Dead Faith and Resurrection Values: James 2:14-18
Ordinary Time
What good is it, my sacred family members, if a man
says ‘I have faith,’ but has no deeds to show for it? Can that kind of ‘faith’ set him free and
make him whole? 15If a family
member or any human being has no clothes to wear or no food to eat, 16and
you say, ‘Go in peace, stay warm, and eat well,’ but fail to give what is
needed, what good have you done?
17In the same way, without deeds, faith by
itself is dead. 18But someone
will say, ‘Faith is what is needed,’ while another says, ‘Good deeds are what
is needed.’ I say that both are
needed. You show me your faith without
good deeds, and I will show you my faith by the good deeds I have done. (First Nations Version)
In
case you didn’t know, church folk are a tad dramatic. We, like most people, want to be right, and
to have everyone know we’re right, and for everyone else to agree with us
because then they would also be right—which is, of course, not specific to the
Church at all. That drive toward having
the right answer means, however, that it’s really easy for us church folk to
get stuck in loops about how we do this strange thing called spirituality. We can get pretty heated about whether or not
the death or the resurrection is the most important part of Jesus’ story, or how
we should best relate to our governments, or whether prayer should be scripted
or done on the fly. Don’t even get me
started on how many books and arguments there are on whether God accepts this
kind of music or that when we’re planning worship. But one argument we may not recognize we’re
having is whether faith or works will save us.
In
this church, we don’t talk about “save” all that often, but what I mean is that
we are fairly constantly having the discussion about what the best way to be in
relationship with God is: what we believe or what we do. In doctrinal circles, this is sometimes
called “the heresy of works righteousness” and I guarantee you you’ve claimed a
position, though you may not realize it.
This
is an age-old discussion in the Church because we have always, always wanted to
know the right answer; we are all Peter, in a sense, ready and waiting to say
that we understand the best way to understand the question. Thankfully, like Peter, we are also always
invited to come along after we get it wrong, even in the most spectacular of ways. This is reassuring, since we Christians have
argued with each other about the best way to serve God from the start and in
the 20th century, it began to split down ideological and political lines
as well as theological.
On
one “side” of our wrestling match, James says, “Some will say, ‘Faith is what
is need.’” This is the corner of sola
fides—faith alone, a position once championed by Martin Luther against what
he saw as the excesses in the Roman Catholic Church. God is far less interested in what you do,
Luther said, than why you’re doing it; action with an empty heart is no action
at all. He called the book of James and its insistence on works an “epistle of
straw”[1] and leaned far more
heavily on the letters of Paul.
This idea
of “faith alone” undergirds the snippets that have come to collectively be
known as “the sinner’s prayer;” heard of it?
It’s usually something like “forgive me, Lord, for I recognize I am a
sinner and need You in my life; make me clean for I believe that You alone are
the one Who can make me whole, and I will follow You all the days of my
life.” It’s not Scriptural and it’s not recognizably
doctrinal; it was developed as a shorthand for traveling evangelical pastors in
the mid-20th century to handle conversions with some guidelines and
expectations. The core of it is that I
believe, therefore I am changed; I believe, which binds me to
God. This is still popular in
conservative denominations and evangelical spaces; search “the heresy of works
righteousness” and you’ll get a lot of commentary from right-leaning
charismatic churches.
On
the other “side,” “good deeds are what is needed.” There’s an oft-quoted saying: “Preach the
Gospel at all times; if necessary, use words.”
It argues that people should be able to see the work of Jesus in you with
or without you talking about it; often, there’s an underlying assumption that
talk may be detrimental to the very work of justice and healing God calls us to
do. This mindset runs underneath a lot
of the backlash against evangelism and the discomfort of having explicit faith
conversations outside of explicit faith settings. Although there’s no corresponding language of
“the heresy of faith righteousness,” there’s a pretty clear bias that if you
have to talk about faith all the time, clearly you’re not enacting it in such a
way that people see it in you.
If
you’re annoyed by the sinner’s prayer or the seemingly-shallow acts of service,
congratulations, you’ve chosen a stance in the faith vs. works debate. If you are beginning to realize this whole
sermon is a theological debate and that’s not your cup of tea today, well,
we’re about halfway through, so hang on.
The
“vs” in “faith vs. works” makes it seem like this is a clear, black and white
issue, and we have learned over and over again that humans, especially humans
walking in Jesus’ footsteps, don’t often get black and white choices.
With the prayer, there has to be both
an internalization and externalization of the belief that’s said; simply saying
it isn’t enough. Baptist pastor J.D.
Greear has said, “It’s not the prayer that saves; it’s the repentance and faith
behind the prayer that lays hold of salvation. My concern is that
over-emphasizing the prayer has often (though unintentionally) obscured the
primary instruments for laying hold of salvation: repentance and faith.”[2] Repentance is an action, though it doesn’t
classify as “works” in the same way.
And faith
cannot be left out of the conversation; Professor Craig R. Koester writes, “People
act on the basis of what they believe to be true. So if people say one thing
but do something else, James would say their actual faith is the faith that
underlies their actions. People must believe in something if they are to act at
all. The question is whether the faith that actually shapes their lives is
faith in Jesus Christ or something else.”[3] The heart of this is that faith leads but
actions must follow.
To
the other “side,” the quote about preaching with or without words is usually
attributed to St. Francis of Assisi but “none of Francis’ disciples or
biographers appear to attribute this phrase or anything like it to the man
himself. He did write, in his Rule of 1221, that ‘All the Friars...should
preach by their deeds,’ but it’s widely agreed that this was a rebuke to
hypocrisy—against word and deed not matching up to each other—rather than a
suggestion that preaching can somehow occur through deeds alone.”[4] The actions only matter because there is
supposed to be belief behind them, and if those don’t match, it reflects poorly
on the faith claimed. A similar
statement comes from St. Ignatius of Loyola’s commentary on Ephesians: “It is
better for a man to be silent and be [a Christian], than to talk and not to be
one.”[5] Doing good things is great, but doing good
things because Christ calls us to do so is a whole different spin. Action reveals what the faith within holds.
“I
say that both are needed,” writes James.
This letter is one of the shorter ones in our New Testament and is
addressed to the “twelve tribes in the Diaspora” rather than a single
congregation. James is writing not for a
singular problem tied to a certain kind of social connection but for the whole
of the culture of the faithful at that moment.
[6] So when addressing the ongoing question of
“which” James answers, “Yes.” “Without
deeds, faith by itself is dead,” but deeds without faith are directionless. To say that I will tell everyone about Jesus
loving the poor but never connect to a poor person myself is foolish; to serve
with poor folk but keep my faith locked in a box I only open on Sunday is
ridiculous.
There’s
a meme that was made popular back around 2010 taken from a commercial for a
taco kit, of all things. You could make
either hard-shell or softshell tacos and a little girl asks, “Why not both?”[7] Her innocent inclusion because a widespread
way to mock seeming (and actual) dichotomies, but James calls the Church to the
same concept: why not both? Why not faith and works? Why must our relationship with the God Who
both held a deep faith and performed a considerable amount of works be one or
the other?
We
in the Methodist tradition are grounded in this awareness because of John
Wesley’s insistence on both personal piety and social holiness. In the preface to Wesley’s 1739 volume of Hymns
and Sacred Poems, he wrote: ‘“Holy
Solitaries’ is a phrase no more consistent with the gospel than Holy
Adulterers. The gospel of Christ knows of no religion, but social; no holiness
but social holiness. Faith working by love, is the length and breadth and depth
and height of Christian perfection.”[8] This is why The United Methodist Church is so
keen on being involved in social justice action around the world, why we have
the United Methodist Committee on Relief as one of our foundational agencies,
why the Methodist Building is the only remaining religious establishment on
Capitol Hill.
And
right alongside that is Wesley’s adamant calling for us to be practitioners of
“the works of mercy…Next to these,” he writes in his sermon “On
Zeal,” “are those that are usually termed works of piety—reading
and hearing the word, public, family, private prayer, receiving the Lord's
Supper, fasting or abstinence. Lastly, that his followers may the more
effectually provoke one another to love, holy tempers, and good works, our
blessed Lord has united them together in one body, the Church, dispersed all
over the earth; a little emblem of which, of the Church universal, we have in
every particular Christian congregation.”[9]
It’s
both, and it’s both together as the Church because it’s here that we learn how
to hold that tension and develop whichever one of the two doesn’t come
naturally to us. It’s here—in the
congregation, wherever our physical “here” may be—that we console each other
over the wounds we bear from the dichotomous fight; it’s here that we are reminded
that God calls our full, entire selves to a world of “why not” rather than
“only this.”
Last
week we had “Service Sunday,” in which we took a couple of hours to offer our
hands and hearts across the city to organizations who do the work of feeding,
housing, and walking alongside those in need.
It was fabulous, and I’m so grateful for each and every one of you who
turned up to sort clothes, make food, clean rooms, pull weeds, write cards, send
encouragements, and all the myriad things that were done on-site and at
home. We had some 80 people involved,
which is fantastic, and tells me that First UMC is ready to do this again next
year.
And
we also had Saturday night worship. This
is who we are: the ones who serve and the ones who worship, the ones who go and
do and the ones who stay and prayer, the ones who hold faith and works as a
twining twist in which both are inextricable from the other. The Sunday of working in the community is how
we are faithful, and singing about the God Who loves us is how we are
faithful. What saves us is looking our
neighbor in the eye as we fight against the injustice of hunger; what saves us
is the way we discuss what is difficult for us in our faith when we gather in
small groups. What heals us is coming
together to speak the ritual of communion again and again so that we remember
we are never fighting alone; what heals us is working on making a space
comfortable for someone else who can learn that they can rest for this
moment. It is faith and works, it
is mercy and justice, it is being frustrated with this imperfect Body of
Christ and loving the beautiful mess of it, it is showing each other our
faith and then showing each other our deeds.
“What James seems to be talking about,” writes Dr. Heather Anne
Thiessen, “is response to God’s call…or to circumstances…It involves ‘saying
yes’ to what God and the neighbor require of us…it is ultimately about saying ‘yes’
to God, whatever the [potential] cost.”[10]
We
are a resurrection people who believe that death is never as final as we
fear. What better way to understand
resurrection than to see the life in our beliefs, the hope in our actions, the
unity of all that we offer to God? Truly
this is not dead, this binding together where so much of our history has tried
to force a separation. May we learn to
live in both our faith and our works, strengthening each so that we can truly
speak to the hope within us that changes us, over and over again, into
something tremendously alive. Amen.
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