Reform Your Soul

Sts Paul and James. Faith and Works.

Propers: Reformation, A.D. 2018 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

True reform must be internal. It is the reformation of the soul.

Which is not to deny that our faith is corporate—for indeed together we are the body of Christ—nor that we are saved by grace through faith, which of course we are. Jesus saves. But this is not to be the end of our labors, nor the end of our joy. Having received the promise of God’s love in Christ Jesus, we are not then to rest on our laurels. We are not then to say, “Well, I’m good. What’s for dinner?”

Rather, having been liberated—having been freed from sin and death and hell—we are then sent out to liberate others, to liberate the world! It’s a package deal. Love of God and love of neighbor go hand-in-hand. God pours out the superabundance of His love upon us, that we might then pour it out upon everyone else, without distinction, without hesitation, be they friend or stranger or even our enemy. And that part’s not easy. It goes against everything we think we know of this world.

We want to horde the love of God, keep it to ourselves, for well we know that it is precious, and in our world precious things seem rare. We must bargain for them. We must hold on to them. We must be prudent, must be stingy. We can’t go willy-nilly pouring out grace and love and generosity upon just anyone every hour of the day. Surely we’ll run out! Surely there’s not enough to go around.

And so we keep the love of God bottled up, stored away on a shelf in the cupboard, so it becomes just one more thing to own, one more thing to buy and to sell. We keep our faith in a little corner of our life next to the self-help books and the yoga videos and that diet we keep meaning to try. One more commodity; one more purchase; one more selection from a menu of infinite selfish choice.

But the love of God is like blood. When it flows, we flourish. When it stagnates, we die. In order to live, truly live, with the life of Christ within us, we must let it flow. We must pour it out. We must be reckless, must be foolish, at least to the eyes of the world. We must lend without thought of reward, give without hope of return. We must love our neighbor even when he’s a pain in the tuchus, or when she votes for the wrong party, or when they just plain tick us off. We must forgive the unforgivable, believe the unbelievable, and see the face of God in men.

The love of God is not gold to be horded. The love of God is fire which must spread. And the more it is shared, the more it is given recklessly away, the brighter and hotter and purer it burns. And that’s not easy. It takes practice; it takes work. It is hard to give, to forgive, to love, to lend; hard to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and rebuke the sinner and build up the broken. It simply is not in our fallen nature, but in the sinless nature of Christ within us.

We read today from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, a fine Reformation text indeed. Good old Paul. He understood grace. He understood the radical liberation of the Gospel. When other Christians—Jewish Christians, just like him—tried to tell his congregations that in order to be a Christian you have to eat a certain way, dress a certain way, act a certain way—that in fact the Gospel of Christ is only for one people, one nation, and to receive the Gospel you must be of that nation too—then did Paul unleash all of his considerable rhetorical fury.

You moralists, he cried. You hypocrites! You want to dump all these rules and regulations and outward foreign signs upon these poor people when we ourselves, the children of Abraham, have proven time and again unable to keep our own Law? It’s not the ritual that matters, Paul wrote, nor the outward religious rites. It’s not the one culture, the one ethnicity, the one way of doing things.

What matters is the heart of the Law—love God with all you’ve got and love your neighbor as yourself—and when we can’t even do that, we must run to the Gospel, run to the Good News, that where we have failed Christ succeeds! We are saved not by works of the Law, not by the strivings of our own hearts and minds, but by the mercy, grace, and love of God in Jesus Christ who died for us.

And that’s fantastic right there. That’s the Gospel truth. That’s what we all need to hear: that we can’t earn this, we can’t be worthy of this, but we don’t have to be! For as all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, so now all are raised to life in Christ. It’s not about ego, or earning, or keeping score. It’s not about hierarchy or being holier-than-thou. It’s about Jesus! It’s all about Jesus! And now this Jesus lives in us.

God bless it. I wish we could end it there. Lord knows many would. But something happened then that Paul perhaps did not anticipate. Having rebuked the moralists, his congregations then went hard the other way. They became libertines. Paul was arrested around AD 58, and soon James, the Brother of the Lord—who was the leader of the early Christian movement more so even than Sts Peter or Paul—started getting reports that Paul’s congregations had gone off the deep end.

See, they knew that we are saved by grace and not by works. But then when Paul got arrested, they just went back to living as they had before; which is to say, as pagans. They stopped feeding the hungry. They stopped clothing the naked. They stopped treating one another as brothers and sisters in Christ and went back to hanging out with their own social classes. Slaves worshipped with slaves. Masters worshipped with masters. And everybody went back to buying a bunch of junk that we don’t need just to pass the time until we die. Not that we can relate to that.

It’s a classic biblical case of liberated people returning voluntarily to their captivity, because it’s easier, it’s familiar. The very things from which God liberates us in Christ—consumerism, social divisions, meaningless entertainments, allowing the market to determine the value of human lives—these are the very things to which Paul’s congregations returned in his absence.

To all this James responded: Are you nuts? This isn’t what Paul meant when he told you that you are saved by faith and not by works. Faith doesn’t mean holding the right opinion. Faith doesn’t mean intellectual assent to certain propositions. Faith means living with the life of Christ within you! Faith means loving others as God has first loved us! Show me your faith without your works and I will show you my faith by my works, for faith without works is dead.

These days we have this sort of theological narrative whereby Paul is the good guy, the radical liberationist, and James is the party pooper, the dour moralist. But in truth they both agree. Paul is a moralist; he kept his folks in check, kept them on the straight and narrow, right up until he went to jail. And James knows that we are not saved by our own works, but by the promise of mercy in Jesus.

Neither one of them would ever dream that God set us free so that we could slouch back into slavery. Should we sin that grace might abound the more? To this Paul says, meganoito—hell, no! We aren’t freed simply so that we can live for ourselves. We’re freed for a purpose, freed for a mission: that we might be the hands and feet, the eyes and ears, the lives and the deaths through which Christ will save the world!

We are the Body of Christ now; we are the vessels of His Spirit; we are Jesus for a world still very much in need of Him—yet we all live like pagans. We all live like everyone else. And so the world cannot believe that Jesus saves, because the world cannot see Jesus except through you and through me.

And so we must reform. We must return to Jesus, the root of our faith. We must die and rise again, every day: die to ourselves, die to our sins; rise to a new life, rise to a new world. We are the keepers of the Kingdom. We are the saviors of the cosmos—if only we will let the Savior shine forth through us.

It’s not easy. I know that better than anyone. It takes time and effort and humility and prayer. It takes silence and meditation and reading the Scriptures until they seep into our bones and we know them like the very air that we breathe. It takes Confession before this assembly, and a constant return to the Eucharist, the font of all our faith. It is hard work being a Christian, and we are, after all, just sinners.

But we don’t do this for us. We don’t do this for our own self-improvement or self-salvation. We are saved; we are loved; we are forgiven; we are freed! Alleluia! We do this because it is through us that God has chosen to save the world in Christ. That’s the price of free salvation: it has to be free for all.

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