Loving Jesus requires loving our neighbors. That’s a challenging message, but James doesn’t let us off the hook. Faith, he insists, needs to be active. If you’re a follower of Jesus, you can’t help loving neighbors.
Portions of this sermon on James 2:1-17 are drawn from last time I preached on this passage, in 2018.
I often begin sermons with the words Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
I don’t think I can start with that line today, because I don’t think these readings are meant to make us feel peaceful.
Maybe there’s some comfort in the Psalm about God working to open the eyes of the blind and give food to the hungry or the Isaiah reading about God coming to save us, but the section of James we just heard is meant to stir us up.
I know it’s a holiday weekend, but if you came to church today to be comfortable, you picked the wrong week to come. This is a challenging lesson!
James has this radical idea that as Christians, we should do more than just say we believe in Jesus. We should do more than just show up to church and Sunday School, more than just sing a few songs and maybe listen to some prayers and a lecture about Jesus.
James dares to say being a Christian means we have to change the way we live. Your faith should have an effect on your life.
Now, over a half-decade of preaching sermons here, I’ve realized I like saying this line about how “your faith should affect the way you live.” I said it last week; I’m sure I’ll say it again. The problem, though, with just saying “faith should change the way you live” is that line is too vague.
James isn’t vague. James is very specific. And that’s where we get uncomfortable.
James says we need to have more than a nice Christian attitude where we say, “Go in peace, feel better. Stay warm. Eat your fill.” Telling someone who is hungry to go eat doesn’t do any good.
Instead, James tells us, we need to give the hungry people food. When someone needs clothes, we need to give them some. We are supposed to do something about the needs of our neighbors. Imagine that!
The challenge comes, of course, when we try to figure out the best way to act, how to most effectively feed the hungry, or respond to refugees, or fight child poverty. That’s where we get into political debates.
Liberals want the government to take care of everybody and not leave anyone out. Conservatives want the government to get out of the way so people can take care of themselves.
That’s an overgeneralization, but I think it explains a lot of the current political debates. Everyone wants children to have food, but there’s vehement disagreement about the best ways to feed them. Everyone wants to help people who’ve lost jobs or income from the pandemic, but what’s the best way to do that?
In our world today, we spend far too much time arguing about the problems around us. Debate can be good, but so often what gets eyeballs and advertising is outrage, focusing on making the other side lose, rather than on solving problems. Watch out for that trap.
James doesn’t really care if you’re liberal or conservative. James wants you to feed your neighbor. James wants you to not just talk about how much faith you have and how much you care, but to actually do something about it. James wants us to love our neighbors.
If you hear your neighbor’s basement flooded and you go over to help them because you think maybe they’ll be able to help you in the future, that’s an investment strategy. That’s not the kind of love James is talking about.
This is a call to love the way Jesus loves , unselfishly, knowing sometimes people don’t respond well to being loved.
Loving means risking getting burned, risking someone misusing your gifts, not making the choices you’d like them to make. So what?
James wants the Church—and by the Church he means you and me, the body of Christ—James wants the Church to live up to its calling. The church is supposed to be something unique in our world. We are supposed to be God’s embassy in a sinful world, the one place where everyone is welcomed and valued. We are supposed to be the ones seeing everyone else as beloved children of God, both sinner and saint.
Through the church God calls every person to repent, to reorient their lives toward God, to follow in Jesus’ footsteps. In the church, the human ways we divide and judge and fight and separate each other don’t apply.
This is an oasis for people in need to come and receive both hope and help. The church is a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven.
At least, that’s the idea. That’s what the church ought to be. But that’s not quite the reality, is it?
Because the church is made up of sinful people like you and me, and thanks to all the people, the church never lives up to its potential. At least, not in this world. The divisions and the fighting in the world around us affect us too. We bring our judgments with us. We bring our selfishness, and our greed, and our desire to have it our own way, and our unwillingness to put others first.
James cautions his community about how when someone dressed well comes into their church, someone who looks wealthy, someone with power, they bend over backwards to welcome them. Yet, when someone poor, someone without status or influence comes in, they get told to sit over there. Maybe an usher stays in back to keep an eye on them.
Focusing on the rich and the well-off and the people who seem to have it all put together is not a bad country club membership recruitment strategy, but James says that’s not how the church ought to be. That’s not God’s kingdom. That’s just a reflection of the world with all its judgments and temptations. That’s not living faith.
And yet, it’s so tempting to do, isn’t it? It’s not just a problem in the early church. Lots of older American churches used to have members pay to rent pews so they’d have the right to sit in the most prominent places. Even today, it’s incredibly easy for churches to make decisions based on not offending the people who give the most offering.
It’s so easy for us to put ourselves first instead of doing our job as the hands and feet of Jesus in the world. James is not an easy book to read, because he doesn’t let us off the hook.
Perhaps the most offensive part of James is verse 17. That’s the money line, the one thing most people think of in James. It’s the last few words of today’s reading. Verse 17: “So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”
Lutherans have been uncomfortable with James for a long time, thanks to this verse. We’re pretty attached to the principle that we are saved by grace alone through faith alone, not by anything we do. And it’s true. God’s love for us always comes first. We love because God first loved us. God doesn’t love us because we do good enough.
James challenges us, though, by calling us to have a living faith. We are saved by God’s grace alone, but that grace forces us to do good works. Because God first loved us, we love. We love God; we love our neighbors. You can’t love God without loving your neighbor.
And it’s not just James. First John 4 – “Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.”
If you don’t care about your starving neighbor, then you don’t understand God’s love. If you don’t care that there are people in this world right now who are unjustly suffering in prison, or being trafficked into sex slavery, or being discriminated against because of their ethnic heritage; if you don’t care about children forced into child labor, or that the poorest in the world are the ones most harmed by climate change, or that some 97 million more people were forced into extreme poverty due to the pandemic, then James will question whether your faith is living or dead. (source)
Now, there are lots of ways faithful Christians can disagree about what to do about these problems. Again, that’s why we have different political parties and church denominations. Each of you has particular gifts and callings, so how you respond to those needs will look different. You can’t fix everything. God calls us to particular vocations. But we’re all called to care, and to act, and to get involved.
You can look at a situation like Afghanistan and debate whether it was the right decision to leave, and whether the evacuation should have been handled better. But when refugees show up in our country without clothes, food, or money, we’re called to help them.
And the church is. The Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service is one of the leading groups providing support for Afghan refugees when they land in the US, and we’re going to have a special offering next week to support their work.
You can be a politically liberal Christian, or a politically conservative Christian, or a libertarian Christian, or even a socialist Christian. But if you’re a follower of Jesus, James says, you have to care. Loving God involves showing love to your neighbor. And not just the neighbors you like or agree with either. Not just the ones who are making the effort themselves, or whose lifestyle you agree with. Neighbors around the world, and neighbors here in town, down the street who need help.
In the middle of this reading, James says if you understand what God has done for you, if you grasp the mercy God has shown to you, then you owe it to others to show mercy to them. If we want to be forgiven for the sins we’ve committed, whether it’s something like murder or adultery or just not noticing the needs around us, if we desire God’s mercy—and we do!—then we ought to share mercy with the people around us.
Maybe we ought to have a warning label in the bulletin, because the kind of living faith James calls us to is dangerous. When you pay attention to God’s Word, it does something to you. The Bible teaches you about Jesus, and when you learn about Jesus, when you put your faith in Jesus, he makes you care about the world around you. When you pray for others, sometimes God calls you to be an answer to prayer.
The Holy Spirit gives you a living faith, and when you have a living faith, you can’t help serving your neighbors.
Thanks be to God! Amen