A Fourth Church Sermon by John Buchanan

September 7, 2003 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Faith Is Something You Do

John Buchanan
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 25:1–10
Mark 7:24–37
James 2:1–7, 14–17

“What good is it,
my brothers and sisters,
if you say you have faith
but do not have works?”

James 2:14 (NRSV)

Startle us, O God, with your truth. And open our hearts and minds
this morning to your word, that hearing we might believe,
and believing trust you with our lives:
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Sometimes unforgettable things happen in church. From our side of it up here on the chancel, the sight of you at about midnight on Christmas Eve sitting in your pews with your faces illuminated by candlelight, singing “Silent Night, Holy Night,” is one of them. Another is 200 wonderful children of all ages walking down the aisle waving Palm branches while we’re singing “All Glory Laud and Honor” on Palm Sunday; another is at half after two on Saturday afternoon, the look in the eyes of a bride and groom as the meaning of the words they have just said to each other weighs in the very air, or the faces of parents as their child is baptized, and on that occasion two people I can always recognize because they’re so proud they are almost levitating in their pew, as Joanna would put it, the grandparents. One of the best things about being a minister is the unforgettable sights you get to see every Sunday.

There are other unforgettable things. The day a man stood up, waving his open Bible and yelled back at the minister who fortunately wasn’t me, but I was here. The preacher that morning was none other than William Sloane Coffin, Jr. The man had come to yell at Bill, and Bill, typically, yelled right back at him. Or the day in a church I served in another city when a young man, clearly distraught, walked in the door and before an usher could catch him, right down the center aisle waiving his arms and praying or mumbling or speaking in tongues during my sermon. And my colleague, Art Romig, a retired missionary who served in China and was a POW during World War II, got up from his chair in the chancel without hesitation and went down and greeted the young man and helped him find a seat, and then sat down beside him, and put an arm around his shoulder and the young man settled down and relaxed and leaned his head back on Art’s strong arm and actually seemed to doze off. Nobody remembered the sermon that day. They saw one. Sometimes unforgettable things happen in church.

One day long ago, when the church was just getting started, two people came in. One of them was wealthy, had great looking clothes on, fine jewelry, manicured, polished, put together. About the same time, a poor person arrived, dirty clothes, disheveled, hair a mess, hadn’t shaved or washed for weeks obviously. It wasn’t a very big church so everyone there could see everything that was happening. Well what happened was that the usher, or whoever was watching the door that day, made a big fuss over the rich person, extended the right hand of friendship, showed him to a good seat, even held the chair for him. And then told the poor person that all the seats were full so he’d have to stand in the back near the door. Everybody saw what was happening and someone whose name was James went right home, got out his pen and legal pad and wrote a little letter of protest to the ministers and elders and people of that church. There are a lot of Jameses in the early Christian church and we’re not sure which one he is but it might even have been Jesus’ own brother.

Whoever he was he didn’t like what he saw in church that day and he said so. He describes the incident in harsh detail. And then he goes on to make a few points that are so important that his little protest letter ends up in the Bible.

His first point is that all people are equal in God’s sight. You’d think that everybody already knows that, but as a matter of fact one of the lingering tragedies of human history is that people don’t believe it, or don’t want to believe it. James’ first point is that at the heart of the Jewish religion and this new Jesus’ religion—at the very bedrock—is the radical idea of human equality. It might look like God has favorites, that some people are better than others, rich people, white people, but it’s not true. There aren’t any special privileges or prerogatives in God’s eyes and in that simple, profoundly radical Judeo/Christian idea, is the basis for what would later emerge in human history as democracy. Don’t be too quick to credit the Greeks with the idea. They only got part of it right. Their democracy was built on the assumption of wealth, education, property and, of course, gender. It was Judaism and Christianity that suggested that there is an inherent, God-given, God-blessed equality about us and of all things and all places, you ought to be able to see it in church, where God’s people assemble to worship and learn and sing and eat together.

The second point James makes, and this goes a little deeper, is that religion, true religion, has more to do with how you live than what you say you believe, or even the religious rituals you perform. It’s an old idea. It goes all the way back to the prophets of Israel who kept insisting that what God really wants is not a lot of bloody, smoking animal carcasses, but justice in the market place, and kindness in society, and mercy and compassion between neighbors and families.

God wants people to act out the implications of their beliefs. God wants new behavior. Call it “behavioral religion.” Traditionally we have two problems with James’ idea of true religion. The first is that we keep thinking that religion is the ritual, the sacrifice, the mass, the prayers and hymns. In Jesus’ day, keeping all the rituals could be full time work. If you did everything you were supposed to do you didn’t have time or energy left over to love your neighbor. The other problem about James’ idea that religion is not, finally, either liturgical or intellectual, but behavioral—that religion keeps migrating to and getting stuck in our minds. This is a particularly western problem that our Eastern brothers and sisters never had. But we, particularly Protestant Christians, particularly Reformed/Presbyterian Christians, can be convinced that true religion is getting it right intellectually, knowing the Gospel, understanding what we believe, saying what we believe in rational statements called creeds, and literally libraries of books of theology. It is our specialty, our gift to the world. “Faith seeking understanding” we sometimes call it and to people on the outside looking in it sometimes feels like being a Presbyterian Christian is a little like going to school. There is so much reading and thinking and discussing and arguing—so many books, so much paper about Presbyterianism. Schools, by the way, for obvious reasons, are also our specialty. We started more of them in this country than anybody else. The whole notion of public education, of the community bearing responsibility for the literacy and education of all its children, not just those who parents could hire a tutor or pay tuition, is a Presbyterian idea.

But in the meantime we have become comfortable with religion as a matter of our intellect. We want to know it. We don’t want anybody telling us we have to feel it, that we ought to be emotional about it. And we don’t want anybody telling us what to do and how to practice it. In fact, when the Anglicans told us we had to use their prayer book in Scotland we went to war.

And what sometimes gets lost is James’ simple reminder that you really don’t believe something until it shapes and forms what you do and how you live. “Faith without works is dead,” he said. “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?”

The late Charles Schultz, creator of the Peanuts cartoon, knew a lot about the Bible. Sometimes I think he was a modern-day prophet. He surely knew about the second chapter of James! In a wonderful incident Charlie Brown and Linus are trudging through the snow. The wind is blowing; the snow is falling. They are bundled up in their snowsuits with fur hats and scarves and gloves and boots. They encounter Snoopy, shivering, naked—as dogs ordinarily are, in front of his doghouse, his dish is empty; he looks cold and hungry and just miserable. Charlie Brown says “Be of good cheer, Snoopy.” Linus echoes: “Yes, Snoopy, be of good cheer.” And off they go leaving Snoopy with a wonderfully quizzical look on his face.

“What is the good of that?” James asked the church.

Interestingly, there is a lot of thoughtful academic attention being paid these days to the idea of “Practices.” It’s a social science term associated with a distinguished philosopher by the name of Alisdair MacIntyre. In religion the topic is addressed by people like Dorothy Bass, who teaches at Valparaiso, and Craig Dykstra, a Presbyterian minister and scholar who heads up the Religion Division of the Lilly Endowment. “Practices” in a religious context, are the things we do because of what we believe. Aristotle said that a good person habitually does good things through good means toward good ends (From Martin Marty’s review of Craig Dykstra, “Growing in the Life of Faith,” Christian Century). Dorothy and Craig are saying that Christian practices address fundamental human needs—ours and others’—through concrete acts.

They are also suggesting that the fact that we don’t talk much about practices just might be the reason mainline churches are not doing as well these days as are churches where religion is both felt and practiced in ways that are visible. Even our founder, an intellectual’s intellectual, John Calvin, knew it. Calvin said: “The Gospel is not a doctrine of the tongue but of life. . . Our religion will be unprofitable, if it does not change our heart, pervade our manners, and transform us into new creatures.” (See Craig Dykstra, Growing in the Life of Faith, Education and Christian Practices, p. 23)

Craig and Dorothy are saying that our religion could use a strong dose of practices: praying, Bible reading, worshipping, generous giving, helping, healing, forgiving. And perhaps more importantly, they are saying that true religion—religion that gets into our minds and our hearts and our behavior, our living—is what most of us are looking for these days. In an article they wrote together they quote a woman who sounds terribly familiar to me.

“I never thought I’d be living this way,” she says, “somehow I imagined that life would be simpler.” She has reached forty, and she thinks she should have her life together by now, but things are just not right. She’s busy all the time: never seems to have time to do what she wants to do; her friends are spread over several time zones and she doesn’t have the time or energy to make new ones. She volunteers when she can, which isn’t much because she’s so busy at work. She’s exhausted pretty much all the time. And at the end of the day she sighs, “This is not how I intended to live my life.” [Dorothy Bass, Practicing Our Faith, p. 1]

That woman is experiencing the unique and profound spiritual hunger that is epidemic these days. We yearn for something that helps us cope with all the demands that are placed on us from every direction, it seems—work, family, relationships, voluntary associations—something that helps us at the end of the day to know that we are not alone, that our little lives, that our being here on this earth has amounted to something. We yearn for something to do that will give us a sense of purpose and authenticity and maybe even a little joy at the end of the day. That’s what true religion is—a matter of mind and heart and hands, behavior, life lived.

And that’s what the church of Jesus Christ is for. I spent some time this summer reading the sermons of one of the best preachers and teachers of preaching of our time, Fred Craddock, who for years was on the faculty of Candler Divinity School at Emory University. He’s written extensively, taught and lectured all over the world and in his retirement has started a small church in north Georgia called Cherry Log Christian Church. Craddock’s Cherry Log sermons are elegantly simple. In one of them he says:

“Two things are absolutely essential to the church: Jesus Christ and human need. In that place where the church dwells are the rich and the poor, the haves and the have nots, the powerful and the powerless. There are those who are educated and those who are ignorant. There are those who believe and those who don’t believe. There are the high and the mighty and the lowly who nobody knows. In between is the Church of Jesus Christ. The church is called to help both the haves and the have nots, the powerful and the powerless. The church is to be the gospel for all these people. As long as you have Christ and as long as you have needs, you have the church.” [p 87/88, Cherry Log Sermons]

That’s why there is a church—to meet human need: needs like food and shelter and clothing, also needs of the human spirit, like encouragement and hope and love. And there is a whole other set of needs, for those of us who are not physically hungry, or cold or naked or alone: needs for authenticity, and meaning and purpose. The need to live and act and have being in a way that honestly reflects the best of who we are and what we believe. The church is here for us to put our faith into practice; to do what we believe: to become what we hope for.

Sometimes unforgettable things happen. Craddock concluded his sermon on the church with a story I haven’t been able to forget. He was the keynote speaker at a conference at Clemson University. Before his lecture a young woman was going to begin the program with a devotional. She was a plain, earnest young woman and as she approached the microphone he could see that she had a yellow legal pad that had a lot of writing on it. “Uh oh,” Craddock thought, “we’re here for the night.”

She spoke softly and in what he thought was a foreign language, and then another language, and then another one, and on and on it went. One sentence in sixty or seventy languages of the world . . . the one sentence said more perhaps than any other sentence in the world. When she got to German and Spanish and French, he began to recognize it. The last time she spoke it, she spoke it in English. She said, “Mommy, I’m hungry,” and then she sat down.

Jesus Christ and human need. When you have them you have the church, or the opportunity, the God-given responsibility to be a church.

So here we are, September 7, 2003, the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago—or, if you are a visitor—whatever your church is. And ahead of us now, here at Fourth Presbyterian Church, is a chance for all of us to practice our Christian faith, to put our faith to work in the world—by being a part of Project Light, by giving generously to the adventure that will strengthen this church and its mission for the future. Before us all, opportunities to tutor a child, to work with a lonely older adult, to teach a class, to go to a class, to pray and help and heal and, in the name of Jesus Christ, to love our neighbor.

“Faith without works is dead,” James said. And in God’s unique economy—our need to give, and love and help and heal, to practice our faith, is every bit as great as the needs of the hungry, the poor, the children of Cabrini Green, the elderly, and the infirm.

The good news is that God has come in Jesus Christ to meet our deepest need, part of which is to give and love and live in his name.

Last Tuesday morning, the day after Labor Day, the beginning of a new program year, the week before this Sunday my family has always called “Opening Day for Dad,” the church staff gathered as it does every morning for prayer. Our colleague, Carol Allen, was leading us in prayer and she began by telling us about Winifred Holtby. No one knew anything about Winifred Holtby, other than the fact that she was born in 1898 and before she died arranged to have these words inscribed on her gravestone:

“God give me work till my life shall end, and life till my work is done.”

Thank you, Winifred Holtby, for that: for that reminder, on this day, in this week, this season that will ask and promise so much for your people here in this church and scattered throughout the world. Thank you for the reminder, not only that faith without works is dead, but that faith lived in acts of generosity and kindness and healing and love — nourishes others, but also us, meets the needs of others but also our own deepest need.

. . . work till my life shall end,
life till my work is done.

Amen.