Sermon — September 8, 2024
The Rev. Greg Johnston
After Wednesday’s mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, Georgia, our political leaders restarted their recurring theological debate over the effectiveness of prayer and its importance relative to action in the face of the crisis of gun violence in America. I’m a little disturbed to admit that on before the shooting, on Tuesday afternoon, I spent some time with our reading from the Epistle of James and then sat down and wrote most of a sermon about the connection between early Christian debates over faith and works and the modern American debate over the use of the phrase “thoughts and prayers.” On Tuesday, it seemed like a decent way to connect the Bible to the real problems of our world. By Wednesday, I just felt sad, because the need for public figures to offer such thoughts and prayers over and over again is sad.
But here we are in church. And so I do want to begin not by offering my thoughts and prayers in the abstract, but by actually praying…
You’ve probably never heard a politician stand up at a campaign rally and declare, “Faith without works is dead!” (James 2:17) But the debate over “thoughts and prayers” pretty closely follows this other, theological debate over the relationship between two sorts of things that we sometimes shorthand by calling them “faith” and “works”. In both cases, it’s easy for things to become overly-abstracted into phrases like “justification by grace through faith” or “Second Amendment rights.” What I love about James is that he makes things very concrete. “If your brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill’… What is the good of that?” (James 2:16) When you see someone cold and hungry and offer them a prayer for warmth instead of your spare coat, are you “loving your neighbor as yourself?” (Jame 2:15–16) James’s answer is simple: no, you’re not. Faith alone, without work—prayer, alone, without action—is dead.
James lists food and warmth. We might add safety to the list, and we might ask in James’s words: If a person offers prayers for our children to be safe, but does not use the power they have to make them safer, “what is the good of that?” (James 2:17)
I want to step back and provide some of the theological context for this debate over faith and works, words and action. It’s a debate that began in the early Church with the apostles James and Paul, was picked back up in Martin Luther’s criticism of the late-medieval Catholic Church, and has continued to the present day.
Indeed, you’ll sometimes hear James’s “faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” countered with the words of the apostle Paul, when he writes, in his Letter to the Galatians, that “a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ.” (Galatians 2:16) This is part of Paul’s broader understanding of salvation. The requirements of the law are so strict, the burden of the law is so great, Paul suggests, that none of us can fulfill it. If God is going to judge us on how precisely we’ve followed God’s commandments, then we’re all in some serious trouble. But there’s good news, Paul says; we are “justified,” we are restored to right relationship with God, not because we’ve fulfilled every point of the law perfectly, but because we’ve put our faith in Christ. It’s Jesus who has fulfilled the law on our behalf; only Christ the King, Paul reply to James, can truly fulfill “the royal law of love.”
Of course, It’s easy to see how you could take this much too far. If we are justified by faith, and not by works, then why do good things at all? If we are all sinners in need of redemption, then we can excuse any amount of bad behavior, so long as the person later says that they repent. If we’re free from the law and we depend only on God’s grace, then why does it matter whether we act? God’s in charge. Paul himself rejects this misunderstanding. But it’s clear that many people took his wrods this way.
Paul is really writing against people who claim that Gentile converts to Christianity need to adopt all of the law, including practices of circumcision and kosher food regulations that essentially mean that they must first convert to Judaism in order to become Christian. James is really writing people who think they need to keep none of the law, not even to feed and clothe their neighbors. If they’d just sat down, you might think, they could’ve worked this out. And in fact, they did. Paul and James and Peter and John met up in Jerusalem, and they agreed that Gentile converts didn’t have to follow the whole body of Jewish law, as long as Paul and his followers agreed to remember the poor, and so it was: faith and works exist in a balance, although we’ve been arguing about the balance ever since.
Our tradition offers us a beautiful image for this relationship, right there in the Historical Documents section of your Prayer Book, in Article XII of the 39 Articles. These articles are the classic formulation of the Reformation-era faith of the Church of England, and while they don’t always capture our own lives of faith perfectly well, they’re full of little gems. Article XII says, “Albeit that Good Works… cannot put away our sins, and endure the severity of God’s judgment… yet are they pleasing and acceptable to God in Christ, and do spring necessarily of a true and lively Faith; insomuch that by them a lively Faith may be as evidently known as a tree discerned by its fruit.”
Elizabethan theological prose is not always easy to parse by ear, so let me explain. Our good works alone, the Article admits, cannot atone for sin. We cannot, by working hard enough, earn our way into God’s good graces. (And so God comes down, in Christ, to bridge that gap instead.)
Nevertheless, the Article continues with a very English kind of reasonableness. The good things we do are “pleasing and acceptable to God.” And more than that. They’re not just nice to have, they spring “necessarily” from a true and lively Faith. There is no stark conflict between “faith” and “works”; when a person is filled with faith, it inevitably bubbles up out of them in good works, such that that you can actually know a “lively Faith” by good works, just as you can know a living tree from its good fruit. And this is what it means that “faith, if it has no works, is dead.” Just as the lack of fruit on a tree might be evidence that the tree isn’t thriving, the lack of love and kindness might be evidence that your faith is dying. In a strange way, praying for something to happen and refusing to make it happen shows a kind of lack of faith; a lack of faith that God might answer your prayers through you.
There’s only one person for whom faith and works are the same, and it’s Jesus. Only for Jesus, the Word-made-flesh, are words the same as deeds. Only Jesus can say “you may go—the demon has left your daughter,” and simply make that true. (Mark 7:29) Only Jesus can simply say, “‘Ephphatha,’ that is, ‘Be opened,’” and open someone’s ears. (Mark 7:34) For Jesus, prayer is the complete action; for the rest of us, prayer is only the beginning.
So here’s your homework for today.
In a few minutes, we will offer our thoughts and prayers. We’ll pray for the Church and for the world in ways general and specific. We’ll pray “for the peace of the world,” and for specific nations engaged in war. We’ll pray for “the welfare of the holy Church of God,” and for people we know and love who are unwell. We’ll pray for the widowed and orphans, for the poor and the oppressed. And our prayers are good. Our prayers are worthwhile. But none of us is Jesus. None of us can just say “Ephphatha” and make it so.
So I want to invite you to pick one prayer that you’re going to turn into a deed; one part of your faith, from which a good work will spring. Pick one of the politicians we pray for today, and write them a letter about something that you care deeply about. Or pick one person on the prayer list, who you know well or not as well, and give them a call.
Not because God will condemn you if you don’t. Not because you will be justified by works of the law if you do. But simply because if our prayers are genuine, they should not end in our hearts, but should move us to do something with our hands. Because if we truly believe God is answering our prayers, we need to be ready to accept that we might be part of the answer.