Proper 15
Living Faith Breathes Works
James 2:1-10, 14-18
6 September 2015 – Redeemer
You only notice your breathing when there’s something wrong with your body. (Pr. William Cwirla) Isn’t that the case? If I hadn’t mentioned breathing, most of you wouldn’t even be thinking about it. None of you sitting here this morning are saying to yourself, “Now, remember to breath – in, out. Oxygen in. Nitrogen and Carbon Dioxide out. Breathing is natural, but if you are plagued with asthma or COPD or allergies, then your breathing is front and center.
Saint James, the brother of our Lord, and the first bishop of Jerusalem, likens the relation of faith and works, to that of the body and breathing. “For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead.” (James 2:26, ESV) If you’re not breathing your body is dead. If you’re not doing works your faith is dead. A living body breathes. A living faith works.
So Saint James, chapter 2, is about faith and a particular work. “My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory.” Saint James was calling attention to the breathing of the body of Christ because something was the matter with their breathing. It was shallow. It was weak. Sometimes it stopped.
The baptized children of God were showing partiality – they were judging people’s worth in the congregation or Synagogue by appearance. When the rich man entered wearing a suit and tie with a lovely wife and 2.7 children, the greeters greeted him with warmth, the ushers ushered him to a seat of prominence, the whole congregation displayed admiration and secretly thought, “Maybe if this rich guy joins our church he’ll pay off the mortgage.” When the poor man entered, whose old truck broke down on the way to church, with grease under his fingernails, his tattoed girlfriend and her five children, the greeters barely made eye contact and the ushers said, “Maybe you can stand in the back. All the good seats are taken. If you need to sit, there’s always the floor.” And the congregation, as they tried to glance, but not be seen, said, “They probably need money.”
Their works were not according to the faith they confessed. Their breathing revealed problems deep within the body of Christ. “Show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of Glory.” It sounds like Saint James is calling on us to recall the Old Testament as he not only calls Jesus “Lord” but also “Lord of Glory.” Those are Old Testament titles that recall God’s Word to the nation of Israel, “I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians.” (Exodus 6:7, ESV) And throughout the Lord’s deliverance of Israel out of slavery and into the promised land – His glory, His presence was with them in the fiery cloud and pillar, in the tabernacle and in the temple. He is the “Lord of Glory”
So Saint James is preaching the Old Testament, reminding Christians that Israel wasn’t great among the nations – Abraham and Sarah were childless when the Lord chose them. God chose Israel even when Abraham and Sarah were poor in faith, even when Jacob robbed his brother Esau, even when Joseph’s brothers sold him into the poverty of slavery. God showed no partiality to His children Israel. In fact His laws worked to protect those most often harmed and take advantage of – the orphans, the widows, women, slaves.
And all of that impartiality of the Old Testament was the center of the fulfillment of the Old Testament in the New Testament. In the New Testament God didn’t come in a cloud of glory that filled the temple; He came in the flesh and Jesus was the very temple of God. How did Jesus regard those He encountered? Impartially. He preached repentance to the rich and to the poor. He dined with Pharisees and Prostitutes. He raised Jairus’ daughter (a rich politician) and the widow’s son (who lived on the other side of the tracks). He told the rich young man to repent and he forgave rich Zacchaeus his tax thefts. There wasn’t a person for whom Christ did not come or to whom He wouldn’t speak. The little children were welcome on his lap and He touched the untouchable lepers. He rescued a woman caught in adultery and had a large group of women as disciples.
Jesus made His work and mission clear – He came for sinners and every one of us is a sinner. And if you don’t believe that, if you don’t need forgiveness then Jesus doesn’t have anything for you. A whole lot of people walked away from Jesus because they believed He should have shown them favoritism and not called them to repentance. But Jesus played no favorites. He took all our sin – the sin we’re born with and all the sins we commit. The sins we hide and the sins others see. We’re poor, everyone of us, in what God requires. We have nothing but the debt of sin in our our accounts according to God’s own Word, but in Christ, God chose those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs in the Kingdom.
This declaration that we are poor people made rich in Christ is the heart of the Gospel, but also the great stumbling block to faith. What do you think of the people who regularly stand on street corners around Saint Cloud with their signs – “Homeless Vet. Anything helps. God bless!” You think they are liars. You’re pretty sure they got into the mess by themselves and they’re pretty bold to be out there asking for a handout. Well you are exactly what you think of those people before God, and even worse. You’re liars because you don’t really think your sins are that bad and you think your problems are someone else’s fault. You’re homeless because of your own sin – Adam and Eve got evicted from the Garden because they broke God’s Law. And in some ways we’re worse than those beggars, because we think God owes us – we’re not really that bad and He should treat us better.
This is the good news for you beggars. God didn’t drive by without even looking at you. Instead He stopped for you. The glory of the Lord descended into the womb of Mary. And He didn’t pass you some spare change out His window. He took your place – true man. Then He took your sin. He became the homeless man – the son of man had no place to lay his head. He became the poor man – covered with the debt of your sin. He became the dead man – for the wages of sin, the debt of sin is death. Saint Paul echoes the same truth as Saint James, ‘“For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.” (2 Corinthians 8:9, ESV)
So what are you Christian? You are a poor man made rich. You are beggar who has by grace and mercy been brought into the Lord’s house, adopted as his own child, cleansed by His forgiveness, clothed in His righteousness, fed at His table with the body and blood of Christ Himself. You are an orphan who now calls God Father with all boldness and confidence. I’m sure none of us will grasp the immenseness of God’s impartiality until we see our Savior face to face.
That is the Christian faith – God shows no partiality. Whatever your sins He calls you to repent. It doesn’t matter if you’ve wasted all your wealth and are poor or if you’re rich and you worship your wealth – repent He says. Whatever your conscience is burdened with He says, “You are forgiven.” Whatever the world thinks of you it matters not to Him – there’s room in His Kingdom for the famous and infamous, the well known and the unknown, because you don’t come into His Kingdom by your works or worth – you have none in His eyes. You come by His forgiveness, by His flesh and blood on the cross. That’s the faith we believe and confess.
We Lutheran’s love to say we are saved by faith alone. When you believe in Jesus Christ everything He did is credited and given to your account. You are rich in Christ when you believe in Christ. We are saved by faith alone, but as Saint James teaches us – faith is never alone. If the body is living it is breathing. If faith is living it is working. One of the ways it works is in not showing partiality. We love the rich man for the same reason we love the poor man – we have been loved. We don’t love only those who return our love – we love those who cannot give anything in return because that is how we have been loved. We love all by calling all to repentance, because all have sinned. And we love all by forgiving all who repent, because by faith (and not works) we ourselves have received forgiveness. Faith alone saves and faith loves. If your faith is living it is breathing love in the name of Jesus. Amen.
Pr. Bruce Timm
5 September 2015 anno Domini