A Swift Kick in the Theological Pants
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
August 30, 2009
Song of Solomon 2:8-13; James 1:17-27

Song 2:8-13 The voice of my beloved! Look, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills. My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag. Look, there he stands behind our wall, gazing in at the windows, looking through the lattice. My beloved speaks and says to me: "Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away; for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land. The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom; they give forth fragrance. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

James 1:17-27 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. In fulfillment of his own purpose he gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures.
You must understand this, my beloved: let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; for your anger does not produce God's righteousness. Therefore rid yourselves of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness, and welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.
But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. For 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. But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act--they will be blessed in their doing.
If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless. 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.

I. BEGINNING

For those of you who are new to town, before too long, you will no doubt notice a certain trend in the social circles here. If you don't notice it while you're in school, you'll notice it once you're out of school. At pretty much every party, every get-together, where you're meeting new people, the second question you'll be asked once you've exchanged names is: "So, what do you do?"

"What do you do?"--the quintessential Washington question. In other cities they ask different questions. In New York, they ask you where you live. But here in Washington, where a person's work is what defines them, the question to be asked is "What do you do?"

Because here, in this town, what you do defines your relative importance or worth. The closer you are to Capitol Hill, the better. The higher up the political food-chain the more interesting you are (apparently).

I started to wonder something recently: what if, in answer to that question, you said, "I'm a Christian"? That would seem to be a non-sequitur. I asked you what you did, not who you are. Work is something you do. Christian is something you are.

Is that really the case?

II. Doers of the Word

I wonder what James would have said about that. The epistle of James could not be clearer. Faith is about the doing. Faith is about action:

But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. For 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. But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act--they will be blessed in their doing.

.... 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.

We are called to be "doers" of the Word, not merely hearers. Our faith calls us to get our hands dirty. To engage with the world, to work for justice, to provide compassion, and to testify with our very beings to the inbreaking Kingdom of God.

So, why then are so many Christians content with the status quo and with a passive faith?

Why isn't "I'm a Christian" an answer to the question "So, what do you do?"

III. Spirituality

This is an old problem, actually. It goes way back. We can see that even in James' day, there was beginning to be a disconnect between Christian faith and Christian action. If we accept that the author of the Epistle of James is in fact Jesus' brother, James the Just, then that means that by the 60's of the first century Christians were already having to be reminded of the importance of putting their faith into action. (We also know that Paul had to remind some of his readers about this important fact). If we accept a later date and a later author, then at the least, it was happening by the end of the First Century.

But perhaps the greatest blow to faith in action was Christianity's sudden success. In the beginning of the Fourth Century, a Roman leader named Constantine was trying to consolidate power over the western half of the Roman Empire. On the night before he would engage Maxentius in battle at Milvan Bridge, he had a vision of the Chi-Rho, the combined XP symbol representing the first two letters of the word Christos "Christ" in Greek. And he heard a voice saying in hoc signo vinces--"By this sign you will conquer". The story goes that he told his troops to put the symbol on their shields before the coming battle. At the Battle of Milvan Bridge, Constantine would defeat Maxentius and become the undisputed ruler of the western Roman Empire. He and Licinius, the ruler of the Eastern half, issue the Edict of Milan in 313, tolerating, among others, the Christian religion throughout the Empire. Constantine would eventually go on to defeat Licinius and become the undisputed ruler of the Roman world.

And in a complete reversal of fortune, Christianity, the long persecuted religion, beginning with its founder crucified on a Roman cross, would in time become the official state religion of the Roman Empire. An amazing triumph for a faith started by a dozen Galilean Jews in a backwater province of the Roman world.

But as in life so often happens, there were unintended consequences to this sudden change in the status of Christian faith. As the marriage between the Empire and the Church proceeded, a certain division of labor began to arise. The Church began to concern itself more and more with the eternal needs of its members, focusing more and more on the hereafter, on matters of spirituality and contemplation. The state could be entrusted to handle all the day to day things. And so we begin to see a divorcing of Christian faith from everyday life. The Church would handle the soul, let the state handle the body.

Over time the "deeds" of Christianity become wrapped up in sacrament, holy ritual, and rites to ensure one's eternal salvation. And then, long after the fall of the Empire, in the late middle ages, Martin Luther and the other reformers objected to the promises of salvation attached to the "works" that the church sought its faithful to do. They objected that the church was blackmailing its faithful into doing these works of the law by promising them something the Church had no authority to grant: eternal salvation.

The Reformers would say that it is not on account of the works of the law that you were saved, but echoing the words of St. Paul, by "grace through faith." Only by God's grace through faith was a person saved and not by doing works.

Martin Luther regarded James' epistle urging Christians to be "doers of the law" and stating that "faith without works is dead" and declared the Epistle of James "an epistle of straw" and would have removed it from the New Testament if he could have.

And since then, Christianity, particularly Protestant Christianity, has seen a continued divide between the spiritual and the material. Faith is something to be believed, something to be felt, something to carry within oneself. This became particularly prominent in America where our individualism took Christian faith to an individualist extreme, where the main question of faith would become, "Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your savior?" "Have you been saved?"

What began in Rome 1,700 years ago placed Western Christianity on a trajectory that saw the spiritual and the material as having very little to do with one another.

IV. A Material Core

Which is odd.

Really odd, when you think about it.

Because when we read the Book of Genesis, right at the very beginning God creates the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them. The sun, moon, stars, plants, fish, birds, cattle, insects, and humans. And at the end of it all he saw that it was "very good". This material creation that God had made.

The beginning of the Gospel of John says that the "Word became flesh and dwelled among us." Jesus would tell his disciples that the bread was his body and the cup his blood. That when they participated in this meal they were participating in him. And on that first Easter, the disciples encountered the risen Christ in the flesh, and he shared a meal with them. Physical. Whole.

The divorcing of spirituality and materiality is odd because at its heart, Christian faith is inherently material. Our doctrines of Creation, Incarnation, Sacrament, and Resurrection all involve an unshakeable material foundation.

Our faith is not the faith of mystical contemplation alone. Our faith is not the faith of disembodied spirits. Our faith is the faith of Christ, rooted in a Jewish tradition that saw the material world as a good thing of God, and our interaction with the material world as the way we lived out that faith.

Just think of the way Jesus conducted his own ministry: he healed people physically, often by touching them. He fed those who were hungry. He interacted with people on the most physical, material level. And it was the most spiritual thing he could have done.

V. A Spiritual Materiality

And so James' call to us to be doers of the Word not hearers only because a faith that is fundamentally engaged with the material world can't not be a faith of action. It's one thing if our faith were contemplation of ineffable mysteries of parallel planes of existence. But our faith is grounded. It is real world. Earthy. It is incarnate.

And that demands action.

Action to live out the promises of the Gospel, in concrete terms. We proclaim Jesus as the Great Physician. We as Christians are called to be doing what we can to ensure the health of others.

We proclaim Jesus as the Teacher and Rabbi. We are called to be doing what we can to educate, to teach, to share knowledge.

We proclaim Jesus as the Prince of Peace. We are called to be doing the real, hard work of peacemaking in our world.

We proclaim Jesus as the Crucified One, the one unjustly condemned, and so we are called to be doing the work of justice for those who have no advocate.

We proclaim Jesus as one who fed the multitudes, and so we are called to be doing the work of meeting people's material needs--filling their hungry stomachs, ensuring that people have access to clean water, taking care of people's bodily needs. As James will write later in his epistle, If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, 'Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,' and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?"

Our faith demands action.

But more than that. More than the traditional litany of Christian action. Our faith demands that we affirm the goodness of the material order and that we embrace the spirituality of the material. As pastor Rob Bell points out in his lectures and teaching, everything is spiritual. Everything.

Imagine what the world would look like if we truly embraced that. If we saw the ordinary not as mundane and distracting, but as a way into greater communion with God?

What would it look like if we began to see everything we did as a spiritual act? If we saw the meals we shared together (as we will do in a few moments) as a spiritual act? If we saw playing a game of Frisbee on the quad as a spiritual act? Or walking through the park on a hike? Or going to the movies with a friend? Or sharing a hug during the passing of the peace--I realize that many of you already view it that way. Or writing a paper? Driving someone to the airport? Our friendships? Our romances? (The Song of Solomon isn't in the Bible by accident, after all). What if every single aspect of our lives--all the gritty, material, physical things we do every single day were not seen as something that happened apart from God but that were something that happened in connection to God? How much more relevant would our faith be?

VI. END

I don't know why this is so hard for us to get sometimes. Is it because we inherited a Greek philosophical tradition that told us materiality was inferior to spirit? Is it because the church surrendered its responsibility for the material to the Empire? Is it because Protestantism downplayed the importance of works? Because American individualism hyper-spiritualized our faith?

Or is it just that we are sinful creatures and a material, active faith is just that much harder?

Either way, we need a good swift kick in the theological pants. Wesley once said that he did not fear that the "people called Methodist" should ever cease to exist, but feared that they would become a "dead sect" having all the form of religion, without any of the power. If we are to reclaim that power for our faith, it is precisely by its intersection with the material world. Because that's where people live. That's the world that God created. That's the world that Word became flesh for. That's the world that Jesus moved and lived and taught and died in. That's the world into which he was raised again. That's the world that will be redeemed at the final coming of God's kingdom.

We are called to be about doing the work of that Kingdom. A kingdom not in some distant far off plane: but here, on earth. For the Word that became flesh, calls us to be doers of the word, not hearers only.

If we were to do that. If we were to claim such a faith, engaged, active, committed, real. Then someone at some party might ask you, "So, what do you do?" and you could say, "I'm a Christian." And that would be the best answer you could give.