Where Does Faith Require You to Act?

September 8, 2024 - The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost Sermon preached at Lions Park Beach in St. Joseph at the 4 pm "Sandy Mass"

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Well, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for a chance to be with you all here today... if you haven’t heard, my name is John Wakefield, and I am the new Rector up Interstate 196 in South Haven at the Church of the Epiphany. Epiphany is my first call as an ordained minister, and I am still a transitional deacon to be ordained to the priesthood in December... There’s some debate about whether or not you can call me Father John, but I’ve leaned into it in South Haven, so Father, Deacon, just John, whatever works. It's nice to meet you.

My wife, Abbey, our daughters, Lily, Nora, and Jane, and I all moved north from Sewanee, Tennessee, in June, where I finished a year of Anglican Studies at the Episcopal School of Theology there. Before that, we were living in Charlotte, North Carolina, where I worked at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church and Abbey worked as a public elementary school teacher for several years...... before that, Abbey and I lived in Detroit and Columbus, Ohio...... and before I met her, I lived in Seattle, northern Idaho, Mozambique, Zambia, South Africa, Egypt, China, Chicago, and the Illinois suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri. Abbey and I have traveled to Italy, Switzerland, and England together... we have been to Argentina, Ireland, Scotland, Kenya, Russia, and South Korea separately. We have literally been around the world... and we are very blessed to have seen quite a bit of God’s beautiful creation.

But I can honestly say to you today, with not just a little bit of flattery intended, that western Michigan might be the most beautiful place I have ever lived. Cape Town might be a close second, and Seattle may come close too on the rare occasion it isn’t gray and drizzling, but here on the shores of Lake Michigan, we are all lucky to have access to some of the most amazing and breathtaking evidence of God that there is anywhere on earth, and I honestly don’t think that’s overselling it. We are all so blessed. 

A few weeks ago, Fr. Jay Johnson at All Saints Saugatuck generously invited Abbey and me out for a sunset cruise on the ship that he helps crew every Friday in the summer, the “Friends Goodwill.” We had been on the water with some parishioners just the weekend before, but the experience of riding on a re-creation of a tall ship from the early 1800s, complete with billowing sails and an operational cannon... well, I highly recommend it. Canon Sunil Chandy and his wife Simi joined us that night, and the wind was just calm enough to make jackets unnecessary.... and the sunset that evening was the most beautiful I have ever seen. We weren’t sure we would see it; clouds earlier in the day had not completely cleared, but just in time for the sun to settle into the horizon on the water, the clouds parted, and yellows and reds and oranges and pinks lit up the sky. When combined with the rolling blues and grays of the calm water, we just stared in witness at (and took too many iPhone photos of) a brilliant, artistic masterpiece. There’s no other word for it. All the passengers and crew were overwhelmed by beauty for a good 20 minutes, and then we slowly made our way back upriver to the Maritime Museum’s safe harbor.

Now, as the newcomer here to this area of the country, I know that I do not need to sell you all on its beauty. You know where you live, you can look around us today and simply be thankful. But maybe sometimes you forget how lucky we are, especially this time of year, to be here. A newcomer’s perspective can sometimes help us see familiar things in a new way... and there’s clearly a tie in to our gospel passage in that truth, where a Syrophoenician woman shifts even Jesus’s perspective with a simple reframing of the situation she finds herself in. Sometimes, we all need reminders. If you need one today, this is a lovely place to live and to serve. Thank you for welcoming us to it.

But I’m guessing some of you heard a sermon on the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7 this morning, we did at Epiphany, and it sounds like Freya preached one here in town... or if not this morning then at least at some point, and so I’m not going to preach on that passage. I’ll instead preach on the letter from James, as I think James chapter 2 is one of the most famous and pivotal passages in all of scripture, and I think it ties in well for us here on the shore of Lake Michigan this afternoon.

I preached on the first chapter of James at Epiphany last week, and so for a few of us here some of this may be a refresher, but unlike much of the New Testament, James was written as a letter specifically to Jewish Christians, and Jesus himself gets only a few mentions. Some commentators argue that that is in part because James wanted to connect this new life that the Jews were being called to live as Christians to the promises of God made to Abraham, to the religious life that they lived before the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. That Jewish life was often one of strict adherence to the law, of following rules and regulations, of works... and it often had less to do with faith. Jesus continually had to make a correction here with the law-focused Pharisees, and then Paul did too, emphasizing the importance of faith often in his letters to churches, most often in his writings to the Gentiles.

So, this now famous distinction in the church between faith and works was very much in the water in the first century. Paul was writing to the Romans that they needed simply to believe in their heart and declare Jesus is Lord with their mouths to be saved, something many hear as the full and only message even today, that nothing else matters but praying a sinner's prayer... but for Jews who had for generations followed the law to show their devotion to God, well, that was probably a tough message to swallow too.

James here in chapter 2 provides a bit of a correction then to the faith-focused Paul, and some would argue it can be seen as a correction to Jesus too. Martin Luther famously called James the “epistle of straw” and put it at the back of this translation of the New Testament in 1552... and Catholic preachers of Luther’s time had long been preaching a works-based salvation, a Pelagian-heretical way to earn your own salvation through rituals and acts, rather than a salvation by faith alone, by our acceptance of a gift freely given. Those preachers were indeed contradicting Jesus in their preaching of James.

But that faulty interpretation, as Luther likely understood, came from not reading the letter of James in its proper context, as a letter written to Jewish communities facing specific struggles. Instead, James knew that the Jews needed to hear that their faith required action of them, that their works were proof of their faith. As James writes in the first chapter, slightly translated for us today, “If you think you’re religious but your life hasn’t been changed, well, your religion is actually pretty worthless.” Maybe some of us need to hear that today too.

In today’s reading, James repeats his message from chapter 1 with much more specific emphasis. “You do well if you really love your neighbor as yourself... 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? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” Combined with the beginning of this passage, with James’ criticism of favoritism toward the rich, we should be able to see where liberation theologians find what they call God’s preferential option for the poor. Western Christians like us have to continually fight to make sure we see the poor in the world and in our neighborhoods as “rich in faith” and as “heirs of the kingdom,” not as failures or nuisances or the uneducated or the results of bad government or of their own poor decisions. Our consumer- and ambition-driven culture often paints them as such. But we must truly love our neighbors as ourselves, all of our neighbors, or our faith, without our much-needed works, is indeed dead.

Now, you might be wondering how this sermon all ties together, where it’s going with personal introductions and then a quick dive into the epistle of straw and faith and works. Or maybe you’re just tuning me out completely and enjoying the scenery, our lovely setting here this afternoon. Well, as one of the great privileges of this vocation, of my new position here in the southwest corner of the future Diocese of the Great Lakes, I have the chance, the opportunity to sit with Sunday’s scripture for an entire week and see where the Spirit leads. It’s wonderful.

And this week, as I read the letter of James to the Jewish communities of the first century, I could not help but consistently go back to that beautiful sunset on Lake Michigan. That image would simply not go away, the oranges and the blues and the ever so slight breeze on the air as the light began to dim. I could not help but think about the beauty of God’s creation, especially the portion that we get to experience on a daily basis here. And then, I could not help but wonder how my faith, my religion, my appreciation for God’s gift here in nature, has impacted my actions, my works, to help preserve it.

Now you might know that the Episcopal Church is now in what it is calling “The Season of Creation,” a month-long specific focus from the denomination on creation care, environmentalism, and lobbying efforts to make changes to national policy regarding green initiatives. I’m also personally pairing that month-long season with Brian McLaren’s new book, Life After Doom, which is just super cheery and focuses on the nearly inevitable climate catastrophe we now face in light of generations of abuse of our created world in the name of financial profit and personal, short-term comfort. This is a time, for me at least, to wonder how my faith requires me to act to preserve the natural world for my descendants, for my three children and hopefully theirs, to make services like this one possible, to ensure that sunsets on Lake Michigan are enjoyed for a long time to come. The next few decades of climate change will almost inevitably have dramatic effects on our world, effects which often most severely affect the already marginalized. We as Christians do have and will have an important role to play here, as we always have. May we all take time to consider what that role will be.

But this passage in James might be calling you to something else (though I do strongly believe it’s calling you to consider Creation Care at least in part). The argument that “faith by itself without works is dead” rings true across the board, across the broad spectrum of ways we live in the world.

What does it mean if we say we believe and then hoard money in savings accounts and refuse to feed the hungry? What does it mean if we say we pray for Ukraine and Gaza and then do little else to work toward peace? What does it mean if we fill in a box on a ballot in November and then do nothing else to lift up the marginalized? From James more specifically, what does it mean if we say we believe and then we clearly favor the person with gold rings and fine clothes over those without, even in our own churches? What does it mean if we say we believe and then go about a life completely indistinguishable from (and sometimes even worse than!) those who do not believe at all? 

New friends here today, I am thankful for a chance to ask those questions here and in South Haven at the Church of the Epiphany, and I bet your clergy and lay leaders are thankful for that chance as well. I hope that you can take time this week to sit with James’ call to the first-century Jewish Christians, to make sure that your faith is not just words or thoughts or beliefs but actions too, actions that come out of a life spent with a heart close to God. I can assure you that there are few places on earth where you have a better (or more readily available) opportunity to recognize God’s presence and powerful creative hand than here on the shores of Lake Michigan.

We are indeed all blessed; may we use our lives to go forth and bless others as well. Amen.