"Defining Our Terms"
September 24, 2006: 16th Sunday after Pentecost, Year B
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, senior minister
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.UnitedChurchontheGreen.org

Scripture:
James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a
Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth. Such wisdom does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace. Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures. Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and the devil will flee from you. Draw near to God, and God will draw near to you.

"May God speak through these words and make from them a holy word for us today. Amen."

Sermon:
The Epistle of James, from which we've heard this morning, is a tricky little letter. Tucked away in the back there, behind Romans and the two Corinthians and the other great Pauline letters, James was a late-comer to the canon of scripture. It wasn't even included in the very earliest lists of New Testament texts from the 2nd Century, but gradually came to be included somewhere between there and the several historic church councils of 4th Century. It is unclear which James wrote the letter—whether James the Just, brother of Jesus and bishop of Jerusalem; James the Less, brother of Matthew the Evangelist; or James the Great, disciple of Christ and brother of Andrew—or even if it was a "James" who wrote the letter at all. This questionable provenance has followed James down through the centuries. In the 16th Century, Reformer Martin Luther called it a worthless "epistle of straw," but that may have had less to do with any serious literary-critical doubts about James and more to do with brother Martin's particular theological prejudices.

Despite this controversial history, the Church-capital-C has seen fit to hold on to James for all these years. And I think I can see why. Every bit as concerned with spiritual truth as any other bit of scripture and more than many, James nonetheless has a marvelously straight-forward take on the life of faith. I think of it this way, and forgive me if the comparison errs on the side of caricature: The Apostle Paul is kind of like your maiden aunt, the one who likes to sit for hours waxing poetic about matters of life and death, weaving all the family stories into one Grand Unified Theory of Life, the Universe, and Everything. But James is more like your grandmother, the one who raised a houseful of kids on her own, thank you very much, nd as a result doesn't hold with all that highfalutin nonsense. James is an older woman in sensible shoes, plain in dress and speech, whose main concern is not poetry or mystery but making sure the household runs in a smooth and responsible manner day to day.

In the household of the Church, James' job is to bring us back when we talk ourselves way out onto the thin ends of the theological branches. For instance, when, having read Paul's rhapsodic account of the grace of God who saves us not according to our deeds but according to the faith of Christ Jesus, we begin to indulge in some theological woolgathering, wondering aloud whether we therefore need to do anything at all to be good Christians, since grace seems to cover a multitude of sins, it's James who walks up behind us a give us a short, swift smack to the back of the head—metaphorically speaking—and says:

Don't be silly. Of course you do! What good is it if you say you have faith but do not have works?... .If someone is naked and starving, and you say to them, "Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill," and you don't give them what they need, what good is that? Faith by itself without works is dead. I mean, if you tell me "You have faith and I have works," well, I'll make you a deal. Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith (2:14-18).

James holds the mirror up to the Church, reminding us that this faith we own is not some flight of fancy, a fine thing for Sunday mornings but inapplicable in the "real" world of Monday through Saturday. Our faith is intended to make a very real difference in the world. Grandma James reminds us in her own inimitable fashion that true faith is not merely a matter of giving intellectual assent to a laundry list of theological propositions or, conversely, of checking our brains at the door for an hour a week while we indulge in a bit of escapist fiction, but of putting our lively relationship with God in Christ to work in our everyday lives through a whole constellation of utterly practical practices of faith. Consequently, James urges us to

be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. For if you are hearers of the word and not doers, you are like someone who looks at themselves in a mirror, and then, on going away, immediately forgets what they were like. But anyone who looks into the perfect word, the Gospel word of liberty, and puts it to work, being not hearers who forget but doers who act—they will be blessed in their doing (1:22-25)

Not surprisingly perhaps, James has a particular bone to pick with folks who say they are followers of the way of Christ, but whose deeds tell another story. Again, like that no-nonsense grandmother, she of the steel-gray bun and the librarian half-glasses, James recognizes that words have great power to shape our world. "With them we can bless the Lord, our Maker, and with them we also can curse those who are also made in the image of God" (3:9). Therefore she urges us to exercise great care to say just what we mean and mean what we say: Be careful, she warns us, for "if you think you are religious but don't watch your tongue and instead deceive your heart (and everybody else), your religion is worthless. True religion, the kind that is pure and undefiled before God, means caring for orphans and widows and all those in distress, and keeping oneself unstained by the world (1:22-27).

And using the ministry of Christ as her measuring stick, James has a few choice words for the church of her own day. She sees a church who talks about equality but doesn't practice it: "For if a person all dolled up with gold rings and fine clothes comes to church, and at the same time a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, 'Oh, sir, have a seat here, please, up near the front," while to the poor one you say, 'Stand over there,' or 'Sit here on the ground here at my feet,'" how is the God who made all of us and loves all of us impartially glorified in that? (2:1-4). That's not equality, friends. Now either actually treat people equally or call it something else...

In the same way, Grandma James hears people in her church claiming to have the wisdom of heavenly angels while acting like perfect devils here on earth. "Well, that's just foolishness," she says, "There are many names for what you are, but wise is not one of them. Wisdom is as wisdom does, and what you're doing proves you're not so very wise. You can call a skunk a rose all day long if you like, but it's still going to stink. You're full of envy and selfish ambition, partiality and hypocrisy, and it shows. 'But the true wisdom, the kind that comes from God, is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and bears good fruit in the world'" (3:17).

I believe the Church today is called to take up James' ministry of loving, no-nonsense prophetic criticism once more. I believe we are called to help hold the world to account in word and deed, beginning with our own household of faith, beginning here. In recent weeks we at United Church have proclaimed a very public welcome for all people, no matter who they are or where they are on life's journey. To paraphrase James' language, we have to ask ourselves whether we are prepared to be doers of the word and not merely speakers. And so we need to define our terms. When we say "You are welcome," do we really mean "You're welcome to come to our church as long as you're willing to do church, to be church just like us"? Or will we live up to the kind of welcome Jesus offered, a welcome rooted in mutual vulnerability and respect, a welcome that reaches out to say, "Please, come, and let's work out what it means to be church together"? Just so confession begins at home, and we are called to check ourselves, first and frequently.

We are also called to offer our sisters and brothers in other congregations of faith the same loving-but-blunt challenge to put their money where their mouths are. It seems to me that there are an awful lot of churches out there today who talk about mercy, about justice, about faith and love and grace but seem to be operating with radically different definitions of those concepts, definitions that don't seem to have much to do with the example given us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. It makes me think of one of my favorite movies, The Princess Bride, in which Vizinni, a schemer, keeps having his nefarious plans foiled by a mysterious Man in Black. As the Man in Black overcomes each obstacle, Vizzini pronounces it "Incontheivable!" Finally, after this happened time and again, each time being "incontheivable," Inigo, Vizinni's partner, remarks: "You keep using that word—I do not think it means what you think it means."

Well, I feel the same way about churches that talk about grace but don't practice it much themselves. Come friends, let us reason together. Let us define our terms: Either grace is free and for all, or it's just not grace, and we should use a different word. Either God is the merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness God has revealed God's Self to be time and again in Scripture," (Exodus 34:6) or God isn't God, or at least not my God and, I believe with all my heart, not the God whom Jesus knew in loving intimacy as Abba, Father.

But now here's where things may get sticky. Here's where I "leave off preaching and go to meddling," as we say in Texas: I believe that as the church we are called to speak prophetically not only to our sister and brother believers, but also to the leaders of our nation.

Let me be clear here that I don't want to impose my religious commitments on anyone else. The church who seeks to exercise direct secular as well as spiritual authority is in danger of losing its very soul to Caesar. But that does not mean that we cannot or should not speak out of our faith when engaging the moral issues of our day; indeed, as followers of the Christ who addressed himself to the needs of the poor, who broke bread with the marginalized and outcast, and who was himself unjustly arrested, tried, tortured, and executed as a threat to the state, we are under a holy obligation to speak truth to power.

I believe there are many in positions of power in our nation today who are engaged in a great project of redefining just what it means to be a moral and a faithful person according to their own desires. Under the pretext of concern for national security and a desire for moral reform, they are busy emptying the watchwords of our common life together—words that shape our very reality, words like equality, compassion, freedom, liberty, human rights and peace—and are filling them again in positively Orwellian fashion with content that is self-serving, prejudiced, and hypocritical. And Grandma James would box their ears for it!

You see, I believe it is wrong to preach equality while watching the gap between rich and poor in our nation widen, while seeking to enshrine prejudice against lesbian and gay persons in state and federal constitutions, or while denying today's immigrants the same rights and responsibilities afforded one's own immigrant ancestors in years gone by. It is wrong to preach compassion while ending welfare for individuals and extending it for corporations. It is wrong to preach freedom while undermining the civil rights of our own citizens through legal and extra-legal means. It is wrong to preach liberty and self-determination while imposing our own vision of the democratic ideal around the world. It is wrong to preach the sanctity of human rights while pursuing a policy of secret detention, interrogation, and torture—and then offering protection to the torturers and those who authorized their activities. It is wrong to preach peace while waging war and preparing war as a preemptive measure against other nations who oppose us. And to those of our elected leaders who are morally opposed to this program of redefinition but pander to the ruling party or simply throw up their hands in frustration, I say it is wrong to pretend outraged impotence while carefully protecting one's own privileged position in the power structure.

I had a professor in seminary who was fond of reminding us future leaders of the church that Jesus told his disciples to be "as wise as serpents and peaceful as doves," (Matthew 10:16) not the other way around. Friends, what we see at work in our nation today is not the "wisdom that comes from above," that is pure and peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits. Out of fear and envy and selfish ambition we have traded the true wisdom that builds up the commonwealth of all persons for the petty, self-serving politics of division, exclusion, and greed. And as a result, though we are begging for security and peace, we find only more conflict. We have turned away from the mirror of true peace, true justice, true compassion in Christ and so have forgotten what they look like. We ask and do not receive because we're asking the wrong question.

The good news is that because God is, in fact, merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, we can ask again. We are not doomed forever by our prior poor choices. We can ask God to speak again and bring us back to our right minds, our best selves. We can ask for the wisdom that comes from above, from God. On this point, also, Grandma James speaks with her usual candor, saying, "If any of you is lacking in wisdom, ask God, who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, and it will be given to you" (1:5). We can choose to be not just hearers who forget but doers who act. We can renounce the increasingly limited and limiting dictionary offered us by the powers of this world in church and state. As participants in a living faith, we can let the story of Jesus define for us again what it means to not just talk about peace, justice, and compassion but to practice it in our daily living as individuals, communities, a nation, and a community of nations.

Friends, trust with me that we can resist evil, and evil will flee from us, that we can draw near to God, and God will draw near to us, that there is indeed a harvest of righteousness sown in peace for those who make peace. Brothers and sisters, old and young, rich and poor, straight and gay, Republican and Democrat and Independent and Green, believe with me: Another world is possible. A better world, a safer world and a freer world is possible, even here, even now. God grant us the wisdom to hear that word of hope and put it to work today.