Sermon 18th January 2009

Today, Simon Brindley preaches based on the reading from James 2: 14-26

– “Faith without actions is dead”

I’d like to start, if I may, by taking you back to a scene from my childhood. My father was a parish priest in a coal-mining community on the edge of the town of Blyth in Northumberland about 15 miles north-east of the city of Newcastle on Tyne. (Any sharp-eared football fans would be correct in thinking this is the same Blyth whose amateur team Blyth Spartans, lost 1-0 at home to the Premiership’s Blackburn Rovers two weeks ago in the 3rd round of the FA Cup but, unfortunately perhaps, the footballing aspects of Blyth have got nothing more to do with this sermon….). There had at one time been at least three or four coalmines, or “pits” as they were known, in Blyth and by the time we moved there in 1963 there were still at least two in production.

The route to school was to go out of the back door of the vicarage, across the garden, through a gate in the wooden fence into the back-garden of a house on the neighbouring council estate, call at their back door for the neighbours’ boys and then all walk for half a mile or so through the estate to a primary school right on the edge of the town. It was situated in an area or suburb known as New Delaval, except that the school was pretty much all that was left of that community. In front of the school wall was a dirt road, to the right a couple of hundred yards away was what we called a pit-heap, which is the waste heap from a coal mine. At the back end of the pit heap was the abandoned mine shaft and lifting gear of the old New Delaval Pit which had closed in 1955 and in front of the school, in an area of some acres – it must have been a decent size as it is now a golf course - was pretty much a wasteland, where once had been a whole community of buildings and streets of some sort. We knew that because everywhere you went you could find, half overgrown, the foundations of buildings, where once had been a thriving area full of people. These foundations were flat areas of concrete or brick flooring with just the slightest remnants of brick walls around them and there were enough to indicate a large number of buildings had been there, but now these flat foundations were overgrown with weeds and surrounded by rainwater ponds. I’ve always assumed that this must have been the coal-mining suburb of New Delaval, rows of 19th century miners’ cottages and so on. It’s possible it was a mix of that and buildings for the mine itself, it wasn’t obvious to us as children, but now only the foundations were left, for as far as seven year old eyes could see. Apart from the school and one or two derelict buildings in the distance round the mineshaft itself there was no human element left in this particular area, no life, no laughter, no people, no community.

Pause…

If faith “is alone, and includes no actions”, says the letter of James, written “to all God’s people scattered over the whole world”, “then it is dead.”

Faith and actions, belief and good deeds, a relationship with God and relationships with your neighbour. On one level James’ message seems quite clear. He was a very straight talker. “Don’t just sit there in the seats or pews believing” he might say to us all today, “get off your backsides and do something!”

But there is a lot behind all this and it may be helpful to ask ourselves what is the significance of these two fundamental elements of Christianity, faith and actions, and how do they relate to each other?

First, what is it that makes us right with God? Is it just our faith, that is what we believe, our having put our trust in God as revealed through his Son Jesus Christ, or is it what we do, our good deeds? This is the first question James poses for his readers, when he says “My brothers and sisters, what good is it for people to say that they have faith if their actions do not prove it? Can that faith save them?”

A colleague at work with whom I have a good relationship sometimes, not so good at others, asked me on Friday just gone if I’d like to have a coffee and we popped out of the office for half an hour or so in the late morning. We chatted at first about issues that we have both grappled with at work over the last few years. I don’t actually know what background of faith he has, if any. His name suggests he might come from an Islamic background, but I really don’t know. “I need to ask you something” he said after a few minutes, “it’s not work related.” “Is it true” he asked, “that it doesn’t matter how many good deeds you do, that won’t be enough on its own to make you right with God?”…that wasn’t quite how he put it, but that was the heart of his question and for the next 10 minutes we talked about Jesus Christ. We didn’t have long and we agreed to talk again. He asked for a book on how you reconcile belief in God with suffering in the world.

But the underlying question was there, in a coffee shop on Fleet Street in 2009, just as it was in the first century Middle East. What is it that makes right my relationship with God? Are good deeds not enough on their own? Is faith enough? Don’t you need to be a good person as well?

If you’ll forgive a brief detour into some of the theology I am just beginning to read in connection with my Reader’s training course, these issues have been widely debated by Christian thinkers over the centuries. A debate was raging in the fifth century AD, over 1500 years ago, between thinkers like Pelagius who was a British monk living in Rome, who argued that since God has given us the free will to choose to do what is right or what is wrong and given us the example of Jesus to follow, then we will be judged by whether we do the right things or not, we will be judged by our deeds, by our actions and on the other side of the debate was Augustine, a Bishop from North Africa, what is now Algeria, one of the greatest thinkers of Christian history, who also spent time in Italy and whose rigorous and compelling analysis of the New Testament makes it clear that we cannot fundamentally be put right with God by what we do, rather human nature is inevitably sinful and our good deeds are never going to get us all the way there. So it is only by God’s grace, freely given by the death of his Son that the fundamental problem of sin can actually effectively be dealt with. The good things we do are then a response to the grace of God and the result of God working with our human nature, in all its weaknesses, by his Holy Spirit.

It was Augustine’s view which came out firmly on top in these fifth century debates and later in church history when similar questions were asked again and it is this view that does seem to be clearly consistent with the New Testament as a whole. So James is not suggesting that our good deeds will be enough to make right our relationship with God. He is not denying that faith is the foundation of our Christianity. Rather he is asking the question from the other end and that is whether faith in fact, on its own, is enough. Where will faith get us if that is the only way that our Christianity is expressed?

And James’ resounding, in your face answer is, effectively, that it will get us nowhere at all.

So why does he say this? Are his words just designed to make us feel bad, to feel that all we ever do is come to church and express our faith in worship and prayer and the little that we manage to achieve in expressing our faith through what we do in the rest of our life, the meagre efforts of our good deeds, isn’t ever going to be good enough? No, I do not believe this is the right way to look at what he says at all.

Rather, I think what James is saying to his readers is something like this. Friends, brothers and sisters, do not accept the view that faith is enough. Do not fall back into that way of thinking. Do not accept that you can play your part in building the Kingdom of God with only foundations, but nothing built on them. If you do, you will fall into a trap. Someone you know will come to see you who is hungry or has no clothes to wear and you will think it is enough just to say “God bless you! I really hope you stay warm and find food.”

Be very careful, if you like, that your good news is not only for Sunday mornings, only for singing and praying. Be very careful that your church is not confined to its buildings, that its holiness is not just behind closed doors. That way your church, as a living community with an impact in society, may die. (At this point, just in case it is crossing anyone’s mind, I am not criticising those closed Christian monastic communities who are called to a life of prayer and devotion behind a monastery wall. That may, for the few who are called to it, be a very effective way of joining in the building of God’s Kingdom in the world. Rather I am talking about what normal Christian church communities are encouraged to do).

“But does everyone have to take this message on board?” asks James next. “Can’t I just have the faith bit and let someone else do the good deeds?” Isn’t it enough that I am part of a faith community that collectively does good things?

Again, James’ answer is a resounding “No!” Show me, he says, how anyone can have faith without actions. And this, for me, is the heart of it. How can you believe in God as revealed in the life of Jesus of Nazareth and not feel a compulsion to try to put your faith into action? Read the gospels again and what do we see? A hermit in a cave receiving the fortunate few and speaking strange spiritual wisdom? No! A prince, studying and writing in his library whose work and thoughts still intrigue us? No! A priest emerging from behind a curtain, from the holy of holies, to share just glimpses of the secrets that really only he is party to? No! A celebrity and magician? No…! Not even a holy man giving others guidance on how to live their lives in practice. Rather we see this compelling figure, born in poor surroundings and whose public life was utterly involved with those around him, whether the poor and marginalised, the leper, the prostitute, the widow, the hated tax collector as well as those in the higher echelons of society, the rich young ruler, the Roman official and so on and who routinely condemns the religious leaders of the day who fail to practice what they preach………. “Even those who reject Christianity in the old way”, wrote Clive James, the author and broadcaster, on the BBC website on Boxing Day just gone, “will be wise never to let the memory of Jesus die”, citing Jesus’ bravery in his actions in standing up, against those who wanted to stone her, for the woman caught in adultery and his complete acceptance of the woman of ill repute who washes his feet and dries them with her hair.

To force his point home to his Jewish readers, James cites the examples of two of Jesus’ ancestors: Abraham, prepared actually to sacrifice his son Isaac on the altar in his desire to be obedient to what he knew God was asking him to do and Rahab the Prostitute from Jericho, who hid the Israelite spies and let them down the city wall in a basket shortly before Jericho was taken by the Israelites, returning to Canaan from their wanderings in the desert after their escape from Egypt. For both, says James, it was their actions and not their faith alone, which worked together. Abraham’s faith was made perfect by his actions.

In fact, says James, it is a person’s actions which are the evidence of their faith. You simply can’t have faith on its own, he says, echoing Jesus’ warning against false prophets recorded in both Matthew and Luke’s gospels, that “you will know them by what they do. Thorn bushes do not bear grapes and briars do not bear figs....A healthy tree bears good fruit.”

And all of this is a long way, it seems to me, from some of the stereotypes which may have dogged the traditional Christian church in this country at least at times during the 20th century – the stereotypes of those who need faith as a crutch and those do-gooders whose good deeds merely feed their own feelings of self righteousness and superiority. These are simply not credible in the light of the New Testament and as an example James himself roundly condemns, earlier in Chapter 2 of this letter, those who show any prejudice towards the wealthy and well dressed in their meetings over the poor and shabby who attend. Christian action is not mere self righteous do-gooding!

So how will this encouragement to Christians, this command if you like, to put our faith into practice work its way out?

Sometimes it will do so dramatically and I can think of two examples of modern heroes which are relevant in the coming week and so worth reminding ourselves of, the first probably much more familiar to us than the second.

In two days’ time, on Tuesday 20th January, Barack Hussein Obama will be inaugurated as the first African-American President of the United States in a ceremony that may attract as many as 2 to 3 million people to the streets of Washington (including at least one member of our churches as Adjoa’s daughter Jesse has gone over specifically to be there!). But tomorrow, Monday 19th January, fittingly, is the national holiday in the USA dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King, a Baptist preacher who was so steeped in the values of the gospel that he simply had to stand up and lead the fight in the 1960’s against racial injustice and there can be little doubt that we would not have seen Obama’s great day without King’s willingness to put his faith into action. A year or so ago the British politician, Oona King, set out in a TV documentary to show that Martin Luther King’s politics could be separated out from the foundations of his Christian faith. I think she hoped to show his faith as incidental, perhaps of his time, but she concluded by the end that you simply could not separate Martin Luther King’s political actions from his Christian faith and I am convinced that her conclusion was correct.

The second modern example concerns what was called the July 1944 plot to kill Adolf Hitler, led by the German Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, about to be portrayed by Tom Cruise in the film Valkyrie which opens in the UK this Friday 23rd January. The plotters had many motives, but amongst the German resistance at that time, and included amongst those who paid with their lives, were some who were quite explicitly led by their Christian faith to stand up against what they could see were the evils of the Nazis. The most well known was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor and theologian who was imprisoned many times for his opposition to the Nazis and finally hanged in a concentration camp at the beginning of April 1945. His brother Klaus Bonhoeffer was shot as a traitor two weeks later for his part in the resistance, both of them just weeks before the end of the Second World War.

These are dramatic examples. Most of us are not put into such dramatic situations, but thank God, there is no particular hierarchy of good deeds, only people who try to be disciples. We are where we are and if we trust God for our lives, we are where he wants us to be and with the people he wants us to be with. We are part of these Christian communities in South London that we call St Paul’s and St Saviour’s in the parish of Herne Hill. And, however imperfectly, as disciples of Jesus Christ, we are called by our actions – actions of friendship to those we meet in our community, actions of working with children, actions in supporting those who are sick or dying, actions in generosity of our giving, actions in visiting those in prison, and in countless other ways, we are called by our actions to build on the foundations of our faith in this place that God has given us. The Christian vision – and in my view the Church’s vision for the 21st century – is not of a weed covered wasteland of mere foundations of faith, an old idea and community decayed and dying.

Instead – and I can’t put it better than our own Archbishop of York when he said in his inauguration sermon at the end of 2005,

“[Jesus’] idea, which has lasted over the centuries, was simply this: a mixed community of sinners called to be saints, a divine society where the risen Christ in the midst of it is grace and truth, and the Holy Spirit is at work within it. An inclusive and generous friendship, where each person is affirmed as of infinite worth, dignity and influence. A community of love, overwhelming in gratitude and wholehearted surrender, because it participates in the life of God”.

And just one example, quoting a few weeks ago the Archbishop of Canterbury who said that the answer during the current economic crisis will not lie in some larger than life economic giant who will save us but in countless acts of human generosity.

No doubt it was this kind of vision that fired the apostle James. Faith without actions is dead, he said. He could just as easily have said that where a community of love in action is built on the foundations of faith, then you look out and see, not a derelict wasteland but God at work in society, a place of life and hope…

Amen

Sermon 11th January 2009

Today, our Associate Vicar, John Itumu, preaches based on the reading from James 1: 19-27

Listening and doing

Last Sunday’s sermon in which Cameron introduced this new teaching series from the book of James, brings to mind the story of a husband who upon arriving home, was met at the door by his sobbing wife. Tearfully she explained, "It's the pharmacist. He insulted me terribly this morning on the phone." Immediately the husband shot out downtown to confront the man and demand an apology.

Before he could say more than a few words, the pharmacist told him, "Now, just a minute sir, please listen to my side of it...

This morning the alarm failed to go off, so I was late getting up. I went without breakfast and hurried out to the car, just to realize that I locked the house with both house and car keys inside. I had to break a window to get my keys. Then, driving a little too fast, I got a speeding ticket.

Three blocks from the store, I had a flat tyre. When I got to the store, there was a bunch of people waiting for me to open up. I opened and started waiting on these people, and all the time the phone was ringing."

Then a customer handed me a handful of coins, and they spilled all over the floor. I got down on my hands and knees to pick them up; the phone was still ringing and ringing. As I rose from my knees, I banged my head on the open cash drawer, which made me stagger back against the shelf with perfume bottles on it...all of them hit the floor and broke.

Meanwhile, the phone was still ringing with no let up, and I finally got to answer it. It was your wife. She wanted to know how to use a rectal thermometer and, honest sir, all I did was tell her!"

There is a bit of this in James’ letter. The tone is that of ‘enough of beating about the bush - I will tell it as it is’. And trust me, it hurts. Hear him start to tell:

V14 but each of you is tempted when you are dragged away by your own evil desire and enticed. Then after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and when sin is full grown, gives birth to death.

James reminds us that in every human being an innate tendency to sin. The prophet Jeremiah many years before had talked about the heart and said:

Jer 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?

And the way that evil desire operates in us is described metaphorically with the words ‘dragged away and enticed.’ These words remind me of how as a young boy we set traps for wild birds that were damaging crops in the farm. To lure them, we would pour seed and watch them being slowly lured and lead to the trap. Before they knew it they would be dangling, caught and facing our wrath.
The temptations of Eve & king David follow the same sequence – desire, sin, death. Eve desired the forbidden fruit and before she knew it, she had sinned and set off a sequence of events that led to the fall. (Gen 2-3) Similarly the famous Israelite king David desired Bathsheba from the roof top of his palace and before long the whole saga eventually led to the death of Uriah, her husband. (2 Sam 11-12)

But James has some encouraging news for us all:

V18 God has chosen to give us birth through the word of truth

Birth in this sense means regeneration – renewal, revival, rejuvenation. This gift of God’s word to us, however confronts our innate tendency to sin. The old nature to sin and the new nature given by God are in constant conflict. We could say that there is a battle of wills. This is an issue that the apostle Paul articulately dwells on especially in Romans 7.

It is also the thing that gets us easily stuck in infancy as a Christian. We are only 11 days into the year. You have probably purposed to make a few changes in your life this year – it may be a stride in your faith in 2009! A new start! But the question remains: how do we get ourselves unstuck from those unhelpful habits and lifestyles of the yester years? Sometimes life feels as when a vinyl record player got stuck and repeated a phrase endlessly, if you remember them? So what is the way forward then?

Well James has an answer for us.

My dear brother and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, 20 because our anger does not produce righteous life that God desires. 21Therefore, get rid of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you. 22Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Those who listen to the word but do not do what it says…

In four verses he brings us back to the word thrice – that is the word of God – holy scripture. Why does he do this? I looked up some research results posted by the Barna Group in the US who research about religious belief. Here are some results for a research done 3 years ago on people describing themselves as Christians:
37% could name all four Gospels.
42% of adults could name at least five of the Ten Commandments correctly.
¼ of all people never read the bible.

A UK blogsite suggests that 70-80% of people in the UK who call themselves Christians have never read the entire bible! We might also have heard it said that the bible should not be read from cover to cover – that just reading the gospels and the Psalm should suffice. Others insist that since Paul was not Jesus he should be read with a pinch of salt. Still others cast doubt on the historicity and therefore the authenticity of the bible and which means that it should be taken as one huge symbol. This and other arguments abound. I am also aware that statistics can be made to say what we want and for that reason, I will leave it to you to extrapolate these research findings and apply them to yourself.

But I have some good news for you today. And I mean everyone here today; God has brought us here for this one reason: God would like us to start living fully; to start living as we were meant to; to stop getting a raw deal from life. Get ourselves unstuck. Even those who have accepted Christ – God wants to take you to yet another level – a newer life.

James provides an answer for all categories of people:
And this is it; we really need to hear the word. It is both our point of departure into this new life promised by God, (because hearing it initiates this new birth). It is also and must be a continuing and dominant factor in our lives.

If the word is to have any impact, there must be a willingness and eagerness to listen. It is possible to hear something and not really listen to what has been said. How often do we just sit through a sermon and drift away – I am happy to take some of the blame for that as a frequent preacher. But equally how often do we not read the word for ourselves, and when we do - how often do we after 15 minutes realise that we haven’t really listened to what we have just read?

It is instructive that James does not go into methods and plans of bible reading, use of devotional materials and the like, important as they are. Methods and plans are useless, if the heart is not attentive, if the reading is not really being heard.

Secondly, those who want to listen and hear God speak must be less impressed with the sound of their own voices. I know we have a lot to say, but a little less talking will put us on the right track, of listening and hearing. It reminds me of the saying about God giving us two ears to listen twice as we speak.

And so how do we know that we have heard? Well the word of God changes our lifestyle – thoughts, aspirations, outlook to life.
Is 55:10
As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish…so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

The word of God, the word of truth, does not affirm our sinful nature, but rather confronts it bringing us to repentance. It gets us unstuck from regrettable lifestyles, even breaks chains of bondage from unhelpful habits. This is the new life. That is what it accomplishes because it is God’s desire to do so! So friends, do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourself. Just do it!

And for those who choose to do this – there is blessing.
V25But those who look intently into the perfect law that gives freedom and continue in it – not forgetting what they have heard but doing it – they will be blessed in what they do.
Law and freedom in our modern thinking are strange bedfellows. If anything, the law curtails our freedom! But we can understand this unique relationship between the two if we look back at when God gave the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. God starts with the declaration:

Ex 20:2
I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery…He then goes to address a people who are now free, giving them commandments to live by and therefore fully enjoy their new found freedom; the freedom he has secured for them. We are truly free when we live lives that are appropriate to those created in God’s image. God’s law safeguards and ensures that freedom/liberty. It is for this reason that James declares that those who take God’s law seriously, anyone who looks intently, suggesting a sustained gaze, everyday; that continued immersion in God’s truth, all day, for all our lives. For such people – there is a blessing.

The outworking of a truly religious life is grounded on this word of truth. But if we don’t read it - how shall we know God’s will for us? How shall we engage with the world? How shall we live the full life that God has called us into?

Finally:
Listening, hearing and doing this word will help us engage with three difficult areas of behaviour mentioned:
taming our tongue, showing a practical concern for others without looking for a return or recognition – because how can a widow or orphan repay you?; resisting to be swept away by worldly values and standards. As a people who know who God is, how different is our use of time, money and energy from those who don’t know Christ?
Why do I ask this question?
Because the new birth brought about by the word implanted in us cannot leave our lives unchanged. Something transformative happens. The word does not affirm our sinful fallen nature – it transforms it.

I know God’s word changes lives, because mine was changed. I also know that God speaks to us in a myriad of ways. The word says that God even "shouts" to us through creation. Psalm 19"The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard… to the ends of the world."
God speaks to us through dreams, and even other people..God also speaks to us through various circumstances – and often it is when a crisis strikes because then we are more likely to stop and listen. God also speaks very specifically through his Word, the Bible.
But friends, the bottom line is this; in life we see what we want to see, we pay attention to what we want to pay attention, we hear what we want to hear. Hearing God's voice and doing it is a choice – and I leave that with you with a prayer that we would choose to hear and God’s word and do it. Let us pray.

Sermon 4th January 2009

A happy new year to you!

Today, our Vicar, Cameron Barker, preaches - based on the reading from James 1 verse 1

Just as the crowded plane was ready for take off, the peace was shattered! A 5-year-old boy picked that exact moment to throw a major temper tantrum. No matter what his frustrated, embarrassed mother did to try and calm him down, the boy kept on screaming furiously, and kicking the seats around him

Then, from the rear of the plane, a smart-looking older man in an SAS uniform walked slowly up the aisle. The well-decorated soldier calmly took over from the flustered mother. He knelt down next to the boy, made eye-contact with him, pointed to his own chest, and whispered in his ear.

Instantly the boy calmed down. He took his mother's hand and quietly fastened his seat belt. Other passengers nodded their admiration at the soldier as he walked back to his seat. On his way, an air hostess asked him: 'Excuse me, sir, but can you please tell me what magic words you spoke to that little boy?'

The soldier smiled, and said: 'I just showed him my medals, and explained that they entitle me to throw one passenger out of the plane door on any flight I choose!'

Let's be honest: not many of us like being told what to do, by anybody! There are times, though, when, like that little boy, we don't have much choice but to do what we're told. Even when that is the case, we still don't like it. And so I do have to begin this year by giving you bad news. From now to the start of Lent we are all going to be told what to do!

Of course we will have rather more choice about how we respond to being told what to do than that boy did! But the fact remains that we will be told what to do – and we'll be told that by no-one less than God himself! This letter from James that we're beginning to study today is only 108 verses long. But it contains almost 60 direct instructions on how to live out the Christian life. And the author's clear, God-given intention was that his readers – which very much include us – should do just what he told them to do!

Welcome to the letter of James, then! There's much that can, and should be said by way of introduction to it. That's what today is mostly about, as we launch into our 2009 teaching programme. But probably the most important thing we each need to hear today is this: faith means next to nothing unless we put it into practice. That's so vital that I need to say it again: faith means next to nothing unless we put it into practice. It's the same as trying to separate a head from a body. If we do that, there can be no life. Well, in the same way, a faith that has no action attached to it is just as incapable of living. Faith without action is dead!

If you hear nothing else today, do take that away with you. Faith without action is dead. So, if you 'do' them, and are still looking for a New Year's resolution how about making that it? What about spending all of this year asking how what you are doing, and how you are doing it, is putting your faith into practice? Yes, that would be a major challenge for most of us to do; but I dare to suggest that there's nothing better that any one of us could do with our life this year. And so, to help us at least start out down that road, we will ask for a very practical faith-action response before the end of this series.

More details of that will follow, later today, and in the weeks to come. To be honest, though, chances are that we will all be challenged to take different kinds of practical action every week. And of course the hope is that this process won't just stop when we reach Lent! This is – or should be – a life-long learning-and-action cycle for any person of faith. And that shouldn't come as news to any church regular. The Christian faith has always been about not just hearing but also doing the word of God. Jesus himself often ended his teaching by challenging his hearers to put it into practice. Often that brought about the desired response – but not always: sometimes people walked away – as we too can choose to do.

But, make no mistake: the letter of James falls very solidly into the biblical pattern of the call for obedience to God's ways. In fact, James is often called the Amos of the New Testament. He's known as that because of the way that he followed the well-established Old Testament pattern, of preaching God's truth straight, and then demanding a practical response to it. That practical response was instant, total, and joyful obedience to God's ways. By the way, James' other nickname was 'Old Camel Knees', apparently! He earned that by the thick calluses on his knees that were the result of extended praying. You see, James also prayed for God to bring about that instant, total, and joyful Godly obedience that he had demanded from his readers. And there can be no better example than that for any would-be leader to follow.

However, I've got rather ahead of myself. It is important to know more about the person who wrote this letter, and why he wrote it. But first we have to tackle the controversy that surrounds this letter. If you know your Bible, or your church, history, you'll know that James almost didn't make it into the Bible at all! Prominent church figures, like Martin Luther in particular, were strongly minded that it shouldn't have done. He was quick to point out that Jesus barely features in this letter at all. He's mentioned in the first verse, and then never again. But this isn't a letter that tells us about who Jesus is, or what he did. It's purely about how we must respond to God's truth, by living it out in certain very practical ways.

James' main assumption was that his readers had already heard the message of Jesus. He took it that they knew all they needed to, and now needed to get on with living it. The challenge was how to live in the truth in the new, and very difficult circumstances that his original readers faced. It's hard to know exactly when this letter was written; but it could have been as early as 48 AD. What is for sure is that, by the time James wrote, the infant church was scattered to the four winds. Persecution had driven the believers from their home in Jerusalem. They had fled to a series of strange, and often hostile, places around the Mediterranean. Their task was to live out their faith for Jesus wherever they were.

So, in his letter, James just by-passed all the theology. He knew that his readers had been taught that, or could read it elsewhere. Instead, he went straight to the heart of the most important matter at hand: what does faith look like in the midst of change and turmoil. How can we honour God, make a difference, and live out the life-transforming good news about Jesus no matter what's going on around us. Well, like this; and this; and this, James wrote – as we will see in the coming weeks. And I, for one, am very glad that this letter did make it into the Bible, as it deserves to have done. I love the Gospel stories about the life of Jesus. I do enjoy a good wrestle with Paul's intellect. But I also need a very practical challenge like this, about how to live out my faith in any circumstances – and I bet that you do, too.

The other important dimension that James brings to us is this: this letter explodes the myth that any church is meant to be perfect! It's easy to perpetuate that one, especially when we are feeling unfairly done to by 'the church'. But the honest realism we see in James reminds us that the church really is a place for sinners. The only advantage we have over other imperfect people is that we can be honest about our shortcomings – with God, ourselves, and others – and be forgiven. Then we can help each other to find better ways to live: better ways like those demanded by James in his letter.

Yes, James spent some of his letter confronting sin. So there may well be uncomfortable moments ahead, for us all. But, in case you're now worried about that practical faith-action response, I can say that it's not primarily about sin! Of course we may want, and need, to take on board James' instructions about our own particular failings. But the specific faith-action response that we'll be looking for is to do with money. James did write about that topic too, along the lines that we are each responsible to God for how we use what He has given us. And, even though there is a credit crunch on, we will all be invited to review what we give to God's work through this church. The figures say not just that most of us have room for improvement, but also that one is needed if we are to avoid real financial trouble this year.

All the details about that are in a letter, that we'll each get, and be invited to respond to before the end of this series. Today I'll just say that James' key principle – that faith without action is dead – applies as much to our giving as to all other areas of our life. I'll then leave that with you, and round off this series introduction by talking a bit more about who James is. The short answer is that we can't be certain who wrote this letter. But the most convincing evidence points to it very likely having been written by none other than James, the brother of Jesus himself.

He appears in several places in New Testament, not least as the leader of the first church in Jerusalem. There's no time to delve into that evidence, or those appearances now. What I do want is to point out that James began his letter by making none of those claims. He could have laid it on thick, about his status as Jesus' brother, as a leader, an elder, or his reputation for wisdom. Instead, he chose to begin by writing this: “From James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

James called himself a slave – which is the literal Greek translation – because that’s what he had chosen to be for God. He chose to be a slave, with no rights of his own. That is what James chose to be, because he knew that he owed God the deepest debt of gratitude imaginable. James had no doubt that Jesus was God. He'd seen the risen Jesus with his own eyes. He also knew that, by his death and resurrection, Jesus had opened the way to heaven for him. So, in his greeting, james put Jesus alongside God – as his Lord, his master, the one he chose to serve as a slave. And, just as he had given his own life to living that out in practical ways, so James now called his readers to do just the same themselves.

Remember, for James, faith meant next to nothing unless it was put into practice. Remember, for James faith without action was dead. And so he wrote to instruct his readers – including us – on to live out what they believed, in very practical ways, in any and all circumstances. As we begin 2009, then, it's surely time to open our ears, to roll up our sleeves, and to do it! So let's now pray that we will ...