Faith 4 Work
James 1:17-27
August 30, 2009
I saw a license plate last week that cracked me up. It read, “jog4me.”
It reminded me of a business venture that a friend and I dreamed up a few years back. We imagined that if we could figure out a way to exercise for other people we could make a fortune. Everybody wants the benefits of exercise, but lots of folks would prefer not to do the actual work.
I think the author of James understood this attitude quite well. Lots of folks want to call themselves faithful, but not all of them want to live lives that reflect the faith. In other words, they can put together some nice words about faith, but the words ring hollow when they’re not followed up by a bit of honest effort.
And, as the book of James famously puts it a bit further on, “faith without works is dead.”
It was probably that line that drove Martin Luther crazy, and led him to wish that the text of James had never been written or, at the least, that it had not been included in the canon.
Luther’s Reformation rebuttal to the church was driven by his conviction that salvation – however one defines it – comes from God’s grace alone and not through any work of our hands or through the mediation of the institutional church and its priests. But salvation in Luther’s context responded to a felt need, an existential anxiety if you will, that was different from the deepest concerns of our own day.
Luther lived, wrote and ministered with people whose lives were summed up fairly accurately by Thomas Hobbes’ observation that life is “nasty, brutish and short.” When that phrase sums up your earthly existence it is natural, perhaps even necessary, to think of salvation as only something beyond this life and thus as something fundamentally disconnected from any work of our hands. It seems clear that we do not co-create with God anything beyond this time, and if our hope lies only beyond this moment then our hope lies solely in a faith that can be expressed without the work of our hands. Thus the great mottos of the Reformation: sola fide, sola gratia, or, faith alone and grace alone account for our salvation.
But in our time and in our North American context, most of us do not live lives that can best be summed up by Hobbes’ dismal description. Life is not nasty, brutish and short for most of us. Life is rich and full for most of us. Look around this morning. We are gathered in a beautiful park, we have a small mountain of food to share, and while there are no guarantees about tomorrow, this moment is full of grace.
To be sure, suffering and loss and ultimately our own deaths are part of the package, but we have inherited and continued to build a culture and economy that allow us to live better and longer lives than Mr. Hobbes could possibly have contemplated.
So the existential questions for us are a bit different. While, of course, the knowledge of our own mortality and the deaths of loved ones do lead us to consider how God holds eternity and what it holds for us, the more pressing and constantly challenging questions for us concern how we respond to the gift of this life, how we live this moment, what meaning do we find for our own lives.
In other words, the great existential question we face is not “what happens when I die,” but rather “how do I live a meaningful life.”
Salvation, in response to that question, has more to do with the root meanings of the word salvation – and those roots, in the Latin salus, point us toward questions of wholeness, healing and community.
Those are questions of life and of the work of our hands in accepting the grace, the gift of this moment, this life. They are questions concerning what it means to be a co-creator with God and what it means to be living into God’s kingdom.
Such questions, I imagine, led poet Wendell Berry to observe that “good work, done kindly and well, is prayer.” Such questions, I imagine, led Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschell to insist that marching for Civil Rights was “praying with our feet.” Such questions, I imagine, led Gandhi to say that, “properly understood and applied, prayer is the most potent instrument of action.”
Indeed, long before our time and before Luther’s time, St. Augustine is reputed to have said, “pray as though everything depended upon God. Work as though everything depended upon you.”
In a few minutes we will join our hearts in the prayers of the people, but first let’s spend a few minutes considering the work to which we are called – the kingdom work to which we are called by God as co-creators of the household of God, of the beloved community, of God’s reign of love and justice.
First, I invite you into a couple of minutes of silent reflection on your own, individual circumstance.
What kingdom work have you been called to in your own life?
Out of our several callings, and through our common life as one small congregation in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), let’s reflect for a couple of minutes on out calling as church.
What kingdom work are we called to as a congregation/community?
August 30, 2009
I saw a license plate last week that cracked me up. It read, “jog4me.”
It reminded me of a business venture that a friend and I dreamed up a few years back. We imagined that if we could figure out a way to exercise for other people we could make a fortune. Everybody wants the benefits of exercise, but lots of folks would prefer not to do the actual work.
I think the author of James understood this attitude quite well. Lots of folks want to call themselves faithful, but not all of them want to live lives that reflect the faith. In other words, they can put together some nice words about faith, but the words ring hollow when they’re not followed up by a bit of honest effort.
And, as the book of James famously puts it a bit further on, “faith without works is dead.”
It was probably that line that drove Martin Luther crazy, and led him to wish that the text of James had never been written or, at the least, that it had not been included in the canon.
Luther’s Reformation rebuttal to the church was driven by his conviction that salvation – however one defines it – comes from God’s grace alone and not through any work of our hands or through the mediation of the institutional church and its priests. But salvation in Luther’s context responded to a felt need, an existential anxiety if you will, that was different from the deepest concerns of our own day.
Luther lived, wrote and ministered with people whose lives were summed up fairly accurately by Thomas Hobbes’ observation that life is “nasty, brutish and short.” When that phrase sums up your earthly existence it is natural, perhaps even necessary, to think of salvation as only something beyond this life and thus as something fundamentally disconnected from any work of our hands. It seems clear that we do not co-create with God anything beyond this time, and if our hope lies only beyond this moment then our hope lies solely in a faith that can be expressed without the work of our hands. Thus the great mottos of the Reformation: sola fide, sola gratia, or, faith alone and grace alone account for our salvation.
But in our time and in our North American context, most of us do not live lives that can best be summed up by Hobbes’ dismal description. Life is not nasty, brutish and short for most of us. Life is rich and full for most of us. Look around this morning. We are gathered in a beautiful park, we have a small mountain of food to share, and while there are no guarantees about tomorrow, this moment is full of grace.
To be sure, suffering and loss and ultimately our own deaths are part of the package, but we have inherited and continued to build a culture and economy that allow us to live better and longer lives than Mr. Hobbes could possibly have contemplated.
So the existential questions for us are a bit different. While, of course, the knowledge of our own mortality and the deaths of loved ones do lead us to consider how God holds eternity and what it holds for us, the more pressing and constantly challenging questions for us concern how we respond to the gift of this life, how we live this moment, what meaning do we find for our own lives.
In other words, the great existential question we face is not “what happens when I die,” but rather “how do I live a meaningful life.”
Salvation, in response to that question, has more to do with the root meanings of the word salvation – and those roots, in the Latin salus, point us toward questions of wholeness, healing and community.
Those are questions of life and of the work of our hands in accepting the grace, the gift of this moment, this life. They are questions concerning what it means to be a co-creator with God and what it means to be living into God’s kingdom.
Such questions, I imagine, led poet Wendell Berry to observe that “good work, done kindly and well, is prayer.” Such questions, I imagine, led Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschell to insist that marching for Civil Rights was “praying with our feet.” Such questions, I imagine, led Gandhi to say that, “properly understood and applied, prayer is the most potent instrument of action.”
Indeed, long before our time and before Luther’s time, St. Augustine is reputed to have said, “pray as though everything depended upon God. Work as though everything depended upon you.”
In a few minutes we will join our hearts in the prayers of the people, but first let’s spend a few minutes considering the work to which we are called – the kingdom work to which we are called by God as co-creators of the household of God, of the beloved community, of God’s reign of love and justice.
First, I invite you into a couple of minutes of silent reflection on your own, individual circumstance.
What kingdom work have you been called to in your own life?
Out of our several callings, and through our common life as one small congregation in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), let’s reflect for a couple of minutes on out calling as church.
What kingdom work are we called to as a congregation/community?
posted by David Ensign at
6:46 AM
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