stephen-stoning, oxford-methodists-how-is-your-soul, daily-examen-evensong, augustine-restless-heart, start-small-fasting
January 17
Reset your soul
“You must be doers of the word and not only hearers who mislead themselves. Those who hear but don’t do the word are like those who look at their faces in a mirror. They look at themselves, walk away, and immediately forget what they were like. But there are those who study the perfect law, the law of freedom, and continue to do it. They don’t listen and then forget, but they put it into practice in their lives. They will be blessed in whatever they do.” James 1:22-25 CEB
There is a specter haunting the world today, the specter of mouth-breathing. Yes, I said it. Mouth breathing. And of course, there are times when people need to pant, after you run up a hill, or after your dog runs away and you have to chase your dog (pant, pant). There are all sorts of ways of breathing, but there are some common manners advice which tells people, “Now don’t be a mouth-breather, especially at an interview., even a Zoom interview.”
Now, of course, we live in Texas, and cedar seems like a 12 month a year issue. So, yes, sometimes we are stuffed up and have to breathe through our mouth.
The issue is not that nobody should ever breathe with their mouth, but that the mouth should not be the primary mode of breathing, especially when someone is talking to you. When you are talking to someone up close and they are like, (pant, pant), “excuse me, what did you say?”
But nasal breathing has many medical benefits, as well. Breathing through your nose helps you to use your diaphragm muscle more, helps develop muscles around your nose, it also filters, humidifies, and warms air, and releases nitric oxide which allows the body to absorb more oxygen, sometimes almost 20% more oxygen, just by breathing through your nose. There was also a study in may showing that nasal breathing might help mitigate the viral load of COVID-19 and lower the chances of a related pneumonia.
But for Christians, breathing has a special place due to its connection with prayer. When we pray, we breathe with God and God breathes with us. Human life began with God breathing into us.
My friends, we are continuing our series called reset, about resetting our lives. A few weeks ago, I spoke about Resetting our Homes and how we can recenter our homes in light of Jesus’s birth. Last week, I spoke about resetting our body and I mentioned briefly how God created humans out of the dust and breathed life into them, and I want to start right there as we talk about Resetting our Soul. We are at Genesis 2:7. “the Lord God formed the human from the topsoil of the fertile land and blew life’s breath into his nostrils. The human came to life.” Some translations have, God formed Adam, but Adam is not a proper name in the Bible until later. It is the word for human. Adama is the arable land or soil.
So God makes humans, Adam, and then breathes life into them through their nostrils and now he has a living soul. A nephesh, in Hebrew. It is translated into Greek as psyche, the root word of Psychology. Psychology literally means the study of souls. Now, soul is a loaded term in a lot of ways. Over the last few hundred years, the soul is often seen in contrast to the body. Sometimes referred to as Mind-Body dualism.
In the Bible, there is not this duality of body and soul. God creates humans, and breathes into them and in that breath we have soul, we have life-force. We have nephesh. You can’t take a soul away from a person and have them be a person. And for now, let us just think and define the soul as those aspects of you that make you you.
One of the tricky things is that a body is really easy to see. We see a body. We look in a mirror and see what we look like. We can look. We can see. We can feel. Our soul, though, is harder to grasp. It is tough enough for us to try and understand ourselves very well. It is almost impossible to understand another person’s soul. You cannot see another person’s soul. It is not observable, like you can observe a bird or a tree or another human.
Yet, as we grow older, we start to develop certain ideas about who we are, about what we like, we develop certain ideas about what we desire. But one of the great assumptions we can make about ourselves is that we are finished or fixed and that there is nothing that can change us. It is the same kind of assumption that we can make with other people in our life. We assume that they are fixed and will not change. It is a presumption, sometimes based on our experiences, but still a presumption. At the end of Acts 7, Saul of Tarsus approves of the stoning of Stephen. His life was laid out before him. His life could have been predictable, yet God intervened.
As well, each of us changes consistently in little ways as time passes and we respond to realities around us. The more closed off we are to change, the more closed off we are to God, because then we are closed off to the possibility that God is going to make a change in our heart and in our life.
To get back to the soul, it is hard to reset something that we don’t know where it is to begin with.
The early Methodist movement was a group of college kids at Oxford who wanted to take their faith seriously, so they asked one of the guys’ older brother, John, to come in and give them some guidance, and the guidance centered around this question: “How is it with your soul?”
So today, I want to ask all of you, both those present here and those with us online: how is it with your soul? We need to know where we are to know where we are going. So let’s take a moment to think about this question, how is it with your soul? (60 seconds)
One of the tricky things is that sometimes we don’t have great language to talk about our soul, especially if we don’t do it often. One of the practices that we do at Evensong is based on the classical Christian prayer, the Daily Examen, which is designed to give people a chance to look at their day out of gratitude for what God has done. To build up a lexicon of gratefulness for God’s actions in their life. This is a great way to start. We begin by becoming aware of God’s presence. We then think back on our day with gratitude. We make sure to pay attention to our emotions. We lift up one moment of our day and then look forward to our future.
We have to start with where we are and the language that we have. No matter who you are or where you are, if you are watching this, you are seeking God in some kind of way. Resetting our soul is about resetting where we are standing on our walk towards God. All of our souls long to be with God, and as Augustine says, our hearts our restless until they rest in God.
So if we start with the question, How is it with your soul? we can begin to understand where we are. But this does not tell us where we are going. If we get back to those college kids in England asking each other, “How is it with your soul?” What they aimed for next is what we call today the means of grace. These are the things of God. We know where we are going when we are doing the things of God. And we are all doing one of them right now, we are worshipping God together.
The rest of the means of grace are as follows: meditating and studying the scriptures, prayer, fasting, Christian conferencing (accountability to one another), and Bible study, visiting the sick, visiting those in prison, feeding the hungry, and giving generously to the needs of others.
We do these things not to earn salvation but to see God and to seek God.
This also gets to what James is talking about.
“You must be doers of the word and not only hearers who mislead themselves. Those who hear but don’t do the word are like those who look at their faces in a mirror. They look at themselves, walk away, and immediately forget what they were like. James 1:22-24 CEB
This metaphor is so powerful. We forget who we are if we don’t do the things of God. We forget that we are loved. We forget that we can love other people. To put our faith into practice is to reset our soul. And we have a chance to do that this year in a new way. One aspect of a church is being a school of discipleship where we learn and practice together what it means to be disciple of Jesus. We worship together. We study the Bible together. There are opportunities on Sunday mornings and Wednesday’s to study the Bible with friends here. We serve together at Partners in Hope and Helping Hands and the Farmacy. We are also looking to start some new small groups that will be intentional gatherings to focus on what Wesley calls Christian conferencing and questions like “How is it with your soul?”
Visiting the sick is a means of grace and it is honestly easier than ever. If you can help with our hospital visitation ministry, you don’t have to leave your home and can reach out to folks who are super lonely.
James is famous for saying that faith without works is dead. He does not mean it is useless but that it is not alive. To be a doer of the word is to be alive in Christ.
We all have to start where we are. Like with fasting, I would not recommend a 40 day fast if you have never tasted before. Maybe start with a meal. Start where you are with prayer, with study, with service, but realize that if you let God act in your soul, you will not be in the same place for long. Even in the little things you do every day like breathing (inhale, exhale), may you think of it in a new way. Let us reset our soul. Let us take a step of faith and do the things of God.
In the name of the father and the son and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.