Faith and Works

What is the relationship between faith and works? That's what I considered in this morning's sermon. I used the old song "Love and Marriage" that go together like "a horse and carriage" to understand faith and works as two things that belong together. You can't get rid of either one in a vital Christian life! What do you think?

Some of you may remember a song from way back called “Love and Marriage.” Frank Sinatra used to sing it. It went something like this:

“Love and marriage, love and marriage,
Go together like a horse and carriage.
This I tell you, brother:
You can’t have one without the other!”
Campbell’s Soup even used it in one of their commercials. (Of course, they substituted “soup and sandwich” for “love and marriage.”) But the point is the same. There are some things that just go together; and one without the other is incomplete.

Faith and works are two of those things. One without the other just isn’t complete. Faith without works is like the horse unhitched from the carriage; and works without faith is like a carriage without a horse! That may seem to be obvious, but many Christians seem to prefer one over the other. We don’t do a very good job of keeping both the carriage and the horse. For example, we Protestants claim that “All you need is faith.” What we mean by that is that no one needs to do anything to earn their salvation. God has already given us salvation as a gift through Jesus Christ. But many people misunderstand this statement. They take it to mean that if we have faith, we don’t have to do anything else. James must have been writing to a congregation who thought like that. Remember what he said to them? ”Faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.” (James 2:17-18) Can we show our faith without taking any actions? I’m not so sure that we can. Other religious traditions make the opposite mistake. These folks concentrate on works, and forget about faith. They believe that we’re not acceptable to God if we don’t dress a certain way, worship a certain way, or believe a specific doctrine. They don’t understand that we are already acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. We can’t earn God’s love by any works that we do! We act as Christians not to earn God’s favor, but in thankfulness for what God has already done for us.

So, what is the proper partnership of faith and works? That’s a difficult question; and the answer will depend on who is giving the answer. My answer goes something like this: We do good works in gratitude to God for the salvation that we have as a gift. We get the power to do those works through our faith in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. In other words, our faith is the horse that pulls the carriage of our works. Think about that for a minute. Faith without deeds is like the horse unhitched from the carriage. It looks beautiful as it runs around. We can admire its beautiful color, its smooth gaits, and its flowing tail. But it isn’t any good to anybody, because it doesn’t do anything. And if we do works but have no faith, we’re like the carriage without the horse. Without energy to pull it, it can’t go anywhere! Oh, we may try our best to do good things; but without faith, we don’t have a chance of doing the kind of works that God really wants us to do! What kind of works am I talking about? I’m talking about the hard ones. I’m talking about loving our enemies, praying for those people who wish us harm, and caring as much for others as we care for ourselves. I’m talking about giving needy people the shirt off our back, the blanket off our bed, and the food off our table. I’m talking about taking up our cross and following Jesus. Without faith, we don’t have a prayer of living like that. But with faith – calling on Jesus for help and trusting in the power of the Holy Spirit – we can do amazing things for the glory of God! If we hitch the horse to the carriage, there’s no limit to what is possible.

You may be thinking, “Well, that sounds good for spiritual giants. Of course, the saints did wonderful things. But that doesn’t work for somebody like me. I’m not smart enough, brave enough, or resourceful enough to do anything really important.” In response to that reaction, let me share what Corrie Ten Boom said about our natural talents: “It is not my ability, but my response to God’s ability, that counts.” Not my ability, but my response to God’s ability. God’s ability is the horse that pulls the carriage of our ability to places that we could never go on our own!

Let me share with you not only Corrie Ten Boom’s quote, but the story of her life as an example of what is possible if we allow our faith in God to power our works.

Corrie Ten Boom grew up in Haarlem, Holland, in what is now the Netherlands. She lived with her sister Betsie and her father Casper in a comfortable, middle-class home. They were devoted Christians, with faith in Jesus Christ and service to others as the twin foundations of their lives. In May, 1942, a well-dressed woman carrying a suitcase appeared at their front door. She told the Ten Booms that she was a Jew, and that the Nazi Occupation forces had arrested her husband several months earlier. Her son had gone into hiding, and she was afraid to return home. She had heard that the Ten Booms were kind to Jews. Could she stay with them? Casper’s response was, “In this household, God’s people are always welcome.” With this simple act of hospitality, the Ten Booms began nearly two years of hiding refugees from the Nazi Occupation forces. Some were Jews, while others were members of the resistance movement. All risked being sent to the death factories of the concentration camps if they were caught. At any one time, there were usually 6 or 7 people living in their home. The Ten Booms fed them, clothed them, and gave them shelter, saving the lives of an estimated 800 Jews.

In late February, 1944, the Gestapo raided their home. They arrested everyone who tried to enter it, seizing over 30 people. Corrie’s father, Casper, was an old man of 84. When the Gestapo asked him if he knew he could be executed for helping Jews, he responded, “It would be an honor to give my life for God’s people.” He died in prison only 10 days after his arrest. Corrie and her sister, Betsie, were sent to a concentration camp near Berlin, where Betsie died in late December. Before she died, she told Corrie, “There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still.” Corrie was freed just 12 days later as a result of a clerical error. The following week, all the women her age in the camp were executed.

Corrie devoted the rest of her life to sharing what she had learned about faith during her years of living as a Christian at the risk of her own life. She was able to do what she did, she said, only through the strength that God gave her through her faith. “Trying to do the Lord’s work in your own strength,” she said, “is the most confusing, exhausting, and tedious of all work. But when you are filled with the Holy Spirit, then the ministry of Jesus just flows out of you.” Perhaps the greatest challenge to that faith came in 1947, just two years after the war’s end. She was approached by one of the guards at the camp where she had been imprisoned – a guard who had been known as one who was cruelest to the prisoners. He asked forgiveness of her. But how could she forgive a man who was responsible for the death of countless innocent people, including her own sister? Listen to her own words about the encounter. “Even as angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him… Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness… And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives us, along with the command, the love itself. For a long moment we grasped each other’s hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then.”

Corrie Ten Boom died on her 91^st birthday after spending more than 30 years sharing her faith and her experiences with people in over 60 countries. If she were here today, she would tell us that she was no one special. She simply did what God asked her to do using the strength that God gave her. She would assure us that “When I try, I fail. When I trust, He succeeds.” That’s not a bad way to end this sermon. “When I try, I fail. When I trust, He succeeds.” When we try to do good works in our own strength, we fail more often than not. But when we have faith in God who promises to fill us with the Holy Spirit, we can do works that are truly remarkable. “When I try, I fail. When I trust, He succeeds.” Now that’s what I call hitching up the horse to the carriage and going somewhere!

 

If you are interested in reading more about Corrie Ten Boom's life, you might want to read one of the books that she wrote: The Hiding Place, about her experiences hiding Jews during World War II, and Tramp for the Lord, her experiences around the world as she shared the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Spiritual Scorecards

What if each one of us decided to really work on improving our spiritual lives? How would we begin to do that? In this sermon, I suggest that making our own "spiritual scorecard" might be a place to start. If you choose to read this sermon, see if my comparison to a filling out a baseball scorecard is helpful to you.

One of the delights of my life is going to a baseball game. Football and basketball and soccer are fine; but give me baseball any day of the week! There’s just nothing quite like the fresh mowed green grass, the smell of popcorn and hot dogs, and the roar of the crowd when the home team takes the field. As far as I’m concerned, that’s summer at its finest.

When my husband and I go to a baseball game, the first thing we always do is to pick up a scorecard. For you folks who may not be familiar with that: a scorecard gives you the ability to track every single play of the game – all the balls, all the strikes, all the hits, runs, errors, and stolen bases – so that at the end of the evening, you’ve got a little summary of the whole game right there in your hands! But when you’re working on a scorecard, you can’t lose focus. You can’t wander off to buy a bag of peanuts, or you’ll miss something. No, a scorecard forces you to stay tuned in to what’s going on.

It makes me wonder if we might be better Christians if we had some kind of “spiritual scorecard” to keep us focused on what we are doing. James tells us to do something like that in the part of his letter that we heard this morning. “Be doers of the word, not hearers only” is the way that he puts it. In other words, “Put what you hear into practice. Act on what you know you should do. Keep trying to do better.” A spiritual scorecard might help us with that. Of course, we wouldn’t be recording balls and strikes. We’d be keeping track of things that are far more important to us: ways in which we would like to improve as Christians.

Wallace W. Bubar, pastor of Philadelphia’s Overbrook Presbyterian Church, recently wrote about a kind of spiritual scorecard like this that he used when he was a boy. Here, in his own words, are his thoughts about his experience. [Bubar’s article appears on page 21 of the August 22, 2012 issue of The Christian Century.]

“It was called the six-point record system. In the Southern Baptist church of my childhood, the offering envelopes in the pews had the usual line for your name and the amount of your contribution. But they also had six little boxes underneath where you could put a check mark, and next to the boxes were six actions: worship attended, Bible brought, Bible read daily, Sunday school lesson studied, prayed daily, [and] gave an offering. Somebody at Southern Baptist headquarters in Nashville [Tennessee] had decided these were the six things that were worth recording. Not the Ten Commandments, not the nine fruits of the Spirit, not the eight Beatitudes, and not the seven cardinal virtues. No, [these] were [the] six essentials of the Christian life.

As a kid, I took this business seriously. I brought my Bible every Sunday and did all the other things prescribed on the offering envelope. I was proud when I could check off all six of those boxes. I knew as long as I was doing these six things, I would stay on good terms with the Lord. It wasn’t until some years later that I met James. I’d never really noticed him back there, hiding [in the New Testament] behind Paul. But [eventually] I met James, and when he asked me about my faith, I proudly showed him my envelope, with all the check marks in the boxes. Six out of six! He took one look and laughed. Then he said, ‘I think maybe you need some different boxes on there.’ [After all,] it’s not about whether you’ve brought your Bible; [it’s] about where your Bible has brought you.”

What if each one of us decided to make a spiritual scorecard for our own use? Think about that for just a minute. What things would you put on your scorecard? Would you include the same items that Rev. Bubar found on his childhood offering envelope: attended worship, brought Bible, read Bible daily, studied Sunday school lesson, prayed daily, and gave an offering? Or would there be other things that, in your opinion, are much more important?

I can’t answer that for you. If you make up a spiritual scorecard, it’s entirely between you and God. But I do have some thoughts about what that scorecard might look like.

First of all, no two of our scorecards will say the same things. That’s because each of us need improvement in different areas. The first line of one scorecard might say, “I need to control my temper.” Another might say, “I want to look for the good in other people.” And a third might simply contain the reminder, “Pray more.” The areas in which we want to improve as Christians are as different as the Christians who want to improve!

And that brings me to my second thought. If you can check off every line of your scorecard every single day, then you’ve made it too easy. Do you remember how proud Rev. Bubar was to have checked off all six boxes on his boyhood offering envelope? And do you also remember what he heard the letter of James whisper to him? “I think maybe you need some different boxes on there.” If we can accomplish all the goals that we set for ourselves, then we’re setting those goals way too low! If you find it easy to study the Bible, but it’s really hard for you to be patient with other people, then maybe “Patience” should have a line on your scorecard. The point, after all, is not to be proud of what we find easy to do, but to work towards improving in areas that are difficult.

Finally – and maybe most important of all – we don’t need to do this all by ourselves! The Spirit of God is eager to help us improve our Christian lives. Through the working of the Spirit, Jesus Christ is walking right next to us, offering his help with whatever we find it hard to do on our own. If you think that you could never learn to visit a hospital patient… or mentor a teenager from a broken home… or even find one more dollar to give to the FISH food pantry… well, maybe you couldn’t do those things by yourself. But with the help of Jesus, I understand that all things are possible.

In the end, the line that matters most is one way down at the bottom. It’s on every single person’s scorecard, no matter what the goals are up at the top. It says, very simply, “Today I did my best with God’s help.” And if you can put a check mark in the box next to that line, God will always score it as a home run.

Deeper Than Words

This Sunday, we celebrated God's gift of music as we thanked two of our long-time worship accompanists. My sermon explores how music touches places in our souls that words seldom reach. If you choose to read it, maybe it will help you recall ways in which God has spoken to you through music.

Every pastor knows that there are some things in a congregation that should not be tampered with! At least, every smart pastor knows that. There are some things about a church that a pastor can’t change drastically without expecting a lot of push-back from the congregation. One of those things is music. Every congregation cherishes certain kinds of music; and a pastor meddles with that at his or her own peril. After you called me as your pastor, if I had replaced all our hymnals with new ones that didn’t contain any of the hymns that you like to sing, you wouldn’t have been terribly thrilled about it. If I had then installed a praise band with drums, guitars, and tambourines to lead worship every Sunday morning, some of you might have liked it, but the rest of you… not so much. And if I had ripped out the organ, thrown the piano in the dumpster, and given away all our handbells… well, let’s just say that my obituary would have run in several newspapers the following week! Congregations don’t like it when anyone fiddles with their music! That’s because music is a vital part of our faith experience. Music feeds us in a way that no sermon possibly can. During a sermon, we may think about God’s ways, but when we hear music sometimes we can almost feel them.

Music touches us in the deepest places of our soul. Many writers have considered the effect that music has on the listeners. “After silence,” said philosopher Aldous Huxley, “that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” Writer Victor Hugo echoed this thought when he said, “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.” Much more recently, J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, put these words into the mouth of her creation Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry: “Ah, music! A magic far beyond all we do here!”

Yes, indeed; it does sometimes seem like music can work magic.

Imagine a Sunday morning when you wake up grumpy and grouchy – a “wrong side of the bed” morning if there ever was one! You drag yourself to church, thinking all the way here that you have better things to do than waste an hour sitting in a pew. You’re ready to endure worship on that morning instead of participate in it.

But the first hymn is “Holy, Holy, Holy.” As that familiar hymn offers images of heaven, cherubim and seraphim worshipping God and the saints bowing down in praise, the music lifts you up into the presence of someone who is far greater than we are. A sense of awe floods over you. The music has helped you to begin an “attitude adjustment.”

The sermon is about Jesus Christ, and about his loving presence that never leaves you, in this life or the next. Jesus was the last thing on your mind when you got up that morning. The sermon does remind you that Jesus is always there. But you don’t really feel Jesus’ presence until you’re singing the hymn “In the Garden” after the sermon. You sing, “He walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own…” and all of a sudden, you know that Jesus is right there sitting in the pew next to you.

The last hymn on that morning is “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus.” You learned that song when you were a kid in Sunday school. It takes you back to a time when you literally stood up from your chairs when your class sang it, together with the teacher that you loved so much. You’re never able to be grouchy when you sing that hymn!

The end of the story is that when you leave worship, you feel a new sense of God’s glory, the presence of Jesus Christ in your life, and the love of God’s Spirit that you have known for so many years in a community of faith.

As much as I’d like to believe that an upbeat call to worship, well-crafted prayers, and an inspiring sermon can do that for all of you, I know better. The kind of transformation that I’ve just described usually happens through music. And thank God for that! Music is one of the most effective tools that God uses to speak to our hearts and to transform our lives. God speaks to us through our minds, surely. I am the last person to suggest that we should take our minds out of gear while we worship! But God also speaks to us through our feelings; and one of the most effective tools for that kind of communication with God is music! We tend not to trust our feelings. That’s because we’ve been told over and over again that thinking is better than feeling. After all, thinking is logical; while feelings are subject to all kinds of whims and fancies. The trouble with that argument is that our logic only goes so far. Logic can’t penetrate into the deep mystery that lies at the very center of our being. Only feelings can go there. And music. It can go there, too.

Try to remember the last time that you sang one of the great hymns that are frequently played at funerals: “Amazing Grace,” “Rock of Ages,” or “Abide With Me.” I don’t know about you, but those hymns always fill me with a deep sense of peace. It’s a feeling of peace that isn’t logical. The gospels even call it the peace “that passes all understanding.” It’s one of God’s richest gifts. And it we most often experience it through music.

Well, I’ve talked a lot about music. I hope that all my talking has helped you to recall some of the times that you have felt God’s living presence through music. That’s why we have music during our worship, after all. The hymns aren’t just for our entertainment: the religious equivalent of a half-time band show at a football game. No, we have up music during worship because it is one of the deepest expressions of our hearts that we can offer up to God; and because it’s one of the most profound ways that God can speak back to us.

And so, this morning, we celebrate music. We are grateful for the ability to enjoy it, and for the ability to participate in it. We celebrate the music makers, too: all those who have praised God in song, in dance, and with instruments down throughout the centuries; and those who compose music and write hymn lyrics so that we can make music ourselves. And we celebrate those in our community of faith who have God-given talents for making music on behalf of all the rest of us. They lift us up on music’s wings! And as they lift us up, they give us a gift – the gift of touching the God who is beyond what our minds can comprehend; the God who cannot be expressed by words; the God who lives in the deep, mysterious places of our hearts, deeper even than words.

But not deeper than music.