Not Dead Yet ~ James 2:14-26 (a series on James)

¹⁴ What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? ¹⁵ Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. ¹⁶ If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? ¹⁷ In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.18 But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.” Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds. ¹⁹ You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder. ²⁰ You foolish person, do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless? ²¹ Was not our father Abraham considered righteous for what he did when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? ²² You see that his faith and his actions were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did. ²³ And the scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness,” he was called God’s friend. ²⁴ You see that a person is considered righteous by what they do and not by faith alone. ²⁵ In the same way, was not even Rahab the prostitute considered righteous for what she did when she gave lodging to the spies and sent them off in a different direction? ²⁶ As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.

We are in our fourth week of our sermon series on James – the first book of the New Testament written by the half-brother of Jesus. We’ve heard about how God is a giver of wisdom and every good gift under heaven, that God cares for the poor and marginal and expects us to care for them as well. We’ve heard that we are to read the Bible with a set of dispositions like humility, patience and gentleness, imagining that, like a mirror that we look into, it seeks to name our sins rather than expose the sins of others. And we learned last week that all of this should lead us to not discriminating against others but practicing mercy. But today – today is what many consider the heart of James. And by “heart” I mean that which gives us heart burn and heart-ache – the relationship of faith to works.

          1.    Don’t be a poser (even demons know better).

A poser refers to a person who pretends to be something they are not, often to be popular or impress others, but who has no

interest or understanding of the values or philosophy of the group. It comes often out of subcultures like skate boarding where someone tries to dress or talk a certain way to seem like they skateboard but they actually don’t.

Posers, according to James,

• ·       like to express their piety aloud rather than quietly act it out (vss. 14, 16)

• ·       want to appear nice (vs. 16)

• ·       like to argue about theology but can’t admit that they are wrong (vs. 18) – this can be confusing with the translation of vs. 18-19 ¹⁸ But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.” Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds. ¹⁹ You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder. A better one, which captures the argument of James’ opponent, is to have: “My opponent says, “One has faith and one has works.” [But James responds], “Show me your faith apart from works and I will you my faith by my works.”

• ·       know the Bible and say they believe it but never shudder - admit it’s hard or challenging (vs. 19)

The challenge is that churches are “poser places.” We subtly communicate that you need to pretend in order to fit in. The biggest obstacle to not being a poser is not simply to “just do it” but sometimes acknowledging that you don’t, or don’t want to, or that you need some help. The demons believe, James tells us, and shudder. As I have been a pastor, I’ve learned that rather than an “amen” sometimes perhaps we too should shudder. Rather than confessing Biblical truths as posers perhaps we should be honest and shake our heads because faith is hard, difficult, and daunting and we often just simply don’t do it. You are as sick as the secrets you keep and being a poser may help you fit in but is soul killing, nonetheless.

In the movie Jerry Maguire, the main character is a fast-talking Sport’s agent who can seemingly talk his way out of anything until he finally has an epiphany that he is not acting on the promises that he often makes – essentially being a hypocrite. So he writes a manifesto which speaks of new business practices (acting on what’s best for the client, having fewer clients, etc.) and is summarily fired. As he tries to get his clients to go with him, however, he continues to fall back on his old ways – promising things he can’t deliver. His last hope is a client who finally calls Jerry out for his untruths, telling him that he doesn’t believe him, and makes him repeatedly

shout over the phone, “Show me the money!”

James doesn’t want nice words. He says, “show me” in vs. 18, show me the money! What’s the money?  For James the “money” is “works of love,” the royal law, vss. 1:25, 27; 2:8. Belief that practices Leviticus 19:18, “love of neighbor.”  In contrast to his opponent, who without works simply cannot prove his faith, James will show his faith by love. Faith for James cannot be reduced to creedal orthodoxy (that’s why the Covenant says we are non-creedal – not because creeds don’t matter, it’s because, James says, they don’t necessarily create love); faith for James produces love towards the poor and marginalized, or it is not saving faith.

          2.    Faith takes work.

It’s not uncommon for people to sometimes to pit faith and works against one another or to imagine that there is a battle between them often leaving either belief or works bruised and bloodied. But James isn’t suggesting that the two are at odds but “work together” [synergei] (vs. 22) demonstrating and supporting one another. John Calvin said, “Faith alone justifies, but the faith which justifies is not alone.” For James, expressions of love and faith are intrinsic to one another. No one confuses a wedding for a marriage – vows are hardly the whole story. They are important, and we might wonder why someone who was truly committed wouldn’t want to make them but marriage is evidenced by how two work and live together. Likewise, a journey of faith demands the daily decisions of a life time. That means that faith is hard because it involves belief that must be acted on. Faith takes risks and can even fail but that’s a good thing – to fail, you see, means that you’re trying. Notice that James for all his hard-hitting style doesn’t use the word “perfect” but the word “complete” or “whole” in vs. 22. It’s what faith is meant to do.

So on the one hand faith involves an ethical orientation to help others, particularly the the poor (e.g. the brother spoken of is not “without clothes” but actually “naked” the text says). But more than simply ethics, faith without works is compared to a body without breath, vs. 26. Without works faith is no faith at all any more than a corpse is a person. So faith both does AND is.

Faith without works, in other words, doesn’t work, James says. Translators say “useless” in vs. 20 but they’re robbing you of James’ clever word play. The word literally is “non-working” –arge combines [a] “non” and [erga] “working” to be both a play on words.

There’s an important truth here for those who find themselves in that place – where faith doesn’t seem to be working, perhaps even terminal or dead. But faith can be resuscitated. Often the temptation is to try and shore up our beliefs but James offer a different remedy – service of others. According to James, the best response to doubt or faithlessness is often not some extended philosophical discussion, not more faith per se, but for the doubter to reach out to others in their need, and doing so consciously in the name of Christ. In our woundedness, our doubt can be healed best when we tend to other’s wounds.
The famous Catholic writer, Flannery O’Connor once corresponded with a college student who expressed his struggle with doubt. She told the student how the agnostic Robert Bridges, struggling with deep doubts about God, wrote to his friend Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet/Jesuit priest. Manley responded with a two-word reply, “Give alms.” Manley was saying that God and faith are to be experienced in love (in the sense of love for the divine image in human beings). Flannery writes, “Don’t get so entangled with intellectual difficulties that you fail to look for God in this way.”

          3.    What you do determines what you believe.

James ends our passage with a quick impromptu Bible study. What motivates James’ vision of faith is what he learned from Jesus – that loving is more revealing of belief than orthodoxy – what one scholar calls the Jesus Creed. Jesus’ spirituality was summarized by two commands – Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and strength (Deut. 6, called the Shema) and Leviticus 19:18, the “royal law,” “works of love,” “love your neighbor as yourself. These two, Jesus said, summarize the whole of the law. And funny enough – they summarize James’ two Biblical examples.

The story of Abraham who demonstrates a willingness to sacrifice his very future for love of God (which itself was an act of trust). Abraham loved God with his whole heart.

The story of Rahab who welcomes strangers, spies, enemies

caring for their safety. She loved them as herself.

Both, James argues, are people of faith

who demonstrate such faith through their behavior. But in the Jesus Creed and James’ example, faith is more than what you do. It’s what you do for others: God and neighbor. And those kinds of acts change you, change your perspective. Faith is not a moral calculation that necessarily helps you or makes you look good, or proper, or nice. Rahab was hardly a moral icon, but demonstrated a faith that is available to all. I

resonate with that.

In the Monty Python movie, The Holy Grail, (I know I’m on a movie kick this Sunday). A man pushing a cart is moving through a medieval village yelling, “Bring out your dead!” Apart from the humor, however, this was a common experience during the time of the bubonic plague in order to let people know that they could dispose of dead bodies to be burned. Anyone who had a friend or relative that had recently died would literally “bring out their dead” and throw the person on top of the pile. In the movie, a man carries a lifeless old man and is about to throw him on the cart when the man looks up and says, “I’m not dead yet.” And then a hilarious conversation ensues in which the elderly man says things like, “I want to go for a walk.”, and “I feel happy.” Maybe you’re here and you are tempted to throw your faith on a cart for the dead.

Don’t do it. Let your faith go for a walk. Let it exercise its limbs, let it run like a child on a playground. Let your faith do as it was meant to – love God and help others. Faith will be faith, James says, it should run around, get into trouble, act out as a body fully alive. That’s what faith is meant to do.

Church fails, Mercy Triumphs! ~ James 2:1-13 (series on James)

2 My brothers and sisters, believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ must not show favoritism. ² Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in filthy old clothes also comes in. ³ If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, “Here’s a good seat for you,” but say to the poor man, “You stand there” or “Sit on the floor by my feet,” ⁴ have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? ⁵ Listen, my dear brothers and sisters: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him? ⁶ But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who are exploiting you? Are they not the ones who are dragging you into court? ⁷ Are they not the ones who are blaspheming the noble name of him to whom you belong? ⁸ If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing right. ⁹ But if you show favoritism, you sin and are convicted by the law as lawbreakers. ¹⁰ For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. ¹¹ For he who said, “You shall not commit adultery,” also said, “You shall not murder.” If you do not commit adultery but do commit murder, you have become a lawbreaker. ¹² Speak and act as those who are going to be judged by the law that gives freedom, ¹³ because judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment.

This week, James will continue his discussion of the church, sin and Bible reading that we began last week – James 1:18-27.

          1.    Jesus, we have a problem. Actually, we have two.

Problem one: The church community, the people of God, “brothers and sisters,” “believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ”, are playing favorites, acting as law breakers, dishonoring the poor, discriminating amongst themselves, and are about to be judged. Problem two: They don’t appear to recognize it (notice the questions from vss. 6-7, which aim to provide recognition of that fact). They are not “listening,” not slowing down to bother acknowledging and change their behavior. James is continuing with the metaphor of looking into the mirror so that one is not self-deceived (James 1:23-25). Unfortunately, however, discrimination and self-deception were two of the original sins of the church (Acts 6:1) easy to forget and they have plagued us ever since.

This past week I had an enlightening experience. I have a Prius Prime plug-in hybrid. It has a charging port where the 

electric plug-in goes and you simply have to push it for it to close and push it again to have it open. One night I came out to plug it in and pushed the charging port door only to have it open half way not fully. No matter how many times I pushed it, it simply wouldn’t open and I became frustrated and began to curse all that was Toyota and technological. As I my frustration began to rise I found myself reaching in with my fingers, tempted to wrench the door open with my bare hands. Thankfully, I caught myself and finally had the presence of mind to look up the problem in the manual. So I grabbed the book, read it, and discovered that it wasn’t

opening because I didn’t have the keys on me. “I” was the problem and didn’t know it just like last week we heard the Bible story of David cursing the man who harmed a poor shepherd only to hear the prophet Nathan say, “You are the man!” (2^nd Samuel 12:1-7) You see I hadn’t read the book and therefore understood the problem to be something else. All my curses were misplaced and outrageous.

The problem of our world, according to the Bible, is not secularism (which didn’t exists but does now), or even paganism (which existed in greater fashion then but now not so much) but a self-deceiving church (1:22) - a church that fails to recognize that it has a problem – in this case, failing to love our neighbors as ourselves. It’s an odd Biblical reality that the real problem is not the wickedness of those outside the church but the wickedness of the church itself, a church which fails the gospel and its Lord by showing favoritism. We need to rely upon the Word, implanted in us by the Holy Spirit, to show us our sinfulness. In our passage this week, James extends the lesson of the mirror and says, “You think I’m talking about others. I’m talking about you. Look into the mirror again, and again, and again!” And it’s not so much a church of sinners that harms the gospel. It’s a church that forgets they are sinners, that forgets they need to repent. Are we as a church willing to interrogate ourselves as James does his – not defending bad behavior but honestly and authentically repenting of our sins?

It’s why we practice confession in our worship. This should mean that our posture is not to defend ourselves, run away from criticisms of Christianity and the church. No, we must be the first to acknowledge that we are sinners. We must bear witness, often over and over again, of our failure, our repentance and God’s mercy.

          2.    We have a “royal” problem.

James follows Jesus who summed up the law with Leviticus 19:18 and the orientation toward love of neighbor. The law at its heart, Jesus revealed is not a moral treatise but relational one that aims to be life affirming and love focused. Likewise James accuses the church of failing the “royal law found in Scripture” (James 2:8). They have failed the law because of favoritism which is a failure to understand and live into God’s love without distinction. Sin is an act against relational love and mercy, particularly against the weak. It favors one and demeans another.

Sin, according to James in vs. 4, is “discrimination,” or “special attention” (vs. 3) which divides people arguing that some are better than others. Friends, this is also a place of sin for the

church. We have not always done well in honoring all whom God loves. We have not always been on the right side when powers and principalities have slandered and harmed the marginal and the poor. We have courted the wrong people.

In this country, there is a growing resurgence of such discrimination from the highest office of the land – women of

color, minorities and refugees are being spoken of hatefully and treated poorly. There is a favoritism that is being reasserted – “Here you sit here because you are worthy. You are best so you can stay. But you are poor or foreign so sit at my feet or go back to where you come from.” I’m not making a partisan political statement. We must bear witness as the church to the “royal law” of Jesus. That is what all of us are called to. It's our primary loyalty. That is what should critique your politics. That is what should inform you, brothers and sisters, on how to treat people of color or those from another country.

Are you a Republican? – follow Jesus and live out the royal law. 

Are you a Democrat? – follow Jesus and live out the royal law. 

And if you imagine that being either one of those identities takes first priority or automatically means you are following Jesus or that Jesus is a member of your party, you are mistaken. You are actually imagining that God favors one over the other. If your Christian beliefs never challenge your politics beliefs, you are in danger of being a law breaker no matter how moral you claim to be. You can’t say, “I don’t murder or commit adultery” but will not care for immigrants or listen to the pain of people of color. To break the royal law, James tells us, is to break all of the law (vs. 10). 

How do we keep ourselves from playing favorites? How do we locate whether the poor are marginal are among us? We ask ourselves questions (vss. 6-7).   

Who is being harmed or exploited? (vs. 6)

Who doesn’t have legal power? (vs. 6) 

Who are the victims of those misusing the name of Jesus for purposes which harm? (vs. 7) 

Are those victims with us?  

We must know who they are so that we can practice Proverbs 31:8-9: Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. ⁹ Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy. And if you discover that those who are being harmed are not in the church, not a part of the fellowship, that’s a dangerous sign of favoritism.

So, what unites us? We must bear witness that it is to believe in the glorious Lord Jesus Christ (vs. 1), those who love him (vs. 5), and who commit to loving our neighbors as ourselves (vs. 8). That is non-negotiable center which should reveal a diversity within the community. We should be a group that is economically, ethnically, and politically, diverse yet united under one “noble name” (vs. 7). To understand this unity in diversity, I often ask believers to consider the definition of a mammal. These are animals that are warm blooded, give birth to live young, have hair, and a backbone or spinal column. While the definition is certainly exclusive, knocking out a whole range of creatures, it, nevertheless, maintains an amazing inclusivity that would describe a tiger and a dolphin. That’s the beauty of God’s kingdom – A delightfully diverse family centered on Jesus Christ.

          3.    You will be judged by love so practice it. (12-13)

The failure of the church is to imagine that how we conduct ourselves has no bearing on the final victory. If mercy is our end, then mercy is how we get there. When I am talking to married couples I remind them that they will fight; sometimes over important reasons. The key, however, is to fight well and to do that you need to fight with the end in mind. What are you after? What

do you wish to accomplish? If it’s love and fidelity then calling your spouse an idiotic moron is probably not going to get you where you want to go. The word “triumph” in vs. 13, comes from the gladiatorial arena. You cannot end with mercy, James tells us, if you’re wielding hate and anger. You cannot end with mercy if you say the rich are better or that your morals are the yardstick for God’s love.

Do you want to win? Love others as yourself. Do you want to escape judgment? Love others as yourself. Why? Because Mercy triumphs. Let that inform you. Let that be what you chant in the arena of your faith. Let the church repent of its favoritism, remember our failures, recommit to follow the royal law, and remember our winning is depicted by what we do now. Remembering mercy is why we do this, it’s because we so easily forget.

This week was the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, but I find Apollo 13 more interesting. In 1970, the Apollo 13 rocket aimed to take another crew of astronauts to the moon.  After leaving the earth’s orbit, however, the rocket experienced a catastrophic failure leaving them with little chance for survival. With minimal tools and the help of ground control thousands of miles away, they had to work together to find a way to get back home safely, which they did. In 1995 Ron Howard made a movie about the event. What's so amazing about the movie is that even though you know that the astronauts make it - you can't help but get drawn into the real drama and tension that they might not make it back.

A number of years ago I met someone whose father was one of the members of ground control fighting to bring the astronauts home. He told me that he took his father to see the movie and during the

scene when the astronauts are coming back into the atmosphere and incapable of communicating, his father began to cry and whisper, “O no! We killed them. My God, we killed them.” The story was so realistic that his dad was transported back to that moment of failure, which lingered on into the present. Friends, that's how we should read the Bible. Even though James' church existed thousands of years ago, we are meant to relive the challenge and criticism that we have failed - failed to love others, failed to practice loving our neighbors as ourselves.

Even though Jesus walked the earth thousands of years ago we are to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, to do this Jesus tells us “in remembrance of him,” to confess our sin and announce, “mercy triumphs!”