One of the classic romantic
comedies of the last few decades is the film When Harry Met Sally. The
movie starts with this great scene which is a group of interviews of older
couples describing how they met one another.
I think it really sets the stage for our reading from James 2 this
morning. [For those reading this on the
blog, the clip can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guinBnWWuKE]
I like this clip because it shows
us how different marriages can be. Each
one of these couples tells a different story.
Each marriage is different, but there are some similarities in every
marriage. Just two of those are that
each marriage starts on the wedding day and neither of the people has been the
same ever since. In our reading from
James 2, James writes to us about our relationship with God. But this reading can cause some
confusion. We read things like, “What
good is it my brothers, if a man claims to have faith, but has no deeds? Can such faith save him?” This can confuse us, because we’ve always
been told that we’re saved by faith, that’s all we need. But James is writing to us about our
relationship with God, particularly emphasizing that fact that we don’t stay
the same in our relationship with God.
James assumes the wedding day, but he emphasizes that our lives
change. As we look at this reading, we
see James make this point: our union with Christ, which comes through faith,
results in good works.
First, we have to realize that
James is talking to us about our relationship with God. In James 2:1, James writes, “My brothers, as
believers in our glorious Lord Jesus…”
James addresses us as those who believe, as those who are in a
relationship with God. I think one of
the most helpful illustrations that the Bible gives us for our relationship with
God is that of marriage. Martin Luther,
the famous Reformer of the 16th century, had a helpful illustration
of this. He told a story of a Prince and
a Harlot. Suppose in a land that there
is a valiant and noble prince who is in search for a bride. One day, he comes upon a poor, shabby harlot,
a prostitute who is living in poverty and filth. Suppose that this prince were to take this
lady of the evening as his wife, what happens to her? She is immediately elevated to be the
princess of the land, regardless of her past, and because of her relationship
with the prince, she has unlimited access to the king. She now has all the wealth and privileges of
the prince, simply because they are married.
Her status as united with the prince has, in effect, covered up her past
and given her a new identity in the kingdom and the eyes of all. This is exactly what God has done in Christ
for us.
The Bible teaches us, and our
experience confirms, that we are all sinners, all of us are in rebellion
against our God. We do not obey as we
should and we constantly live as if God were not the real ruler of this
world. Because of this, we are separated
from God, we have no relationship with Him, and we deserve the punishment of
death, because we are rejecting the Lord of Life. The Christian message is that, in God’s
mercy, He sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to live as one of us, to take the
punishment for our rebellion on his himself as he died on the cross, and then
he rose again to life to give us new life; that is, to repair our relationship
with God and allow us to live with him forever.
Like the prostitute, we are elevated from our former status and made to
be the bride of Christ, and the children of the Heavenly King. According to Scripture, all of this happens when
we are united with Jesus. He is the only
truly innocent one, the only one who can stand before God clean and pure, so we
become united with Jesus and stand in him before God.
It’s my understanding that there
have been a number of weddings in our congregation over the past year. In May of last year, Tyler and Amy Dewey were
married; this past May, Mark and Jennifer Spurlock were married, and Jason and
JoTherese Waller were married in June.
Picture one of these couples, right after the wedding; they’ve exchanged
their vows and processed down the aisle, arm in arm, smiling at their friends
and family. Picture the glow on their
faces as they exit the church and then head into their car for the reception
afterwards. Ah, the love that’s in the
air. Now, imagine that after getting
into their car/limo and they embrace and kiss, the groom were to turn to his
new bride and say, “Now, I want you to understand that, even though we just
went through that whole ceremony, I really don’t consider you my wife. We’ll have to see how well you do at this
wife thing before I declare you my wife.
So, over my life time, if you cook well enough, clean well enough, and
provide for my other needs, then on my deathbed, or yours, I will let you know
if you were good enough for me to call you my wife.” WHAT!
Clearly this groom has not understood what has just happened in the
wedding service. I really hope that
Tyler, Jason, nor Mark actually said this to their respective wives. This conditional understanding of marriage;
if you are good enough, then I will accept you, fails to understand that in the
wedding service, the man and wife are
married, really and truly. It is a
relationship making event.
Now, we don’t want to be one-sided
here. So now imagine that the bride, after
embracing the groom, turns to him and says, “I’m so glad that we are married,
I’ve wanted this for a long time. But to
be honest, I really just wanted that status of being married because I’m so
tired of people looking down on me for being single. Since I just want the status, don’t expect
any sort of growth in our relationship, this is it.” Now our bride has misunderstood what’s gone
on in the wedding service. While it is
true that they will never be more married than that moment, the very nature and
essence of marriage being a relationship means that you will actually affect
one another and grow in trust, intimacy, friendship, and love. This misunderstanding we could call the dead
understanding of marriage.
Regardless of how ridiculous or
unthinkable these misunderstandings us, these same two misunderstandings of our
union with Jesus plague the church. On
the one hand there is the conditional understanding of this union. We think that all Jesus did was give us a
chance to prove ourselves, but that we need work really hard to earn the status
of justified in God’s sight. We think
that God says to us, “Sure, you have been baptized and have come to believe in
me, but I’m not going to say that you’re truly united with my son until you’re
good enough. So if you pray hard enough,
if you do enough good deeds, and if you go to church enough, then, at the end
of your life, I’ll let you know if you’ve made it or not.” This is where the second part of our sentence
today comes in: our union with Christ, which
comes by faith. This is the
misunderstanding that Paul is combating in his letters, particularly in Romans
and Galatians.
Just like the groom in the back of
the limo didn’t understand the nature of the wedding ceremony, so this
conditional understanding of our union with Christ doesn’t understand the power
of faith. It’s like faith is the wedding
ceremony, which actually makes the relationship. Paul writes that through faith, and faith
alone, we really are made to be one with Christ. Paul writes in Romans 3:23-25, “for all have
sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are
justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came
by Christ Jesus. God presented Christ as a
sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received
by faith.” A little later, in Romans 5,
he writes, “Therefore, since we have been justified through
faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” That’s it.
It really does happen in the moment of faith, when we profess with our
lips that Jesus Christ is Lord, and believe in our heart that God raised him
from the dead, we really are united with Christ. It’s like the wedding service of our union
with Christ. Once we go through with
that, we are united with him, and never more so than on that first day of
faith.
Paul’s emphasis regarding works is
that no amount of work that we do before having faith can actually save
us. In my marriage to Mandy, no matter
how many flowers I bought her, how many cards I wrote her, no matter what I did
that may be considered good husbandly activity, if it was done before the
wedding service, it did not make me married to her. Paul wants to emphasize that we cannot earn
this ourselves, but it is a gift from God.
Just like that prince who unexplainably chose the harlot, God has
unexplainably chosen to work in our lives, and nothing we do earns that
relationship. So our union with Christ
comes by faith. But our reading from
James wants to emphasize that this union results in good works.
James is combating the
misunderstanding of our bride. She knows
that something happened during the wedding ceremony, but she thinks that the
ceremony made the marriage. While it
certainly did give the status of married, it also calls for a
relationship. If we were to translate
the words of our bride into the Bible, James 2:14-16 is what we would get,
where we say that we are Christians but no good work comes out of our
relationship with Jesus.
It’s important to note that James
still believes that we are saved by faith, but this faith contains more than
just the right words. Notice that he
commends the faith of the congregation in verse 19. “You believe that there is one God. Good!”
However, he goes on to comment, “Even the demons believe that—and
shudder.” It’s almost sarcastic, as if
to say, at least they do something about their faith – they react, they
shudder! We expect that, once a bride
and groom are married, that their lives change a bit. Their behavior changes; they often, over
time, start to go to bed at a different time, they want to get home earlier to
spend time with the other person.
Likewise, through spending time with the other person, they change how
they relate to people who are not their spouse.
How many times have you said something that you knew your spouse would
say? Sometimes it’s frustrating, but at
other times it’s a good thing. What
James is telling us is that our faith in God is not just a head thing. It’s not just a set of beliefs, but it is a
relationship, truly a union which results in good works. And these good works are directly related to
the one with whom we are united. When we
talk of these good works, we’re talking about the things that Jesus did and
does. Jesus prayed, so we pray, because
we are united with him. Jesus cared for
the poor, so we care for the poor, because we are united with him. And this union, which comes by faith, results
in these good works coming out of our lives.
James points us to Abraham, that
great hero of the faith. Abraham, in
Genesis 15, before he does any good deed, is declared by God to be righteous,
to be in the right with him. In Genesis
15:6 we’re told that this comes about because Abraham has faith in God. Later, God calls on Abraham to sacrifice his
son, Isaac. Abraham takes Isaac up to a
mountain, builds an altar, makes a fire, ties his son to the altar, and is
about to kill him with a knife, when God stops him. The Lord says to Abraham, “Do not lay a hand
on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear
God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.” It is this moment that James points to and
says, you see that his faith and his actions were working together, and his
faith was made complete by what he did.
In other words, this moment of him acting in trust of God was a moment
when his faith was matured, brought along.
Just as in a marriage. When a husband does something good for his
wife, an act of love and service, it’s like we’re seeing the fruit of those
vows that were taken on the wedding day.
When the man honors, cherishes, tends in illness, rejoices with success;
those are moments when the marriage that began on the wedding day, grows and
matures. The relationship is brought
closer together. It’s not like they
weren’t married before then, but that when the vows and the actions of the
spouse were working together, their relationship matured.
Last week, Fr. David gave us some
good questions to ask of
any passage of the Bible we study: what does it say, what does it mean, and how
does it apply to my life this week. What
does this passage of James say? Faith
without works is dead. What does it
mean? It means that our union with
Christ, which comes by faith, results in good works. Works are part of the package. So how does this apply to our lives this
week? It applies by challenging us to go
about doing good works, not because we have to please God or earn his
favor. We already have that because we
are united with Christ. We do good works
because we love Christ, because we really are united to him. That means we pray, we care for the
poor. It means that we give up our time
for others, like spending time with an international student. It means that we proclaim the gospel in word
and deed, by talking about Jesus and by helping with things like Campus
Alpha. There are numerous ways that
these good works come out in our lives.
The challenge for us today, as we approach God’s table, as we really are
fed and united with Jesus at communion, is to discern where God is calling us
to serve him and to live that out. Not
out of fear or obligation, but because our union with Christ, which comes by
faith, results in good works.
No comments:
Post a Comment