Faith and Works
James 2:1-10; 14-17
Today marks the 23rd anniversary of a tragedy that remains a sobering reference point for millennials like me. I was in 8th grade when the World Trade Center towers fell. And every time this anniversary comes around, I hear of new stories about 9/11: “I was at work,” “I was at school,” “I was hiking,” “I remember how strange it was for the sky to be completely devoid of air traffic.”
Every time this anniversary comes around I am a year older and, hopefully, wiser, with the capacity to expand my perspective on what happened and to evaluate the important things that happened on that day.
One of the most important things that happened on 9/11 is also a theme that finds itself in the passage we are going to hear in worship this week at Lakewood United Methodist Church. “If you show partiality, you commit sin.” (James 2:9 NRSVUE)
The most powerful story of 9/11 was the astonishing strength of character on display by first responders; people who, by virtue of their jobs, cannot show partiality. How can you show partiality when everyone’s face on that day near the site of the collapse was the same color of ash and smoke from the dust in the air anyway? How is it possible to show partiality when such a tragedy did not discriminate against those victimized by it?
For me, 9/11 has become an anniversary that keeps reminding me just how lucky I am that there are first responders out there fighting fires, responding to dangerous human behavior, tending to the sick, doing wellness checks, responding to crisis after crisis…
Servanthood is the glue that keeps our communities whole. And that servanthood is not just found in the work of the first responder. Servanthood is at the root of parenting, and caregiving. Servanthood is at the root of our faith as Christians—a faith that the writer of James reminds us is dead if it is not associated with the fruits of servanthood. “Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (James 2:17 NRSVUE)
Those words constitute a core understanding I have of my faith. They remind me that faith isn’t just an identity, it has a job description. Faith isn’t just a conviction, it is a commitment!
How can faith save us if our faith has no impact in the world around us at all? How arbitrary a God we worship if such a God only demands that we believe an arbitrary list of doctrines and doesn’t demand that our beliefs result in an increase of goodness in the world!
The conversation that pits faith against works is an ancient conversation. James (Jesus’ brother and author of the book of James) sounds completely different than the author of Ephesians (who if it wasn’t Paul made attempts to sound like Paul) who wrote “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9 NRSVUE)
This tension is what drew me to Methodism. For it was John Wesley who preached in his sermon Almost Christian, “…the ‘faith which bringeth not forth repentance’ and love, and all good works, is not that ‘right living faith’ which is here spoken of, but a dead and devilish one…”
We Methodists believe that true faith and good works are two sides of the same coin. The fruits of our faith and the faith out of which we live our lives in ways that reflect God’s love are inseparable.
And yet, that doesn’t make the love that it took for those heroes on 9/11 to sacrifice their lives to save people any less true if they didn’t identify as a Christian. God’s love is always transcending the boundaries of identity—and I would guess that we have more to understand about love and faith as followers of Christ, even today 2000 years after Christ committed his ultimate redeeming act of sacrificial love on Calvary.
