Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 6, 2009

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

We just heard a reading from the Letter of James. It’s not a part of the New Testament that we spend much time with, but there’s an important thing to know about it. Martin Luther wanted to throw it out of the Bible. Yeah. He disliked it that much. He called it a “book of straw.” He thought it contains false teaching, even though it had been in Christian Bibles for over a thousand years by Luther’s time. You see, Luther’s theological insight, the one that sparked the whole Protestant revolution, was that we are not saved, or justified to use Luther’s term, through good works, through obeying religious laws and performing religious duties. We are saved, Luther said, by grace through faith. Faith is what gets us right with God, he said, not good works.

The Letter of James says quite the contrary. In the bit of it we heard this morning James takes the members of the church to task for dishonoring the poor. He calls on them to obey scripture’s command to love our neighbors as ourselves. Then has asks rhetorically: “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you?” His answer is no. Faith cannot save you. He says: “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.” James’ contention that faith without works is dead drove Luther nuts, so convinced was he that works without faith are useless and that it is faith that saves us. So he wanted to throw the Letter of James right out of the Bible.

We, or course, are Protestant Christians, and so whether we know much about Martin Luther and his dislike of James or not we tend to think that faith is what matters, faith is what we need, faith is what gets us right with God. Actually, I think that it is God Who gets us right with God and not anything we do, not even have faith. Still, our thinking is generally more in line with Luther’s than with James’. So was Luther right that we should just get rid of James? I used to think so, but today I’m not so sure. Let me explain.

As I reread James this last week, it occurred to me that he is dealing with an issue in the life of the church that is very real and very important. I was reminded of my own experience with the church in my younger days. I grew up in First Congregational Church in Eugene, Oregon. I left the church when I was in high school. Although today I realize that there was more going on with me than this, at the time I thought that the reason I left the church was because, in my youthful arrogance, I thought that the people of the church were all hypocrites. I thought: These people come to church on Sunday and say all the right things, then go out and live as though they had never heard all those right things. I of course had no real basis for that conclusion; but I was a teenager, so I knew better and didn’t have to bother with facts.

Yet as I read James this last week it struck me that what I thought about church people way back then is actually a very important issue. And it occurred to me that that is the issue James is dealing with. Christians coming to church on Sunday, hearing the Gospel, saying all the right things, then going out and living lives unaffected by the Gospel is a very real issue. It’s an issue for those of you in the pews, and it’s an issue for those of us who stand up in pulpits and preach at you. It’s something we need to take seriously.

James had had it with people who profess faith in Jesus Christ, then live as though they didn’t know him. They claimed faith in Christ but lived according to the values of the world. Their faith wasn’t reflected in their actions. If we’re honest, I think we have to admit that an awful lot of that same thing goes on today. One reason so many people in our culture today have no time for Christianity is precisely that it so frequently looks like Christians don’t live what Jesus Christ preached. We Christians are so often materially comfortable, and we are so often comfortable with the values of the world, values of materialism and security through strength and violence. Christians living the life of the world and not the life of Christ makes the faith look useless, or worse, to those outside the faith.

Christians not living the Gospel they proclaim is dangerous to us Christians too. It has inherent in it the great danger of self-righteousness, of a holier-than-thou attitude, of a smug judgmentalism toward other people. The spiritual arrogance of those attitudes makes the faith look bad and damages our own souls by driving us away from the humility that Jesus lived and taught and which all great spiritual traditions know is the way of truth.

Those dangers of not living what we preach is what the author of the Letter of James was concerned about. That’s why he was driven to ask his rhetorical question “Can faith save you?” I’m a Protestant Christian, but I am now convinced that James had a point. He had a point that we need to take seriously. Faith without works may not be useless to the person who has it. It can still bring peace, courage, and strength to the person who has it in times of difficulty and in the face of death. But faith without works certainly is useless, or worse than useless, to the world. As far as the world is concerned, faith without works is dead indeed. So we have to ask ourselves, and keep asking ourselves over and over again: Do we live what we proclaim? James had a point. If we don’t live our faith, our faith is dead indeed. Amen.