Together Like a Horse and Carriage

The New Testament letter of James tells us that faith isn't enough, that we need to do good deeds, too. What does he mean by that? Maybe my sermon will help you as you think about that question.

Some of you may remember a song from way back called “Love and Marriage.” I think that Frank Sinatra used to sing it. It went 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. They substituted “soup and sandwich” for “love and marriage;” but the point is the same. There are some things that just go together; 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 most Christians seem to prefer one over the other. We don’t do a very good job of keeping both the carriage and the horse. We Protestants, for example, claim that “All you need is faith.” What we mean by that is that no one needs to do anything to earn their salvation. When you open those beautifully wrapped gifts on Christmas morning, you didn’t do anything to earn them; they were given to you out of love! Salvation is just like that. God loves us so much, that he gives us salvation through Jesus Christ, no strings attached! But many people misunderstand “all you need is faith” and 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. He was careful to tell 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 2:14-26) Can we show our faith without taking any action? I’m not so sure that we can. And some other religious traditions make the opposite mistake. These folks tend to forget about faith and concentrate on works. They believe that God gets angry if we don’t dress a certain way, worship a certain way, or believe a certain way. They don’t understand that we are already acceptable to God; and that we can’t earn God’s love by any works that we do! We behave as Christians not to make God happy with us, but because we are thankful for what God has already done.

So, how do faith and works fit together? How can we hitch the horse to the cart so that we can move through life with enough horse and enough cart? The answer is that we do good works because we are thankful for the salvation that God gives us as a gift; and 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. 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 works without faith is like the carriage without the horse. It can’t go anywhere! Oh, we may try our best to push it along by our own strength; but without faith, we don’t have a chance of moving that carriage along very far. Without faith, we can’t possibly do the difficult works that God calls us to do: works like loving our enemies, praying for people who want to hurt us, and caring as much for others as we care for ourselves. Without faith, we don’t have a prayer of being able to give needy people the shirt off our back, the blanket off our bed, and the food off our table. Without faith, we can’t possibly take up our cross and follow Jesus. We just can’t do it by ourselves. But with faith – by 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 right now, “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 tell you about Corrie Ten Boom. She grew up in Holland, in what is now the Netherlands, in the early part of the 20^th century. She came from a middle-class family of devoted Christians where faith in Jesus Christ and service to others were the twin foundations of their faith. In May of 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. Her son had gone into hiding, and she was afraid to return home. Could she stay with the Ten Booms? 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 Nazis. Some were Jews, while others were members of the resistance movement. All of them 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 with the Ten Booms who fed them, clothed them, and gave them shelter. During that time, they saved 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 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 those. 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.” A challenge to that faith came just two years after the war ended. One of the guards who had been at her prison camp approached her and asked for her forgiveness. How could she forgive someone who had been responsible for the death of countless innocent people, including her own sister? Here are her own words about the encounter. “Even as the 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 did nothing extraordinary. 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 a good thing to remember. “When I try, I fail. When I trust, God 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, God succeeds.” Now that’s hitching up the horse to the carriage and going somewhere!

Spiritual Scorecards

The letter of James is advice to a church that had, apparently, forgotten how to "be" Christians! They were great at saying that they had faith (more on that next week), but their actions weren't what they should have been. James tells them, in no uncertain terms, that they need to put their money where their mouths are! Do we do that? And how can we better put our own faith into action? Would "spiritual scorecards" be helpful...?

One of the delights of my life is going to a baseball game. Football and soccer are fine, and I do love college basketball; but in the summer, give me baseball any day of the week! There’s nothing quite like the freshly mowed green grass, the smell of popcorn and hot dogs, and the roar of the crowd when the home team takes the field. Yes, sir, that’s summer at its finest. Now, when Fred and I go to a baseball game, the first thing we always do is to pick up a scorecard. A scorecard lets you 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 a Coke in a souvenir cup. 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 advises us to do something like that in the part of his letter that I read this morning (James 1:17-25). “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.

Presbyterian pastor Wallace W. Bubar wrote about that kind of spiritual scorecard that he used when he was a boy in 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.’ It’s not about whether you’ve brought your Bible, but 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 items would you put on your scorecard? Would you include the same items that Rev. Bubar found on his childhood offering envelope? Or would there be other things that, in your opinion, are much more important? I can’t answer that for you. One of the aspects of the United Church of Christ that I cherish the most is the freedom of conscience that we enjoy. 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 off, I’m pretty sure that no two of our scorecards will say the same things. That’s because each of us need improvement in different areas. Now, James suggests a couple of things that we might include. Learning to listen before we speak is one, and controlling our temper is another. What good advice for today! Wouldn’t it be great if folks stopped getting angry at people with whom they disagree, and asked them instead, “Why do you feel that way?” Learning to listen is a great thing to put on a spiritual scorecard!

But there are other things that we could put there. Patience is one that springs to mind. Something as simple as learning to be patient with your infuriating Uncle Charley is a spiritual skill. In fact, patience is one of the most necessary and least used spiritual skills in our society today. We want what we want when we want it, which is RIGHT NOW! Should patience go on your scorecard? I know that it could go on mine. As a matter of fact, patience is one of the seven great virtues that the Church has always encouraged us to practice. Patience, together with self-control, moderation, generosity, hope, kindness, and humility are the virtues that we Christians should be working toward. I’m willing to bet that you have a problem with at least one of these! And when you make up your spiritual scorecard, don’t make it too easy on yourself. If you can check off every line of your scorecard every single day, then you’re setting the bar way too low! If you find it easy to read and meditate on the Bible, but you find it very difficult to share a portion of your paycheck, then don’t include “read Bible.” Instead, add a line labelled “generosity.” We all know what we need to work on, even if we don’t want to admit it to other people. The point is not to be proud of what we find easy, but to work towards improving in areas that are difficult.

As you work towards improving your spiritual score, remember that we don’t need to do this all by ourselves! The Spirit of God wants to help us improve our Christian lives. Through the mystery of the Spirit, Jesus Christ is walking 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 find one more dollar to give to the FISH food pantry… well, maybe you should think again. You might not be able to do those things by yourself, even by gritting your teeth and trying REALLY HARD; but rumor has it that with the help of Jesus, all things are possible. In the end, though, the only line that really matters is the one at the bottom. It is on every single person’s scorecard, no matter what goals are listed at the top. That bottom line says, very simply, “Today, with God’s help, I did my best.” If you can put a check mark in the box next to that line, God will always score it as a home run.

Cosmic Consequences

We are connected to the world around us. Most of us know that already, but the Old Testament makes it clear just HOW connected we are! My sermon this week takes one of Jeremiah's visions very seriously. I wonder how different we really are from the people of his own time...?

I am constantly amazed at what some people consider to be entertainment. Many pastimes that amuse other folks simply leave me wondering, “What in the world is the attraction of that?” Horror movies fall into that category for me. I never have seen the sense in paying good money to sit in a dark, crowded theater and have the liver scared out of you every 10 or 15 minutes! But lots of people enjoy that sort of thing. They sit on the edge of their seats, pulses racing and nerves tingling, eagerly waiting for a zombie to thrust his moldy arm through the window and snatch some unwary teenager. These people love them all: aliens, poltergeists, and chainsaw-wielding madmen!

Now, I will admit that there is one big attraction to horror movies. The experience is under our control! When the movie is over, we walk out of the dark theater into the comfort of the daylight, secure in the knowledge that the horrors we’ve just seen are going to stay on the movie screen. After all – they’re not real! They’re just made up for our entertainment. The vision that Jeremiah saw, though was a horror that he couldn’t escape (Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28). It was a Technicolor, surround-sound, 3D disaster, like a nightmare from which you can’t seem to awake. As Jeremiah stood by horrified, he watched the very fabric of creation come unglued. Image followed dreadful image like the tolling of a funeral bell. God took the world apart and returned it to the state that existed before creation began. The mountains swayed back and forth like a man after a drunken binge. The birds fled, leaving creation as silent as the grave. All the cities collapsed like houses of cards. Finally, the world dissolved into black, formless chaos.

What in the world caused God to dismantle his beloved creation? What was so bad that God threw up his hands in despair and said, “The heck with all of it! I’m starting all over again!” Why, the people didn’t know God! Even worse, they became experts in evil! The Hebrew text literally says, “They are wise in the ways of evil.” Instead of trying to be good, they were working at being bad! They established Evil State University, a school that offered majors in Exploitation, Oppression, and Greed. And oh, how well they learned their lessons! They earned advanced degrees in selfishness, greediness, stupidity, and arrogance; and creation itself paid the penalty.

The writers of the Hebrew Bible knew that creation is always a player in the cosmic drama. They understood that the well-being of creation and people are intimately joined. That’s something that many people have forgotten in this day and age. They talk about living “in the world,” as though we aren’t really a part of it. They look at creation as just a background for their activities. If creation is damaged because of the way that we live, well, that’s too bad; but it’s unavoidable in the long run. It’s “collateral damage,” something that just got in the way of progress! But the reality is that creation and we humans who are a part of it are as intertwined as the threads of a garment. If one set of threads breaks, the other set becomes weaker, too. All the threads must stay strong or the garment will fall apart. If we think that we can separate ourselves from the creation that surrounds us, we’re only fooling ourselves

Jeremiah might have the same vision if he were living today, because Evil State University is still enrolling millions of students, still teaching its lessons of selfishness and stupidity, still graduating lots of experts in greed and arrogance. There is a difference between Jeremiah’s time and ours, though. Today, God doesn’t need to destroy creation. We’re doing a good job of that all by ourselves. We’re taking creation apart, one piece at a time, because of our greed, arrogance, and stupidity.

One of my close friends, Rev. Robin Blakeman, is a Presbyterian pastor who is a native of West Virginia. She feels called to a ministry of increasing environmental awareness. Several years ago, she described the effects of mountaintop removal mining in her home state:

“The most urgent wake-up call of my life was delivered during a plane flight in June. For the first time, I got to see those majestic mountains from a bird’s eye – perhaps a God’s eye – view. Just outside Charleston, reality struck. The number and size of mountain top removal sites were astounding! Giant sites extended in every direction to the horizon – some worse than others. The sludge pond behind Marsh Fork Elementary dwarfs the school. It was enough to make this preacher want to cuss! A mining company in our region has defended their practices by posting a scriptural quote on their website: Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low. (Isaiah 40:4) What arrogance! Will we allow mining company executives and the politicians who are beholden to them to play God with these ancient mountain habitats, and with the ancient texts of the Holy Bible? West Virginia used to be (in the words of John Denver) ‘almost heaven,’ but now we are [just] ‘open for business.’”

Even if we don’t live in West Virginia, we can all see effects of human greed on the environment. We remove wetlands so that we can build homes close to the beach, and whole ecosystems disappear. Fertilizer runoff is killing fish and wildlife in south Florida. Monarch butterflies are no longer plentiful because we are destroying the milkweed that they need to live. We seem to think that regardless of what we do, creation will continue to putter along just fine the way it always has. And we’re wrong.

So where does that leave us? How do we move beyond these catastrophic predictions, dire warnings, and despair? Is there any good news here? There is, indeed! The good news is that God will never leave us in despair. In the midst of Jeremiah’s horrifying vision of creation’s destruction, one verse glimmers with a ray of hope: “Thus says the Lord: The whole land shall be desolate; yet I will not make a full end.” Much of the earth is indeed desolate today; but God has not given up on us! God continues to call men and women to heal and nurture the creation that God loves so much. Pope John Paul II once commented, “The earth will not continue to offer its harvest, except with faithful stewardship. We cannot say we love the land and then take steps to destroy it for use by future generations.”

Protestant and Roman Catholic churches alike need to take Pope John Paul II seriously. Can we Christians be like the flower that grows through a crack in the asphalt to bloom in the most barren of surroundings? Can we set an example to the rest of society? We can recycle paper, cans, and bottles. We can set a goal to decrease the amount of energy that our facility uses. We can continue to offer our recreation park for groups that want to experience creation first hand! Oh, we may not be doing big things like the Cincinnati Zoo; they’re trying to save entire animal species! But we can do small things; and lots of small things add up to big things!

Like the people of Jeremiah’s time, we have a choice to make. We can continue to follow the ruinous way that Evil State University has taught us; and friends, it has taught us well.  As long as we do, we will have a front-row seat in that dark movie theater, and we will watch horrors of our own making come to life right in front of our eyes. But there is another way: we can wise up. We can come to our senses and choose to do things God’s way and love creation as much as we love ourselves! If we do that, we will leave the darkness of the horror movie theater behind us, and walk joyfully into the light of God’s good creation.