Saturday, September 1, 2018

Be Doers of the Word: Reflections on James 1.17-27 (RCL Proper 22B, 2 September 2018)

Be Doers of the Word
Reflections on James 1.17-27

RCL Proper 22B
2 September 2018

Holy Trinity Cathedral

James 1.17-27

                  1.17Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.  18In fulfillment of his own purpose he gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures.

                  19You must understand this, my beloved: let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; 20for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness.  21Therefore rid yourselves of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness, and welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.

                  22But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.  23For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; 24for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like.  25But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act — they will be blessed in their doing.

                  26If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless.  27Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this:  to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

            When I was twelve years old, I learned that not all Christians think alike. I shared with some friends that I was beginning preparation for confirmation.  A couple of them asked me what confirmation was.  I gave them my twelve-year-old interpretation:  ‘Confirmation is when I publically promise to keep the vows made by my godparents on my behalf at my baptism.’  One of my friends, who came from the Baptist tradition, was not impressed.  ‘No one should be baptized,’ he said, ‘unless they can say for themselves that they believe that Jesus is their Lord and Saviour.’

            Although I knew that there were different Christian churches, it had never occurred to me that what they believed and what they did was so different from what we Anglicans did.  For the first time I experienced the divisions that exist between Christian traditions, some of which are really minor, others more significant.  Later in life, after I had been ordained, I became more involved in the dialogues between Lutherans and Anglicans, both in the United States and Canada.  In some of the conversations we would keep a chalk board or some newsprint in the room, so that we could keep track of the words we used that our conversation partners did not understand.  Fortunately, our commitment was to work towards a common understanding and the removal of obstacles that kept us from more visible unity.

            What my twelve-year-old Baptist friend expressed was a view shared by various Christian groups.  In order to belong to the Christian community, you must first confess your belief in what that particular tradition teaches and then behave in a way that is consistent with that belief.  Diana Butler Bass, an American writer, calls this the ‘Believe – Behave – Belong’ model of how someone becomes a Christian.

            As a life-long Anglican I had been raised with a different model.  We baptize infants and young children, trusting that their parents and godparents and congregation will share their faith as the child grows.  There was never a time in my life that I did not doubt that I ‘belonged’ to the church. True, in those days, children did not receive communion, but I never felt excluded from the life of the congregation.  I learned how to live as a Christian in the Anglican tradition and then, when I was old enough, I was expected to take up the mantle of faith and live as an adult member of the community.  Our model was and continues to be ‘Belong – Behave – Believe’.

            More importantly, when we say ‘believe’, we are saying more than ‘a declaration of assent in certain doctrines and teachings’.  We invite people to ‘believe’ in the root sense of the word.  Our English word ‘believe’ has its roots in the Germanic verb ‘lieben’, ‘to love’.  To ‘believe’ is more than ‘head knowledge’; to ‘believe’ is to be in love with the God who is revealed to us in Jesus of Nazareth and whose Spirit continues to lead us, to comfort us and to challenge us.  

            To belong to the Christian community is to choose to love what the community loves: justice, kindness, humility.  To belong to the Christian community is to choose to love this motley crew of people, young and old, women and men, foolish and wise, dependable and undependable, who come Sunday after Sunday, month after month, year after year, to say:  ‘We believe, we hold dear what God holds dear.’  And Sunday after Sunday, month after month, year after year, we practice how to behave --- not in order to belong but in order to grow in love.

            But one thing is certain:  we belong. We belong because every human being belongs to the family of the children of God.  We belong because we need each other to become more fully the person God intends us to become.  We belong whether or not we fully understand what are sometimes called the ‘mysteries’ of faith.  

            We are all trying to be Christians.  We are all trying to fulfill our baptismal promises, whether they were made for us or whether we made them for ourselves.  We are all trying to fall deeper and deeper in love with God, the Lover of all creation, with Jesus, the Beloved of God who shows us the way, with the Spirit, the Love that unites us, as obstinate and as questioning as we may be. 

            I believe that the writer of the Letter of James shares this model of how one becomes more fully Christian.  We belong to the community before we come to believe fully what the community values. For James ‘right action’ --- orthopraxis--- is the way we come to ‘right praise and worship’ --- orthodoxy.  We learn what it means to be a Christian by practicing discipleship through our service, our worship, our evangelism, our education and our pastoral care.  If the truth be told, none of us ever truly comes to the fullness of belief because none of us, in this life, ever “ . . . (loves) God with all (our) heart, with all (our) soul, with all (our) mind, and with all (our) strength” nor do we fully “love (our) neighbour as (ourselves).”  Martin Luther, although not a great fan of the Letter of James, understood this well. When asked if he were a Christian, Luther is said to have replied, ‘No, but I’m trying to be.’

            I’m trying to be as well, as I know all of you are.  The good news is that this is all God expects of us, trying to behave, in each moment, in every day, to love this world as God loves it, to love ourselves as God loves us, to love others as God loves them.  Love, after all, is the choice we make to be Christ in any given moment and it is in this community of faith, here we all belong, that we have ample opportunity to practice.  For it is in the belonging that we learn how to behave and it is in the behaving that we learn to believe.

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