15th Sunday after
Pentecost
September 6, 2015
Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23;
James 2:1-17; Mark 7:24-37
This morning’s readings remind me of
the story about the new pastor who dressed up as a homeless person his first
Sunday at his new church. Have y’all
heard this story? As the congregation
files in for worship that morning, most of them ignore him as he’s sitting there,
maybe a couple pay attention to him, and something like just one or two people
offer to any help to him. Then, when the
new pastor is introduced before the service starts, he rises from the back pew,
takes off his homeless disguise, and reveals himself as their new pastor. The church is shocked and ashamed of
themselves and learn a good lesson about paying attention to the poor. After all, Jesus says the poor will always be
with you.[1] Yet we’re never quite sure what to make of
that verse. Does it mean that poor
people will always be poor, no matter what they do? Does it mean some people will always make
poor decisions that will result in or keep them poor? Or, perhaps, as we hear in our Scriptures
this morning, simply that we are always to help the poor, regardless of why or
how they are poor. One proverb this
morning tells us that “Happy are generous people, because they gave some of
their food to poor”.[2]
Generous people are happy when they share, because they get to act on their
disposition toward generosity. Are you
happy when you share? Perhaps you are
also a generous person! James writes
that we are not to dishonor the poor; we are to give people what their body
needs.
And yet these passages can really
put us on the defensive. What do you
mean, God, that you chose the poor?[3] What do you mean that we’re to share with
them? We worked hard for what we have;
we deserve it, we earned it. They don’t
deserve anything. And yet God doesn’t
work on the basis of what we deserve.
What we all deserve is death and condemnation and judgment for our sins,
regardless of which specific sins they are.
And God offers all of us grace and mercy; it is a free gift without
price and without doing anything to deserve it.
Martin Luther was the first big theologian to start the Protestant
Reformation, and for whom the Lutheran Church is named, and one of the things
he was most upset about with the Catholic Church was over the sale of
indulgences, which implied that you could buy your way into heaven. Martin Luther emphasized that salvation is
all God’s grace, there is no action, there is nothing we can buy or do or say to
get it. It’s simply faith. On a related note, Martin Luther really
didn’t like the book of James. He supposedly
even ripped it out of his Bible! Don’t
like something the Bible says? Rather than ignore it, just rip it out! Martin Luther didn’t like James because of
this emphasis on works. He wanted to
make sure people knew Jesus was about a faith-based righteousness, not a
works-based righteousness. It is faith
in Jesus Christ that saves us, not anything we do. We are saved by faith alone.
And so Martin Luther especially
didn’t like this line, probably the most famous verse in James, that “Faith is
dead when it doesn’t result in faithful activity”.[4] What we have to do, then, is tease out this
relationship between faith and works. We
are saved by faith, not by our works.
Yet, if we truly have faith, then it will show itself through our
works. We don’t do good things because
we’re trying to earn our way to heaven or because we’re trying to prove just
how Christian we are. If we are
Christian, then doing good things is just naturally our way of life. Because we have faith in Jesus, we do what he
says, which means we love our neighbor and we help the needy. Because of our faith, we do good works. Being a follower of Jesus should make a
difference in your life. Otherwise, as
James says, your faith is dead. Faith
without works is dead, because real faith overflows in love for God, for
ourselves, and for our neighbor. We
don’t earn salvation. Yet if we are
saved, then that aspect naturally flows into everything that we do.
Even Jesus learns this lesson in our
Gospel reading this morning. He says he
came to God’s children, the Jews, and the Syrophoenician woman says that even
the dogs eat the crumbs from under the children’s table. Jesus’s words and salvation in Jesus was not
just for the Jews, but for the whole world.
Jesus came that the whole world might be saved, not just part of the
world. It appears, in this story, that
Jesus tried to show favoritism, and he gets called out on it. Favoritism is not a good deed. Favoritism results in injustice, as we see
from the example in James this morning. If
two people were to come and join us this morning, one dressed well and one
dressed in rags, would we treat them differently? Would we roll out the red carpet for the
person who appears rich and ignore the person who appears poor? Or perhaps you’ve experienced favoritism in
your family, and, especially if you were not the favored child, you know the
injustice it causes. Instead of
favoritism, Jesus came for everyone, as he is reminded in our lesson this
morning, and he does not favor one group of people over any other, nor does he
favor one person over any other.
And so when you see a good deed done, like the lady
behind me on Campbell Boulevard who offered a bottle of water to the person
carrying the walking billboard, don’t feel guilty that it wasn’t you. Don’t feel jealous that you didn’t think of
it first. Don’t feel selfish that you
didn’t want to offer anything. Simply
give thanks to God that one of his creatures was showing care to another
creature. We can thank God for one
another’s good works rather than have a spirit of competition or guilt or greed
about it. A couple weeks ago a delivery
van pulled into the Cowenton church parking lot, and I kept an eye out so that
I could try to keep the dogs from barking.
Except, instead of coming to the front door, the delivery man walked out
in the middle of Red Lion Road and picked something up. It was a baby turtle, and after he looked
around at the small church yard and narrow grassy strip across the road, he
took the turtle in the van with him, presumably to find a better place to
release the turtle. There are good deeds
and good things being done all around us every day, they just don’t get
highlighted in the evening news and they don’t get the attention the bad things
do. Whenever you feel overwhelmed by all
the bad, start paying attention to the good.
It’s often smaller, it’s often easier to overlook, but it’s there. Because good people do good things every
day. They just don’t always get their
names in the newspaper for it.
We, as followers of Christ, do good things because we are followers of Christ. We
don’t do them to try to earn our way into heaven or to make up for past
sins. We do them because we have faith
in Jesus and Jesus asks us to take care of the weak and the poor and the needy. God honors them because they are never honored. God
remembers them, because they are often forgotten and overlooked. God favors them, because no one else
does. God’s mercy and love for his
creatures looks different for each of us, because we each have different needs,
and God treats each of us accordingly. We
are to do the same. One of the mission
projects this church takes on is to provide dinner once a month during the
winter at the men’s shelter, Streets of Hope.
It will start again in November.
For the six months this project runs, I’d like to challenge each
household in our congregation to somehow participate in it, whether to bake an
extra batch of cookies to be taken for dessert, or tell TJ that you’ll cover
dinner for one month, or to give her some money to put toward one month’s
dinner, or even just going over to hang out with the men for the evening, which
is what Isabel and I do. It doesn’t have
to be a lot. God can do a lot with just
a little. However it works out, I’d like
to see a 100% participation rate from each household in our congregation. It’s one way that we put our faith in action,
and are doers of the Word, and not just hearers of it.[5]
Having faith in Jesus Christ should make a
difference in your life. Faith alone
saves, yet faith that does not result in faithful activity is dead. One activity Jesus calls all of us to do is
to care for the needy. And so we are to
be generous with what we’ve been given, whatever it is that we’ve been given;
and we are to put our faith into action, whatever those specific actions look like. We’re not all given the same gifts and we’re
not all called to serve the same way in the world. What we are all called to do is to do
justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God.[6] We do this as an outpouring of our faith in
Jesus, and for no other reason. Thanks
be to God. Amen.
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