As we present Bibles to our third-graders this weekend, we’re looking at the uniqueness of the Bible and the importance of putting our faith into action. Like a Bible just sitting on a shelf, our faith does little good if it’s not used during the rest of the week.
A sermon on James 1:17-27 and Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 for August 29, 2021.
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen
This weekend, we’re presenting Bibles to our third-graders, and one of things we’ll say in the Bible orientation class is that your brand-new Bible won’t do much good if it just sits on your shelf, or if you treat it like just some nice story.
Some of you know I really like Star Wars. I think it’s an epic tale of good versus evil, with heroes and villains and the best music of any movie in history. Lightsabers are awesome, and the way the Jedi use the force is really cool. I also like Harry Potter. The books are better than the movies, but the movies are pretty good too. It’s fun to imagine going to school at Hogwarts and being able to use magic.
Those are both great stories. The Bible is also a great story, but it’s different, because it’s true. It’s different because it’s supposed to be more than just entertainment.
In the Bible, God is speaking to us. God is telling us who God is, and how much God loves us. The Bible is the story of God making the world, and the people of the world rebelling, and God trying again and again to get the people to come back, to realize God’s love for them.
It’s the story of Jesus Christ being born into the world. Jesus is God in the flesh, God in person. It’s the story of Jesus dying on the cross to show us how much God loves us, just how far God will go for us, and then rising again to defeat death and give us eternal life. It’s the greatest story ever told!
But again, it’s more than just a story. It’s more than just a book saying “God loves you” so you can smile and say, “Aw, that’s nice. I like being loved!” Through the Bible, God calls us to do something. Because we believe God loves us, we want to love God back.
That’s what James is talking about in the section of the Bible we just read. He says, “Be doers of the word, not merely hearers.” The stuff you read in the Bible, the things you hear in church, the commandments God gives us are supposed to make us do something.
James says, “If any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like.” I don’t care if you spend two hours every day reading the Bible before you eat breakfast; if you ignore everything you read as soon as you close the book, it doesn’t do any good!
God’s Word is intended to change us, to shape how we live our lives. Star Wars and Harry Potter don’t do that. JK Rowling and George Lucas aren’t trying to claim your soul or tell you how to spend your life. But that’s exactly what God is doing.
In the Bible, God is telling us who we are as God’s children, and calling us to use our lives to love our neighbors and glorify God. God is claiming authority in your life. God wants to be your God, your source of life, the one you look to for help, the one you pray and give thanks to. There’s a verse in 1st Timothy that says “All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” It comes from God, and it’s meant to be useful in our lives.
If your relationship with God doesn’t have an effect on the way you live, then as James says, your religion is worthless. Your faith should shape the way you treat other people. Faith should affect how you spend your money, how you use your time, how you vote. The faith God calls us to, says James, is “to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” This is the faith we’re welcoming Remington into this weekend as he’s baptized, a living faith that has a claim on his life.
Living your faith means hearing again and again the promise that God loves you and God’s love is enough, going against the world’s claim that you are more valuable if you are wealthier, better looking, more popular, going against the world’s claim that you need to follow the right diet, have the right job, hate the right things. The Bible tells you God loves you. Period. Jesus loves you enough to die for you. And then, God through the Bible calls you to love others in response.
We humans are really good at making it more complicated, focusing on the wrong things, external things that aren’t the point. The Gospel story in Mark is a great example. In the story, the Pharisees and religious leaders complain to Jesus that some of his disciples aren’t following all of the correct traditional rituals before eating.
In response, Jesus calls them hypocrites, because they’ve taken human traditions and raised them to the level of God’s laws. Notice though, that he doesn’t say human traditions are bad. Jesus does not say say to avoid washing your hands!
The problem Jesus has is that these religious leaders have forgotten the point of the traditions. God gave them the laws so they could live God’s way and be a blessing to their neighbors. Their life of faith is to be a testimony to their God.
Over time, though, the laws and traditions turned into a way to judge their neighbors rather than to bless them, a way to separate themselves from those people, those unclean, contaminated people.
They focused so much on the individual trees, on the specific details of the law, that they missed the forest. They missed the point of the law, which is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself. That’s the heart of the Bible.
They missed the good news that our love is always in response to God’s love for us. They’ve lost sight of the point of faith James talked about. Instead of being doers of God’s word who let the love and grace revealed in God’s word shape their lives, they’re stuck on human traditions.
We can make that mistake too, right? At their best, traditions are beautiful, meaningful links to those who have gone before us, connections to the church’s history. But we always need to be asking ourselves if the traditions are getting in the way of what we’re called to do today as followers of Jesus.
Do our traditions and history connect us to the past, grounding us in faith so we can love and serve our neighbors like Jesus?
Do our traditions help people connect to God, or do we get sometimes get so focused on external things that we forget about the central call to love our neighbors, care for the people around us, reach out to people with the good news of Jesus in the midst of a changing world?
Sometimes, traditions just get outdated. My favorite example is the classic story of the woman who always cut the ends off of her pot roast before she seasoned it and put it into the pan to cook. One day, her husband asked her, “Honey, why are you cutting off that perfectly good meat on the ends?” She answered, “Well, that’s the way my mother did it.”
She called her mother and asked, “Mom, why do you need to cut the ends off the roast before you cook it?” Her mom answered, “You know, I’m not sure, that’s just the way your grandma did it.”
So she called her grandma and asked, and her grandma laughed at her and said, “I don’t do that any more! It’s just that when your mom was growing up, my pan was too small to fit a whole roast!”
Or a church example – some of you were taught a very particular way of lighting the candles on the altar, how it’s very important to start at the correct side. The problem I have is that the church I grew up at didn’t have a candelabra like we do here, so when people have asked me where to start, I don’t know. And—as far as I can tell—some of you were taught one way, and others were taught the exact opposite.
The tradition is not a bad thing. I appreciate people beginning worship carefully and intentionally! But the Bible doesn’t say how to light the candles. So if that tradition were to ever turn into judging someone else for lighting them the “wrong” way, then the tradition gets in the way of worship.
We can worship in different places, at different times, with different instruments and songs and prayers, as long as we’re seeking to faithfully proclaim the good news of God’s love revealed to us in Jesus Christ. The words we use for confession don’t have to be the same each week, as long as our confession is offered faithfully, trusting in God’s grace and forgiveness.
What’s much more important than human traditions, Jesus says, are our intentions. Human rituals can be good or bad, but they’re not the point. The Pharisees tried so hard to be faithful the right way, that they lost the point of faith. The point is the thoughts, words, and actions that come out of us and whether they show love, whether they reflect God’s love for us.
How we worship and our traditions are important, because our worship shapes our faith, but coming to church on Sunday morning / Saturday night is not the point of being a Christian.
This is the pit stop, the time to refuel for the rest of the week. If you’re driving somewhere, you’ll run out of gas if you don’t regularly stop to get fuel, but if you just stay in the gas station parking lot, you’re missing the point of your trip. You’re not going to get anywhere unless you pull out back onto the road.
If our traditions are to be meaningful, they have to point us to how Jesus calls us to live. They have to come from the intent to please God, the intent to love our neighbors. Faith has to make a difference in our lives, or religion is a waste of time.
Even reading the Bible isn’t the point of being a Christian. If you don’t let God use the stories in your Bible to change your life, then it’s just another book.
So, church, as we enter a new season, a new school year, we are entering a new chapter of our life together. In this new season, may the Holy Spirit help us to be not only hearers of God’s word, but doers, following God’s will, building God’s kingdom.
May we live out our faith not only here in worship, but in the rest of the week as well. And may God forgive us when we fall into that human trap of being more concerned about ritual purity than about loving God and our neighbors.
Amen