What are we DOING?
Sermon delivered at University Church on June 23, 2024
James 2:14–26
My brothers and sisters, what good is it if people say they have faith but do nothing to show it? Claiming to have faith can’t save anyone, can it? Imagine a brother or sister who is naked and never has enough food to eat. 16 What if one of you said, “Go in peace! Stay warm! Have a nice meal!”? What good is it if you don’t actually give them what their body needs? In the same way, faith is dead when it doesn’t result in faithful activity.
Someone might claim, “You have faith and I have action.” But how can I see your faith apart from your actions? Instead, I’ll show you my faith by putting it into practice in faithful action. It’s good that you believe that God is one. Ha! Even the demons believe this, and they tremble with fear. Are you so slow? Do you need to be shown that faith without actions has no value at all? What about Abraham, our father? Wasn’t he shown to be righteous through his actions when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? See, his faith was at work along with his actions. In fact, his faith was made complete by his faithful actions. So the scripture was fulfilled that says, Abraham believed God, and God regarded him as righteous. What is more, Abraham was called God’s friend. So you see that a person is shown to be righteous through faithful actions and not through faith alone. In the same way, wasn’t Rahab the prostitute shown to be righteous when she received the messengers as her guests and then sent them on by another road? As the lifeless body is dead, so faith without actions is dead.
The word of God for the people of God.
As some of you know, I’m planning a wedding in August to celebrate my and Vaibhav’s marriage. The planning is a little more complicated because we’re merging two different religious/cultural traditions: American Protestant and Indian Hindu. We’re learning a lot about each other’s traditions through the process. About a month ago we got our wedding invitations in, were prepping envelopes to send, and Vaibhav told me that the first invitation had to go to Lord Ganesh, the Hindu deity of prosperity and good fortune. That’s the tradition. And I said great, how do we do that, he said we just have to go to the Ganesh temple on Devon and present the invitation with a priest, pretty easy. And then he said, “And you should invite Jesus.” Which made me go, “huh.” I don’t know about y’all, but I haven’t invited Jesus to anything except my heart when I was 10 at summer camp. So, I said, “Sure, how would I do that?” Like the agnostic Hindu in front of me would know. Vaibhav said, “I’ve seen the table at the church, you could bring the invitation to service one Sunday and put it there. Or you could put it in front of the big cross up front.” To which my response was, “yeah, but the cross is empty because he’s not there.” I told him I would have to think about this.
The question is really a great theological exercise, “how do you invite Jesus to your wedding?” I mean, you could say that we invoke the Spirit as part of a wedding ceremony and since we believe in one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance, that should be sufficient. But what if you just focus on Jesus, because each distinct person of the Trinity gives us specific insight, specific understanding of God. Jesus, the Christ, is God incarnate, the Living Word, the embodiment of God’s love. Jesus is flesh and bone, God that you can touch, see, hear, smell, and taste. And Jesus’s ministry on earth was physical, visceral. The miracles he performed were not parlor tricks meant to inspire awe, they were primarily acts of healing, of feeding, of restoration. When people encountered Jesus, the material conditions of their everyday lives changed. They stopped hemorrhaging, they could see again, they could think clearly, they woke up from the dead. Some were restored to their larger communities, lifted out of poverty caused by their affliction or the social taboos surrounding their circumstances. Jesus preached a good sermon, but he also made a material impact on people’s lives.
James, the author of today’s passage, sees this understanding of embodied love as central to both understanding who Jesus was and what being a Christian requires. The letter from James is a short one, but well worth reading. He’s writing to a community of early Christians who were showing partiality to their wealthier members and ignoring the needs of their less-well-off members. James is where you get some of the fieriest, most radical expressions of the Christian faith as counter-cultural, revolutionary, and justice-seeking.
This passage in James can really preach itself. James articulates here what it means to be a follower of Jesus. Our faith is embodied. It does something, it has a material impact on the people we encounter. In fact, James argues that it is the most important expression of our faith, so much so that we do not have to even verbally confess anything — even a pagan like Rahab can be called faithful by compassionate deeds alone. If our faith has no positive and felt effect on another person, then it is quite literally “immaterial.” This particular community was saying all the right things — James asks, “but what are you DOING?”
Now you can see why this would be a very popular passage for a place like University Church; we have always been about social justice and compassion and helping people. But I want to stretch this passage a bit, stretch our understanding about what we are called to do. When I hear the words “material effect,” my brain jumps to metrics. I’m a good graduate of UChicago SSA and in social work and community-serving organizations you must demonstrate the effectiveness of various programs and interventions. And I will take a moment to remind all of us that the one of the most effective, evidence-based interventions is actually direct cash assistance, so those benevolence offerings are probably the most impactful ministry we have. Now we use metrics to help us measure or identify the impact that a particular program or service has. This isn’t limited non-profit world, every business, every organization measures its effect in some way. What are some of the metrics? You can shout them out or put them in the chat.
- Expenses and profit — how the money moves
- Participants/clients — number and type of people served
- Employees and volunteers — what are we dedicating people to
We are interested in all of these metrics because they tell us something about our work and whether or not we are having the effect we say we want to have — if our words match our actions. It’s how we figure out what we are actually doing. How we are embodying the pretty words in our mission statements. And you can learn a lot about an organization by looking at their budgets, their policies and procedures, the people that they serve, their org chart, and how they measure their own impact. And we should look at all these components of an organization and its work because words are not enough. What are they doing?
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And I think this is a particularly appropriate question within Pride month. As Pride has become more popular, more mainstream, there is now a critique from the LGBTQ community about words vs. actions. A major criticism of Pride celebrations, Pride parades, Pride merchandise is that “Pride” has become a way for many organizations, businesses, and government entities to express an immaterial faith. Just because a business marches in the Pride parade does not mean it covers gender-affirming care for its employees and their families. I’ve met plenty of congregations with rainbow flags on their signs but who have never employed an LGBTQ pastor or other clergy staff. Entire nations laud their moral superiority of extending equal rights to their queer citizens while indiscriminately bombing tens of thousands of their neighbors. You can rainbow-wash anything, even a genocide.
Now, I don’t think that the community James was writing to, or even some of the examples that I have given re: rainbow-washing are entirely malicious in their mismatch of words and actions. I read many commentaries that pointed out that the community that James is addressing was giving preferential treatment to the wealthy because Christianity was very much underground, and you needed friends in high places to stay safe. The commentators also said that they were replicating the class strata that was part of their everyday lives, it was what they knew. James had to shake them up. We can say all the right things, read all the right books, post all the right ideas and memes, but if there is no material effect on the people around us, then “what good is it?” What are we doing?
The last time I was in the pulpit, I talked about Moses’ experience of learning that he was not going to enter the promised land. And how that story teaches us to look for the new things that God is doing and the new ways we may be called to use our assets, our resources for the vision that God has for the world. Moses, who always used his hands for violent, dramatic action to demonstrate supernatural power, learned to use those same hands for language and storytelling — which is how future generations would know the God of liberation and love. And I invited us to reimagine how our assets — our people, our money, our property, our time — could be used in new ways for the new thing that God is doing. And today I’m emphasizing how important it is to not only imagine what could be possible but to actually do something. We must use the things we have been given towards that very purpose of love and liberation — we have to embody it in all of the facets of our church and its life.
One challenge in that reimagining is that I think we sometimes just don’t see many of the ways our faith can be and is manifested in the physical world. We don’t see all the opportunities that we are missing to live out our values. And this shows up in our congregations when we talk about “business.” I define “business” as all the logistical, administrative, detail work we do in order to manage our assets. Money, property, staff. A colleague of mine who’s been a UCC minister for 40 years has this saying — “when it comes to business, church leaders become functional atheists.” And I get it, right. We are charged with stewarding assets that Scripture has no explicit direction for — we don’t have the Book of Budgets in the Bible. And many of us in our “secular” lives are very competent and capable of managing assets so we take what we learn in the “secular” world and bring it into church business.
All of that is valid, all of that is understandable. We are recreating the patterns and interpreting “best practices” for business and organizational management into our stewardship of the church. But we are embodying a different mission than other organizations, and none of the “business” of the church can be separated from our faith because all the “business” of the church is an embodiment of our faith. Everything we have creates an opportunity to have a material effect on people — our congregation members, and our communities. There may not be a “Book of Budgets” in the Bible, but church budgets are theological documents. The calendar of events for this building is a theological document. Our Board meeting minutes, our bylaws, our annual report, are all theological documents. They tell us what we are actually doing, and by what we are doing they tell us what we actually believe. As James says, “I’ll show you my faith by putting it into practice in faithful action.”
Now I could take a deep dive into our budget or bylaws today, but I won’t because I think that plus the heat would put most of us to sleep. As Minister of Place here at University Church, I want to talk about the building because it is physical, material, and really the greatest asset we have besides our people. A church is a “house of worship,” and I think reading James challenges us to think about all the different kinds of things that could be facilitated by our facilities as an expression of worship. This building allows us to embody our faith beyond Sunday service. And so looking at what this building is doing allows us to both take account of what we truly believe about the church and its purpose, but also to see the myriad of opportunities to embody our faith and to have a material effect on the people who already are, or could potentially be, served by it. What does our building do?
- Gives asylum seekers a safe place to live and get on their feet
- Provides a home for the Chicago Religious Leadership Network of Latin America
- Provide rehearsal and performance space for the Hyde Park Community Players
- Provides mental health counseling
- Hosts the Woodlawn Restorative Justice Hub, which seeks to decrease violence
- Distributes clothing, furniture, electronics, dishes, and other second-hand items
These are all great embodiments of what we believe. Immigration justice. Solidarity. Restorative Justice. The importance of the performing arts. Accessible mental health. And it is only a tiny fraction of what it could be doing. Just as our faith is defined by what this building does, it is also embodied in what each of its individual spaces do. And most of what those spaces do is storage. We may call the second-floor corner room the nursery, but it really just stores kids’ items. The room next door stores arts supplies. The three offices on the third floor all in a row store things — different organization’s things, but they store them. The recording studio downstairs stores a mishmash of electronics and various recording equipment. That is why the Board wants to have a big church-cleaning initiative this year, so that these spaces can embody University Church’s faith and mission in new and exciting ways beyond storage. For what good is a nursery that does not see any children? What good is a beautiful sanctuary if only 70 people sit in it, and only on Sunday mornings? What good is a facility with a stage, offices, a recording studio, kitchen and dining room that will soon have air conditioning, if one of the primary things it’s doing is storage?
Was this entire sermon a long lead up to a call for volunteers to join the summer clean-up crew? Maybe. But I hope it is also received as an invitation to help us do something meaningful here at University Church beyond decluttering. Help us embody the love of Christ with everything we have available to us, make it ready to do new things, serve in new ways. Make it ready to DO something.
I never really came up with a good answer for how to invite Jesus to my wedding, but the exercise helped me to discern that the wedding needs to somehow embody love and compassion, and that even that celebration will need to — in some way — make someone else’s life better. And the theological explanations that Vaibhav was so good to listen to, reminded me that while we have an empty cross at the front of this sanctuary, Jesus is still physically present through the embodiment of God’s love — embodied through each of us and through the entirety of our church in how we serve and benefit others. In the silence of the next few moments, I invite you to reflect on how this church, the building and the people, have embodied that love for you and how we can continue to manifest love and liberation with all that we have available to us.
