Wednesday night was Ash Wednesday, and Carolyn and I made our way up the three mile winding mountain road, Green Cove Road, past homes that are trailers, the best of which are doublewides, to the little Methodist church which we attend in the mountains called Hickory Stand. There I'm not the pastor; I'm an usher and a chair setter-upper. After we set up chairs for the overflowing crowd that was bigger than they have ever had and filled the little church, maybe 80-90 people, we heard the message and then we each went forward and the pastor marked us with the ashes. As I stood before Jacob, the pastor, he said, "From dust you have come and dust you will return."

I was never better reminded of that than in my office the Wednesday before. That morning I had spoken to Lutheran pastors at a conference in Cincinnati. The Senior Management Team was meeting, as we do every Wednesday afternoon, and Mike Bowie was filling me in on what had happened at the Worship Design Team meeting. He was very articulate, but stopped in the middle of a sentence like you often do to collect your thoughts. Then he began to stutter and I thought he was teasing. The next thing I knew he went into a seizure and even quit breathing for a period of time. He was then taken to Upper Valley Medical Center where it was discovered he had a brain tumor in the right frontal lobe of his brain the size of a baseball and was told that there was an eighty percent chance that it would be malignant and a bad diagnosis. He was flown to Miami Valley Hospital by CareFlight where they determined it was non-malignant and he had surgery on that Friday. He had a little bit of a setback this week when he developed a blood clot in his leg and they did a surgical procedure to take care of that. But at one o'clock this afternoon, they released Mike Bowie from the hospital.

It's amazing what they can do today. God is an incredible God. One of the surgical nurses came out and said everyone on his team who took part in that surgery was a believer, and that they prayed together before this surgery, which was a powerful thing. The doctor said that anything that Mike was able to do before, he should be able to do afterward, after his recovery. It's going to be some weeks, quite possibly six weeks, before he can return on a very limited basis. We need to allow him to have those weeks. As you can imagine, with brain surgery, it's going to take some time for recovery. Mike Bowie works out. He is careful about what he eats. What this really shows us is that no matter how hard we try to be in control, we are not in control and that bad things happen to good people. One of the doctors who is a neurologist from this church, that first night said (I'm paraphrasing what she really said), "Why with all the idiots in the world and the evil in the world, why does something like this happen to a person that has so much positive impact and influence on so many people?" That's what you feel.  

Of all the New Testament books, what is so powerful about the book of James is that it is about the cut-to-the-chase, bottom-line practical faith that works. James, who most biblical scholars say was the brother of Jesus, wrote this. Some of the best ancient Catholic scholars say he was a cousin of Jesus. I tend to say he was the brother of Jesus, we know it was a close relative of Jesus. The Apostle Paul had these lofty theological constructs and sometimes I read Paul's letters and I sit there and scratch my head and think, "What does that mean?" Not with James. This is just that no nonsense kind of faith that works. We are going to be months in the book of James. We are going to discover that for James, faith is not the absence of doubt. James didn't believe in Jesus. He was agnostic toward his own brother during Jesus' lifetime. However, after the resurrection, there was a miraculous conversion. Paul wrote in I Corinthians 15:7 of Jesus appearing to the disciples and then the 500. He also appeared to James. Then James went from agnostic to leader of the church in Jerusalem. So for James, faith is not the absence of doubt. Nor is it this magical formula for the believer, the person who is doing everything they know to righteously follow God. It does not exclude them from pain, persecution or even death. James himself would die a martyr's death in 62 A.D., less than 18 years after writing this letter. Martyr means die for his faith.

One of the major themes in the first chapter of James is that faith is persevering when life doesn't make sense and that dung happens. What you read on many, many bumper stickers is just a reality in life, and faith does not preclude good people from missing the dung that happens. We will see that the reason God gave us the word is that we will have wisdom. Not just that we know the word, but that we should know the truth and by having the wisdom of the word, the truth will set us free. Will you bow your head with me now and ask the Holy Spirit to give you a wisdom of heaven that no one on earth can possibly give so that you can have the empowerment to persevere when life doesn't make sense. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

As your pastor, I sometimes am overwhelmed by the bad things that happen to good people. You and your son (in congregation) just lost your wife and mother. How old is your son? Fourteen years old - and his mother, your wife, died last week after battling cancer for a year. Two weeks ago, you remember, I asked anyone who needed individual prayer and their families to come forward, and we were overwhelmed. I thought I could do it by myself. By the last worship on Sunday, I think I had about seven other people up here with me to pray. One man fell into my arms crying and his wife was with him. A son, a law school student was killed in an automobile accident and was soon to be married. We are not talking about bad things happening to bad people. We're talking about bad things happening to people who are doing everything they know how to do to be right with God.

So that's the question we ask: why do bad things happen to good people? Here's what is so amazing - nowhere in the Bible does the Bible ever try to explain this question. The Bible does not even attempt to give an answer to why bad things happen. As a matter of fact, the oldest book in the Bible is the book of Job. The very first part of the book identifies Job as this righteous dude who lives his life to please God. If anything could possibly go wrong, Job is one of those cases where everything that could go wrong, goes wrong. They were even having a party inside his house and the roof caved in and killed all of his children. He developed some kind of disease where he had this constant flowing of pus. All of his friends throughout the book of Job are trying to answer this question, "Job, think about it, you must have done something. You must have ticked off God because God wouldn't let this kind of thing happen to you if you were a good person." The book of Job never gives an answer, but here is the best line of the book of Job: Job said, "Even if God slay me, I will put my trust in him." I love it! In all of these books, nowhere does the Bible try to give an explanation for why bad things happen. Dung happens. I love the book of Ecclesiastes and at the end of the book where it says, here's the sum of all things, "Fear God and keep his commandments."

I am going to read from James 1, "James, a servant of God (Wow, right there a servant of God. It's not about you. We are here, what life is about is to serve God's purpose.) and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes scattered among the nations: Greetings. Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds..." Notice it doesn't say if you face trials of many kinds, it says expect it. Faith doesn't remove you from the world. Jesus said, "I don't pray to remove them from the world." Faith does not exempt the faithful person from the consequences of living in a broken world. Jesus put it this way, "In the world, you have problems. Expect in the world you will have trouble, but take heart, I have overcome the world." Faith doesn't remove you from the problems of the world, faith empowers you to excel and live through the problems of the world.

We are going to come back to James, but I want you to turn to 2 Corinthians. Nowhere does it say that if you have faith enough, bad things won't happen. Some of the preachers on TV sometimes teach that. We are going to see many cases where we need to pray for healing, but God doesn't always heal. If it was always God's will to heal us physically, why do 100% of us die? Some of the teachers I hear on TV say if you have faith, you can always be healed. There would be some people who have faith enough that they would never die. 2 Corinthians 4:8, "We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body." It doesn't say you are not going to be hard pressed. It says that faith will empower you not to be crushed in the midst of it. God is not going to take you out of the problems that everyone else has to go through. It's in the way that you will go through those problems and the faith that you have in those problems that other people will see the life of Christ in you.

Notice to whom James is writing. This is not to the Gentiles. James is sometimes called the gospel to the Jews, and this is why some folks, like Martin Luther, thought that James should not be included in the Bible. James was pre-Paul in the Gentile world that the Apostle Paul reached. The first Christians were Jewish people who still practiced Judaism in the synagogue. We have to understand who Jewish people are in the world. I hear people say, "Jews are going to go to hell if they don't accept Jesus Christ." I want you to read Romans 11, how in the end all of Israel will be saved. That means all of Israel, because the covenants that God makes with his people cannot be reversed or nullified. It's important that we understand that. The Jewish people have been the unique chosen people of God. We need to understand "chosen." Chosen does not mean privilege or protection. Obviously, the Jewish people are some of the most beat up people in the world. To be chosen is a unique responsibility. Israel has been chosen by God to be a kingdom of priests - today we would call them God's agents in the world. So Israel had this unique trust and calling from God. God entrusted the people of Israel with his law or the book. The Jewish people are called the People of the Book. So they were entrusted with this unique revelation of God so that the world could know the laws of God and that God is a moral God, a boundary God, a God of absolutes and a God who would redeem the world out of its brokenness. And that God would send a son, a Messiah, who would establish an alternative kingdom to all of the kingdoms of the world that ruled by oppression and power and warfare. So the Jewish people, one of the smallest groups of people in the whole world, had their identity around this city called Jerusalem and their life centered around worship in the temple. The word Salem means peace. The temple signified that of all the people on the earth, God dwelled among these people in a unique way. Calling is not to privilege or protection, it is to responsibility.

There were two major invasions against the people of God. The first one was in 722 B.C. by the Assyrians. The second invasion and the last one was in 586 B.C. by the Babylonians, which is modern day Iraq. In 586 B.C. was the last time, except for a very, very brief period before the birth of Jesus, that Israel was an independent nation until 1948. Can you believe that?  From 586 B.C. until 1948 except for just a little brief window under the Maccabees, Israel was not an independent nation. These invading nations carried the Jewish people away into slavery. It's called in history the diasporia or the dispersion. The Jewish people then were settled into areas of the world where they lived as servants to the people who enslaved them. As a matter of fact, in Psalm 137 one of the Babylonian captives wrote that psalm, and told how they watched as their captors took their children and bashed their heads against the rock. So these chosen people of God who were trusted with God's book, God's revelation to the world, were taken into captivity 700 years before Christ and experienced some of the worst atrocities that any human beings on earth could experience. These people of God have been displaced, despised, ghettoized and even demonized. Isn't it interesting that that's what it means to be the people of God? Anybody want to sign up for God's team right now? Say, "I do." Let me say that the mission of Jesus is not about going to heaven. That's just a sideline thing down the road.

The question in the Bible is not why. Why do bad things happen to good people? The question in the Bible is this: what is God's will and bigger purpose? It's not why, it's the will. What is God's plan? Romans 8:28 says, "We know that in all things God is able to work for the good to those who love God and are called according to God's purpose." It doesn't say that all things are good, or that God causes all things. Please hear me: God never causes pain or evil. Yet sometimes when someone dies a tragic death, someone will say, "Well, I guess God took them." No, the Bible says, as we will read in the first chapter of James, God does not participate in anything evil, nor can he by God's nature. But God, being all-powerful God, allows these things to happen. Why? I can't totally know God's thoughts on this. The Bible says, "'My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,' says the Lord." But God is able to take all of those things for those who love God and are called according to God's purpose and redeem them for a greater outcome.

We have many, many stories in the Bible. One of the stories is about Joseph, one of my favorite stories in the Bible. Joseph got a raw deal, a series of life events of things going from bad to worse. Joseph was Abraham's grandson, Jacob was his daddy. Joseph was a favorite of his daddy and he always ticked off his older brothers, so they beat the living daylights out of him and sold him to slavery. They put animal blood on his clothing and went back to their dad and told him that some animals got a hold of him and killed him. So Joseph was taken by slave traders to Egypt and sold to the house of Potiphar, who was an assistant to Pharaoh. Because Joseph was so smart, he excelled to be the manager of Potiphar 's estate. Now, Potiphar 's wife started to have eyes for Joseph. I get the idea that Joseph was a pretty sharp young guy. Potiphar traveled a lot, and his wife wanted to, you know, do the wild thing. Joseph wouldn't do it. Joseph said, "How can I commit that? My master trusts me, and how can I commit this sin against my God." Wow, he had an understanding of boundaries, didn't he? When we screw up, we are really sinning against God. She was incensed and cried rape. Joseph was in prison for years for a rape he never committed. Through a sequence of events, he finally got out again and because of God's anointing in his life, he advanced to second under Pharaoh over all of the granary systems. Years later, his brothers showed up in Egypt to get grain in a time of famine to take back to their father. Joseph was an older man and his brothers were standing before him, and he revealed to them who he was after all of these years. God didn't cause all that junk in Joseph's life, but God was able to take all of that junk and redeem it for a greater purpose. Joseph said to his brothers, "You meant this for harm, but God made it for good and now he has used it so that I can save you and my family and all of my people of Israel." God doesn’t cause the bad things to happen in our lives, but he’s able to take all of those and use them for his purpose. Jesus, himself, wasn't exempt or removed from the pain and injustice of the world. The night before his death, he was in the garden praying to his Father, and he said, "Father, if it is possible for this to pass, let it pass. But not my will, your will be done."  

On Thursday, they said to Mike that he had a blood clot in his leg and told him to not move, then had him in surgery within 30 minutes. They said this could go to his lungs and kill him. Jeannette just looked up and said, "Well, the Lord knows somebody else needs to get saved. God is going to use this as an example of faith for somebody going through hard times who needs faith.” Isn't it a powerful thing to say, Satan is not going to win this one. So the question is not "why" but the question is "what" - what is the purpose and will of God? As God's people, what is our purpose? I hope nobody prays to God that life is short and so I want you to make my life easy. I read the other day that most people do not fear death, they fear insignificance. I would rather die young and know the purpose and work of God through my life than die old with no significance.

The whole purpose for the people of God is to be the light of the world. Light allows other people to see in darkness. If I get up before Carolyn, she is always yelling at me for turning on the light in the bedroom. This is the truth and I have done everything to try to serve her. I have gotten up and I've actually broken my toe. So I get up quietly, put on my robe and go out to the mailbox to get the paper. One time my neighbor went by, looked at me and said, "Nice robe." I looked down and I had on this frilly robe. My neighbor hasn't been back to church since! The purpose of God's people is to be the light of the world, and we don't understand all that is going on.

For 700 years before Jesus came, Jewish people had been living in these oppressive situations subservient to first the Greeks, now the Roman Empire. Remember the first Christians were practicing Jews. We know Christians from Paul's time. Pre-Paul, the first Christians were practicing Jews and the gospel of Jesus was spreading through the synagogues of the diasporia or the dispersion. What was happening was the gospel being spread out into the world through these synagogues that had been there for 700 years. Do you see how God is going to turn the evil into good? What is so amazing is these Jewish people had been raising their children for 700 years in a world where the official language was Greek. So the Jewish people translated their Bible around 400-300 B.C. into Greek and now they had this Jewish Bible in the Greek language. These Greek people, these Gentile people, had been reading the Jewish Bible about a Messiah who was going to come and establish an alternative kingdom.

You have to understand the time. Seven hundred years of oppression might seem like a long time for us, but God does everything right on time. These people had lived in this decaying, corrupt Roman Empire where there were clear class structures all the way from Caesar, the emperor, down to the slave - and no one ever crossed class structures. Then came this new alternative kingdom led by this Messiah where there was neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free person, male nr female. Here was this community of people who had high moral standards and didn't go to the whore house. Remember, the Romans had turned worship into going to all of these gods with male and female shrine prostitutes. But these Jewish people were committed to their families and they had strong families. Not only did they believe in this all inclusiveness of all people and are included in this new alternative community of people, but they were committed to the welfare of all people. The first hospitals in the world came out of this community. One of the worst fates in the Roman world was to be a widow, because if you had no male children or sons-in-law to take care of you, you would go out in the wilderness and die. One of the first things you read in the book of Acts, in this new community was a program they had for the care of widows. Schools came out of this community. It is an amazing thing how God began to work through the dispersement of his people.

What I want you to understand is that God's truth is going to prevail. It might not prevail in our lifetime, but we are going to die of something, so why not die in the will and work of God? I love the way Brian McClaren in his book "Everything Must Change" explains it. "This movement of Jesus conspires to set off explosions of spontaneous kindness. The plan is to replace regimes of domination and oppression with movements of empowerment and service and a complete overthrow of violent terrorism. They fly airplanes of generosity into towers of need and plant improvised encouragement devices by roadsides and in neighborhoods everywhere seeking God's kingdom of equity." What a God! When Pastor Jacob put the ashes on our head Wednesday night and said, "From dust you came and dust you shall return," I was reminded that we are all going to die of something. So the question is will you die in the will of God working the work of God? Look at James 1:22, you will see that faith is not hearing the word or believing the word. Faith is working the word. Faith does you no good if you are not working the word of God in your life.

The Lenten season is a time of refocusing and readjusting. It's really coming back to that hard question, "If I had one year to live..." It was scary when I saw Mike quit breathing for a time. I was reminded that we have no guarantees, none of us. Most of us probably are not going to pick the time or even be aware of the time when we check out or leave the planet. If you had one year to live, what would you do? How would you change your priorities? What kind of life would you really want to live? That is what the Lenten season is all about. It's about refocus and re-alignment. It's coming to that place with Jesus to say, "Not my will, but yours. I want to live for your purpose. I want your Spirit to work God's will through my life."

Will you bow your head in prayer with me. Take a moment to listen to the Holy Spirit. What is the Spirit saying to you? What do you need to allow God to change? What do you need to let go of? Maybe fear and anxiety. Maybe the paralysis of asking the question to God, "Why, God." Why did this to happen to me or in our family or in our marriage. It is changing the question not why, but what is your greater purpose in this world? What is your will? Because of the pain that I have experienced or gone through, somebody else is going to receive hope through it. Somebody is going to be saved because of it.

Lord, Jesus, use me. Put me to work for Your will and Your purpose. We pray this in Your name. Amen.