Faith without Works: Caring for Others with Your Actions

Every summer, the Worship Team meets to pray and talk about our worship themes for the year ahead. This summer, folks were feeling election anxiety, front and center, and wondering if there was a healthy way to talk about it together. They made it clear that they don’t mean WHO to vote for. We hear that plenty enough these days, between yard signs and TV commercials, and robocalls, and robotexts.

Sometimes, you see churches doing this by putting out what are sometimes called “voter’s guides.” These are supposed to be issue-specific, not candidate-specific. When tax-exempt churches start to cross the line into supporting specific candidates, it raises serious church–state issues. But, a lot of times, these voter’s guides still feel pretty partisan: not telling you specifically to vote for a certain person, but telling you what issue to base your vote on and what certain people’s voting records look like on that issue.

Let me suggest that this is a pretty decent voter’s guide, by itself—that is, what the Worship Team suggested. Instead of talking about who to vote for, they wondered if we could talk about HOW to vote. Specifically, how we as Christians might engage in the election cycle in a Christian way. And I would suggest that is what the book of James does, in spades. In James, we learn about the difference between Godly wisdom and worldly wisdom. It teaches us about how to engage in dialogue with each other. James teaches about the place of prayer in our civic practice. About who is a priority as we engage.

By the way, if you didn’t hear Nathan Huguley’s introduction to the series last week, you need to go back and find it. Nathan did a brilliant job last week as he preached to an audience of one—himself—and allowed the rest of us to listen in. He introduced James as a kind of New Testament wisdom literature. What Proverbs or Ecclesiastes are to the Old Testament, James is to the New Testament. Practical. Pragmatic. Nuggets of wisdom that teach us how to live. Nathan reminded us that James was likely influenced by the tradition of the exchange between Jesus and teachers of the law who asked, “which commandment was the most important?” Of course, Jesus famously said that there are two, which are really one and the same: Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. All of the law and the prophets are really summed up in these two, said Jesus. The book of James, then, is a sermon based on these two mighty principles. A practical guide to how we might live out these principles in life.

Easier said than done, right? Scholars have argued about when James was actually written, with a lot of them suggesting that it was pretty early in the game. Before the Gospels. Possibly even before a lot of Paul’s letters. The audience seems to be a group of Jewish Christians—or maybe a general letter written to all Jewish Christians—especially those living outside of traditional Jewish territory. So they were outsiders, wondering how to live out these twin principles of God-love and neighbor-love.

In the second part of the passage that I read this morning, he tackles the God-love question. How are we supposed to love God? To practice faith? James starts with what not to do, and is pretty blunt: “Faith without works is dead.” Well, then. I need to take a minute and address the faith and works thing, because a lot has been made about the apparent theological differences between James and Paul on this. Paul, after all, told us that faith is sufficient alone. You don’t need the law anymore. You don’t need works anymore. In short, “the law is dead, next to faith.” So, generations later, the Reformers imagined this huge ideological battle between James and Paul, that they were mortal theological enemies on different sides of a great divide. Martin Luther famously called the book of James “an epistle of straw” and suggested that it should be left out of the Bible all together!

Now, we don’t really have any historic proof that Paul and James were literally arguing with each other. In fact, a lot of theologians now suggest that there isn’t that big a difference between the two. They suggest a kind of balancing act between two unhealthy extremes. On one side is an unhealthy “salvation by works,” sometimes called Pelagianism, which suggests that we can earn our own salvation by impressing God with our actions or our works. Our actions force God’s hand. Paul was pretty worried about that extreme, and so he wrote that the law is fleshly and we have to die to the law and live by faith alone. Salvation by works is bad! Meanwhile, on the other extreme is what some might call “faith without works.” The Gospel of Matthew is pretty worried about that one. He writes a lot about the ethics of our faith. The action of our faith. In fact, he quotes Jesus when he said that he came not to abolish the ethical teachings of the Torah, but to fulfill it. James would agree, that the ethical standards that the Torah taught us are still valid. The way that you love God, worship God, have faith in God, is through your actions.

So, how do we live out this balance in our faith during this election cycle? Start here. Faith WITH works. Faith through action. That’s the balancing act. James wouldn’t have much time for slacktivism. For social media posts without service. For yard signs and campaign buttons that aren’t backed up with literally caring for those in need. He writes that it would be the same as telling someone who is without food and clothing, “Go in peace. Keep warm and eat your fill.”

Which we do…all the time. Some of us tend to do it by meeting immediate needs, but ignoring the larger systems that caused the poverty in the first place, refusing to stand against those systems and do our part to reverse them. “Thoughts and prayers. Here’s some potatoes. Peace out.” And others of us work to participate in that systemic work, but then don’t show up to care for immediate needs. We cannot remember the last time we looked in the eye someone who is struggling with poverty. “Oh, I don’t need to do that…just look at who I vote for. Peace out.” And James says that’s not faith. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. All your actions. Faith without actions is dead.

That’s one side of the coin. Jesus also reminded us that the other was to love our neighbor as ourselves. James called this the royal law, the perfect law of liberty. The first part of the passage that I read this morning references this law. Again, this is a continuation of the passage that Nathan preached on last week, where James reminded us that our priority must be the widows and orphans of our world, the most vulnerable, least privileged. James here contextualizes this by pointing out one of the ways in which his church drops the ball. Specifically, he points to the fact that we say we want to live according to royal law, in which every neighbor is valued. Every person is loved. No one gets loved as a neighbor MORE than someone else. But then, when a poor person walks in the door, we tell them to sit in the back, but if a rich person walks in, we give them preferential treatment! That’s not neighbor love. That’s money love. That’s wealth love. That is earthly wisdom, not godly wisdom.

Again, how does that look in our election cycle? Start here. I don’t know who you are going to vote for for president this November. But I guarantee you that James would have considered them among the “rich who are exploiting you.” Red, blue, independent—every presidential candidate is a millionaire or a billionaire. And James doesn’t mess around…he insists that that wealth does not mean that we should listen to them. That we should give them preferential treatment. In fact, according to the royal law, in which the poor are preferred, they have more to answer for than the rest of us. Why are they so rich, while others are so poor? Who should we pay attention to, James asks? The widows. The orphans. The poor. That’s who is on the ballot. That’s who we should put up on a stage and pay attention to for 2 hours. There’s your voter’s guide.

But James doesn’t just browbeat us and leave us with a guilt-hangover. He doesn’t just tell us what not to do, but also what TO do. His point is that God-love and neighbor-love are good and holy and life-giving parts of the Christian walk. Faith WITH works is a wise way to live. Neighbor-love and not wealth-love is a wise way to live. When we love God with our whole selves and our neighbor as ourselves, we receive as much as we give. We are saved alongside of those whom we serve. In fact, the polarized conceptions of server and recipient of service kind of get blown up.

The Nicaragua Mission Team talked about this point yesterday. We are already meeting together, and preparing for our trip in June. And one of the ways we are preparing is to read a book titled Healing without Hurting, by Steve Corbett, Brian Fikkert, and Katie Casselberry. The authors work to help us understand that caring for those in poverty takes a shift in mindset:

When we recognize that poverty is relational, and that we are all poor, we can enter a community with humility. We can guard against harming the materially poor with our god-complexes and arrogance, instead focusing our thoughts, actions, words, and attitudes on affirming the greatness of God, the dignity of the materially poor, and our mutual need for Christ. Rather than seeing ourselves as bringing hope to New Orleans or taking back Africa for Jesus, we can rejoice that Christ is already at work in these areas. Rather than seeing ourselves as saving ‘the least of these,’ we can celebrate together the ways the reconciling work of Christ is bringing healing to the poverty in all of us.

In other words, we have to let go of this assumption that we have all the resources, and because we are so awesome, we decided to share some of those resources with people who don’t have as much. That’s what they mean by a god-complex; we think that we are morally superior and Jesus wants us to help those who are somehow inferior. James would say that that is wealth-love, giving preferential treatment to those who have material resources. The shift comes when we move from a server/recipient mindset to a shared recipient mindset. All of us struggle with some kind of poverty. All of us require God’s grace. All of us are here to open our eyes to God’s work in our lives. All of us are here to receive as much as we give. In our actions, in our works, all of us find the door to our own redemption.

How is this for a voter’s guide, brought to you by the book of James:

1.    Step one: blow up your assumptions about who is rich and who is poor, and what that means about folks’ inherent value

2.    Step two: with those assumptions gone, start hanging out with those who are materially poor, asking what they can teach you about your own poverty

3.    Step three: practice faith WITH works…advocate and vote and participate in the reversal of broken structures in this world in ways that reflect this learning…

…and step four: alongside others who are experiencing poverty, receive God’s grace in new and profound ways.

It is no accident that James finishes the chapter talking about Abraham. Abraham chose a life of faith WITH works. He heard God’s calling to “go to a land that I will show you.” At that point, he could have had great faith but no action: “God, you are so awesome that I am just going to sit tight and wait on you to do all of the work!” But that isn’t what happened, was it? Abraham went. He acted. He practiced his faith. And he was blessed in the going. God showed him a land of promise. And a family of promise. Because he acted, he received.

I think that God is inviting us as a church to receive God’s grace in new and profound ways. It takes some work. It takes us throwing out some of our worldly assumptions about who matters and who doesn’t. But in the place of those god-complexes and arrogant assumptions, there is a land of holy wisdom that awaits. Friends, let’s pack our bags. It’s time to go.