What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. (James 1:1-3)
Something that we want, but we cannot have?
Security!
It is common to desire to be secure, to be safe, to be free (or at least according to what we can conceive of “freedom” being). An expectation has been perpetuated among the population that we have a RIGHT to be secure and to have no harm beset us. This expectation plays on our desire for security, but has been used to perpetuate political and legal careers, economic wealth, and ideologies. The problem is, we will never be secure or safe from harm. We demand it, but we do not receive it because it is outside the realm of possibility to live into such an expectation. We demand it and temporally do stuff in our attempts to have it, but we do with wrong motives – in order to benefit only ourselves, our own “pleasures.”
We cannot demand that soap will not cause us to fall in the bathtub, resulting in a broken pelvis. We try to demand such things, and we sue the soap manufacturer and the distributor and the packaging company when such things happen and wonder why no warning was on the label, “CAUTION: This product is slippery and if you step on it in the bathtub dire consequences could result.” What we want is to not be held responsible for our own actions. What we want is millions of dollars that we think we can get because of “their negligence.” …never our own fault, never simply an accident, never our own negligence.
We cannot reasonably expect that we can be completely safe from terrorist attacks (whether homegrown or foreign) or that citizens of other nations will not do to us what we do to them. We want safety, but we do not want to do what is necessary to secure the highest level of safety genuinely possible. Instead, we demand that the world and cause-and-effect work the way we want them to, not the way they really do. So, in order to try to delude ourselves into feeling more secure or safe, we give up some of our own freedom, we invade other countries, we destroy other societies, we exploit other peoples, and yet we never realize our desires – security, safety, peace, freedom. As a matter of fact, we make things worse.
We ask, but do not receive because we ask in order to please ourselves. We demand security. Why? What are our motives? To perpetuate a nation-state? To secure the notion that we can be happy by buying more stuff? To protect our mountain-o-things? To protect our families from harm – that I can see, but the others above, I cannot accept as a follower of Jesus Christ.
Our security, our peace, our freedom, our life can be found in God, but we delude ourselves if we think they can be found in guns, wars, envy, pride, arrogance, selfishness, nationalism, and the like. Let’s invade more countries. Let’s invade Iran or North Korea or Venezuela or Cuba or Syria or maybe even Russia, and let’s see how much more secure we become.
James writes that there are two kinds of wisdom.
“But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. Peacemakers who sow in peace raise a harvest of righteousness.” (James 3:17-18)
We don’t hear too much about these kinds of attitudes or this kind of living from hawks seeking empire or the Religious Right. We want security, so we wage war. We want safety, so we send armies to kill in order to be safe. “Peacemakers who sow in peace raise a harvest of righteousness.” Perhaps, if we took responsibility for our own actions, if we did not live only for our own pleasures, if we found true inner security by way of the true source of security, rather than through manufacturing means of self-deception, we would not need wars to attempt to be “secure.”
I’m not naive. I know that there are loads of people out there who are willing and wanting to kill every one of us even as they destroy themselves, too. It is reasonable to try to stop them. BUT, what caused them to want to kill themselves in order to kill us in the first place? As a Christian, it ultimately makes no difference to me whether the U.S. continues to exist, whether certain economic theories continue to rule, whether I live in plenty or want.
What makes a difference is that I love God with my whole self and, and, and that I love my neighbor as myself! What makes a difference is my motive for wanting or asking for anything. What makes a difference is whether I ask for my own pleasures or for the betterment of humankind, made in the image of God.