Looking Good, Dying on the Inside

The New Revised Standard Version Warning against Partiality

Warning against Partiality

2 My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? 2 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, 3 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,” 4 have 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? 6 But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? 7 Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you?

8 You 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. 10 For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. 11

During the Protestant Reformation, one of the major critiques raised by reformed leaders was focused on what we call “works based righteousness.” It is what is sounds like — the church imposed a number of practices on the people that amounted to the works of faith being worth access to grace and God’s mercy. For instance, in the Catholic Church in the generations leading up to the Reformation, priests had taken up the practice of requiring indulgences to be bought by parishioners. You could pay a fee to have a sin absolved, pay for prayers to be said for a deceased loved one, fees charged to ensure your right standing in the community. For the Reformers, this practice was abhorrent in that it divorced a person’s contrition, sacrifice, and faithful growing from lived actions of faith and a deeply held belief in God’s love for them. It was a disconnected system, a system that functioned to reinforce the Church’s role in mediating grace, disconnecting people from what it meant to know God personally and devotionally.

And these systems worked, for one because of what James is outlining in the first part of this morning’s scripture. The system of works based righteousness privileges the rich, those with access. They could pay for the nicer seats in the cathedral, their power and rank affording them access to clergy and absolution for their wrong doing could be bought at a price — which the rich would willingly pay and the church accept because it solidified their position in society as well.

But what James is reminding us of is that while riches and privilege may look good on the outside and afford us access to the things we want, when they are divorced from a deeply held faith that drives us to actions of sacrifice and service, when those are divorced, we can be very dead on the inside. We can look good, but be no better off spiritually than the one who looks like a mess. In fact, throughout the scriptures we hear that it is the heart of the person that matters to God, not the outer appearance.

A well dressed faith can be dead. Dead faith is faith without action. Belief isn’t the only part of healthy, flourishing faith.

The New Revised Standard Version Faith without Works Is Dead

Faith without Works Is Dead

(Cp Gen 22; Josh 2)

14 What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? 15 If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, 16 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? 17 So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

In between faith and works there lies a tension — a point of integration between what we know and what we do. It’s that space between right belief and right action. The tension has to exist, it has to pull in both directions, to remind us of the positive bind that exists in the Christian journey. One has to have the other. Faith and works, together, bring life. Faith without works, well, it’s dead. Works without faith are shallow, actions that lack significance, a living by just going through the motions.

This integration point is grace. Faith that lives out in works discovers the grace of Christ at the tension point. Faith that lives out in action awakens in us our need for and reception of grace.

Back to the Reformers. Martin Luther took issue with James, as I mentioned before, and one of the big sticking points for him was around this verse and the role of grace.

It is easy for us to look at verses 14-17 and hear a teaching that we must be very active in our faith to show its validity and “living” nature. We work it out with fear and trembling, as we hear the Apostle Paul speak of in Philippians 2.

And so we get out there, we start serving, working the faith out, getting our hands dirty. We volunteer, we give our money, we write letters to prisoners, we go on service trips. We get to work.

The problem, though, is that through all our work, the faith and works duality begins to shift in the opposite direction. This is especially true today in what we call progressive and social justice minded churches. It is easy for communities like ours to lean heavily on the works side of the equation, becoming involved in so many works for the good of our neighborhoods and world. This is not a bad thing, certainly. But what can become a struggle is that we can begin to do these acts of righteousness as duties and tasks — if I do my monthly volunteer work for the poor, then I receive God’s grace. If I give some of my money away, then God will bless me.

You see, we’re not too far from being in the same situation that the Reformers were pushing against. Perhaps the role of the church is a bit more decentralized at this point in history, not necessarily the mediator of God’s grace in the same way, but on the whole, it is easy for us to see the connection between pious activity divorced from faithful devotion and activism and service divorced from meaning that comes from the heart of faith.

Thankfully, I believe this is one of the beautiful places the community of the Church CAN stand in and help us reintegrate faith and works. The church CAN be the sight of the tension between those two parts — Church can be the space where we experience the grace of God so that faith and works are linked.

And there’s also good news — this is what happens in the church, at least as I witness it.

Here, among the gathered people of Christ, this is the site where so many of us come to integrate our faith and works.

One more time through this, to make sure it’s clear. In the community of Jesus, we can find ourselves isolated first in the realm of faith — I believe and doubt and come to hold truths about God and myself and others and my faith grows. I believe, I hold God’s love in my heart. I contemplate upon God’s goodness daily, I have the reassurance that I am saved by God’s grace, apart from anything I do or say, but simply because God is merciful and offers grace freely to all who ask for it.

You see, that can be the faith side. And then we can find ourselves isolated in the realm of works too — in the church we can give you 10 different projects to be a part of, a committee to join where you can get to work, acting as Christ’s hands and feet. Belief doesn’t have to matter much, faith in the deeper principles behind why we do what we do doesn’t have to matter — just get to work.

But helping and serving can also harm. It can form us to simply look for the hurting and solve their problem and then move on. There can be all kinds of action, but it can also lack the heart of compassion and love that comes from a life formed around faith in Christ. We can help solve the problems of the world and yet lose our souls.

Once again, we are seeking integration. Faith and works together to find life. Otherwise, we simply look good, look pious, but we’re silently wasting away inside. We burn out because we have not nurtured the inner space of faith that sustains the work. Works without faith are also dead.

Let’s talk about what it means to witness the good news of a living faith that works itself out in the world. Gratefully, we can praise God that we don’t have to look far to find examples of sincere faith living itself out.

A few examples from our community. First, I want to highlight Nebiyu, one of our church elders. Out of sincere faith, Nebiyu has stepped up over the last year to serve and lead in our congregation. One example of this is how the last month or so, he’s been arriving to church early to help usher and make sure some of the things are set up around the sanctuary for worship. I don’t want to expose Nebiyu too much personally, but I will tell you that I know from our conversations the deep faith he holds and the why behind his participation at St. James is based on a desire to put that faith into action, caring for a church that cares for him. This is faith in action, works and faith together.

Or take our beloved Faye Hill for another example. I’m sure if you’ve spoken to Faye, you can immediately sense her deep love for Christ and a faith rooted in years of devotional growth. Pre-COVID, Faye had been leading our Sunday morning Bible study for years. Faye’s faith and devotional formation has led her, for years, to take action and lead others in studying the Scriptures and exploring their application in our lives. Faith and devotion live out in teaching and praying, serving and caring.

To witness faith and work together, we also have to recognize the ones who do this in silence. Our deacons and elders and prayer team — the living faith of these folks is put into action in the ways they pray for our congregation and the world, the ways they quietly and faithful steward the resources God has blessed us with, the seemingly mundane decisions about which contractors to hire or what is written in our bylaws and personnel manuals — these are actions inspired by faith in Christ that binds us together.

I want us to be encouraged — our faith can be lived out in action in many simple ways. And by living our faith out, we grow in it more deeply.

In closing, I want to offer a few ideas for how to live out your faith in daily life. Simple opportunities to seek after that integration.

First, a great place to start is prayer. In prayer, we focus on connecting with God and speaking to God as a beloved friend and partner. In prayer, we don’t simply roll around our thoughts and help firm up our beliefs by meditating on them until they become more clear, though that is a part of it. But prayer lives — prayer takes what we believe, what our faith says, and then puts action to it. We pray FOR God to intervene. We pray FOR healing, on behalf of the hurting. The action of prayer takes shape within us as we take our faith that God is good and speak to God of our desire that God’s goodness intervene where others need. Prayer is faith in action.

Next, faith that is alive impacts how we speak and treat our neighbor. As we recall from the first part of our reading, faithful Christian communities do not show partiality for privilege and power, but rather, faith leads us to see each other as our sibling in Christ, our beloved neighbor. And when we speak to one another, our faith is put into action by the words we say, the encouragement we offer, the grace we extend. A heart formed by faith in Christ lives it out in offering kindness, lifting up the hurting, correcting in love when we see a fault, speaking truth for the liberation of the oppressed, and even holding back our speech in compassion and patience. We’ll talk more about faith-inspired speech next week. How we speak to one another is a way our faith is lived in action.

Finally, a way our faith is put into action is through what I want to call yielding. When we yield our position and privilege, the things that by the standards of the world we might call our rights, when we let them go or yield them for the benefit of the other, this is faith put into action. It’s faith put into action because it is exactly what Jesus does in his life. He takes all privilege and power and lets it go in order that others would experience grace — letting go, the action of yielding, this takes us to the center point of tension between faith and works — grace!

What does yielding look like? I see it around our community in the way longtime members here welcome new folks. The act of hospitality is built upon yielding — the welcoming of the stranger is to let go of our privileged place in the order of things and offering the grace of presence to the outsider. Yielding also looks like giving up our wants, our possessions, our knowledge, in order to share it with others. To yield is to say, not my will but yours be done, to God and to each other.

Let me close by turning our attention to the table.

At this table, faith and works come together to meet at the point of grace.

When you come to this table, you do not need to come out of a sense of duty. Nothing you do at this table will make you any more loved or privileged in the kingdom of God. When you come to this table, you are also not punching your God card for the month — this meal isn’t about checking a box of action by getting up and taking and eating. No, we come rather out of a deeply held faith which compels our feet to come and delight in the goodness of God we find here. We delight in this meal, not because we’ve done our devotional act, but because this table is filled with the presence of our beloved Christ.

So come, experience faith in action, come experience grace.

Let go of looking good, of going through the motions. Let go of having it all figured out. Come to the table to receive the grace of Christ that integrates our faith with our actions. Come, simply to see and taste and know that the Lord is good.

Come.