Church of the Redeemer UMC
August 30, 2015
James 1:17-27
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
“Inside Out”
If you were arrested for being a Christian, would there
be enough evidence to convict you? This is the question I asked in my DownTown
Abbey Bible study this week. DownTown Abbey is a group that meets weekly at
1151 North Marginal Rd. in downtown Cleveland. We study the lectionary
scriptures for the upcoming Sunday, and we ponder what it means to be a follower
of God– at the same time you are being an engineer, or a lawyer, or an IT
specialist, or a Unitarian Universalist minister. You are all welcome to join
us on Wednesdays at noon.
This week, as
I looked around the room at us – dressed in business casual, or business formal
for the lawyer, I wondered what would make others see us and know we are
Christians. We don’t wear anything special – no head coverings or clerical
collars, no long dresses or phalacteries or burkahs. Most of us don’t wear any particular jewelry
or even have any bumper stickers on our cars that proclaim our faith. We don’t have a secret handshake like the
Masons or a special language like Hebrew we share in common.
And most of
the time, we kind of like it that way, don’t we? We’re just one of the folks, not really any
different than anyone else, definitely not any better than anyone else. In
fact, we might say we know non Christians who seem more Christian than some of the
Christians that we know. And we certainly know Christians who we don’t want to
be associated with. At all. It’s easier, most of the time, if we just blend in
to the crowd, don’t offend anyone with any rhetoric, just do our thing and not
really tell anyone where we go on Sunday mornings.
So what makes
you a Christian? Would you even call yourself one? Is there another name you
would rather use? I have to admit to going by “Christ follower” more often
these days, as I feel like the label Christian, the way it is understood by
American culture, doesn’t really fit with me. What makes me a Christ follower?
How do you know when you meet someone who is a Christian?
In the past
couple of months, I’ve had the chance to be with you Redeemer folk a couple of
times, as we have celebrated the lives of two of our saints, Mary Ann Carlson
and Beverly Holland. I think it was pretty clear to all of us that both Mary
Ann and Beverly were Christian. You didn’t have to be around them long to see
the way they cared for others and cared for what is right. The way they spoke
up on behalf of the oppressed and spoke out against injustice. The way they cared for us, whether through
encouraging notes or homemade broccoli soup. Yes, sometimes it’s easy to spot a
Christian, isn’t it?
In the
lectionary this week, that group of readings used by many Protestant and
Catholic churches, we turn to the letter of James. James is a controversial
book for a lot of Protestants. In fact, Martin Luther, who began the break from
the Catholic church back in 1517, called it an “epistle of straw”. The reason
for Luther’s disdain for the book was its emphasis on works righteousness – the
power of doing good in getting us to heaven– instead of righteousness by faith –
the idea that it is God alone who is responsible for our salvation. In our
Methodist heritage, we see evidence of Luther in Wesley’s insistence that
salvation comes by grace alone – that it is not what we do, but God’s never-ending,
abiding and deep love for us even before our birth that connects us to God.
I felt pretty
much the same way as Luther about the book of James until about 10 years ago,
when I joined Eric Skinner and a dozen or so Redeemerites on my first real
mission trip. If you don’t know Eric, he
moved down to Peninsula a few years ago after he got married, but he was up
here for Mary Ann Carlson’s funeral.
Eric made it very clear to us even before that mission trip that his
favorite Bible verse came from the book of James – specifically James 2:17 –
Faith without works is dead.
Faith without
works is dead. Basically, James is responding to the letters of Paul, which
insist on the primacy of God’s grace over all. Our passage for today reiterates this theme –
that our actions matter, and unless we walk the talk, we aren’t doing our jobs
as Christians.
Eric lives
this verse, and we got to reap the benefits here at Redeemer as he worked with
a team to set up mission trips to Virginia, Michigan, Chicago, and Vermont in
the years I was a part of the church. And I learned the joy of working with my
hands to help make someone’s life a little better, whether it was Millie in
Virginia who needed a new front porch, or Bill in Vermont who had no way to get
his wheelchair out of his house. We cleared an Ojibwe graveyard in Michigan and
painted white cross grave markers, and in Chicago we cleaned and painted an
inner city church and worked with a vacation Bible school. How many of you remember those trips? Did
they change your life? I know they
changed mine.
Those trips
brought home to me what it meant to be Christ’s hands and feet, God’s love in
action. But they also brought home to me the difference between acting like a
Christ follower and really being one.
On one of our
early trips, when we were working on that porch at Millie’s house, a few of us
noticed that Millie had a really nice boat in her backyard. It was up on a trailer, covered tightly with
a tarp, nicer than any boat most of us could ever hope to own. And then, when we were talking to Millie, she
started telling us about her sons who lived nearby. And I started to wonder, “Why
are we working on this person’s house, when she could ask her sons for help, or
maybe even sell that expensive boat and pay for someone to do it?” It made my
work that day a lot harder, when I started to resent what I was doing and maybe
even feel a little taken advantage of.
But that
night, when we were in our Bible study time together and I voiced my feelings,
Dave Rodney said something that helped me to see the connection between being a
Christian in action, and being a Christ follower in my heart. That night, when we sat down for our Bible
study of the book of Habbakuk, Dave shared the story behind his attitude of
acceptance and joy in doing work for others.
He admitted that when he first started doing missions work, he often had
the attitude of “just getting it done”, accomplishing the task as quickly as he
could, with the intent of finishing it. He
also worried about selecting projects to ensure that his efforts only went to
the most deserving. Slowly, however, he found that over time his attitude had
changed. Now, he says, he tries to
approach all the work he does as an act of gratitude to God. He is grateful that he has the ability to do
the work he does, and that he can make something beautiful with his hands. He said this attitude has changed how he
looks at helping people. Sure, there are
some people who may need our help more than others. But if we just help whomever we can, just
because we can, we take out the aspect of judging who is worthy of our
work. Maybe Millie really needed us to
put on a new deck for her. Or maybe she
could have paid for it herself. Who
knows? But our act of doing it was good
not only for her, it was good for us as well.
In the act of building her deck, we learned a lot about each other. We learned how to work together. Some of us learned some carpentry skills that
we can use on other projects. And in a
certain way, by giving to Millie, unconditionally, we were giving back to God.
That
conversation with Dave that night changed my heart and has changed the way I
approach every mission trip project and every service project since. Basically, it comes down to this: it’s not
about me. It’s about what it means to be a follower of Jesus. And when I can
focus on that, I don’t worry so much about what I am doing, but rather the
attitude I bring to my work.
I think that’s
why the passage Milo read for us from Mark, the chosen gospel reading for this week,
fits so well with that James passage. In Mark, we come upon Jesus interacting
with the Pharisees, a sect of Jews that was very concerned about following the
law of the Torah, so concerned, in fact, that they seem to have forgotten what
the purpose was of the laws set out in the early Hebrew scriptures. And Jesus isn’t going to put up with their
hypocrisy, not even for a minute. He
tells them that their insistence on right actions is hiding what is really in
their hearts, and that what is there is not pretty. He admonishes them to look
at the evil in their hearts before they start telling other people how to act.
Being a
Christian means acting like one, and being one. It means doing things we might
not want to do, and praying our hearts will follow our actions so we live on
the outside the way God has worked in us on the inside. It means living our
faith.
So how do we
do that? How do we make sure our insides and our outsides, our feelings and our
actions, are consistent with our claim to be followers of Jesus? We might never have the faith Beverly had, or
the ability to speak out on issues like Mary Ann. We might never be able to do
everything just right. But we all have the one thing we need. We all have the
gift of the Holy Spirit, the guidance of God through the One who is called the
advocate, the counselor, the one who walks with us and is in us.
When we can
learn to trust in and rely on God, our insides, and our outsides, will reflect the
love of Christ. And really, that is what
it is all about. Thanks be to God.
Amen.
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