Faith That Works

Sermon by Rev. Steven McClelland on James 2: 1 – 10, 14 – 17.  Focus on why we show our faith by what we do and say.  Why did we ever think it would be different. Check out Jody Sinkway and the choir following the sermon.

There has always been an artificial distinction between faith and works. Too many Christians think that just confessing Jesus as their personal savior is all that is required to be saved. But Jesus reminds us that not all who cry Lord! Lord! Shall enter the kingdom of heaven.

And this is why the book of James was written. One thing the early church faced was what constituted the essentials for all Christians to believe about Jesus. One of the early heresies that gave rise to the church writing the Nicene and Apostle’s Creeds was a heresy called Gnosticism.

It was a 2^nd century Christian belief held by some that Christ was made known only to a select few and only those few could really know Jesus Christ. The heresy that they advanced was the belief that Jesus was not both human and divine. That he was only divine.

The reason the church rightfully rejected this assertion is because Jesus is both. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary says the Apostle’s Creed. And why this is important is because the church has always had to hold these two claims together, but we have tended to go to one side or the other on this spectrum throughout our history.

And this is the reason that book of James was written and included in the Christian canon. James is here to remind us as Christians that belief without action is meaningless. We define what we believe in by what we do. And to be even more specific we define our faith or lack thereof by how we treat those mentioned in Matthew’s parable of the great judgment – the sick, the imprisoned, the poor, the stranger.

Back in June of this year a group of us made dinner for roughly a 100 folk who come to the homeless shelter in Hackensack for their daily bread. I spoke with the director of the program who told me that of the 100 folk who come to eat every night over two thirds of them are working full time, but because they make so little they often have to choose whether to use their money to eat or buy medicine or pay for their rent and utilities – if they’re lucky enough to have an affordable place to live.

To truly understand how tough you have to be to be among the working poor in this country Barbara Ehrenreich, went out in 2000 and began an economic experiment that resulted in her bestselling book, Nickel and Dimed; On (not) Getting By in America. The experiment was hatched one day when she and her editor were pontificating about American poverty, welfare reform and the like when she wondered aloud how an unskilled but fully employed worker could survive on minimum wage.

Her editor challenged her to go and find out and so for six months Barbara lived the life of an unskilled but fully employed laborer. She worked in Florida as a waitress on the 2:00 to 10:00 p.m. shift, then as a house cleaner for Molly Maid. In Maine she worked as a “dietary aide” at a nursing home and as a hotel maid. In Minnesota she clerked at Wal-Mart.

Although she admits that her experiment was artificial in many ways, Ehrenreich lived in budget motels and trailer parks, she ate only what she could afford (which tended to be fast food), she discovered that she really needed two such unskilled jobs just to squeak by, and overall found herself physically and emotionally drained. And God help her if she ever got sick or needed health care.

The working poor that Ehrenreich imitated are the fully employed, not lazy. They constitute about 30% of the American work force that earn less than $10 per hour (cf. the Economic Policy Institute). They are the people we pass every day who make our American way of life possible. They clean our office buildings at night, serve us at restaurants, pump our gas, sew our garments, handpick our fresh produce, and mow-n-blow our yards.

Even though these people work long and hard, they barely make ends meet. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, “in the median state a minimum wage worker would have to work 89 hours each week to afford a two-bedroom apartment at 30% of his or her income, which is the federal definition of affordable housing.” In fact, Ehrenreich’s colleagues routinely worked more than one job, slept in cars, and crowded multiple people into small living quarters.

The challenges that the working poor face are immense, complex, and interrelated. There is no easy solution and that’s one reason that we haven’t had a successful war on poverty, because poverty is both a cause of the problem and a result of the problem.

And here’s what I mean by that. If you’re poor you are likely to live in a run-down apartment, which can exacerbate problems such as asthma, which leads to a call for an ambulance, which generates a medical bill that cannot be paid, which ruins a credit record, which hikes the interest rate on an auto loan, which limits your earning capacity, which confines you to poor housing, higher crime rates, lack of educational opportunity.

While some people blame the poor for their economic plight, Biblical passages like Psalm 146, Proverbs 22, and the epistle of James all blame the rich for the plight of the poor. Rich people, they say, oppress, exploit, and plunder the poor “because they are poor,” for their own advantage, and if that is not enough, they “crush” them in courts of law. With powerful forces like that, poor people often cannot control their own destinies.

The epistle of James thus considers it a bitter irony that some early Christians actually favored the rich. People have always believed that God has blessed the rich. But the mistake they have always made is that God never blamed the poor but as Jesus said in the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the poor and the poor in spirit.

James calls out his Christians brothers and sisters who have favored the rich over the poor when he writes: “You have insulted the poor,” writes James. “Is it not the rich who are exploiting you? Are they not the ones who drag you into court? Are they not the ones who are slandering the noble name of him to whom you belong?” (James 2:6–7).

Later in his epistle he turns up the heat even higher. These rich people, he says, hoard wealth instead of sharing it, and live in luxury while withholding wages from workers, and glory in their indulgence. Whereas people often intimate that their wealth is a sign of God’s blessing, James compares their wealth to a toxic chemical that has “corroded” their character and will “burn their flesh like fire” (James 5:1–6).

Perhaps it is human nature to flatter the rich and to demonize the poor. After all the American dream is based on selling us the idea that its better to be rich than poor, but Christians are called to show favor to the poor not because of any political agenda of the right or left, because we’re called to imitate the character of God.

Borrowing from the ancient Hebrew legal system, Proverbs says that God is the maker of the poor, God is their advocate and their vindicator who will “take up their case” in the heavenly courts (Proverbs 22: 2, 23). James adds that God has specially chosen the poor to be “rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him” (James 2:5).

It’s interesting that when Paul the advocate of salvation by grace looks back over his life the thing he remembers most about joining up with the original disciples of Jesus was this: “All they asked was that we should remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do.” (Galatians 2:10). Something to think about! Amen