mayog's posterous

NB: I do not typically post my sermons. This one is posted because of a particular request. If you quote it, please attribute it.

Do Something

A Sermon on Jas 2:1-17

for the Presbytery of Twin Cities

Friends, the political season is upon us? I'm sure you've noticed. Even Barb and Jim, the pitch people for ketchup on Minnesota's own A Prairie Home Companion are beginning to talk about politics. One of the phrases being batted around these days is that we are living in a time of a “Do Nothing Congress.” A Do Nothing Congress.

Sisters and brothers, as Christians, we will disagree on whether on not Congress deserves the “do-nothing” charge. But there is a more serious charge that we cannot ignore. For, if we as the church are not careful, Congress will not the only institution charged with “doing nothing.”

To be fair, “doing nothing” has always been a temptation in the church. James points this out candidly in the second chapter to his much-maligned epistle. Now, I know James sometimes gets a bad rap, but perhaps it is because our practice of faith is so very different today than it was back in the first century CE. You see, in James' day, it was possible for good Christian people to walk up to someone who was in need, wish them well, and then do nothing. In James' day, it was possible for good Christian people to see the practice of class favoritism blatantly practiced in seating at worship and do nothing. And I know you cannot imagine this ever happening in the Twin Cities, but in James' day, it was possible for good Christian people to argue that their faith in Jesus Christ and his redemption of them entitled them to do nothing.

And so James pushes back. He pushes back against a faith that threatens to become a vestigial appendage – an eyebrow or an appendix for example – an appendage whose only purpose is ornamentation at best; or that, at worst, festers, swelling up like a raisin in the sun, exploding spewing deadly poison everywhere. It is against this kind of faith that James is preaching when he says faith without works is dead. Doing nothing, says James, is simply not an option for the Christian church.

The history of the church bears this out. The ancient church thrived when it refused to do nothing. Facing a diverse membership filled with those who had more than they needed and others who were lucky to get their daily bread, the church could have simply done nothing and left its members to fend for themselves. But the testimony of the Acts of the Apostles is that Christians shared their resources not out of class-based patronage but out of an understanding of themselves as the interdependent indivisible body of Christ.

Facing questions of allegiance to the power of empire, the church could simply have done nothing and escaped attention. But the testimony of Perpetua, Felicitatis, Justin and all the marytrs is that the church understood its allegiance not to empire or nation of any kind, but to Jesus Christ as Lord.

Facing deadly plagues, the church could simply have done nothing, and saved its own life. But the testimony of history is that the church refused to flee even the plague, tending the sick and the dying, and nursing many back to health even though many Christians paid for this ministry with their lives.

These ancestors along with our brother James remind us of the royal Law to which Jesus referred his disciples, the royal law to which we are beholden: You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself. And love, in that Leviticus text is not a Valentine's day card. Love is a call to a do-something faith, a faith that practices just action on behalf of our neighbor. Love is a call to DO something.

And the truth is, there is plenty to do. The truth is, the church has more than enough to occupy itself with until Jesus comes again. We live in a world in which white men elected to political office with power and authority think it appropriate to comment publicly and derogatorily on the anatomy of another man's wife and pray for that man's death, for his children to become fatherless and his wife to become a widow because that man is perceived as being the wrong race to occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. We live in a world in which little black children are still taught that to be dark is bad and to be light is good; and championship women's basketball players can be called nappy headed hoes. We live in a nation where race and class and power continually collide and yet, we as a Presbyterian church are so caught up in our internal bickering that we cannot even manage to adopt a prophetic confession that names racism as sin. Are we not in danger of becoming a do-nothing church?

Friends, we live in a world where anonymous strangers on youtube to tell bullied children, some of whom are gay, some of whom are just different, not to kill themselves because our churches do not. We live in a world where children are regularly thrown out of their houses and into the streets into the hands of the sex traffickers that infect the streets of Minneapolis, St. Paul and yes, especially my city of Atlanta, thrown out on the suspicion of homosexuality, thrown out because their Christian parents would rather discard their children like last night's shrimp shells than to find a way to love and understand. We live in a world in which children are preyed upon by men made demigods by football games played for too much money; and when they are held up to justice, it is their ouster, not the impact on the victims that causes riots in the streets. We live in a world, sisters and brothers, where the parents of rich children defend their right to keep all of the wealth within their neighborhood schools; and poor children, poor black and brown and white boys, fill and fuel the demon that is the prison industrial complex. And meanwhile churches are more interested in getting families with the right demographic in the door than they are with those children for whom the world cares little or at all. Are we not in danger of being a do-nothing church?

As our Reformed brothers and sisters from around the globe confessed in 2004,

We live in a scandalous world that denies God’s call to life for all. The annual income of the richest 1 per cent is equal to that of the poorest 57 per cent, and 24,000 people die each day from poverty and malnutrition. The debt of poor countries continues to increase despite paying back their original borrowing many times over. Resource-driven wars claim the lives of millions, while millions more die of preventable diseases. The HIV and AIDS global pandemic afflicts life in all parts of the world, affecting the poorest where generic drugs are not available. The majority of those in poverty are women and children and the number of people living in absolute poverty on less than one US dollar per day continues to increase. (Accra Confession)

This has not changed. And yet, so-called Christian leaders blaspheme the name and message of Jesus Christ by arguing that Jesus would have supported this status quo and the system of unregulated global free-trade that caused it, trade that is only free to those who have power, and enslaves those who have none. We live in a world where we walk around with iPhones and Androids, iPads and Kindles oblivious to the women and men of Congo mining the minerals for our expensive so-called necessities under the rape-filled domination of gangs or of the ruined hands of 30 year old Chinese factory workers building our latest Apple product laboriously by hand in a factory so filled with despair that the roofs are surrounded by nets to catch potential suicides. And meanwhile that which calls our church together in urgent summit are not these real human crises but manufactured crises about race, class and gender privilege that we tweet and text and facebook about with our own manufactured urgency on these same blood-filled devices. Are we not in danger of becoming a do-nothing church?

And time does not allow me, friends, to speak about the warming earth that led to 52  degree December weather in Minneapolis , and threatens the snow pack on which the Colorado basin relies for water. Time does not allow me to speak about the drumbeat of the next war as we systematically take sole possession of the oil reserves of Western Asia. Time does not allow me to speak of Haiti or Indonesia, of the human rights struggles in Ethiopia and North Korea. Indeed, there is more than enough to do until Jesus comes back. And yet we as a denomination find ourselves distracted by first-world problems of property rights and per capita giving and power. How is this any different from the church that was showing favoritism to the rich man in fine clothes while humiliating the poor brother in James 2? How, my friends, can we avoid seeing that we are in danger of becoming a do-nothing church?

http://nobelprize.org/) [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons">

By Nobel Foundation (http://nobelprize.org/) [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

You know, sitting in a Birmingham jail five years before his death, a young black minister named Martin Luther King Jr. wrote: “If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.” If this was so in 1963, how much more so is it today? How much more true is it that, in his words, “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”

Some will say of this sermon that it is not Reformed enough, that is is a sermon about so-called works righteousness. Friends, if I am preaching works righteousness, so also did Jesus when he warned that in the last days, when the sheep are separated from the goats, the sheep will be known because they did something. If I am preaching works righteousness, so also did Jesus when he told a story of a rich man in the fires of Gehenna who had Lazarus at his gate everyday but failed to do something. If I am preaching works righteousness, so also did Jesus when he warned that discipleship requires more than belief. Discipleship requires the conscious act to take up one's cross and follow. Discipleship requires us to do something.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is often referred to not as a “Day off” but as a “Day on.” However, the challenge of James, the challenge of the gospel, the challenge of the gospel in this time of global crisis is to see every day as a day on. For every day is a day to live out our faith not only with our lips but in our lives, to actually act in love toward as neighbors as toward ourselves.

So today, I challenge all of us to add two words to today's theme for the Presbytery meeting. Acknowledge, Confess, Lament, Celebrate – yes. And then, church, rise up! And in the name of the Triune God, do something. Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria

M. Aymer, 1/14/2012