FaithWorks

Sunday, September 10th, 2006
Proper 18 B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
James 2:1-17

We’re going to spend the next month or so away from John’s gospel. Since we just completed a five week series on the sixth chapter of John, I thought it might be good to delve into some other scripture passages. So for the month of September we’ll be looking at the epistle of James.

A little background on James: tradition holds that the letter was written by James the brother of Jesus, who after his ascension over the next few years became the leader of the Christian church in Jerusalem. During the nearly three decades after Jesus’ ascension, the church in Jerusalem underwent alternating periods of benevolent disregard and outright persecution, whether at the hands of the Romans or Jews, and eventually a severe persecution by Herod resulted in James’ being martyred in the year 62, just a few years prior to the Roman’s total destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70.

Many scholars believe that what we have in the general epistle of James is actually a combination of two things – at its heart, it is a sermon preached by James to his congregation in the midst of one of those times of persecution. It is also the result of a later Christian, who most likely knew and served with James, sitting down and expanding on the ideas and themes presented in the sermon. The resulting epistle is generally dated from between 80 and 90 as a point of information. It is ultimately a letter of encouragement and exhortation for Christ’s followers to remain true to their faith IN Christ.

Martin Luther didn’t have much use for it – he called it ‘the straw epistle’ – most likely because of its seeming contradiction of Paul’s view of Salvation only coming through FAITH that we find most clearly spelled out in Romans – and that was Martin Luther’s point of departure which sparked the reformation.

James, like Paul, doesn’t mince words. So let’s read together from the second chapter, the first seventeen verses:

1My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? 2For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, 3and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one who is poor you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” 4have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts? 5 Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? 6But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? 7Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you? 8You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 9 But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the
law as transgressors. 10For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. 11For the one who said, “You shall not commit adultery,” also said, “You shall not murder.” Now if you do not commit adultery but if you murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. 12 So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty. 13 For judgment will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment. 14 What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? 15If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, 16and 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? 17So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

And there you have it.

“So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”

Keep in mind, we, just like all those who have preceded us in the faith, need to hold that verse in a dynamic tension with the last several verses of Romans chapter 4 and the first two verses of chapter 5, where Paul says, concluding the argument he is presenting,

“Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.”

What does it mean to hold two things in dynamic tension? It means that though on some level they seem to contradict each other, there is a necessity to continue to KEEP them together – kind of like a vinegar and oil salad dressing – they won’t always stay together, but shaking them up and mixing them together brings out the best flavor in the salad – that’s sort of what we are going for when we speak of salvation through faith versus salvation through works – of course we can all agree that the seed of salvation is found in faith, and that no, salvation does not come through works alone, but there is an undeniable connection, an association between what it means to have faith – to accept Christ as Lord of your life and follow him in his example of living, and giving, and loving, and calling, and offering the world what it so desperately needs, and what that means when we translate it into ACTION.

Though we have contemplative strains within varying Christian traditions, we are not called to examine our bellybuttons, as it were. In other words, our faith does not dictate that we gather and discuss doctrine and theology, what the best form of worship is, or what color our carpet should be, our faith DOES dictate that we are to SHARE the love of Christ by SHOWING it, by doing, by performing acts of kindness and charity in the name of Christ and for HIS sake in order to draw people TO him.

But here’s the rub. Remember the chapter from First Corinthians that I read a paraphrase of a couple of weeks ago? About doing all these amazing, honorable, noble, generous, benevolent, effective things even in the name of Christ … what was the catch? If I don’t have … LOVE, it’s all dross, it’s worth zilch, zero, nada, nothing.

Can we put those together? Can we do the dynamic tension thing and keep in our heads the idea that it’s not what we DO that saves us, but what we DO DOES SHOW whether we have THAT WHICH SAVES … IN us …?

What we’re approaching is a place where we begin to understand that what we do is born out of what we believe. What we do with our hands and feet reflects where we’ve placed our hearts and our heads. And what we live – the state of grace in which we carry out our witness—begins to show whose we are, and where we come from and where we are going.

What most distinguished the early Christian Church – the early JEWISH Christian Church – of which James was the leader – from the standard Jewish synagogue of the day was the absence of distinctions. It bears noting that in the passage, in verse two, chapter two, the word that we read as ‘assembly’ is the same word that elsewhere is translated ‘synagogue’.

Last Sunday we visited Harrisonburg Baptist Church, where Leslie attended while she was in college at James Madison University. We didn’t take dress clothes with us, since we didn’t know where we would end up when we set out on Friday, but it wasn’t really an issue. We looked up the church on the internet from the hotel, and found out that they have an early service on Sundays – they call it a ‘Caffeinated Service’, and the dress code is ‘come as you are.’ There was an iron and ironing board in the hotel room, so even though we were wearing casual clothing, it wasn’t wrinkled. J

When we walked into the foyer of the church there were several people standing around chatting, and I noticed one man in particular stood out. At first I wondered if he had wandered in off the street, but that thought went away pretty quickly by watching the way he interacted with the people who more seemingly ‘belonged’ there.

You see, from the looks of him, the man was homeless. He was wearing several layers of clothing, and a pair of ragged sneakers, and the suit that made up his outermost layer of clothes was pretty ragged. And he smelled – REALLY strongly. There were a couple of bags off to one side there in the foyer that probably contained all his worldly possessions, but in watching how he carried himself, and how the other people related to him, it became pretty clear that he wasn’t an intruder, and he wasn’t out of place, but what was most amazing was that he wasn’t unwelcome. He was a part of that family of faith.

What James was pointedly saying to the folks at the church in Jerusalem was “if you make distinctions based on the way someone looks, or dresses, you might as well go back to being what you were before you professed faith in Christ, because if your faith hasn’t changed the way you treat others, then it’s really not worth calling faith, is it?” that opening phrase could actually be translated as a question rather than a statement: “You are not having faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ when you show partiality, are you?”

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

How open are our doors to those who would seek the Lord?

How open are our hearts to welcoming the stranger?

How open are our minds to understanding that God really is no respecter of persons? That it really DOESN’T matter to God what we wear, or how we smell, or what we sound like, or where we sit, as long as we are thirsting after God’s own Word, that Word of life Jesus spoke of in the Gospel of John?

Let’s pray.