Sermon — September 15, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters,
for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.” (James 3:1) Amen.

James’s warning seems both funny and appropriate today, as we plan to bless our students and educators, to offer prayers for those who learn and, perhaps especially, for those who teach. Classes, after all, have begun, from kindergarten all the way through college. Our Sunday School classes will begin next week. Our Thursday-morning group is already underway. We’re making plans for possible confirmations later this spring. And of course, every Sunday includes a moment of teaching right here, during the sermon.

James may be writing mostly about the kind of teaching we encounter in church. He’s warning his readers about the dangers of the preacher’s untameable tongue, about the higher bar that’s set for theological ramblings from the pulpit than casual conversation among friends. We entrust clergy with an uninterrupted fifteen minutes a week, and we have the power to do great good and/or great evil, depending on what we say, to be sure. But teaching isn’t just something I do, or something teachers do. It’s something we all do.

Every day of all our lives, every one of us is demonstrating something to the people around us. Every word we say models what is it to live a kind and loving life to the people around us. Or it doesn’t.  And if what James has to say is true for all of us, because we are all subject to the power of the tongue.

The bit in a horse’s mouth is tiny, James say, compared to the huge body of the horse; (3:3) a rudder is small, and yet it can turn the whole ship. (3:4) A small flame can start a forest fire, he says, and you better believe that the tongue is a fire. (3:5-6)

You may already know this to be true. If you’ve ever hurt the feelings of someone you love by saying something you shouldn’t—has this ever happened to you?—then you know what James means when he says, “From the same mouth come blessing and cursing.” And you can probably agree when he says, “My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so!” (3:10)

And yet, as James says, “All of us make many mistakes.” (3:2)

Our Gospel reading proves the point. It’s incredibly easy to say something wrong, even if most of what you say is right.

Jesus is walking with his disciples through the villages near Caesarea Philippi, thirty miles or so north of their home base in Galilee. And he asks the disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” They tell him there’s a rumor going around that Jesus is John the Baptist, returned from the dead to take vengeance on Herod and finish the work of repentance he began. Others say something even grander, that Jesus is Elijah, who had been taken up into heaven in a chariot of fire a thousand years before, and who was supposed to return before the Messiah came. Others are little more down to earth: he’s a prophet, and that’s reason enough to follow him.

“But who do you say that I am?” Jesus asks. And the disciples are silent. Maybe they’ve been listening to James. Maybe they’re afraid to make a mistake. All of the disciples are silent except one. Peter answers him, simply, “You are the Messiah.” (Mark 8:29) And while Jesus warns them not to tell anyone, (8:30) Peter is right. For now.

And Jesus begins to explain what being the Messiah means. What he says might seem familiar to us, because we already know how the story unfolds. But it’s shocking to them. Yes, Jesus is the Messiah, the anointed one of God. But he hasn’t come to resurrect the royal line of David and set up a new kingdom here on earth. He’s here for something else. This Messiah is going to suffer, and be rejected, and be killed, and after three days rise again. And I get the sense that Peter is so outraged by the first half of all that that he doesn’t even hear the end. He’s so upset about the failure and suffering of Christ that he doesn’t even hear the part about the resurrection. Peter takes Jesus aside and starts to rebuke him: Bad, Jesus! No! (8:32) But Jesus turns it right back around: “Get behind me, Satan!” (8:33)

Poor Peter. This is why nobody else wanted to raise their hand in class.

Of course, Jesus isn’t rebuking Peter because his answer was wrong. Jesus is the Messiah. He’s rebuking the temptation that Peter offers. And this makes sense based on who “Satan” is in the Bible: Satan is the accuser, the tempter, the one who afflicted Job to see if he would curse God, the who enticed Jesus with food during his wilderness to tempt him during his fast. Here, Peter is the tempter, the one who tries to lure Jesus away from the hard road toward the easy path. Surely, if he’s the Messiah, he doesn’t need to suffer. Surely he doesn’t need to die. But Peter’s temptation doesn’t undermine Jesus’ courage. It doesn’t turn him away from sacrificing himself to save us all. He rebukes Peter for his mistake, and then he explains: If you want to follow me, don’t try to tempt me away from a difficult life. If you want to follow me, then follow me along that same road. Take up your cross, he says. Make your own choice to sacrifice something for the good of someone else.

Words matter. But actions matter even more. Following Jesus isn’t just going to be a matter of saying, “You are the Messiah.” It’s going to take a willingness to give something up for love.

I wonder what that might mean for you. I wonder what it might mean to “take up your cross.” It doesn’t mean what it meant for Jesus. It doesn’t mean that you need to endure violence or pain at the hands of another person. You don’t, and you shouldn’t. But it means something. It means that if you want to follow Jesus—if you want to walk in love, as he loved us—You’re going to need to give up whatever is hindering your ability to love. And I can’t tell you what that is, for you. But there’s a chance that you already know, and it’s just that taking up your cross is hard.

And that’s the bad news, or the challenging invitation, for today.

But there’s good news, too, and it’s as much a part of this letter and this story as the rest. “All of us make many mistakes,” says James, the Brother of Jesus, Bishop of Jerusalem. Not “all of you,” but “all of us,” who teach. And yet his very words, his very teachings, still stand, two thousand years later, a part of the Bible’s canonical text. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Peter seems to say to Jesus, the Son of God. “You’re wrong about what the Messiah is supposed to do,” he tells the Messiah. This isn’t the high priest or the Roman governor, a Pharisee or Sadducee—this is Peter, who used to be Simon except that Jesus named him Peter, which means “Rock” in Greek, because he is the rock on whom Jesus will build the church. I love to point out from time to time how wrong or foolish Peter can be. Not because I want to put him down, but because it’s an incredible symbol of God’s forgiveness and grace that a person who is so imperfect, a person who makes so many mistakes, can still become the chosen and beloved instrument of God’s work in the world.

And so can you, you beloved, imperfect, child of God. Unless you are, as James says, a perfect person, you have made and you will make many mistakes in this life, including and especially with your tongue, with the words that come out of your mouth. But mistakes are not forever. Mistakes can be forgiven. The bit that turns the horse one way, can turn it back the other. The rudder can turn the ship to starboard as easily as to port. Mistakes can be forgiven, and mistakes can be corrected. And in a life which sometimes feels like it’s full of tests—whether we’re in school or out of it—it’s good news to remember that the one who’s grading you loves you so much that he took up his cross and laid his life for you. Amen.

Sermon — September 8, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

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.