Enlivening Our Values: James 2:14-18, 24-26

 Ordinary Time
"Great Choice" series on discernment

My brothers and sisters, what good is it if people say they have faith but do nothing to show it? Claiming to have faith can’t save anyone, can it? 15 Imagine a brother or sister who is naked and never has enough food to eat. 16 What if one of you said, “Go in peace! Stay warm! Have a nice meal!”? What good is it if you don’t actually give them what their body needs? 17 In the same way, faith is dead when it doesn’t result in faithful activity.

18 Someone might claim, “You have faith and I have action.” But how can I see your faith apart from your actions? Instead, I’ll show you my faith by putting it into practice in faithful action.

…24 So you see that a person is shown to be righteous through faithful actions and not through faith alone. 25 In the same way, wasn’t Rahab the [sex worker] shown to be righteous when she received the messengers as her guests and then sent them on by another road? 26 As the lifeless body is dead, so faith without actions is dead. (CEB)

 

          Tomorrow is Indigenous Peoples’ Day.  Some version of this shift away from Columbus Day has been around for a while; South Dakota started observing it in 1990 and the city of Berkeley, California, in 1992.  “Seattle, Albuquerque, Minneapolis, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Portland, Oregon, and Olympia, Washington, have all established Indigenous Peoples' Day celebrations in place of Columbus Day” in the 90s and 00s.  The switch has been fueled partially by an ongoing ask from indigenous peoples themselves, including a direct ask of the federal government in 2000 by the American Indian Movement to stop celebrating Columbus Day.[1]  The day does not align with stated American values, they said, stating that “Columbus was the beginning of the American holocaust” and “to celebrate the legacy of this murderer is an affront to all Indian peoples.”[2]

          In 2021, Joe Biden became the first president to formally recognize Indigenous Peoples’ Day, proclaiming the second Monday in October “as a day to honor Native Americans, their ‘resilience and strength’ and determination to preserve ‘land, language, spirit, knowledge, and tradition,’ even as they have faced a ‘centuries-long campaign of violence, displacement, assimilation, and terror’”.[3]  The same day, he also signed off on the traditional declaration of Columbus Day, putting the two on equal footing.

          The United States has long refused to see our own history with indigenous peoples as anything for which we need to exert ourselves, most notably around anything resembling an admission of guilt.  Congress buried an apology wrapped in protective clauses in an addendum to a defense spending bill in 2009;[4] Barak Obama publicly acknowledged the apology but didn’t publicly read it into record anywhere in 2010.  In 2021, Joe Biden’s administration “began investigating the federal government’s roles in and responsibilities for the damages and harms inflicted by the federal Indian boarding school system, including how many children died at the schools” and Biden himself formally apologized for federal Indian boarding schools in 2024,[5] a rare admittance that has been completely swept under the rug by the current administration which not only is not apologizing to indigenous people but is actively adding to their harm. 

          One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

          Today’s reading is from the letter of James.  “This James is most likely the half brother of Jesus, the son of Joseph or Mary…also called James the Just…an attribution that is corroborated by early church tradition, especially in the writings of Eusebius, Jerome, and Origen…Paul identified James as an eyewitness of the resurrected Christ (1 Cor 15:7) and as one of the ‘pillars’ of the church (Gal 2:9).  It was he, not one of the Twelve, who presided over the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15:13–21).”[6]  James had considerable heft to throw around and uses it in this brief letter to talk about many things, including hypocrisy.  The verses today follow several examples of how his congregational audience has been saying one thing and doing another, especially around their treatment of wealthy patrons and poorer community members.  James is all about walking the talk, as it were, because he has seen the Man Who lived a life, a death, and a resurrection fueled by the things He believed.

          “Faith without works is dead” is actually a fairly well-known phrase—or, in the CEB here, “faith without actions is dead.”  There are pages and pages and books about what James means with this; Martin Luther (yep, the one who nailed paper to a door and also married a nun and ran a small brewery with her) hated him for seemingly contradicting Paul’s idea that faith alone was what one needed for full standing in the eyes of God.  Luther called this the “epistle of straw.”  But, writes Episcopal priest Rick Morley, “James isn’t making a great, nuanced theological point here. He’s looking at the behavior of the people in the church, and he’s saying that he doesn’t see much faith, if any.

“If you’re going to claim to be a faithful Christian, there should at least be some evidence there. That doesn’t mean that you’re going to be perfect. We all fall short of the glory of God. But, there should be a visible attempt.  An attempt to bring in the reign of God. Establish God’s Kingdom, so that God’s will can be done on earth as it is in heaven.  James wasn’t telling the church to be good to the poor and thereby earn salvation. He was saying that if their faith was genuine, they’d actually be loving their neighbors as themselves.”[7]

It is wildly easy at this particular juncture in history to point out people who say they believe one thing but do radically different things.  Knowing what hypocrisy looks like or what faith that is only words-deep looks like is not necessarily the takeaway for us from James, not right now.  We got that.  Rather, we can dig into why James is so adamant about works and faith being an interlocking package.

Everybody—okay, well, we have learned not everybody but pretty much most people who successfully paid attention to kindergarten, Sesame Street, the Pass It On billboards, or community engagement—knows that general good deeds are a good idea.  It’s why the Golden Rule variations shows up all over the place, not because all religions are the same but because every society has figured out that their survival depends on people not killing each other long enough to raise a new generation.  Being generally not a jerk to others is a longevity plan, and people don’t need to have any kind of faith to be not a jerk.

For James, however, the works happen because the faith is happening.  University of Glasgow researcher Kelsie Rodenbiker writes, “James has explained what faithful action entails. Faithful living, in this sense, is a two-sided coin: inaction is also faithlessness. Belief without works is not faith; conviction without action is emptiness. The author presents a challenge: show me your faith without action—I dare you—and I will provide confirmation of my faith through action (2:18). The rhetoric is clear: this separation is impossible, because faith works.”[8]  It is not simply that faith without works is dead but that the works are fed by, spurred on by, shaped by the faith that demands them.  Because we believe; we want to reach out to others; because we reach out to others, we believe with more depth.

In our own tradition as Methodists, we find this in John Wesley’s writings.  In his 1739 preface to Hymns and Sacred Poems, Wesley states, “The sole cause of our acceptance with God (or, that for the sake of which, on the account of which we are accepted) is the righteousness and the death of Christ, who fulfilled God’s law and died in our stead. And even the condition of it is not (as they suppose) our holiness either of heart or life, but our faith alone, faith contradistinguish’d from holiness as well as from good works,” and yet faith alone is not a faithful life.  Rather, “contemplation that ‘consists in a cessation of all works’ [is] [d]irectly opposite to…the gospel of Christ. Solitary religion is not to be found there. ‘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.”[9]

If you have faith, what you do will be shaped by it.  James’ argument is not that everyone has to be perfect but that declaring a life with God means your actions will shift to match—and if they don’t, it’s time for a faith tune-up.  We’re in a series about discernment; last week we talked about how learning from and leaning on the ones around you helps you see what values shape you, and here we see further that you can write all the values list and draw all the visual representations you want, but if the values you claim, the faith you claim, the hope and commitment you claim aren’t remolding how you work in the world and how the others who also claim that work in the world, it’s only words and sketches.  How is the community holding itself accountable, discerning together that we are called to do some things?  How are the choices you’re discerning shaped by the ways your actions show or do not show what you say you value?

Here in Minnesota, Indigenous Peoples’ Day started on Friday and continues through tomorrow.  There was a “film screening in Mankato and a weekend-long basketball tournament and festival in St. Paul,” a powwow at the American Indian Center and a falling water ceremony at St. Anthony Falls.  Tomorrow, there will be a community round dance in Duluth and an honoring breakfast in Fargo, a gathering in Brainerd and another powwow in Moorhead.  On Tuesday there will be celebrations and speeches at the University of Minnesota honoring both Indigenous Peoples’ Day and Coming Out Day, including recognition of the colonists’ attempted erasure of the two-spirit identity.[10] This is how we live into the value of liberty and justice, of listening and learning.

How do you live into your values?  How do you live into your faith?  What does it mean for your beliefs to come alive, to put flesh on the bones of the faith you claim?  How do you see others around you living into what they say matters to them, following the Spirit they claim as utmost?  It’s hard work, this work of faith, and it’s not a matter of “well if I do everything right then the world will be okay.”  We’re not God, thank heavens, and it is not ours to save everything.  But it is ours to live what we are called to do, what God has gifted us to do, the place in the Body we occupy.  “How can I see your faith apart from your actions?” asks James. 

We are called to speak of the hope we carry, but who will ask about it unless they see us carrying hope?  May God grant us strength for the journey, faith for the fueling, and ever and always awareness of the love that carries us through.  Amen.


[6] Daniel K. Eng, “Letter of James,” in The New Testament in Color (2024), 634.

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