Saves Whom?

Sts. Paul and James

Scripture: The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 23), A.D. 2015 B

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Are we saved by our faith, or are we saved by our works? This has been perhaps the most galling bone of contention between feuding Christians for the last 500 years.

To hear some folks tell of it, the whole situation is very simple: Protestants wave the banner of salvation by faith while Catholics wave that of salvation by works. Protestants believe that we cannot save ourselves, that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; therefore, we must put our faith solely in the mercy and grace of Jesus Christ, Who loves us while we are yet sinners. This stands in sharp contrast to Catholics, who insist upon utilizing good works and pious deeds as rungs upon a ladder of salvation, so that they can try to climb their way back up into Heaven, try to save themselves. Obviously this is ridiculous. We are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, and not by our own works.

Hold on there, counter faithful Catholics. Have you not heard that faith without works is dead? Do you not know that all will be repaid according to their deeds? We are saved not simply by intellectual assent to propositional truth, as though we were checking the proper box on a questionnaire. We are saved by living the daily life of faith, by caring for Jesus in the person of the poor and imprisoned. Protestants preach a Christ without a Cross, a faith without demands. Obviously this is preposterous. We are saved by works of real mercy toward real people, not by a limp and empty faith that does no one a lick of good.

And so we have argued back and forth down the generations, the former accusing the latter of trusting in themselves rather than in Christ, while the latter accuses the former of paying homage to God with their lips but not with their lives. Which side is right? C.S. Lewis was once asked which was the more properly Christian position, salvation by faith or salvation by works. “We might as well ask,” replied Lewis, “which blade on a pair of scissors does the cutting.” Indeed.

Lewis was right, of course. After all, another way of asking the question of faith against works is to ask which pleases God: that we love and trust in Him, or that we love and serve our neighbor? Both, obvioisly. Loving God and loving neighbor go together, inseparably so. God wishes us to have both faith and good works. This, of course, is what Protestants and Catholics have come to realize. It’s not a question of either/or. In retrospect, our argument seems ridiculous. Did Catholics really think that Protestants condemned good works? Did Protestants really believe that Catholics put their faith in anyone other than Jesus Christ?

We are saved by grace through faith—not because we’ve earned it, but because God loves us and has poured out His very life for us upon the Cross. Now that we are redeemed, now that the Spirit of Christ dwells within us, we do good works naturally, as a good tree produces good fruit, because Jesus works through us. Good works are not the root of faith but the fruit of faith. They are how we share our faith, show our faith, live our faith. We all believe this, and we always have. The question of faith against works was never truly a question at all—for we are all called to love God with our entire being, and we are all called to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Nowhere is this synthesis clearer than in the Epistle of James:

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.

So writes the first bishop of Jerusalem.

Can faith save you? Now there’s a verse that should shoot straight to the heart of any Lutheran. Lutherans, after all, have made a mantra of St. Paul’s promise that we are saved by faith alone. When Martin Luther was a young man, he hated the Epistle of James. He had grown up in an environment where corrupt churchmen taught that poor folk not only had to earn God’s love, but quite literally had to pay for it. This is a sin called simony, the selling of that which is sacred. Luther wanted people to know that God loves us already, unconditionally, and so he emphasized the writings of St. Paul, who wrote that we are saved by faith alone.

Later in life, however, when the Protestant Reformation went to extremes, there arose radicals who claimed that Christians could live in any selfish or hedonistic way they desired, commit even the most licentious of sins, because they had “faith” in Jesus—they checked the right mental box—and that was all that God required for a ticket through those pearly gates. They used hollow faith as an excuse for sin. This was exactly the sort of lawlessness that Rome had feared from the start, and when Luther encountered it he discovered a newfound love for the Epistle of James. Yes, we are saved by faith, as Paul writes—but James reminds us that faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

I am reminded of an Orthodox priest who was once asked how a man might convince an atheist friend of God’s existence. “Teach him to give alms,” said the priest. James and Paul are the biblical roots of that conflict between works and faith. But as Luther learned with age, and we have affirmed in dialogue, it’s really no conflict at all. Faith and works are one, just as love of God and love of neighbor are one.

And yet—I wonder if we aren’t misreading James. We come to him seeking salvation, personal salvation. We come to him seeking guidance as to how we might enter the Kingdom of Heaven. And when we read “Can faith save you?” we automatically interpret that as, “Can my own faith in God save me from God’s judgment?” But that’s not James’ concern. James wants to know if our faith saves others. He wants to know if our faith feeds the hungry and clothes the naked and shelters the homeless. He wants to know if our faith does any good at all to other people and not just to our own souls.

When the dominant image in this week’s news is of a little boy, a toddler, whose drowned body washed up on the Turkish shore after his family joined the migrant crisis fleeing chaos in the Middle East, I hear James’ pointed question: Can faith save you? Did our faith save this little boy? Will it save the next one? On a most profound and basic level, faith is not about us. It’s about him.

Hear the words of the prophet Isaiah:

Say to those who are of a fearful heart, “Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God. He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. He will come to save you.” Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.

Salvation by grace through faith liberates us from selfishness, sets us free to do God’s good work, healing work. Do not worry about earning the love of God, for it has been given to us freely. And do not agonize about going to hell, for in some sense I fear that religious obsession with the salvation of one’s own isolated soul can become a hell unto itself. Focus instead upon those in whom God has chosen to dwell, in the marginalized, in the needy. Show mercy instead of judgment. Argue for God by giving alms. I’m not saying that we can all go out to work great and heroic deeds—but every one of us can do small works of mercy with great love.

Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.