Sermon 11th October 2015

Today, one of our Lay Readers, Simon Brindley, continues our study of the book of James. The reading is from James 2 verses 14-26.

“Faith without actions is dead” (but what about actions without the foundation of faith?)

I preached on this identical passage from the letter of James nearly 7 years ago, in January 2009, and actually I remember it very well (I am not remotely expecting anyone else to!) – and better than most of what I have said in church – because I used an image from my childhood and one that I can still easily recall. I remembered looking out over the low front wall of my primary school in the North East of England in the 1960’s at the site of what had once been a whole coalmining community, a village called New Delaval. But the mine had been closed in the 1950’s and the village largely demolished and all you could see was the bare foundations of where the houses and other buildings had been. Our school was pretty much all that was left standing. And I used that image to illustrate the message that James is trying, quite forcefully, to get across, that if all you have is the foundations of faith, but you have nothing built on them…

…..if you do not build on your faith by your actions, then your faith is, effectively, dead. You have, pretty much, a derelict wasteland. No life….no signs of hope….no laughter.

We’ll obviously have another look this morning at what James says about the need to put your faith into action but I also want to look at this from a slightly different angle and ask another question as well today.  I want to ask not only “Is it not enough that I have my faith, and can’t I even leave the actions, the loving of my neighbour, to other people?” and so on but I also want to ask the following: “But why have faith as the foundations of your actions at all? Isn’t it enough just to love your neighbour? Why do we have to go on about believing in God as well?”

I hope the reasons why I think that is also a good question to ask in 2015 will become clearer over the next few minutes. So here goes. (And what I have tried to do in preparing this morning is just to watch out, over the last couple of months, for examples in real life: in the books I have read or just dipped into, listening to people talking, in the stories in the newspapers, on the radio and so on, for these questions about the relationship between faith and faith in action being thought about - and appearing – all around us, so I hope that at least some of the illustrations I have gathered will help show just how important these issues still are today).

To start with though and putting it at its simplest, this passage from James pretty much hits us between the eyes with its clear-cut message. If all you have is your faith, your believing in God, and you do not actually put it into action, your faith is dead. You simply cannot claim to love God, to have a living relationship with God, to be saved, to be born again, to be a follower of Jesus Christ, in whatever precise terms you prefer to express the fact that you are a believer, and not have with it, some compassion, some desire to do good, some desire to forgive, some desire to love your neighbour, some desire to stand up for what is right, some desire to fight for justice, some desire to work for peace, some desire to help people or however you describe what it might mean for you to put your faith into action. 

You cannot even leave the good works to others within the church family and, as it were, ride on their coat-tails.  James is abundantly clear about that as well. “But someone will say”, he writes, “You have faith and I will do the good works?” But James rejects that option as well. You just cannot leave the actions to others. 

These two elements of Christianity, faith and good works, if you like loving God and loving your neighbour as yourself, inevitably go together. And history, old and recent, is littered with examples of people whose faith has come alive in the good things they have done. James mentions Abraham, prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac although spared from actually having to do so, and Rahab the prostitute, who hid the Israelite spies and let them down the walls of Jericho in a basket during a siege, as examples of faith in action that his readers would have been very familiar with.

This does not mean of course that we must do great things for them to be of real value. The commandment is to love your neighbour, the person or people you come into contact with in your daily life, whoever that might be. The commandment is not to solve the world’s huge problems by yourself, to take everything on your shoulders. There are examples of people of faith who are called upon to do that, to stand out nationally or locally, but for most of us it will be in smaller acts of kindness that we contribute to the bigger picture, whether that is leaving harvest gifts for the refugees (on that one by the way the Southwark Day Centre for Asylum Seekers have said thanks very much for the “bumper crop” we sent them from our Harvest Service recently!) or filling a shoebox with good things for Christmas (listen out very soon for details on this year’s shoebox appeal) or a cup of tea for the neighbour who has lost someone or been abandoned by their partner or a listening ear for the friend whose child is in serious trouble at school or a meal or a visit for the elderly person or a visit to the person in hospital, or cleaning the church hall floor or helping with one of those other many tasks that needs to be done in our church community, or whatever it is. 

Don’t forget the story of the widow’s mite. The two tiny coins were of far more value than the larger gift, because the widow gave from her heart from the little she had to give.

So never think that your own good works are of no value because you think you cannot do much. Do what you can from the heart and God rejoices. If you think what you do is worth little because you cannot do much, you have not understood the message of the gospel. The journalist and broadcaster Libby Purves, who is reported as having clearly stated many times that she does not believe in religion, actually said exactly this in the Times newspaper on September 7, 2015 (1), agreeing that faith can inspire many good things, not only in the famous names – William Wilberforce and Martin Luther King for example - but also in those of whom the author George Eliot wrote, “That things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs”.  There is so much that can be done by ordinary people in their ordinary lives. It may go unseen, what you do for others in your life may be hidden from most other people, but do not underestimate its value.

So far, I hope, so clear enough.

And today of course there are many examples also that do hit the headlines, of faith being put into action. In our own Church of England, Archbishop Justin Welby spoke at an evensong service at a church in Tower Hamlets on Tuesday 29^th September 2015, to a group of about 50 or 60 church members involved one way or another in the battle against the burden of unfair personal debt. “Money” he said “could be a slave-master of the utmost cruelty, without grace and guidance,” as he commissioned the first 150 or so Church Credit Champions to lead debt-counselling and support for credit unions in our own churches. Our Church of England is already heavily involved in this work on the ground; the plan is to roll the work out to another 27 dioceses and train 6000 credit champions in parishes across the country. Much of the work unseen, with ordinary people in the poorest areas of our society but absolutely rooted, said the Archbishop, in the love of Christ and a desire to set people free from the tyranny of unfair finance. If you want to read about this, see the Church Times for 2 October just gone (2).

However, however, however….this idea of good works founded on religious faith is not just now the predominant culture in which we live, at least not in this country. We live in a society that has to a large extent, I think it is fair to say, rejected or at the very least marginalized faith as a foundation for everyday life. The senior Jewish and Catholic leaders in this country Rabbi Mirvis and Cardinal Nichols writing in the Daily Telegraph on 3 September 2015 (3) said that “publicly identifying with any religion has become an act of courage in many western countries because believers are now routinely assumed to be naïve, unsophisticated and narrow minded”. They were urging society not to reject out of hand what people of faith have to say about vital social issues like assisted dying and family values.

And all this raises the question, which is very much alive in our society today, why have faith as the basis of your actions at all? Is it not enough just to do good, for goodness’ sake?! Will that not get us to where we really want to get to?

On more than one occasion over the last few years I have wondered if sport in various forms is not in effect the modern religion? I remember being in a huge and noisy football crowd at St James’ Park Newcastle some years ago and sensing all around me a passion and a sense of belonging and common purpose and commitment and identity that felt almost religious in nature. Not too far from what you might experience in the best of church life. And I was reminded of this thought about sport and religion just a few weeks ago when I read this book, on the recommendation of my son Michael, “The Society of Timid Souls” (4). It is very well researched and movingly written and it is about real people showing incredible courage and dealing with real fear in all kinds of situations. I can highly recommend it. 

In one chapter in this book the author Polly Morland says that the gym has become the twenty-first century church and she describes being part of a crowd of 15,000 runners in a provincial half marathon, so many running for good causes, for cancer sufferers, treatments for a whole range of illnesses and disabilities and so on, often in memory of lost loved ones. And the sense of belonging, of common purpose, of really worthwhile action, of being appreciated, of wanting to help, of good humanity in a modern Sunday morning race, wearing a shirt like this one (5) (Green Macmillan Cancer care T shirt) as I did last Sunday morning in a crowd of many, many thousands in Glasgow can be close to anything you will experience of loving your neighbour through the activities of your church community.

Loving your neighbour does not have to be built on a foundation of faith to be of value. You may want to argue differently, I don’t know, but for me actions without faith are not dead!

I thought of this again during the last few working days. The London Evening Standard, you may well know, has been running a really strong campaign in just the last two weeks first to enquire into the dreadful gang culture and blight on the Angell Town estate only hundreds of yards from where we are this morning, literally just round a few corners in that direction, as I am sure most of you know. And it has culminated in grants of about £150,000 to local heroes setting up all kinds of wonderful improvement projects. It really does seem to me to be a sign of hope and of trying to love your neighbour as you love yourself. Here are some of the local heroes in a beautiful picture on the front of last Monday’s evening paper (6). You might even recognize one or two of the faces.  If you have not read about this yet, please do so.

There are in fact at least two local, ordained Christian women ministers mentioned as very heavily involved in all this effort in Angell Town, but does its value depend on the foundation on which those involved try to build? No, I do not think so, and I do think God rejoices when by their actions people show their love for their fellow human beings, whatever their fundamental foundation and motivation. Good actions without faith are far from dead. They certainly can be signs of hope, of life, of laughter. For this reason among many, perhaps it is not entirely surprising to us who do try to base our lives on the foundation of faith that its role as a foundation for good works is being questioned in our society.

For all kinds of reasons our generation is struggling with its traditions of faith. Jennie and I went to the west of Ireland for two weeks in late July and early August, to a country which seems in many ways to have raced away in recent decades from religion to a much more secular society. While there I dipped into a large volume of poetry by the great modern Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney. Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 and in his lecture titled “Crediting Poetry” to the prize-giving ceremony in Stockholm that year (7) he describes the incredible hardship and internal turmoil of seeing religion and political violence tear apart his country and its people’s lives during the decades of the Troubles. I wish I had time to share more of his moving account but the point I want to make is that the violence surged so powerfully that it became too much for Heaney. He describes himself like a dutiful monk at that time, sitting over his desk, “blowing up sparks [on his fire] for meager heat” and,

 “Forgetting faith, straining towards good works. …Attending insufficiently to the diamond absolutes, among which must be counted the sufficiency of that which is absolutely imagined.” 

Because sometimes life’s circumstances can be so hard, so powerfully against the idea of faith that it can become easier just to forget about God and focus on good works. 

Seamus Heaney himself goes on to write that “finally and happily and not in obedience to the dolorous circumstances of my native place but in spite of them, I straightened up. I began a few years ago to try to make space in my reckoning for the marvellous as well as the murderous.”

But you can certainly understand why, in the face of horror, and even more so where the horror appears to have a religious element,  a thinking person might try to focus on doing good works but not on any foundation of faith.

So why, for the final few minutes, is faith persisting and bubbling up all over the place and why is it still such a powerful motivator to good works and a firm foundation for them?

Well, first I would say it is because faith deals with so much more than our love of our neighbour. It speaks to us about where we come from. It speaks to us of a living relationship with that Creator God. It speaks to us about being loved in spite of anything, it speaks to us of being forgiven in spite of everything. It speaks to us of life beyond the limitations of this life. It speaks to us of hope that is not based only on human effort but is positively and powerfully supported by the living, breathing, indwelling Holy Spirit of God. And faith speaks to us of the value God places on every single created human being in His creation.

And for us who call ourselves Christians, as the Archbishop of Canterbury reminded those who heard him speak on the burdens of debt last week Tuesday, it is the example of Jesus Christ, broken on the cross to set us free, that forces us to face again and again and again the needs of those who are not free, whatever it is that enslaves them.

You see, in this Christian duality of faith and good works, once you accept by choice the option of faith, I think trying in whatever way you can to love your neighbour is not an option, it becomes a command. Forgive me for speculating for a moment, but it may just be that in understanding just that, that the reality is that loving our neighbour as we love ourselves is not intended as an option but intended as a command, that the future of humanity ultimately depends.

And the point I want to leave us with is this. That although faith without actions is dead and although I think we can see that actions without faith are not, faith itself is far from dead and remains a really sound foundation for action. As well as dealing with so much more, our faith compels us to care for others. 

And so we still find the overtly non religious broadcaster Libby Purves this month (1), praising the example of the Queen who says every year that it is the teachings of Jesus Christ and her own accountability before God that provide her with the framework for her life, and Libby Purves wonders at the Queen’s silent steadfastness.

And we find the broadcaster and screenwriter Rhidian Brook talking on 8^th September 2015 on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day (8) about why he chooses to play football on a Sunday instead of go to church and stating, “Playing football instead of going to church isn’t a clash of faith and unbelief, its just a clash of timetables. But nor is football - for all its unexpected similarities – a substitute. The church carries a great hope beyond itself and that hope continues to draw me to pursue God with others, even if not always at the usual time.”

And it is why finally the new Liverpool football manager Jurgen Klopp – you may not know this yet – says that if anyone asks him about his faith, “I give information. Not because I claim to be any sort of missionary. But when I look at me and my life – and I take time for that every day – then I feel that I am in sensationally good hands” (9).

Amen to that.

Faith without actions is dead but faith remains a powerful and sound foundation for our love of others. Faith has inspired many generations to do good things. It continues to do so and will, I pray, for generations and generations to come, compel us to show love for those around us.

Amen