Sermon for Sunday Sept. 6 (Clearwater/Zion Lutheran Parish, Kyle, SK)

Text: James 2:1-17; Mark 7: 24-37

Grace to you, and peace from God our Father and our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

“…so faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”

I come from the small town of Vulcan, Alberta. I have seen, voluntarily or otherwise, just about every Star Trek™ movie and TV show out there. My favourite lines come from the TV show.

Captain Kirk: “I take the odds are against us and the situation is grim.”

and, of course, Dr McCoy: “He’s dead, Jim.”

In fact, they may be my favourite lines because they’re the only two that I can readily remember; the rest have been deeply buried in my subconscious so that I have no recollection of them. But those two stick.

It’s interesting how some things like that stick in our minds, isn’t it? I can remember when my wife first told me we were expecting our first child. Three months after we were married. An hour before I had to write a 3-hour final exam for an archaeology course. Don’t remember a blessed thing about the exam. Remember where I was, how I was standing, where I was when I woke up…that sort of thing.

And you probably have the same sort of memories. Lines of dialogue from TV shows and movies, family snippets. Your most treasured – or your most hated – memory may be of the last words you spoke to a loved one before they died.

These things stick in our minds and in our heads like prairie mud, tracked into the house. We can scrub at them, try to wipe them out, but they’re still there.

In the same way, one line from the letter of James sticks in the collective mind of Christianity. As it is too often misquoted: “faith without works is dead.”

And the assembled Lutheran congregation mumbles to itself: that’s not right. We’re saved by grace, not by works.

And some other, deeper, more primitive impulse adds to that: but we do need to live right.

That is the Law overriding the Good News of Jesus Christ. One impulse is to reject any means of behaving that makes us right with God; the second corrective impulse is bred into us through school and years of living in society: but we need to behave ‘right’ or we will be punished.

Now, Martin Luther hated the Letter of James. In fact, ‘hate,’ may be too frilly a word to describe Luther’s feelings for the letter; he called it the ‘gospel of straw,’ good as a firestarter or bedding for cattle, but not for Scripture. I think that Luther was wrong, but I understand his objection to the letter: he felt that it would be too easy for people to get wrong idea about how God works in our lives. About that, he was correct.

Because really, it’s far, far easier to judge people according to what they do than who they are. We do it all the time in society, really – the rich person on TV is accorded and almost godlike status, whereas the farm wife beside us is all too often ignored. The person who’s rich has obviously done good for themselves – but how to you measure the contribution of a farm wife?

Well, you don’t. Most of us can’t measure that high. And if we try, they’re often better shots than us.

It’s very easy to get lost in the world of judgment. A great deal of Christianity focuses on judgment, and certainly you’ll find no argument from me that in the End, we will all stand before the judgment seat of Christ. But then our vision gets a little clouded. Because beside each of us, inside each of us, is a little doctor who stands beside our sin-filled hearts and pronounces us dead.

“He’s dead, Jim.” Endlessly. Over and over, in each of us. We are dead in sin, no matter what we do. As James points out: “whoever keeps the law but fails at one point has become accountable for all it.” – we are all, no matter how hard we try, sinners who cannot by our doing attain the righteousness or the salvation of God. We could try to live in bubbles, to keep the bad and ugly stuff of the world at bay, but we fail. Yet we still try.

It was to this that James wrote to the congregation. “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them: ‘go in peace, keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet does not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?” Jesus called the disciples to be engaged in the world, to be covered in the muck and the mess of life, to immerse their sinful hearts in the river of humanity in order that they could see what it would mean to be truly in relationship with people.

As a wise man once said, “Jesus did not come to show us how to become divine. Christ came so that we may know what it means to be truly human.”

Truly human.

A well-known celebrity was in town for a couple of days. He’d come to look at the wooly mammoth; maybe a little bit of fishing down at Diefenbaker. But he’s here, in town. And he’s told the people that he’s staying with that he doesn’t want anyone to know he’s here.

But of course, that’s not going to happen. Soon the whole town is buzzing with the gossip. “He’s here! He’s there! Did you see him?” But everyone tenuously respects his privacy. Everyone except, that is, the one person in town that everyone hopes he doesn’t see.

She’s ragged and dirty. No one really remembers how she came here, or who with. But she’s got a kid. Pretty sickly, the one at school who’s classmates take delight in pointing out that her clothes used to be theirs. The kid who’s teased at lunch because her sandwich is two slices of bread and half an apple. This is the family that a teacher or community worker slips a little extra to when no one’s looking.

People invent a myth about respecting her privacy when the one thing that poor, desperate creature needs is community.

So one day the celebrity is outside of the hotel when she comes walking towards him. He’s with his entourage: a few strong men try to block her way; across the street a few people from the town see her moving and try to get to her before she has a chance to embarrass you all.

But she’s at his feet in a flash. “Please, sir, my child needs your help.” And all those people around her start trying to bodily move her, apologizing for her, condemning her.

Where are you in this story? I saw almost this exact thing happen, once, when I was a teen and Ralph Klein came to visit my school. A person who’d lost everything to Ralph’s education and social assistance cuts stood up and started yelling during his address. Afterwards, I heard a member of the town council say apologetically to Klein, “don’t worry, they’re not from here. We’re not like that.”

No, in fact, we’re something worse.

I think James wrote his letter because he saw how easily Paul’s good theology corrupted people into becoming baseless, judgmental hypocrites who, secure in their own salvation, then sought to prevent others from attaining the same. So he wrote to the congregation to remind them of that works are evidence of their faith, that a simple stated empty belief left very short change in the empty stomaches and closets of the needy.

Because one of Christianity’s great cultural sins – from the very beginning – is complacency. The desire to sit back and congratulate ourselves, to observe others in their struggles and say to ourselves, well, thank you God that that’s not me, instead of walking where Christ did, with them, and offering them our own hands.

We have made distinctions between ourselves, between the right and the wrong, between the righteous and sinners. But we forget so easily, and with such disastrous consequence, that if we are righteous then we have no need for the great physician.

Because he came to call not the righteous - but sinners, instead.

And yes to quote Captain Kirk, in this world the odds are against us and the situation is grim. We live surrounded by the myth of competition and competence – a legacy of eugenics and a twist of the ideas of Darwin that turn our own human community into a bloody war to see who comes first. Our own churches tear at their own community in a competition to see who’s the most right, or the most faithful, or the most holy.

But we stand with Christ. When Jesus is for us, who can be against us? Well, ourselves, for one. Maybe one of the problems with our faith comes from living at the foot of the cross, where our eyes are looking up at that Cross, remembering that for us – each and every one of us – Christ died. Yet in doing so, we miss an important point – that Christ is looking down, and seeing all of those crumbled around us. If we look where Christ sees we will see what Christ sees: frail, broken humanity, stressed by so much and in such dire need of grace that we ache for his touch.

And then our eyes will see what Christ sees, and our hands will become those of Christ: broken, bleeding, beset by own frailties, but reaching out for those who are in such desperate need.

For we are sinners, this is true. But we are also the beloved and justified, the redeemed of the Lord, free to go and serve our neighbour in gladness. Faith sets us free to serve one another, to love one another, as Christ loved us.

May this be so among us. Amen.