Proclaimer Blog
James in one mouthful
I had something of an epiphany last night. It came as we read James in one session at our small group. It’s an amazing way to take this unusual book in. I say unusual, not in a pejorative sense. It’s simply different from the Greek logic of Paul that we embrace so easily. James, as I’m sure you know, is much more Hebraic in its forms and logic so issues and themes get gnawed away at, then James switches tack, then returns to the same theme (try tracing through the theme of tongue and speech, for example).
There’s no mistake, as you read through, what the big issue is: the melodic line is very clear. James is calling his readers to true religion; religion where faith is matched by deeds: this is friendship with God. And seeing that big picture unlocks much of the so-called “bitty” nature of the book.
Actually, it’s not bitty at all when everything is connected back to that big thing. The irony for me is that we try to shoehorn James into a Pauline kind of structure, where it simply doesn’t work. It’s not that sections are entirely divorced from one another, that would be a preposterous suggestion. But the logical connections are decidedly not Pauline.
All of which, as we were reading, got me thinking. How do you preach a book like James in an expository manner – i.e. saying what God says? Two standard approaches fall short. Texting (just ripping out purple texts) is almost bound to ignore the connection to the whole. But even a more standard “few verses at a time, in order” approach may fail to do justice to the way the book works. It is more like Proverbs than Ephesians, after all.
So here’s something to ponder. What about preaching it thematically? Yep, thematic expositional preaching. I bet that puts the cat amongst the pigeons.