By the Rev. Sr. Constance Joanna, SSJD.
Deuteronomy 4.1-2, 6-9
Psalm 15
James 1.17-27
Mark 7.1-8, 14-15, 21-23
Way back in the 1960s I was in graduate school at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. I had a good Lutheran friend with whom I had many discussions about faith. I had grown up in the Methodist Church but had wandered away from the church when I was studying philosophy as an undergraduate. It seemed to me that there were so many competing truth claims, and I began to doubt that the Christian ones were actually true. At the same time, I never lost that deep inner longing for God that I had developed in the Methodist Church. I felt torn between what my intuition and my heart told me was true, and what my philosophically trained mind told me was not possible.
I discussed theology a lot with my Lutheran friend, named Vivian, and I sometimes quoted passages from the King James Bible – the only one I had at the time. At Christmas that year, Vivian gave me a brand-new Bible in the Revised Standard Version, which was quite newly published at that time. She believed that reading a more contemporary translation would help me connect my heart and my mind.
On the inside cover, she inscribed the following words from the letter of James:
Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.
And as I read James in that translation a number of the phrases from this morning’s reading really stood out and make guides for me:
Welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls. . . . Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. . . . Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.
Craig Koester, a professor from Luther seminary in Minneapolis, has said that “Martin Luther made critical remarks about this book, calling it an ‘epistle of straw’ in his preface to James,” who is identified as James the brother of Jesus – though this is tradition and may not be factual.”
I was fascinated by this because Luther’s theology focusses so strongly on the importance of faith alone for salvation and he did not like that James said “faith without works is dead”– Luther was of course reacting to Medieval Catholicism’s focus on “works” in the sense of reciting rosaries and other devotions – not unlike what Jesus criticized in the Pharisees.
In his article, Koester points out what James is really getting at in this letter – “that people sometimes confine their understanding of faith to a simple series of truth claims–something limited to their heads or their words. For James, this is inadequate. Throughout this letter, the faith that counts is the faith that is actually operative in a person’s life. People might say they believe one thing and yet do something completely different. Therefore, James will insist that true faith is whatever is actually operative in your life. Faith that is not active is not faith at all. And in this, James agrees with both Paul (Galatians 5:6) and Luther.”
But back to my gift Bible:
When I read the inscription that Vivian had written in my Bible, I was deeply moved by two ideas: First, that God as “the creator of lights,” the creator of the universe, was the God of life and love, and I gradually came to understand that truth claims alone don’t do it. I can say all the words of the creed, but if I don’t let them affect the way I live my life, then they are useless. Similar to the way Paul talks in First Corinthians – if I have all the spiritual gifts and have not love – the love that reaches out to others – “If I speak in the tongue of mortals or angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.”
And the second idea that really rocked me and still does is James’ statement “to welcome the implanted word.” What is the implanted word? It is the word of God planted in our souls, the creative word of God, the logos that not only brought the world into being but each of us into being. It’s also the source of our conscience, what allows us to know deep within what is life-giving and what is darkness. But even more for me at that time it was the word calling me into a relationship of love with God – whether my philosophy training told me to doubt the faith statements or not – I felt, I knew something holy was calling me.
Now none of these realizations happened overnight. James’ letter became a guide to my spiritual journey as my Christian faith was gradually reborn. And it is still at the centre of my faith today. When I look at all the evil around the world, and how easy it is to slip from light into darkness, it’s hard to make some of our truth claims – that God is love, that God will rescue us from our enemies, that God will raise us up on Eagles’ wings. But in spite of the fact that those promises seem to contradict the reality of the world around us, they give us hope to realize that we don’t understand everything. The one thing that is crystal-clear in the letter of James as well as in all the other three readings this morning is that a relationship with God is more than reciting a creed or going to church on Sunday. It is ultimately about the way we live our lives and the way we bring love and hope to others in both practical and spiritual ways.
In the reading from Deuteronomy, we have a promise that if we follow God’s commandments, we “will live to enter and occupy the land that the Lord, the God of your ancestors, is giving you.” That land is not just the physical land promised to the Israelites when Moses led them out of Egypt. It is that spiritual land, the reign of God within, that we enter. In the psalm, the writer asks “God, who may dwell in your tabernacle? Who may abide upon your holy hill?” Again, that is not just the physical temple or the holy hill of Zion in Jerusalem. It is also the little body of Christ right here in this chapel this morning. Or the space in our own hearts where we meet God. Following God’s commandments is important to do. Following them – not just making a statement of faith about them.
In the gospel, of course, we have Jesus making this point the most clearly. The Pharisees, all through the gospels, try to trap Jesus when he does something against the written commandments – meaning not the implanted word, but the human-made rights and wrongs of a particular culture at a particular time. Jesus links the Old Testament understanding of the implanted word – the Logos – with his own teaching when he quotes the prophet Isaiah:
This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me;
in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.
And then doubles down on this when he says:
You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.
For me, James has been a guide to keep me focused on the implanted word, the gift that is created in each of us at our conception. And so, James and Martin Luther and Paul and above all Jesus have a single important message for us today: “Be hearers of the word and doers.” And James makes it explicit: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” The implanted word is a gift to share, a love to give away.
Photo: Aaron Burden from Unsplash.com
