FAITH IS NOT ENOUGH. How’s that for an opening? You got faith? Great, fine.
Remember those moments from the gospels where Jesus was confronting the
demons? When he tossed them out? When Satan tempted him in the
wilderness? Guess what, they had faith
too! So what else you got? There is some of the homespun theology we
have come to know from James. “Demons
believes in Jesus, just like you! What
else you got?”
The story
seems to be that some people are claiming to be of exceptional faith while
others are of exceptional works. It
could be people attempting to understand and interpret spiritual gifts, as Paul
lays out in Romans 12: We have gifts that differ according to the grace given
to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher,
in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the
leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness. There is precedent to dividing up the work of
the church according to the gifts of the Spirit. But is that what is actually happening
here? Or is it spiritual laziness?
The
examples coming to the ears of James seem to be different. As he illustrates, “if a brother or sister is
naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep
warm and eat your fill”, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is
the good of that? So faith by itself, if
it has no works, is dead. Maybe its an
apocalyptic view. Jesus is coming soon,
so the end will come before we need to work out this faith of ours. Or perhaps the idea is a good one, clothe
naked and feed the hungry (Jesus likes these in Matthew 25), so ‘someone’
should do that? But the people who have
works as their spiritual gift, not simply faith.
I have seen
the T-shirt, “Sola Fide”, By Faith Alone.
Jesus has done all that we need to receive salvation and eternal life as
Children of God. There is nothing we
need do, nothing we can do, to earn a place in heaven. But does that mean we need do nothing?
If there is
a pendulum in our religion, it is pretty much all the way to one side with
James. Faith without works is dead. Can’t get much more explicit than that. So why is this even a thing today? Because of the Reformation. It was in that movement that the modern
Protestant churches emerged, Presbyterian, Reformed, Methodist, Baptist, and
Lutheran. Martin Luther was the big
cheese to get the ball rolling. Faith
alone baby! 95 theses nailed to the
church door in Wittenburg. Call it a
five hundred year old email blast.
By the time
of Martin Luther, the Church and what it represented was inextricably bound up
in the political, military, and economic lives of the nations of the
Europe. In an attempt to stop the wars
between Christians in Europe, the Church leveraged its eternal authority to tap
all that military energy and send the warriors of Europe to invade the lands of
the Bible, promising full forgiveness and eternal life in heaven for their
efforts. Reigning monarchs and lords
could be forced out or forced to back down because the Church had the power to
declare their lands and all their people excommunicated from the faith. It got to a point of economic privilege where
someone could buy forgiveness, buy indulgences, to save their eternal souls.
This was
also a time when all people worked off the presupposition that the Christian
Heaven and Hell were all there were after death.
In a time
of reemerging literacy, the realities of the Bible were being
rediscovered. From what I was taught in
Seminary, the reason Martin Luther became so convicted of the truth that our
salvation comes by faith alone is because, as a monk, he was so concerned about
the destiny of his own soul that he drove his confessor nuts. The priest confessor assigned him Bible study
to give himself some breathing space.
There Martin Luther found “faith alone”, sola fide. So when James said that faith without works
is dead, Luther had a very particular point of view as to what the ‘works’ of
the faith were. And he rebelled.
Yes, that
is the Reformation, several centuries old at this point. And it is true that the church does not hold
the absolute power it once did. Nor does
it demand or offer the kinds of works that Luther found so offensive to someone
who claimed Jesus as Lord and Savior.
But the intermixing of religious, political, and economic authority and
power did not disappear with the Reformation.
It was reformed, but power, once seized, is very hard to put down.
If we are
going to think about our faith in terms of political activities, what if we
used the expression “moral agenda”. What
I mean by that is taking the morality of our faith and how we use that as a
basis for a political agenda? Take for
example “blue laws”, laws that restrict commerce and shopping activities on
Sundays. Still exists in Bergen County,
I believe. That is a Sabbath application
of Christian morality on a political agenda.
Churches open, businesses closed.
It has a tremendous appeal. I
don’t know how many times I, as a pastor, have wished the law was that churches
were open and children’s sports activities on Sundays were closed.
But even
the political right and the evangelical conservatives that are in concert with
each other in American politics, their power is only a faint shadow of the
power the church used to hold. When the
Church was a monolithic organization, it had a monolithic moral agenda to
impose on the political will of a continent and beyond. Now, denominations are divided, as are our
moral agendas as well as our discussions of what is appropriate and
inappropriate to thrust into the public sphere.
Our own denomination has a moral agenda, part shared in a “Take Action”
notice I received this wee in regards to Defending Human Rights of Palestinian
Children. Please note, I am not
questioning the validity of such agendas, only marking their reality.
While our
moral agendas may be widely differentiated from one another, the most
politically active moral agendas gain traction in the age-old political tactic
of creating the common enemy, “those” people for us to unite against. “Those” women who dare to want control of
their bodies. “Those” people of the
weird alphabet sexuality community who are not defined according to “man and
wife”. “Those” people who are not from
this country but are sneaking in to steal our jobs. “Those” people who speak weird. “Those” people who look different.” “Those” people that some moral agenda in the
divisions of Christianity calls ‘sinful’.
Those people who are hurt by the Church and turn away in fear and
disgust from what we know to be the place of our salvation. Unfortunately, these are political tactics
added on to our moral agendas.
When taken
out to its extreme, faith alone looks pretty good, doesn’t it? The activities of the Church, or select
pieces of that church, are hurting people.
How far backed into a corner do we feel?
How do we fight against something like that? How do even begin to exercise our faith? How are we even relevant? Our dwindling numbers would seem to provide
us with an answer we do not want to that question.
This is
where theological consideration is so very important. What I mean is this is why it is SO important
to think about our faith. If a Church or
a Christian is putting forward a moral agenda in the name of Jesus Christ, we,
as Christians, should be in the best possible place to evaluate that agenda for
1. its accuracy in reflecting faith in and our understanding of Jesus Christ
and 2. How pursuit of that moral agenda does indeed provide that in doing this
work, our faith is, in fact, not dead.
What we are
looking for in thinking through and evaluating a moral agenda in light of our
faith in Jesus Christ begins here. How
does what this person or organization is claiming in the name of Christ is the
right work to do reflecting how Jesus died for my sins? How does it reflect how, in Jesus’
resurrection, I have received the gift of eternal life? Another way to look at it, how does this
moral agenda work in light of how Jesus worked out loving his neighbor as
himself? Jesus’ moral agenda was that he
loved us so much that he died for us.
There are
times I wished we lived in a world where we could separate our faith entirely
from politics. Where our moral agenda
and our political agenda as a nation did not intersect. That may be a nice abstract, but it is not
reality. While we no longer live in a
world where the power of the state is used to induce belief in Jesus, the name
of Jesus is still used extensively to justify all kinds of moral agendas. All kinds of work is claimed to effectively demonstrate
our faith in our Savior. And all too
often, for some Christians to disagree with the moral agenda of another group
of Christians, we are to be condemned as unsaved, demonic, or worse.
So what are
we to do?
If it is a
moral agenda that we are putting forward to answer the call that ‘faith without
works is dead’, James gives us some important examples to use as we think
through what it means to live into our faith by our works.
His opening
example is particularly clear. Tell
those who are naked and hungry to “go in peace and be satisfied” without
lifting a finger to help them get there?
That is all talk and no action.
That is all “faith”, and I put faith into quotation marks here, and no
work being done. So that is where our
work can begin. Making sure everyone has
enough to eat and drink, has enough to wear, has basic safety and sanitation,
that the resources of our faith are used to bring everyone to an equitable,
dignified level of existence?
Despite
what we are going to our planet, we have the resources to make that work. The will, that’s another story.
Or we use
the examples that James cites from the Old Testament. He cites Abraham, and how could we not? The Father of Judaism and Christianity and
Islam? “Was not our ancestor Abraham
justified by works when he offered his son Isaac on the altar?” I have to say that being a father, the story
of Abraham and Isaac is one of the tough ones for me. How could Abraham do that? How could God demand that? How did Isaac stay faithful to a God who
demanded that? But those are my issues,
that is where my faith continues to grow.
Abraham did
what God commanded him to. And God saw
to it that the gruesome potential of what God asked for did not happen. God provided a sacrifice in place of the
sacrifice of Isaac. Like Jesus is the
sacrifice in place of our dying for our sins.
James says, “You see that faith was active along with his works, and
faith was brought to completion by the works.”
He goes on to call Abraham a friend of God, that he is justified by
works and not faith alone.
And the
other example? A prostitute. A person of a questionable moral
character. Rahab lied to her own people
to protect the spies sent out by Joshua in anticipation of the Lord’s granting
them the Promised Land by conquest. She
became a part of the nation of Israel.
Heck, she is one of four women referenced in the gospel’s genealogy of
Jesus. Her works justified her faith. She was ‘bearing false witness’ in the words
of the Ten Commandments, but she was working out her faith in protecting God’s people.
When I say
it out loud, “faith without a moral agenda”, it sounds political in its intent,
almost pompous in my own ears. But James
is addressing a powerful truth of our faith.
What is our faith without works?
What is it to believe in Jesus as Lord and Savior without that causing
some kind of change in our lives? It is
a faith that is dead. It ties into the
piece about the human tongue that James spoke of a couple of weeks ago. We can say whatever we want to convince
people to listen to us. Politicians wave
around Bibles. Christian leaders who
have railed against sin, only to be caught in it themselves, they cry and
confess and promise never to do it again.
What our
faith will truly be is how it works out in our lives. It will be how we express the love of God in
Jesus Christ for our neighbor. In my
theological considerations, in how I think about my faith, I do not believe it
is in our best interest to press a moral agenda into the world of
politics. I do not believe there ought
to be a “Christian” voting guide. And
that is because power is involved and power is temptation and corruption and
takes us down dark, sinful roads.
For me, the
questions I have for us to consider in the works of our faith concern how we
discern the neighbors we have in need? Where
do we make a difference in this moment, even on this block, in this town? Where do we see people working out their
faith in our very midst, living the law of loving neighbor, but as something
that a good person does, something disconnected from the faith in Jesus Christ
that brings goodness back into who we are?
I think it
would be fair to think that James would, in his homespun theology, talk about
the truth of the faith in the lives of people being better witnessed in what
they do, in their work, than in what they say.
The demons believe, and they shudder.
What then do they do? They work
to undermine the love of God for humanity.
We believe, and what? Receive the
gift of a new life in Jesus Christ, where sin is forgiven and everything is
made new. How could we, if we are going
to live into that new life, do anything less than work for the world to be made
new? One neighbor at a time maybe, but
they will know our faith by the works we do.
Amen.
