Welcome
We are so glad you have joined us virtually this day. I’m Pastor Alan and we welcome you to this time of worship. You might want to light a candle, open the curtains to let in light, and find some elements to join us in communion. Next Sunday, November First, … I know, right? … we will have this virtual worship in the morning, and then in the evening you are invited to come to our courtyard, the space between the MUB and the Sanctuary, for an All Saints Celebration led by Pastor Ashley and Nicole. Bring a lawn chair, and we will socially distance and wear masks during the service.
Also, Sunday morning, November 8, at 11 we will have a service on our parking lot, facing the Heritage Chapel. It will be a time of meditation and renewal, no sermon, just scripture, prayer communion and reflection in the season after the election.
Today we continue our them of giving legs to our faith, as we look at the letter James wrote to his friends.
Call to Worship
Jesus was asked what is the greatest commandment and he replied. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, and the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. May these words stir our hearts to action as we begin our worship together.
Pastoral Prayer
The Lord be with you. And also with you.
Our prayers are with those affected by COVID-19, including our own congregants and their loved ones.
We celebrate:
If you have concerns you would like shared with our prayer ministry, please reach out to us through Facebook or email.
Join me in prayer:
God of our most ancient and precious faith, we see in Jesus that we only know You through flesh and bone, through bread and wine. And we only love You as much as we love our neighbor, even, and perhaps especially, the neighbors we don’t like. It would be easier, O Holy One, if our faith could remain a private, personal affair, filling us with warm fuzzy feelings and helping us sleep at night.
But we realize that that kind of faith is not faith at all. It’s dead, the apostle Paul says, unless it results in faithful work. Even as our faith is one that sprouts up in our heart, we admit that well wishes and good intentions mean nothing if not followed by faithful activity. We confess that no litmus test will ever make us true disciples except for us to do the work of Jesus. You seem to answer our prayers when we pray with our legs, and sometimes we find that we are the answers themselves. What good is it, You say more than once through Your scripture, to pray for people if we do not also help them? What good is it to wish them full bellies if we do not also fill their bellies?
This is not to say, O God, that we are human doings—tirelessly working our way into the kingdom. But we are learning that the gospel is news that changes our hearts and lives. That our day-to-day work, our structures and partnerships, our habits and habitations, are all fundamentally changed when we encounter the Living God in Christ Jesus. And when we come together to pray this morning, we are weaving our lives into those around us at the most cosmic level, the ties of our destinies tightening together.
So may our faith be a living faith, a breathing faith that eats and drinks and walks to a friend’s house and dances in the kitchen, whose belly rolls with laughter and whose hands are calloused from diligent work. May our faith be one that tears down when it is time to tear down, and builds up when it is time to build up. May our faith flip over tables and may it bring precious gifts to a cooing newborn. May our faith be in constant motion, even as our hearts rest in Your great love for all of creation.
For our final posture, bring your hands to your heart in a posture of devotion with your head bowed.
And Holy One, we pray softly the prayer together that Jesus, our brother and redeemer gave us to hold onto:
Our Father, who art in heaven
Hallowed be Thy name
Thy Kingdom come
Thy will be done
On earth as it is in heaven
Give us this day our daily bread
And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors
And lead us not into temptation
But deliver us from evil
For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever.
Amen.
Children’s Message
When people want to become a Christian, they usually pray to God, and make some statement like “I believe Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God, and I accept him as my Lord and Savior.” Maybe you’ve heard that before. It has lots of meaning. The word “Christ” means special or anointed, gifted, holy. When we call him God’s son, we mean that he was given to us by God, a part of the divine spirit in the world. When we call him savior we think of forgiving our sins and offering us grace to continue to live with confidence. And when we call him Lord, that’s a reference to someone who has authority over us, like a teacher, a leader, a boss. In that respect, when we become a Christian, we are saying that we will follow Jesus, where ever he leads us. And do the things Jesus would do: Like feed people, give them clothes, give them shelter in stormy or cold weather, or visit them. Maybe we are doing less of that now because of the pandemic, but we can still talk to them, or text them to give them some encouragement.
I invite you to pray, and to imagine one thing you can do for someone else today and this week.
Scripture
James 2: 14-26
What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? 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. But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith.
You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder. Do you want to be shown, you senseless person, that faith apart from works is barren? Was not our ancestor Abraham justified by works when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was brought to completion by the works. Thus the scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” and he was called the friend of God. You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. Likewise, was not Rahab the prostitute also justified by works when she welcomed the messengers and sent them out by another road? For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead.
Sermon
This scripture, more than any other, gives meaning to Fredrick Douglas’ phrase, “I prayed for 20 years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.” This letter of James states in so many different ways, that faith is nothing, without works.
Some people would place this concept in opposition to Martin Luther’s work. Most of us credit Martin Luther with the saying “Sola Fide” “By Grace alone,” meaning that our salvation comes by the work of God, and not by anything we could do ourselves to earn it.
Luther wrote:“Faith is a vital, deliberate trust in God’s grace, so certain that it would die a thousand times for it.” (Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration, book IV, section 12).
But Sharron Blezzard of the Stewardship of Life Institute reminds us that in his Introduction to Romans, Luther wrote “Faith cannot help doing good works constantly. It doesn’t stop to ask if good works ought to be done, but before anyone asks, it already has done them and continues to do them without ceasing.”
The quote, from the Formula of Concord and the Solid Declaration, is actually more involved:
The leaders of the Lutheran movement who compiled these documents quote Luther this way: “Faith is a living, busy, active, mighty thing, so that it is impossible for it not to be constantly doing what is good. Likewise, faith does not ask if good works are to be done, but before one can ask, faith has already done them and is constantly active. Whoever does not perform such good works is a faithless man, blindly tapping around in search of faith and good works without knowing what either faith or good works are, and in the meantime he chatters and jabbers a great deal about faith and good works.” (FC SD IV, 10-11)
Good works are the natural expression of our love for God. Good works becomes the essence of who we are as Christ followers. It’s not something we have to think about. We just do these things for others. More than saying the right things and believing the right things, Christianity is doing the right things.
This point is that “Faith involves more than affirming theological formulas, but a thorough reorientation of one’s life.”
That quote from A.K.M. Adam, deserves to be repeated. “Faith involves more than affirming heological formulas, but a thorough reorientation of one’s life.”
He goes on to say, “Faith makes a difference in us. More importantly (in these verses), faith makes a difference in our relations with our sisters and brothers.”
It’s a longer quote but the essence is so important: “Just as God has chosen needy, broken, bereft brothers and sisters as the visible embodiment of Jesus’ good news among us, so faith reorders our own desires away from securing our well-being by our own efforts, from enhancing our image by associating with glittering celebrities, and summons us to make our friends among the shabby poor, and to trust the provision of God who gives freely to all. – A.K.M. Adam from St. Stephen’s house in Oxford, England, U.K.
A thorough reorientation of one’s life.” A reordering of our own desires. A summons to make our friends among the poor.
And you thought we were just going to talk about pledge cards today.
A radical reorganizing of priorities, a tectonic shift in the way we live in community.
The beginning of this chapter, before our reading, is a harsh warning to this new community about treating people the same, no matter their wealth, status, origin, or whom they love. In fact the root Greek words are roughly translated as, “don’t judge people at face value.
Which made me think of our unique experience in the world. When we encounter people these days, masked up, socially distanced, it’s hard for me to recognize friends, family members, I can’t make many judgments on “facial recognition,” because there’s not much there to see.
It’s almost as if James is saying, don’t look at their outward appearance, look on the heart, see that these people, rich or poor, all the colors of the rainbow, every experience of humanity, are all the same. They are, we are all children of God, all one family. And he echoes the words of Jesus found all over the gospels. Love God, love your neighbor as yourself. It is two expressions of the most important commandment. And the best way we love our neighbors is honoring their God given status as a beloved child of God, helping them with their physical needs. Walking with them through their emotional struggles, encouraging them in their spiritual explorations.
ACC, you are good at the feeding the 5,000 part. We did it again yesterday. 110 bags of groceries, sorted and distributed in just about 2 hours. You are good at responding to global disasters through our giving to Week of Compassion. You are even good at it when we have our friendly competition for socks, purses, underwear, You respond.
Today, I’m asking you to pray about how this thorough reorientation of our moral, ethical, and spiritual compasses, will affect your giving to this ministry in the coming year. In a few days, you will receive a letter from the church with a pledge card in it. And we plan to do a radical reorienting of how we collect them. Instead of bringing them by the church, we plan to make an appointment with you, and do some front yard, front porch, in person visits. At that point, you are invited to contribute some food items to the Little Free Pantry, to donate some new socks, we’ll make sure they are credited to the correct bin, and to give your financial pledge to the church. It’s a socially distanced, safe way for us to connect with each other as we commit ourselves to following Christ into the new year.
I just want to finish with this story. It’s from the Sojourners community outside of Washington, D.C., led by Jim Wallis. Mary Glover lived in the neighborhood and often helped distribute food in their ministry’s weekly food line. She was so poor that she too needed a bag of groceries each week. Yet Mary was also a kind of leader of the food ministry; she often said its prayer before they opened the doors on Saturday mornings. She was, after all, the ministry’s best pray-er. She was one of those people, Wallis wrote, “who pray like they know to whom they’re talking.”
Mary would generally begin by praying something like, “Thank you, Lord, for waking us up this morning! Thank you, Lord, that our walls were not our grave and that our bed was not our cooling board. Thank you, Lord!”
However, Mary also prayed in a way that showed what God had showed her what was at stake in our treatment of people who are materially poor. She would pray “Lord, we know that you’ll be comin’ through this line today, so, Lord, help us to treat you well.”
What if we practiced that simple idea. If we are all consumed by the presence of God re ordering every part of our existence, then everything we do is an extension of the Christ who lives in us. Every person we meet, carries a piece of God with them. Then every encounter we have, … is a holy moment, a sacred experience of the reign of God’s love.
Communion
Sharing our Resources
We have several ways to give, and I don’t just mean the various ways to contribute financially. We have our ongoing food ministries. Our sock and coat drives. And then, the ways that aren’t focused toward this building. You contribute to this ministry in the ways you help the people around you. Let the presence of Christ be your guide this week.
Benediction
Faith without works is dead. Let your work be the expression of the love God has poured into your heart.