James 4:13-17

My usual practice with this study has been to post the passage from the Letter of James and then comment upon it in my blog. Then all you folks who have been taking part comment on my comments. All very hyper-texty and post-modern.

I'm going to suggest another procedure today. We'll try it. If folks like it we'll stick with it for a spell. If not we can always go back.

Below is the text in the NRSV. I suggest we each write a blog here responding to some aspect of this passage. And then we can each comment on each other's responses. I'm not going to post my response immediately. I want to step back and see what develops. Besides, it frees me from the role of learned lecturer into which I seem to have fallen like some prehistoric wasp set in amber. This time I get to create the space and then step back and see what fills it.

Have fun!

Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money." Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that." As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil. Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin.

-- James 4:13-17 (NRSV)