Sitting in Someone Else’s Pew
James 2:1-10, 14-17
Rev. Randy Quinn

This month we are reading from the Epistle of James. James is a lot like a “how to” book for those who are looking for specific guidelines for living out our faith. And since we’ll be reading several short passages from James over the course of the next few weeks, I encourage you to read the entire book in order to get a better grasp of the ideas it sets before us. If you haven’t done that yet, it’s not too late!

Today’s text comes from the second chapter.

My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? For 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, and 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," have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts? 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? But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you? You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it.

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? 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.

Jas. 2:1-10, 14-17

While his letter doesn’t easily lend itself to an outline, I am making an attempt to provide one for my sermons. You can see the basic outline for today printed in the bulletin.

1. Defining Faith.
   1. It is a verb
2. Defining Works.
   1. Actions that can be seen
3. Defining Christianity
   1. Faith in action

Listen again to the last line we read from James: “So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (Jas. 2:17). In other words, faith without works is dead. That might be a good summary of the entire letter.

But if faith without works is dead, then what makes faith, faith?

I don’t want to go so deep into the woods with this that we get lost, but I think we need to explore what we mean when we speak of faith, because we tend to think of faith as a noun, when in reality it is a verb.

Many of us, if not most of us, use the words faith and belief interchangeably. We might say we have faith in Jesus or we might say we believe in God, as if we are saying the same thing. We might even say the core of our faith is captured in a particular verse such as John 3:16:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

Or we may turn to Paul’s summary in Romans 10:9 as the essence of faith:

“If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

The problem is that verses like these imply that faith is something you can have – as if the “what” of our belief provides the essence of our faith. It’s hard not to because that tendency is rooted in the bias of our language.

How many of you have studied or tried to learn a foreign language?

I remember in my first exposure to other languages, my teacher insisted that it wasn’t just about learning to translate from one language to another but to learn the culture of the language. That didn’t make complete sense to me, especially since most of what we seemed to focus on was learning what something meant in English or how to convey an English thought into that foreign language.

It was in seminary that I got a glimpse of what my teacher meant. I learned that unlike the English cultural bias toward nouns, the Hebrew language is based on verbs. A part of the heritage of the early Christians was an understanding that what Jesus did and how he acted was as important as what he said. Even when the most philosophical of the gospel writers, John, spoke of the “word of God,” he knew that the word is not static, but moving (Jn. 1:3). It was the living word of God that spoke the world into existence. It wasn’t a blueprint or a set of instructions from which the world was created, but a word that acted and created.

Those of us who speak English, however, want to define things in more concrete ways. We want to “see” what we’re talking about. We want to be “touched” by and “feel” the presence of God’s Holy Spirit.

Even when we learn another language, or teach someone ours, we begin with nouns. We play with a baby, for example. We roll them a ball. But we say “ball” as we do so, not “roll.” It isn’t wrong to do that. But we do it so easily that we often miss the cultural bias we have towards the “noun” in our native language.

So when we explore the language of faith, we carry that bias with us and continue to look for nouns. We want our religion, our faith, our church to provide us with information. We want something we can write down and memorize. We want something to put in a file. And so we make faith and belief something we can see or touch or hear or a concept we can grasp.

Look, for instance, at the word “belief.” The “Olde English” roots of the word come from the concept of being loved as in “beloved” a word that conveys an action rather than a thing. But today we’re more interested in the content of someone’s belief. We want to know what or who someone believes in, more than we care about how they are loved or how being loved has shaped their life.

In the Greek language of the New Testament, there were two forms of faith. One is a noun, the other is a verb. When translated into English, however, we have tended to make nouns out of both usages.

It’s neither right nor wrong. It’s simply the limitation of our language.

But it reminds us why the book of James is so important to the church today – because we have a cultural bias toward making faith a noun rather than a verb.

We tend to think of “works” as the counterpoint to faith; in its most positive light, works are spoken about as if they are the verbal form of faith. But our bias becomes evident when we quickly respond that we can’t earn ourselves into heaven with our good works.

Works are the actions that can be seen; and they leave behind a mark. Like the wind that blows limbs off of trees, or the new paint on a house, we don’t have to see the action to know what took place.

The works of faith include regular participation in worship. We also recognize the works of faith when we reach out to a grieving family or provide hospitality to a visitor by offering them our pew.

John Wesley, the man who began the movement that became the United Methodist Church, encouraged us to participate in works of faith in multiple dimensions.

He said it was important to express our faith in relationship to God as well as to our neighbor. He referred to them as “acts of piety” and “acts of mercy” respectively. He also suggested that each be done both publicly and privately and that we hold ourselves accountable for them in the context of a small group – what he called “class meetings.”

The works of faith, according to Wesley’s ideal, include public worship and private devotions, as well as private acts of giving and public advocacy. One contemporary scholar has renamed them as Worship and Devotion, Compassion and Justice. Now I know that some of us tend to focus on one type of work, or maybe even rely solely on that particular expression of our faith. But the well-rounded Wesleyan recognizes and finds balance by participating in all four arenas of good works.
 

Along with attending worship, for example, numerous people read the Upper Room as part of a personal or family devotional time, keeping the balance between the personal and public forms of the acts of piety of Worship and Devotion.

Some people give generously to the church and to other organizations as an expression of their faith. These private acts of mercy, or Compassion, can be balanced by participating in civic clubs that are working to make a difference in our community, where we work towards Justice. It may take the form of advocating changes in public policies or spending time with students who need a tutor or a role model.

Our problem comes when we encounter and begin to judge others who are doing the same acts, but for entirely different reasons. They may be participating in acts of mercy, but it isn’t an expression of their faith. Or we may begin to think that doing these acts of piety wins us favor with God.

Works may be actions that can be seen, but works without faith is just as dead as faith without works.

Living as a Christian, according to James, is captured when we can see our faith in action. It is when we walk the talk. It is when the words we profess with our mouths can be heard most clearly when we don’t speak because our actions are speaking louder than our words.

In a rather pointed example, James reminds us that we ought not to say we care until we act like we care (Jas. 2:16). I came across a short video clip that might highlight what James means.

 

In this video clip, two women meet at a restaurant to pray. When provided a chance to help a man in need by giving away their leftovers, they offer to pray instead. Then we learn the rest of the story. The man and his young daughter lost everything trying to treat his wife’s cancer. She died; the man and his daughter now live in their car and he was looking for a meal for the daughter.

That may be stating it a little too strongly, but it makes the point that our faith must be accompanied by action. Christianity is faith in action. It begins with an understanding that faith is a verb. It also includes the realization that our faith leads to works that can be seen – in the form of acts of piety as well as in acts of mercy.

Together, faith and works reveal our Christianity in action.

My hope and my prayer is that others will see that in each of us, individually, and all of us as a congregation.

This day and every day. Amen.